Category: issues

“Those stages now need content, and that has Western producers and promoters looking at the Chinese market, and at ways to build new audiences and expand their activities — and earnings. Yet many arts professionals from the West say China has a long way to go.”

“A study to be released Monday by Theatre Projects Consultants, a theater-development firm, found that the average standard width of seats in performing-arts theaters has expanded from 21 to 22 inches over the last two decades, “primarily due” to the concurrent rise in obesity.”

“Why are there seven separate festivals? Why not unite them under one banner – and spread the subsidy around more equably? Goodness knows there are struggling Fringe artists who could do with a slice of Mills’s £2.5m from Edinburgh City Council. But then, why risk reducing Edinburgh to the homogeneity Mills already detects in its media coverage?”

“Across Detroit, land is being turned over to agriculture. Furrows are being tilled, soil fertilised and crops planted and harvested. Like in no other city in the world, urban farming has taken root in Detroit, not just as a hobby or a sideline but as part of a model for a wholesale revitalisation of a major city.”

“The competition for retrofitting downtowns and parking lots for this century was open to architects, urban designers, planners, students, community activists — really anyone interested in reshaping the Island’s future. Entries came from 30 countries ranging from Argentina to India, including finalists from both Serbia and Iran.”

“Two prominent intellectuals, facing a verdict of up to three years’ imprisonment over a museum exhibition in 2007, issued dire warnings on Thursday that Russia was starting to resemble Nazi Germany, contemporary Iran and the Soviet Union in the harshness of its growing nationalism, dominance of the Russian Orthodox church and fear of modern art.”

“In one corner, there was the [Dale] Chihuly paid-entry exhibit, with a glass house and art garden that its proposers, the privately owned Space Needle, say will bring in 400,000 visitors and $1.1 million a year in revenue to the city. In the other corner was KEXP, a non-profit, listener-supported radio station, which proposed bringing its studio and operations to the Center, building green space, and introducing new musicians to the public.”

In a project called “Ancient Greeks/Modern Lives: Poetry-Drama-Dialogue,” Peter Meineck and his Aquila Theatre “will stage free dramatic readings from 10 [verse epics and] plays – including Homer’s Odyssey, Sophocles’ Ajax, and Euripides’ Trojan Women – for the public, especially combat veterans, inner-city residents and rural communities … at 100 public libraries and art centers in some 20 states.”

“To cope with the blitzing level of noise in today’s oceans, North Atlantic right whales are calling louder to each other. It is the first time a baleen whale has been observed compensating for the din in this way.”

“The invitation is the outcome of Sir Tom’s backing of the dissident Belarus Free Theatre – a group that has been subject to constant harassment since its formation in 2005 – and a protest against draconian new laws regulating internet access in the former Soviet republic.”