Music Theatre Wales has been catching fire for its current touring production of Peter Eötvös’s opera The Golden Dragon, which uses an all-white cast in a work set in a Chinese restaurant and featuring Chinese characters. Now the London venue for the tour, the Hackney Empire, has cancelled its scheduled performance (October 31) and disavowed all connection with the production.
Blog
Vincent La Selva, Who Staged Operas In Central Park For 38 Years, Dead At 88
“[He] exuberantly weathered thunderstorms, flimsy sets, crackling audio, frayed costumes and sometimes inexpert performers so that his spare but enormously popular company, the New York Grand Opera, might live up to its lofty name.”
Scotland’s Arts Funder Says Its Income Is Down, So Cuts Are Coming
“A reduction in National Lottery money, as well as an expected standstill or reduced grant from the Scottish Government, has led to Iain Munro, deputy chief executive of Creative Scotland, to warn arts, theatre, dance, literature and music companies that some will lose out in looming spending round.”
Expanded Tate Gallery St. Ives Says It Will Add Millions To Cornwall’s Economy
“The newly refurbished Tate St Ives – which reopens this week (14 October) following an ambitious four-year building project – should draw an extra 50,000 visitors and raise an extra £10.5m annually for the local economy, says the executive director, Mark Osterfield. The waterfront venue, nestled into the rock face, has enlarged its exhibition spaces, adding almost 600 sq. m of new galleries. Tate St Ives opened in 1993 and draws around 250,000 visitors each year.”
Trump Pulls US Out Of UNESCO
“UNESCO, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization known for its designation of world heritage sites, is a global development agency with missions that include promoting sex education, literacy, clean water and equality for women. In a lengthy written statement, Irina Bokova, UNESCO’s director-general, expressed regret at the American withdrawal and said that the American people shared the organization’s goals.”
Top Posts From AJBlogs 10.12.17
Sovereignty or service
We often talk about an organization having a mission, as if the organization exists as some separate entity with its own individual will. But increasingly I’m wondering if that attribution hasn’t always been upside-down. … read more
AJBlog: The Artful Manager Published 2017-10-12
A Shroom With a View
“Sex” in a headline could once skew a reader’s attention, but I risk vanilla using it here. Grade-schoolers of all nations do porn homework online. That coy teen you meet at your niece’s bat mitzvah … read more
AJBlog: Out There Published 2017-10-12
Who Cares If Languages Become Extinct?
“Tales of language extinction are invariably tragic. But why, exactly? Aka-Bo, like many other extinct languages, did not make a difference to the lives of the vast majority of people. Yet the sense that we lose something valuable when languages die is familiar. Just as familiar, though, is the view that preserving minority languages is a waste of time and resources. I want to attempt to make sense of these conflicting attitudes.”
First Impressions Of Cincinnati’s Rebuilt Music Hall
Janelle Gelfand: “On opening night, listeners were still taking in the elegant new décor and patron-friendly amenities, which include cup holders for the first time on new, wider seats. Now, however, there are about 1,000 fewer seats in a hall that formerly seated more than 3,400; the audience for this gala re-opening was 2,282.”
The Bilbao Effect – 20 Years Later
“For all its fame, there are many who ask if so-called the “Bilbao effect” is real, and if so, if it is easily repeatable. Was the Guggenheim Bilbao a unique combination of a project at the right time and in the right place—a great architect and daring museum combined with an unusually forward-looking regional government willing to invest? Have the reasons for its transformative effect been misunderstood, explaining why its model has been frequently imitated but its extraordinary success rarely replicated?”
Study: How You Read Affects How Much You Remember
“One study revealed that people think they are better at comprehending information when they read it on a digital screen. This resulted in those readers reading the text much faster than those reading the text in paper format. Yet despite spending less time reading the text, the digital readers predicted they would perform better on a quiz about the text than the people who read the text on paper. Yet when the digital and paper groups were tested, the paper groups outperformed the digital groups on memory recall and comprehension of the text. They also were closer to their test result predictions than the digital group was.”