Category: issues

With Artistic Fraud, Keiley has created a number of inventively staged productions that have toured Canada, including Tempting Providence and AfterImage. Her latest collaboration with playwright Robert Chafe, Oil and Water, will play at Toronto’s Factory Theatre in April.

“Our fundamental guiding principle is to use culture as a tool for education and transformation, to improve people’s lives, and we’re in a position to fulfill that mission, thank God. Over the last decade our budget has been doubling every six years or so. It’s incredible, no?”

“Scotland’s five national performing companies achieved a near 20% increase in audience figures in the financial year 2010/11, according to figures published by the Scottish government. However, while financial and audience indicators are healthy for the year-on-year statistics, audience figures have not recovered to 2008/9 levels and show a decline since the companies entered a direct funding relationship with the government in 2007.”

“Licences are complex and confusing and difficult to understand by the majority of those working in further education.”

Most English-speakers who’ve studied some French know that, in France, most vulgar exclamations are along the lines of bordel and merde (and bordel de merde). But in Quebec, much to some innocent students’ surprise, the bad language seems to center around the Blessed Sacrament. Mais pourquoi?

“I had hoped to find residues and traces of traditional China. But today, especially in major cities like Beijing and Shanghai, the remnants of tradition — unwanted and unmourned — are rapidly dwindling. They are perceived as atavisms of underdevelopment that must be extirpated in the name of progress, in the service of catching up with, and ultimately surpassing, the West.”

“The collective bargaining of the art handlers’ union is one of the few remaining guarantees of fairness in the art world, and Sotheby’s is doing everything they can to eliminate it.”

Sure, austerity hurts arts groups in Europe, but what about the U.S.? “For Americans used to seeing the best and most adventuresome European culture on tour in this country, the belt-tightening is beginning to affect both the quantity and quality of arts exchanges.”

In Seattle, architects make the finals for planning a revamped Seattle Center. But what in the hell are they talking about? Knute Berger asks, “Why do architects talk about dialog in incomprehensible language that seems to catalyze brain-freeze and prevent any dialog from actually taking place?”

Cuts in 2010 left large swaths of Wales bereft last year, arts groups say. “The Wales Association for the Performing Arts said ACW’s funding decisions had left arts cold spots in Wales and affected young people disproportionately. It stated: ‘You cannot withdraw funding to 32 arts organisations and expect participation not to be affected.'”