Category: people

The 33-year-old father of two, who created installations at galleries throughout the US, worked often with musicians and dance companies as well as in theater. He was thrown from his motorcycle on Saturday night when a driver ran a red light, struck him and then fled the scene on foot.

“In 1998, he founded the Pyotr Fomenko Workshop Theater that quickly grew into one of the country’s most renowned companies known in Russia and abroad for its sophisticated interpretation of the Russian and international classics.”

Brian Lauritzen of KUSC: “Vin Scully once said that what he does to evoke the image of baseball is to make the ballpark atmosphere enticing. That really resonated with me. If there’s some way a concert on the radio can demystify it for someone who might not know all the etiquette…. If I can get one person into the concert hall, it’s been worth it.”

The actor played Malcolm X in the 1979 TV series Roots and Elijah Muhammad in Spike Lee’s 1992 Malcolm X.

“Rakoff, a prizewinning humorist whose mordant, neurotic essays examined everything from his surreal stint portraying Sigmund Freud in a Christmastime shop window display to his all-too-real battles with cancer, died on Thursday in Manhattan.”

“Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is among the jurists who have looked for legal lessons in arias, and she got a chance Friday to indulge both passions at the American Bar Association’s annual meeting in Chicago.”

“For God’s sake, this was the author of The Fatal Shore, his epic story of our country’s founding. He was the man who had shown us who we were, or what darkness we had to confront in order to grow up. He had grasped the cruelty of our birth and shoved it in our faces. Here, in this vast masterpiece, was the hell we were born into, and he would be our Dante.”

Says the writer/director of Away from Her and Take This Waltz, “We’re all kind of ugly in our relationships. I have a friend who thinks that you find someone who will take you and then you reveal yourself. … What’s sexy at the start of a relationship is how that person offers you the possibility of reinventing yourself. And then at some point you realise they probably won’t.”

“His elitist aesthetics and patrician diction supported a populist ethos that celebrated excellence in carpentry and art-making alike, and hoped to play down the role of money in ruling everything, a shaky position to maintain at any time and maybe impossible to duplicate by anyone brave enough to emulate his example.”

He co-founded DV8 Physical Theatre in 1986, then went on to work as a solo artist and to create his own company, Nigel Charnock + Dancers, as well as making work for other companies. “Nigel had a love-hate relationship with a lot of things, but dance as a form was up there near the top of the list. He was critical of the lack of content in dance and of most contemporary choreographers, … [and for] many years, he tried to stop dance audiences from coming to see his work, particularly dance critics.”