Photo by Elke Wetzig — Some Rights Reserved

Under the “grass is always greener” category, what is more important to you: to keep working, contributing and creating; or to win a prize, even the ultimate prize?

According to the ever-perceptive Doris Lessing, winning the Nobel Prize in Literature, in 2007, has been a “bloody disaster.”

In an interview with UK Radio 4’s Front Row, Lessing laments all the obstacles that come with being a prize winner: “All I do is give interviews and spend time being photographed.” As for her talent and vocation, “It has stopped, I don’t have any energy any more.”

No more novels because she has become too celebrated? (Do you think the fact that she has also become eighty-eight years of age has anything to do with the level of her energy?)

This is certainly a turn from the woman who declared on winning on the award: “Oh Christ! I couldn’t care less” and that the prize “doesn’t mean anything artistically.”

Lessing has always been a master of altering our perceptions of our world. The author of The Grass is Singing, The Golden Notebook, The Good Terrorist, amongst so many other significant works, has never shied from critiquing with a smile.

In an appearance at one festival, Lessing asked, “What use are men?” At another festival, she defended men against “unthinking and automatic rubbishing” by feminists.

So from all sides, it is worth considering the words of the Nobel’s oldest prize winner. Then again, wouldn’t you rather have the phone ring and the email box ping with some regular frequency?

Be it wisdom, weariness, or just age, Lessing deserves her prize and her privacy to work, if not at least think.

Born in Iran, and raised in Rhodesia, which is now Zimbabwe, Lessing’s voice also counts in politics: “Mugabe is a disaster.”

Through her work, and her interviews, Lessing has held fast to a core principle: “We are free… I can say what I think. We are lucky, privileged, so why not make use of it?”

Wouldn’t you, too, make good use of an award?

- Bill Reichblum

Twelve years have passed since the opening night of Jonathan Larson’s musical Rent at the New York Theater Workshop in 1996. After twelve years of success and awards, one of the longest running musicals on Broadway has now premiered in Buenos Aires. The venue couldn´t have been a better choice: Ciudad Cultural Konex, a former oil factory turned into a cultural center in the heart of the Abasto neighborhood, where famous tango singer Carlos Gardel spent part of his childhood.

Director James Murray and producer and executive director Andy Ovsejevich talked with KadmusArts about how and why they decided to produce the musical in Buenos Aires, what the creation process was like, and how they dealt with the translation and adaptation of the script and lyrics. In closing, they shared with us an upcoming production at Konex: Puccini’s opera, La Boheme.

Cast Photos from the Ciudad Cultural Konex Production of Rent:

 

 Interview: James Murray and Andy Ovsejevich [20:08m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Photo by Kenneth Lu — Some Rights Reserved

Wired magazine has created a twelve-step program that makes you smarter.

While the regular audience for Wired might approach this program from a techie point of view, we have a much better path towards intellectual enlightenment and accomplishment.

For this twelve step program, you don’t have to be shamed into action. Here’s the hook: If you go to festivals, you will have fun, and each of the twelve steps is made easy.

Here are Wired’s twelve steps to think about, and KadmusArts’ twelve steps to take:

1. Distract Yourself

2. Caffeinate with Care

3. Choose Impressive Information

4. Think Positive

5. Do the Right Drugs

6. Juice Your IQ Score

7. Know Your Brain

8. Don’t Panic

9. Embrace Chaos

10. Get Visual

11. Exercise Wisely

12. Slow Down

Don’t you feel smarter already? So, where are you going to go now?

- Bill Reichblum

Margaret Lawrence is the Director of Programming at the Hopkins Center for the Arts at Dartmouth College. The “Hop” presents each year 100 or more live performances in music, theater and dance, plus well over 200 film screenings and other events. Most recently, Class Divide, a three-year programming initiative, seeks to examine the issue of class through the arts.

In this interview, Margaret talks about the multiple roles that the Hopkins Center plays within the local community, how to forge relationships with artists, and the whys and hows of commissioning new works.

 

 Interviews from APAP: Margaret Lawrence [10:36m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Photo by Timo Arnall — Some Rights Reserved

Manuel Bagorro’s work answers his own question: How can an international arts festival benefit people who are struggling with so many everyday necessities?

Bagorro is the founder and artistic director of the Harare International Festival of the Arts, or HIFA.

As posted this week in KArts Culture News from the BBC coverage of Zimbabwe, Bagorro has been writing a diary while keeping the upcoming festival alive in Zimbabwe. (The festival begins April 29.)

Producing an international festival in the midst of the surreal elections, where eight of ten are unemployed, and the inflation rate is 100,000% (officially), is more than challenging. For Bagorro and his colleagues in Zimbabwe, it has become necessary.

His diary posts run through the daily obstacles: budgeting in an economy where the cost of paper changes drastically from 10 am to 2 pm in the same day; water and electricity are never a given; the box office’s computers are stolen at customs; and, the ever-present fear of violence coupled with the constant hope of national resolution.

Still, HIFA’s platform for Zimbabwean artists and artists from twenty other countries opens a space for the “power of the arts to unify” and “to nurture the creative aspect of national identity.”

It is easy for philosophers and politicians to spout such noble phrases.

For Bagorro and HIFA, the nobility is in the doing, the acts of creating of art and community.

The theme of this year’s festival? The Art of Determination.

- Bill Reichblum

Photo by Márcio Cabral de Moura — Some Rights Reserved

Tuesday, April 29 is International Dance Day. To celebrate, why not listen to what dancers and choreographers have to say about their art?

From the KadmusArts archives, here are sixteen podcasts featuring voices from the dance stage:

• Pablo Pugliese and Noel Strazza
• Lucy Guerin
• Ronald K. Brown
• Judith Smith
• Lára Stefánsdóttir
• Carolina Pizzo
  • Spanish
  • English Translation
• Carolina Simón
  • Spanish
  • English Translation
• Cathy Weis
• Jennifer McLachlan
• Helen Herbertson
• Harri Kuorelahti
• Dulcinea Langfelder
• Gabriela Zuarez
• Silvina Szperling
• Lane Alexander
• Ulrike Becker
  • Part 1
  • Part 2

Photo by Romain H. — Some Rights Reserved

Thirty years after giving the world disco, France has given us a new dance culture, albeit one where the brand is as important as the moves.

Can anyone be nostalgic for disco? The music, those clothes, the attitude: all can found at the international disco museum — yes, the Disco Museum.

Watch the best video Disco Dance instruction: How to Disco

In those innocent days before instantaneous worldwide video distribution, Marc Cerrone created his seventeen minute Love in C Minor, and Henri Belolo helped ignite the sound of the Village People. Now, who owns all those mirrored balls?

As posted in KArts Culture News this week, there is now a new dance craze that is a combination of techno and hip-hop styles, with moves like “Le Brushing” and “Le Pot de Gel.”

Tecktonik, though, is as much a dance as it is a brand.

Alexandre Barouzdin and his partner Cyril Blanc have put in a trademark for any use of the Tecktonik name. Seven years ago, Barouzdin and Blanc hosted parties called “Tecktonik Killer” at the Metropolis club in Paris. Barouzdin takes credit for naming Tecktonik for his impression of the different dance styles colliding on the dance floor like tectonic plates. From the club’s wild scene to the open space outside of Centre Pompidou, the style became a rage, and a movement was born.

Now there is the logo, the gum, the energy drink, clothes, the mobile handset, hair salons, and, of course, the soon to be video game.

The best description so far: “Weird-looking teenagers seemingly trying to rip their own heads off.”

Wonder what they said about the first disco dancers?

- Bill Reichblum

Pablo Pugliese is a choreographer, dancer, and tango dance teacher, and lives in New York City. Noel Strazza is a contemporary dancer, choreographer, and tango teacher. She currently lives in Montreal. Pablo and Noel are tango dance partners, and during a visit to their native country, Argentina, they talked to KadmusArts after presenting the piece Madness Tango at the Cambalache Festival in December 2007.

In this interview, Pablo and Noel talk about Madness Tango, which premiered in New York and participated in the Basel Tango Festival in Switzerland. They also discuss their approach when teaching tango, as well as their independent projects in Canada and the United States. Finally, they share with us which songs and musicians they prefer to dance to, as well as why they think foreigners are so crazy about tango.

 

 Interview: Pablo Pugliese and Noel Strazza [44:04m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Steven Gove is a founder and director of the Prague Fringe Festival, based around the principles of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. Now entering its seventh year, the Festival will host in 2008 around 40 productions from all over the world, including Australia, Canada, India, The Netherlands and the UK.

In this interview, conducted by Prague journalist Andy Markowitz, Steven talks about how and why he came to found a Fringe Festival in Prague, the challenges involved, and the potential for similar festivals to spring up in other cities.

 

 Interview: Steven Gove [13:02m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Photo by Libby Rosof — Some Rights Reserved

When you go to a museum, do you ever feel as though you don’t quite “get it”?

Now, don’t worry — the Whitney Museum of American Art explains it all for you. After all, the goal is to encourage new audiences to access art. Right?

Their Biennial 2008, which runs through June 1, is one of the most prestigious gatherings of new art. The exhibit is so new and so bold that it is a good thing the Whitney helps entice the potential audience with clear and concise summaries of the artists’ works.

Or is it? Carol Diehl found her own favorite Whitney exhibition descriptions, some of which we reprint here along with a couple of choice additions.

Sure, it might be easier to write a description of an episode of Gilligan’s Island (“Gilligan finds a crate full of magician’s props, but his attempts to use them backfire.”)

Still, you might want to get the Professor off the island to help you with the Whitney’s invitation to art:

It is the problematizing of expectations and formalisms through destruction and transformations that is the heart of the continuing project.

Baldessari’s juxtapositions, displacements, and spatial interventions resonated with Magritte’s uncanny aesthetics but also with the disjunctive poetics very much at the dyslexic heart of his own work. This was further achieved through the deployment of elective amenities, primarily by displacing the familiar—and familiar narratives—with the unexpected or with other elements of disruption, including surprising spacing or gaps.

Thomson’s inherently conversational practice both gamely Pop-ifies its often antiaesthetic historical precedents and resituates that generation’s thought experiments in the social realm.

Bove’s “settings” draw on the style, and substance, of certain time-specific materials to resuscitate their referential possibilities, to pull them out of historical stasis and return them to active symbolic duty, where new adjacencies might reactivate latent meanings.

As political actions, Haeg’s initiatives subvert the idea that humans are the earth’s apex species by alleviating our alienation from our environment, our food, and each other. Artistically, they challenge viewers and participants to diversify their own daily routines in favor of poeticism and positive interaction in all regards.

Ultimately, Lawler’s self-reflexive photographs about the endless parades of artistic display point toward the regeneration of surplus meanings produced in the spaces between artworks and exhibition frames. Marking the apparatus of the art system, Lawler’s knowing work is at once critical and in on the game.

As McMillian continues to explicate present moments, his work comments on the lugubrious underbellies implicit to each cultural progression and movement.

Perhaps plucked from a commercial or shareholder prospectus, each vignette denies specificity even as it is fetishized through its transmutation into luxurious materials at a grand scale, leaving the narrative ambiguously open—and ready to be consumed, repurposed, and discarded anew.

Don’t walk, run!

- Bill Reichblum