08.08.14 – ArtsJournal Wayback

Why Did Samuel Beckett Abandon His Mother Tongue (Only To Translate His Work Back Into It)?

Because he needed to. “It is becoming more and more difficult, even senseless, for me to write an official English. And more and more my own language appears to me like a veil that must be torn apart in order to get at the things (or the Nothing-ness) behind it.”

Tiler Peck Transforms Herself Into The World’s Most Famous Ballet Statue

“With her strong jaw and confidently bared breastbone, Degas’s Little Dancer statuette … absolutely does not care what we think. Yet her mystique has only grown. Who was that girl, really? And who was she to Degas? These questions fuel [a new] musical, which is reportedly part fact, part fantasy,” in which Peck is starring this fall.

D.C.’s Shakespeare Theatre Co. Is Literally All Over The Place

“The Tony-winning classical troupe performs in Penn Quarter on two of Washington’s biggest stages, but its offices and shops are miles away” – scattered throughout the District and beyond. Nelson Pressley looks in – and sees why STC has bought land on which to consolidate.

Penguin Defends “Creepy” Cover Of “Charlie And The Chocolate Factory”

“Members of the public reacted angrily when the new edition – part of the Penguin Modern Classics range – was revealed [last] Wednesday. The cover was deemed ‘misleading’ and ‘creepy’. Author Giles Paley-Phillips said it looked ‘more like Lolita‘. But Penguin said it stressed ‘the light and the dark aspects’ of Dahl’s work.”

The Last of The Yahi Indians Chose To Live Out His Life In A Museum Exhibit

He appeared from the California wilderness in 1911, “For the last five years of his life until he died in 1916 from tuberculosis, he was a sort of living diorama, as well as a voice for a vanishing past … isolated as a survivor of the disease and destruction that had claimed his culture.”

The First Domino? One Of Italy’s Crisis-Ridden Major Opera Houses Goes Dark

Bari’s Teatro Petruzzelli, the country’s fourth-largest opera house, is simply out of money. With both the city council and the regional government having slashed funding, the Petruzzelli has cancelled the two productions it had scheduled for this fall, and no one is sure if or when it will reopen.

Can Digital Tech Help Build A Better Piano?

That’s what acoustical scientists at NYU are trying to find out, as they bring banks of microphones and a Disklavier out to the Steinway factory to gather “a very dense acoustical scan of the radiation pattern of the grand piano.” (includes audio)

Dylan Thomas Is Underrated. Why? Embarrassment

“[There’s] a degree of cultural and political embarrassment to start with – over a writer whose near-total indifference to politics is still startling and whose attitudes to women are likely to win few allies today. But there is a deeper embarrassment yet. For so many male readers, he is the quintessential poet of adolescence. How many of us were convinced on reading him that this was what poetry was really like, heady, incantatory, obsessively sensual? How many proceeded to write terrible imitations of him in the back of school notebooks? That is what people wince over.”

Beware Los Huecheros: Mayan Tombs And The Men Who Loot Them

Huecheros is “the [Guatemalan] slang term for antiquity looters, derived from the Maya word for armadillo. On a building overlooking an ancient plaza, the looters scrawl a message, brazen and taunting: “We, the huecheros, stuck it to this place.” Here’s the who, what, where, and how.

Tag: 08.08.14