Category: issues

The group overseeing redevelopment of the World Trade Center site is soliciting arts groups that might want to be part of the project. “The ‘Invitation to Cultural Institutions for the World Trade Center Site’ is a nine-page ‘request for information’ that also provides the first glimpse into how much space, in terms of square feet, may be allotted to arts groups as the area rejuvenates.”

“Despite a last-ditch plea from the culture minister, French actors and backstage workers walked out as promised yesterday, forcing the country’s most renowned drama festival to abandon its opening night and threatening the Rolling Stones’ 40th anniversary Paris mega-gig. ‘It’s the future of French arts that’s at stake’.”

Striking performance artists – who include actors, sound technicians and costume designers – “briefly slowed the Tour de France, tried to block a Rolling Stones concert and canceled opening day of a drama festival in Provence. In the northern town of Saint-Dizier on Tuesday, demonstrators stepped into the road to block cyclists in the Tour de France. The protesters stepped out of the path of the lead cars, but still forced the main pack of racers to slow down, with some touching their feet to the pavement to keep from falling.”

French show unions say they’ll go ahead with a strike during the Avignon Festival. “The strike by actors, dancers, filmmakers and technicians has already cancelled dozens of artistic events throughout France during the summer festival season. In some cases, artists didn’t call off shows but merely disrupted them, blasting fog horns or bursting on-stage to explain their demands. Some festival organizers have waited day by day to see if performers would return to the stage.”

A program that infuses teaching the arts into all aspects of the school program has been a big success in North Carolina, and the program is expanding elsewhere in America. “In the schools’ first four years, they have performed at least as well as the rest of North Carolina’s public schools on the state’s school and student performance tests, known as the ABCs. That’s especially notable, evaluators said, because A-plus students are not “taught to test” – and the schools have a larger percentage of minority students, who typically score lower than other groups on the tests.”

California is considering eliminating its state arts funding. John Killacky writes that the idea is shortsighted. “Should the arts be held exempt when funding for human services, libraries, road repairs, affordable housing and education is being slashed? Of course not, but the intellectual and social capital the arts contribute to the vitality of life in California must not be underestimated. Multiculturalism and innovation are essential elements in making our state’s economy among the largest in the world.”

So maybe school isn’t for everybody. A surprising number of creative and accomplished people were expelled or dropped out of high school. Some find school rejection “catastrophic in the worst way. They start to think of themselves as worthless. Others see it as a challenge. The curtain hasn’t dropped on their creativity and emotional development. They say to themselves, ‘So be it. Adults don’t think very much of me. I’m going to prove them wrong’.”

Think video games are detrimental to your child’s progress as a student? “One-third of college students play video games on their cell phones and laptops during class, but apparently with no effect on their grades, according to a report on video games and campus life released Sunday.”

Miami’s new performing arts center is rising under construction cranes. “For many, the $255 million PAC – which includes a 2,200-seat symphony hall and a 2,480-seat ballet opera house – represents the arrival of Miami’s burgeoning cultural scene. The PAC has drawn comparisons to New York City’s Lincoln Center and Washington, D.C.’s Kennedy Center. But beneath the surface, Miami’s arts community remains a work in progress that will take at least another generation to complete.”

Is the performing arts center an idea whose time has passed? “Those performing arts complexes were conceived in the ’50s, when the country was puffing out its civic chest and no one quite knew what burgeoning suburbs would mean for the cities they surrounded. By the time the first of the complexes was ready for audiences — Lincoln Center in 1962 — there were 68 others under construction, or planned, around the United States. Many were seen as tickets to legitimacy, playing the role that sports stadiums and museums would assume in later years. Now, decades later, the leaders of these monuments to the arts find themselves searching for new uses of aging halls and for more diverse new generations of patrons, all while spending hundreds of millions of dollars to make their fortress-like campuses more open. The performing arts center is being rethought, if not reinvented.”