A Renaissance At Grand Rapids Ballet

“An ambitious new repertoire, record-breaking sold-out performances, and a renewed local buzz have revitalized the 41-year-old company.” In just over two seasons, artistic director Patricia Barker “has taken GRBC from a little-known regional ballet company to one making inroads into the national and international dance scene.”

Finding A Way Through Music

Matt Savage is 10 years old, and he plays the piano well enough that he turns heads in New Orleans, where he lives. He’s playing jazz in concerts around the world. But he isn’t just a prodigy, he’s also autistic, and “when he was younger, had great difficulty communicating, did not like to be touched and – most incredibly for a musician – couldn’t stand the sound of music or of household noises like a blender or a vacuum cleaner”

Finding A Way Through Music

Matt Savage is 10 years old, and he plays the piano well enough that he turns heads in New Orleans, where he lives. He’s playing jazz in concerts around the world. But he isn’t just a prodigy, he’s also autistic, and “when he was younger, had great difficulty communicating, did not like to be touched and – most incredibly for a musician – couldn’t stand the sound of music or of household noises like a blender or a vacuum cleaner”

The New Americans

From where do you get your art history? If you’re a student, probably from a textbook. “Until recent years, few choices existed for textbooks of American art history, still a relatively young field in academia.” But the field has exploded with new choices. “Scholars applying the ‘new art history’ have expanded all boundaries of ‘American’ art in their studies—including media, people, and methods—creating a yearning in the field for new teaching tools that reflect these changes.”

Touch Me… Feel Me…

There is a visceral thrill to collecting books. Sure they’re difficult to store. But “most true book-heads will not be content with contact by catalogue alone. They must sniff the dust of ages, they must browse, they must handle the goods. Dealers have responded to this urge by peregrinating around the country offering their wares at book fairs.”

Who Owns Dance?

Who owns a dance once it’s been done? “In the 18th and 19th centuries, choreographers were rated so low that it was the composer’s name which usually headed the posters. The ownership of a ballet, if contested, would generally have been considered the right of the theatre. This meant, if you were a choreographer, that your ballet was fair game for the subsequent improving hands of producers acquiring it for other companies or staging it after your death.”

Don’t Box Me In

Why is it that some of the most critical people condemning contemporary art seem to have the strongest ideas of exactly what art is? And those ideas usually involve some sort of idea which has been done before. Beware, writes Martin Gaylord, having inflexible definitions of art is a sign of narrow minds…