“With a career spanning over six decades, Smith’s credits include eight Broadway shows, hit TV shows, feature films and major domestic and international tours (including West Side Story). … Even with high-profile friends like Eartha Kitt and students like Barbra Streisand, Sylvie Vartan, Barbara Walters and Diane Von Furstenburg, Smith was best known as dance consultant for box office smash hit musical Saturday Night Fever (John Travolta). He will also be remembered as the founder of Jo Jo’s Dance Factory (currently Broadway Dance Center).” — Dance Magazine
Category: people
Why Jay Leno Gets A Screen Credit On “Mary Poppins”
It has to do with a car. – Entertainment Weekly
Jean Guillou, Legendary Paris Organist And Composer, Has Died At 88
Guillou, the organist for the church of St. Eustache from 1963 to 2015, had an international career and was excellent at improvisation. He was quoted as saying he wanted his instrument “out of churches” and in other areas of contemporary musical life – working with Noh theatre and with mimes, for instance. – Le Monde (France)
Lamia al-Gailani Werr, Archaeologist Who Helped Rescue Iraqi Art, Has Died At 80
Werr, an expert on Mesopotamian stone seals, helped assess the damage to the Iraqi National Museum and its art, and also helped “catalog the objects that remained, found storage facilities for them and acted as an intermediary between the museum staff and occupying forces.” – The New York Times
Lyn Kienholz, Tireless Advocate For The Artists Of Los Angeles, Has Died At 88
Kienholz, founder of the California/International Arts Foundation, fiercely advocated for the artists of Los Angeles, and she hosted dinner parties to connect them with “writers, politicians and tastemakers from all over the world.” She was one of the main sparks for the idea that became the L.A.-focused artist showcase Pacific Standard Time, and she never stopped advocating for the artists of Los Angeles to be written permanently into art history. – Los Angeles Times
Florence Knoll Bassett, Who Designed American Offices Into Modernity, Has Died At 101
Knoll Bassett was “a pioneering designer and entrepreneur who created the modern look and feel of America’s postwar corporate office with sleek furniture, artistic textiles and an uncluttered, free-flowing workplace environment.” – The New York Times
Michel Legrand, Oscar-Winning Composer, Has Died At 86
Legrand won three Oscars and created around 150 scores, including the legendary Jacques Demy Umbrellas of Cherbourg, “a landmark film in which all of the dialogue is sung and which is believed to mark the only instance in Oscar history in which a composer was nominated in all three music categories for the same film (best song, best original score, best musical adaptation).” – Variety
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Glamorous Exile
Vain, Solzhenitsyn was less vain than most dissidents. He had no political deference, but a metaphysical humility had been beaten into him by what he had undergone. Exile was not a “new beginning” for him. He undertook it with dread, and a somewhat unrealistic idea of how tight a link he could maintain to the culture of the old country. – National Review
Jonas Mekas’s Final Interview: ‘The Best Commercial Cinema Today Is Action Cinema’
“The plots are invented on the spot. Not like Hitchcock, where every scene that follows is connected with the final scene. In the action movie, it is more like the style of The Arabian Nights.” (Mekas’s favorite recent film? Lady Bird. “It is the only one that deals with real life and succeeds.”) — The Guardian
Andy de Groat, Experimental Choreographer Of 1970s And ’80s, Dead At 71
“Mr. de Groat was a significant presence on the New York downtown dance scene and in Paris in the 1970s and ’80s. Introduced to audiences through his work with [Robert] Wilson, he later formed his own company and built a distinctive choreographic identity through his use of spinning, a technique he began to develop for Mr. Wilson’s work.” — The New York Times