As rumor has had it for months, Legris, a 55-year-old former étoile at the Paris Opera Ballet who has been at the helm of the Vienna State Opera’s ballet company since 2010, will become ballet director at Milan’s opera house at the end of this year. – Gramilano (Milan)
Blog
Can A Theater Function With Four Artistic Directors? Philadelphia’s Wilma Theater Will Try It
Blanka Zizka, who founded the company with her ex-husband Jiri about 40 years ago and has been sole artistic director since a couple of years before his death in 2012, “has recruited three new co-artistic directors — noteworthy local playwright/director James Ijames, Russian-born director Yury Urnov (who’s had a long association with Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company in Washington), and Morgan Green of the New Saloon theater in Brooklyn — to share the AD responsibilities with her starting this summer.” – The Philadelphia Inquirer
Will UK Have To Return Elgin Marbles To Greece To Get Post-Brexit EU Trade Deal?
“That’s the message embedded within a clause recently added to the E.U.’s negotiating mandate, which says the British government should ‘address issues relating to the return or restitution of unlawfully removed cultural objects to their countries of origin.'” – ARTnews
For South L.A., A Sort Of African-American High Line
It’s not an elevated park, and it’s not on disused train tracks (in fact, it’s tied in with a new light rail line), but Destination Crenshaw (as it’s called) will be a 1.3-mile-long public space along Crenshaw Boulevard, with landscaping, murals and other public art, and plazas — all intended as community gathering places to affirm the area’s African-American identity as the pressures of gentrification increase. – New York Magazine
Actress Zoe Caldwell, Four-Time Tony Winner, Dead At 86
She began her professional career in her native Melbourne at age 9, went to England and joined the RSC at 26, and was a founding member of Tyrone Guthrie’s theatre company in Minneapolis. Though she appeared occasionally in TV and film, she was most famous for her stage performances. She won Tonys for playing Miss Jean Brodie, Medea, Maria Callas (in Master Class), and (her first) for a double-bill of Tennessee Williams one-acts that ran for a week. – The New York Times
Arts Council England Warns Organisations: Get More Diverse Or Give Up Government Funding
“Arts organisations and museums in England are being warned they will lose public funding unless they meet ‘stretching’ targets to create and attract more diverse workforces and audiences. … ACE has been publishing diversity data for five years but has often been accused of merely talking instead of taking strong action. The language this year is significantly more robust.” – The Guardian
‘True Grit’ Author Charles Portis Dead At 86
“[He] was a master of shaggy-dog stories set on the American frontier or just beyond the Southern border, where his characters journeyed to recoup a debt, mete out justice or track down a runaway spouse. … By 1998, when author and journalist Ron Rosenbaum called him ‘our least-known great novelist,’ four of his five books were out of print.” – The Washington Post
Crystal Bridges Changed The Landscape Of American Art. Now It’s Taking On Contemporary Art
The effects Crystal Bridges has had on the region are more than clear. And later this month, the museum is going one step further. It’s opening a satellite contemporary art center, the Momentary, which, by all accounts, is expected to further solidify the impact art has had on this town that once counted the Walmart Museum as one of its biggest cultural attractions. – Artnet
Art Critic Christopher Knight Wins Lifetime Achievement Award
It’s the second Dorothea and Leo Rabkin Foundation award and comes with a $50,000 prize. Knight has been an art critic at The Times since 1989, where he continues to chronicle the growth of Southern California’s visual art scene. He was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in criticism in 1991, 2001 and 2007, and he received the National Arts & Entertainment Journalism Award for art and design criticism last year. – Los Angeles Times
An Open-Ended, Ambiguous, Multi-Perspective Opera Made To Resist Reduction
Yuval Sharon: “If there was a straightforward message, there would certainly be simpler and more direct ways to communicate it than by creating this enormous operatic experience. Opera’s power lies in its complexity and its ability to create complication, to help us experience complex visions of the world. It’s something we need more and more desperately and why I think opera has an underestimated political power. Reducibility, along with didacticism, has been something all of us have actively resisted in this process.” – San Francisco Classical Voice