ABT – Ads For A Younger Audience

Trying to appeal to a younger demographic, American Ballet Theatre has commissioned a hip new ad campaign. “Rather than targeting the ballet’s traditional audience, older patrons and aficionados of the arts, the campaign takes aim at younger set. According to the U.S. Census, young adults ages 18-24 is the fastest-growing segment in arts attendance. The “Be moved” campaign aims to change people’s perception of the company from stodgy to sensual. ‘We wanted to really make it aspirational, but also accessible’.”

The Promising Young Writer Who Says He Won’t Write Again

Who is Dan Rhodes? “At 30, he is one of the youngest authors to be chosen for Granta’s reputedly generation-defining Best Young British Novelists list. His first novel, ‘Timoleon Vieta Come Home,’ has attracted a flurry of plaudits.” But there’s a catch on the way up the literary ladder. Rhodes declared that he will never write again.

Commercial Interests Picking Apart Libeskind’s WTC Plans

Stakeholders in the process to build on the site of the World Trade Center are already starting to pick apart the Daniel Libeskind design that had been chosen for the site. The owner of a retail mall that had been in the base of the World Trade Center doesn’t like the design: ‘We don’t think [the Libeskind plan] works. So why don’t we sit down and fix it? Why not have a meeting? It’s not that difficult. We think we can help and make it better.’ Westfield’s unhappiness is significant because the company and the Port Authority will have to renegotiate Westfield’s lease at the site.”

Nureyev And The Royal – What Might Have Been

What would have happened if Rudolf Nureyev had become head of London’s Royal Ballet? Nureyev wanted the job, and Royal managing director John Tooley talked with him. “The Royal Ballet needed a new director in the mid-Seventies and approached Nureyev. Tooley remembers several discussions with him, in which Nureyev finally said that he would like the job but would also need to continue dancing. He never made any secret of his need to be on stage, but he also needed a fall-back if he proved unsuited to directing. Tooley answered that if Nureyev continued dancing to the extent he wanted, this simply wouldn’t meet the company’s needs. End of negotiations.”

NEA Chairman Dana Gioia’s view of Theatre in America:

“It cannot be a coincidence that the three greatest eras in theatre – which I would define as Athenian drama, Elizabethan drama, and 19th Century Italian opera – existed in those rare moments when all classes attended the theatre together. The dramatists had to find a way to create works that spoke across classes of people rather than flattered one particular group. So I believe we must aim high in quality and as broadly as possible in terms of audience. Anything less would be unworthy of a great public agency.”

The Kentucky Derby Of Theatre

The plays at Actors Theatre of Louisville’s Humana Festival can be surprising, but “perhaps the strangest spectacle of all is an overflowing international crowd of press, theatre pros, alumni, locals, and just-plain theatre junkies who descend on a city block of this courtly, urbane Kentucky city to binge on eight programs of nothing but new plays by living American writers.”

Movies On TV? Time To Move On

“Britain has been Europe’s most movie-intensive television market for more than 40 years. Until relatively recently, this has made perfect sense. Before it was possible for viewers to compile their own private film library, the belated television screening of a successful theatrical release was a genuine broadcasting event.” But with so much non-TV access to movies, it’s time for programming to move on.

The All-Important 18-to-24s

The 18-to-49 American TV demographic is “the single most important factor in determining what we see, hear and read. Appealing to young adults and trend-setting teenagers in an effort to sate ad buyers has promoted numerous media trends, among them the proliferation of so-called reality television, since the genre disproportionately attracts them; the 1990s surplus of yuppie-something sitcoms; news channels streaming text up, down and sideways; and even shorter newspaper articles, usually accompanied by pictures the size of a cantaloupe. Now, beyond tailoring sitcoms and dramas to a younger crowd, news coverage increasingly reflects this infatuation, from model-like anchors to gee-whiz graphics that translate the war into video-game language for those conversant in Nintendo and PlayStation.”