Performing Arts

Globe to Globe – Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre

May 4, 2012
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Many of the world’s greatest directors, over six hundred actors from all nations, and audiences from every corner of our polyglot community, will assemble to celebrate the stories, the characters and the relationships, which are etched into all of us. Shakespeare is the language which brings us together better than any other, and which reminds of our almost infinite difference, and of our strange and humbling commonality. And above all there are the plays themselves, plays which have travelled far and wide, and which on their travels have midwifed new theatre cultures, spread light and laughter, and helped nations, new and old, to define themselves. A Globe beside the Thames is where many of these plays began their extraordinary journey. Another Globe beside the Thames is delighted to be bringing these plays, dressed in the clothes of many peoples, back home …

 Globe to Globe

 

http://www.shakespearesglobe.com/


Britain’s Proms: music for everyone in Olympic UK

April 21, 2012
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Reuters) – In London’s Olympic year, the BBC Proms is mounting an olympian effort to attract audiences to its 92-concert summer season, and to be sure they can get there amid the crush of athletes and hundreds of thousands of fans flooding the city.

“It’s an international musical festival which happens to take place in the UK,” Proms director and BBC Radio 3 controller Roger Wright said at a news conference on Thursday launching the 118th Proms season.

The Proms open on July 13 and run until early September, providing a rich feast of concerts, chamber music, opera, musicals, world music and, most famously, the flag-waving, singalong pageantry of the Last Night of the Proms…..

Reuters

National Theatre Live

March 28, 2012
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The best of British theatre broadcast live to cinemas around the world.

National Theatre Live

The World Shakespeare Festival

March 23, 2012
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The World Shakespeare Festival (WSF) is a celebration of Shakespeare as the world’s playwright and we hope you will come and join us.

Produced by the Royal Shakespeare Company, in an unprecedented collaboration with leading UK and international arts organisations, and with Globe to Globe, a major international programme produced by Shakespeare’s Globe, it’s the biggest celebration of Shakespeare ever staged.

Almost 60 partners are coming together to bring the Festival alive.  Thousands of artists from around the world will take part in almost 70 productions, plus supporting events and exhibitions, right across the UK, including London, Stratford-upon-Avon, Newcastle/Gateshead, Birmingham, Wales and Scotland and online.

Over one million tickets are on sale. It runs from 23 April to November 2012 and forms part of London 2012 Festival, which is the culmination of the Cultural Olympiad, bringing leading artists from all over the world together in a UK-wide festival this summer.

The World Shakespeare Festival

Leonard Cohen’s Old Ideas album

February 2, 2012
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Leonard Cohen’s new album Old Ideas is unexpected delight, says Bernadette McNulty.

Being invited to an exclusive first listen of an album at a record company playback is usually a poisoned chalice, especially if the musician themself will be present. While you sit in a windowless room, being bombarded by unfamiliar songs blaring at you at cinematic volumes, innate human politeness dictates that under the watch of the star and their publicists, you betray no opinion on your face but delight…..

 

There was no need for such artifice though yesterday when Leonard Cohen arrived in London to unveil his latest album Old Ideas. Entering the Mayfair hotel like a genteel gangster in his trademark double-breasted dark charcoal suit, he politely doffed his fedora to the audience. “Don’t worry,” he said with a mischievous smirk before the music began, “I’m not going to sit facing you.”


The Telegraph

Why don’t theatres talk to each other more?

January 26, 2012
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Theatres are keen to advertise their own shows, but not events at other venues. Isn’t it time to pool publicity for the benefit of all?

There’s much talk of collaboration in theatre at the moment, but how far does it really extend? We’ve already seen the National helping regional houses unlock philanthropic donations, but are there other areas where theatres could do little things to help each other?

I ask because on a daily basis I sit at my desk and piece together which companies are touring where, even when the shows in question are co-productions between different venues. The theatres have pooled the money and the talent, but they don’t seem to pool the publicity or marketing information…..

The Guardian

 

Youth orchestras in Venezuela

January 23, 2012
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The music man
The power of art

IN THE debate on the value of arts lessons in schools, one killer argument comes from a place that few know much about. Some are familiar with Venezuela’s oil, natural beauty, high crime rates and comic-opera rulers. But the country is also home to el sistema, a network of youth orchestras founded in 1975, which has lifted innumerable children from overcrowded barrios and turned them into successful professional musicians. Its star graduate is Gustavo Dudamel (pictured left), who, among other things, is the music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic. This month he begins an ambitious programme to honour the centenary of Gustav Mahler’s death, conducting all of the composer’s symphonies with both the LA Philharmonic and the Simón Bolívar Symphony Orchestra of Venezuela, his alma mater…..

The Economist

Arts review of 2011. BBC

January 23, 2012
By

Will Gompertz

A devastating earthquake and tsunami in Japan, revolutions in North Africa and the Middle East, riots in London and Manchester, and the imminent threat of financial Armageddon in Europe. That was the big news of 2011.

Oh, and there were some good art exhibitions too.

Tracey Emin at the Hayward Gallery, Mike Kelley at the Baltic, Gateshead, and Leonardo da Vinci at the National Gallery, to name just a few.

But then, enjoyable as they were, they hardly compare in news terms to the matters of life and death that were (and continue to be) played out during some of those major world events…..

BBC

Alex Ross

January 18, 2012
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OUTSIDE THE MACHINE: THE BEST CLASSICAL PERFORMANCES OF 2011

By Alex Ross

If popular stereotypes about classical music held true, the genre should have had no social or political relevance in 2011, one of the darkest and angriest years in recent American history. Classical music is, we are given to understand, the playground of the one per cent, the province of the super-rich. When concerts are depicted in the movies, you see élites in evening wear gazing snootily through archaic eyewear at misbehaving interlopers. Anyone who has actually attended a classical performance in the past half-century knows that such images are largely make-believe. Yes, the most expensive seats at the Metropolitan Opera cost hundreds of dollars, but the highest-priced tickets for big-league pop-music and sports events generally cost far more, and the money in play behind the scenes of such mass-market spectacles makes the classical economy look puny……

The New Yorker

Guimarães, Portugal, 2012 European Capital of Culture

January 13, 2012
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Guimarães 2012 ECOC

In 2012, Guimarães is hosting a major gathering of creators and creations: music, cinema, photography, fine arts, architecture, literature, thought, theatre, dance, street art. In Guimarães, the artistic products imagined and created by its residents will merge with those coming to the city from all over Europe. Over the course of one year, the city will be the promoter of Europe’s cultural diversity, revealing its creations and welcoming those from other countries….

http://www.guimaraes2012.pt/