Dancers Flock To Oslo For Audition

There’s not exactly an opening yet in Norway’s National Ballet. But 90 dancers from around the world turned up to audition just on word that there might be extra money in the budget next year to hire for a couple of “temporary” positions. “Permanent dance contracts in Norway are viewed as attractive, because they provide a secure position until ‘retirement’ age at 41. That suggests more job security than elsewhere in the dance world, where many professionals move from assignment to assignment, always having to audition and prove themselves again and again.”

A Hard Look – Can We Really Afford A Concert Hall?

The city of Elgin, Illinois has hired consultants to take a hard look at whether the city actually needs and can support a new concert hall. “What it boils down to is this: What does a concert hall really mean to the city and at what cost, and can the money be raised? A task force of Elgin officials has explored the possibility of building a performing-arts center with a potential price tag of $60 million.”

2005’s Top Concert Draws

Who did we buy tickets to hear last year? “Top honors go for the second time to the Rolling Stones, who posted a combined gross of almost $168 million, the vast majority of which came at the concert box office. U2 wasn’t far behind with $150 million, and then Kenny Chesney at $109 million, the only other acts to top $100 million.”

Locking Down Our Culture

“New ideas about the bounds of ‘fair use’ are slowly shifting the blame to antiquated notions of intellectual property, for making copies a crime. Contrary to popular logic, there’s an argument to be made that access to our common culture has never been as restricted as today, when the simple act of circulating a song comes with the threat of a lawsuit.”

A Plan For UK TV Downloads

The UK has the most illegal downloads of TV shows. There’s no legal downloading system. Now there’s a proposal for TV producers. “They would have a set amount of time, called a ‘primary window’, in which to distribute the show. There would be a second period, or ‘holdback window’, during which broadcasters could restrict what the show’s producers do with it.”

Rating The Movie Experience

“Box office may be down, but sales of iPods, Xboxes, cellphones, MP3 players, TiVos and plasma screen TVs are going up. Make that … skyrocketing. People are spending more time every year with entertainment — nearly every new consumer electronics gadget exists to provide it. But with today’s entertainment coming in all sorts of shapes and sizes, two-hour movies are simply no longer the first-choice package.”

Italian Filmmakers Protest Berlusconi

There is “a growing movement in Italy’s left-leaning artistic community that has galvanized against the center-right Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi ahead of a general election due in spring. The uprising in the arts includes a string of movies explicitly targeting Berlusconi, whose tight grip on the country’s media through his Mediaset empire provides plenty of ammunition to opponents with concerns about free speech.”