“It does seem a little ironic that while the Atlanta Symphony is more than a third of the way toward raising $300 million to build a new facility, the Atlanta Ballet can barely afford to keep its doors open.” Now the company has let go of its orchestra, dooming it to the minor leagues.
Tag: 10.22.06
Wrapping Your Head Around Butoh
“People tend to think of Butoh in terms of aesthetic markers: white body paint, shaved heads, slow movement gained through intense muscular control, and a way of manipulating the body that is at once beautiful and grotesque, tragic and absurd. Influenced by German Expressionism, it tends to be imagistic rather than narrative. But while these elements often appear, defining Butoh in stylistic terms is dangerous.”
Have Awards Replaced Critical Judgment?
“Ours is truly the age of awards. Prizes are becoming the ultimate measure of cultural success and value. In a time of information overload – of cultural excess and superabundance – our taste is being increasingly created for us by prize juries and award ceremonies. Art is beginning to resemble sport, with its roster of winners and losers and its spectacles of competition: the Oscars, the Baftas, the Brits. Indeed, the larger cultural festivals and prizes, such as the Venice Biennale, the Oscars and the Nobels, are consciously imitative of international sporting competitions like the Olympics.”
Pirates Of Penzance In Yiddish?
The Gilbert and Sullivan classic is a masterpiece of word play. “Theatrical translations, of course, are common. Still, Gilbert’s dazzling patterns of double and triple rhymes, his ingenious puns and his lyrics’ perfect match with Sullivan’s music make the work terribly difficult to translate. Why go to the trouble?”
Humanities Of Art And Science
Lawrence Weschler is putting his stamp on Chicago’s Humanities Festival. “The division between the sciences and the humanities is completely artificial and one that is extremely recent. Until 100 years ago, it was the arts and sciences. Michelangelo and Leonardo and so forth were scientists as much as they were artists. I am very much for getting the sciences in the humanities where they belong.”
Renaissance Scholar Thomas Puttfarken, 62
“He was an internationally eminent scholar of Renaissance and Baroque art, elected a fellow of the British Academy in 2003 and for 30 years a pivotal figure in the department of art history and theory at the University of Essex.”
Arts Meet Technology In Pittsburgh
These days everybody’s online. So that’s where the artists are going too. “The good news is there is plenty going on in technology to help artists create new works, arts organizations to support them and ultimately for art fans to experience them.”
So, What Now?
“The successor scenario remains unclear, and the rest of the Eschenbach tenure – almost two full seasons – could go to a number of extremes: Conductor and orchestra might just give up on each other, which would be painful and/or soporific, or they might decide that since it’s not a marriage anymore, they can relax and have fun. [As for a successor,] the orchestra will have a long, hard slog with dark horses eager to come up, veterans such as [Bernard] Haitink who guard their time jealously, and interested parties in between – all arriving here knowing that the orchestra needs them more than they need it.”
How Things Sound In Miami
“Everything is audible: a candy wrapper 50 feet away, someone tapping their shoe three rows back; even a moderate cough in the balcony explodes like a detonating landmine on the main floor. Miami audiences are going to have to engage in some serious self-policing to avoid disrupting performances in such a live acoustic.”
TV Gets Its GOP On
There are some strange and unfamiliar characters in some of this fall’s new primetime TV series. Careful research has revealed that these characters – previously seen in Hollywood only as cartoonish foils and token presences – are called “Republicans.” Some of them are even called “Christian conservatives,” and it is fascinating to watch as their liberal creators attempt to flesh them out.