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The Baryshnikov Arts Center has (finally!) officially purchased the 299-seat Jerome Robbins Theater adjacent to the three floors that it owns in the 37 Arts building. The closing was yesterday - thanks in part to $2.5 mil from the Jerome Robbins Foundation, matched by Baryshnikov, the BAC paid in cash! The renovated theater will open […]

Clive Barnes.
The British dance critic died today. He was 81, and in fragile health, but it is still a shock: it couldn’t have been more than a few weeks ago that I last saw him at a show, frail but alert, always a gentleman, always with a grand anecdote.

Can Lincoln Center save public television? Can public television make the Lincoln Center campus “more transparent and welcoming”?

Can anything save City Opera? Can we at least have a public television reality show about its demise if not?

Here come the cuts.

If only dance videos would evolve…
Who says dance doesn’t work on video? O.K., O.K., maybe I’ve said that to some of you. Please allow me to refine such a crude pronouncement: It’s not that dance can’t work on camera, it’s that most of the dance films and videos out there […]

“The Art of Participation,” installation view at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; photo: Ian Reeves, courtesy SFMOMA
Museums, as we’ve discussed, are eager to engage with their public in ways that move beyond handing out headphones. It’s all about interactivity and live art, from the Whitney’s mostly unsuccessful foray into participatory art during the last […]

Marin Ireland as Cate and Reed Birney as Ian in Sarah Kane’s “Blasted” at Soho Rep. Photos by Simon Kane.
Among the interesting post-election trends I’ve noticed is a certain impatience among audience members with, shall we say, downer art. As one friend whispered in my ear at the start of a recent show, “I hope […]

The rumors were true: Gerard Mortier ain’t coming.
Sadness.
Who will do the “Brokeback Mountain” opera now???

Apparently, a vote for Obama was a vote for ballet - at least, since he tapped Representative Rahm Emanuel of Illinois to be his chief of staff. This from a Rolling Stone piece:
“When Rahm was a boy, his mother forced him to take ballet lessons, and he threw himself into it with the same intensity […]

“Les sept planches de la ruse.” Photos by Richard Termine.
I write fortified with Riesling.
I have just been to see Compagnie 111 and Scenes de la Terre’s “Les sept planches de la ruse” (The Seven Boards of Skill) at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, where it had its U.S. premiere as part of the […]