Line-up of geniuses: West Side Story’s Broadway creative/production team
The West Side Story Broadway production team in 1957: (l. to r.) lyricist Stephen Sondheim, scriptwriter Arthur Laurents, producers Hal Prince and Robert Griffith (seated), composer Leonard Bernstein and choreographer Jerome Robbins. (click for detail) Thank you, songbook1, for posting this photo. Like this? Read more: Not a Jet, but still the swingingest thing: George ...
Headlining at the Rainbow Room: Jack Cole and his Dancers
Sep
14
2011
Cafe Life in New York Jack Cole and His Dancers Featured in the Rainbow Room’s New Show (by) Malcolm Johnson The New York Sun, Saturday, May 18, 1942: The Rainbow Room’s new show, introduced this week, is a gay diversion highlighted by the colorful performance of Jack Cole and his Dancers. In fact there is ...
Eiko & Koma’s ‘Water,’ in a frigid lily pond
“Water is in our bodies, rivers, sea, our womb, and our tears.” So say Eiko & Koma, the Japanese-born performance duo, in an artists’ statement. Immersed for 45 beautiful, but bitter-cold, minutes in a Skirball Center lily pond, they encourage their audience to “remember and imagine the ancient water from which all living things came.” ...
A Gish gift for Trish
Pleased to see Hollywood riches supporting New York creativity. That’s the way it oughta be. And especially nice that it’s an exchange between three creative women. [Item below re-posted from New York Times Culture Beat, September 7, 2011, 12:45 pm , by Daniel J. Wakin] Trisha Brown Wins Gish Prize A Gish for Trisha: the ...
Why art matters: Eiko & Koma and photographer Johan Elbers on lower Manhattan sand dune in 1980 2
Photo featured in Eiko & Koma: Time is not Even, Space is Not Empty Photo credit: (c)Johan Elbers (1980) Like this? Read more: Eiko & Koma’s “Event Fission” at the landfill created for the World Trade Center, 1980
Eiko & Koma’s “Event Fission” before the twin towers of the World Trade Center (1980) 2
Sep
10
2011
How did these two artists foresee that there would be hell to pay on this site? Who knows? They’re artists. They probably don’t know themselves. “Event Fissions” took place at sunset at Battery Park Landfill in Manhattan, which was created from sand dredged from New York Harbor and earth excavated during the construction of the ...
The Agnes & Cecil Show 1
From Empire of Dreams: The Epic Life of Cecil B. DeMille, by Scott Eyman, published by Simon & Schuster, 2010, page 307-308. Agnes deMille was struggling in London to make ends meet when Cecil hired her for six weeks at $250 a week to create the dances for Cleopatra. It ended badly, but then it ...
Eyman hits a bull’s eye; his “Empire of Dreams” wins prestigious theater book award
Not just because he’s a friend of arts•meme, and a fellow toiler in the bowels of Brigham Young University’s Harold B. Lee Library, the resting place of the massive Cecil B. DeMille archives… [… a humongous trove of cinema-memorabilia prodigiously overseen by archivist James d’Arc...] The well regarded film historian, Scott Eyman (Lion of Hollywood: ...
The Juilliard School tells you everything you always wanted to know about Swan Lake but were afraid to ask
The survival, let alone the mystique, of the ballet, Swan Lake, is a phenomenon few would have predicted at its premiere in Moscow in 1877 — which was a flop. Wikipedia notes [with added commentary]: The premiere of Swan Lake on March 4, 1877, was given as a benefit performance for the ballerina Pelageya Karpakova ...