Susan Hall
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Recent Articles:
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New York Theatre Ballet Streams Dance and Talk Front Page
Between the Acts on Sundays
By: - Feb 12th, 2021The marvelous New York Theatre Ballet is offering Sunday conversations on dance in their Between the Acts Series. Agnes de Mille was featured recently. Diana Byer, the founder of the troupe, spoke with Anderson Ferrell and Diana Gonzalez-Dudert from the De Mille Working group, Broadway dancer and actor Dirk Lumbard, and NYTB’s Elena Zahlmann. Diana Byer, the company's founder, president, and artistic director, has said: "...Right now ballet is dominated by a very athletic style, and it's important that there's not just one style out there. I'm really committed to keeping this other way of working alive, a way that's more about the meaning of a gesture, the feeling of the music, or a story.'
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Wave Theory Records Presents 3 Women Front Page
Legendary Score by Gerald Busby
By: - Feb 07th, 2021Wave Theory Records has released the original soundtrack from legendary filmmaker Robert Altman’s 1977 cult avant-garde film 3 Women, starring Shelley Duvall and Sissy Spacek. The strikingly dissonant score was written by American composer Gerald Busby,
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Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera and Mexican Modernism Front Page
A Dazzling Exhibit at the Albuquerque Museum
By: - Jan 31st, 2021One of the largest, and most comprehensive, collections of 20th-century Mexican art takes over the Albuquerque Museum beginning February 6th.Consisting of more than 150 works— paintings, drawings, photographs, woodcuts, sculpture and publications. This blockbuster exhibition highlights the identity of Mexico in the aftermath of the Mexican Revolution.
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Atlanta Opera Presents Love Letters to Atlanta Front Page
Jamie Barton Sings Georgia on My Mind
By: - Jan 29th, 2021Georgia has been very much our minds this year and last. The state significantly contributed to the return of Happy Days. The Atlanta Opera Company is offering Love Letters to Atlanta on February 14. Morris Robinson, Jamie Barton and Kevin Burdette.
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TFANA Streams an Outsider Rehearsal Front Page
John Douglas Thompson Takes on Shylock
By: - Jan 28th, 2021Preparing for live-reopening, Theatre for a New Audience (TFANA) is sharing its rehearsal process. Arin Arbus, a regular as TFANA, directs. She and John Douglas Thompson have worked together on Otello and Macbeth. Now they take on Shylock and Merchant of Venice.
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A Dancer's Covid Tale Front Page
Chriselle Tidrick's "The Limits of Escape."
By: - Jan 16th, 2021Make Do is not what many artists are doing in the time of Covid. In the process of coping, they have extended boundaries, created new forms, and looked particularly to visual distribution channels to show their new work. Chriselle Tidrick is a formidable aerial dancer who has also appeared on stilts at the Metropolitan Opera. Here is the dancer herself on how she came to create "The Limits of Escape."
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Song for 2001:A Space Odyssey, Just Released Front Page
52 years later
By: - Jan 13th, 2021Mike Kaplan is a producer, documentary director, actor, award-winning poster designer and marketing strategist. He is known for co-producing The Whales of August, (Lilian Gish’s last film.) A Clockwork Orange, I'll Sleep When I'm Dead, Robert Altman’s Short Cuts and more. In addition, he is noted for his collection of historic movie posters that have been exhibited in Museums from Los Angeles to Jacob’s Pillow. He is also a songwriter.
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Wide Slumber at Prototype Festival Front Page
Gorgeous Music Combining Science and Art
By: - Jan 13th, 2021Wide Slumber is a taped work presented at the Prototype Festival. It premiered in Reykjavik in 2014. Icelandic composer Valgeir Sigurdsson adapted a much lauded poem by Canadian a. rawlings. In evocative, erotic and riotous words. rawlings shows us the night zone between sleep and dreams. Shakespeare dwelt there often – to sleep perchance to dream. Wide Slumber is a large work.
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Network for New Music Presents Extraordinary Measures Front Page
Composer Portrait of Richard Wernick
By: - Jan 11th, 2021Network for New Music gives us a delightful composer portrait of Pulitzer-prize winner Richard Wernick, a native Bostonian. He has studied at Tanglewood, and with Leonard Bernstein. Can you imagine a "Sunken Synagogue" replacing the Ys' cathedral of Debussy?
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Prototype Festival Opens OnLine Front Page
Modulation Startles and Stuns
By: - Jan 09th, 2021Undaunted by the constraints of COVID, the Prototype Festival launched its 7th annual event on January 8th. Modulation opened the week of new, streaming works. While the trailer and prologue look like the Hollywood Hills striped with waving geological lines, the three florescent doorways invite entrance to an interior. The inventive work, made up of 13 parts, is divided into three acts, Isolation, Fear and Identity.
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Pen/Man/Ship by Christina Anderson Front Page
Moliere in the Park Streams Its First Contemporary Play
By: - Dec 27th, 2020Moliere in the Park, with their streaming team Andy Carluccio and Liminal Entertainment Technologies, LLC are presenting Christina Anderson’s pen/man/ship free through January 4th. It is a powerful play set on a boat passage that reverses the more familiar journey of black Africans.
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Hans Henze's Sailor Betrayed Front Page
Simone Young Conducts a Masterpiece at Vienna State Opera
By: - Dec 23rd, 2020The Vienna State Opera has recently streamed their live production of Hans Henze’s The Sea Betrayed, a title translated with the approval of Yukio Mishima, the famed author of the novel on which the opera is based. The opera premiered in Berlin in May of 1990. Audiences in this country were not initially attracted when it was produced the following year by the San Francisco opera. The War Memorial Opera House was half empty. The opera is a masterpiece.
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Hunt Slonem Reimagines Rabbits Front Page
An Artist's Adventures in Wonderland
By: - Dec 17th, 2020For more than five decades artist Hunt Slonem has been painting and reimagining his obsessive motifs: butterflies, birds, bunnies, and portraits of Abraham Lincoln, whom he refers to as his Marilyn. Repetition plays a huge role in his work. Excess and extravagance define his life and art.
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Irish Repertory Theatre's Meet Me In St. Louis Front Page
Holiday Treat Directed by Charlotte Moore
By: - Dec 13th, 2020The Irish Repertory Theatre has brought superb streamed theatre to the public this fall. Their most recent production, streaming now, is Meet Me in St. Louis. It is just the right champagne for the holiday season.
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Experiments in Opera Delivers A Podcast Series Film
Aqua Net and Funyums
By: - Dec 09th, 2020Experiments in Opera (EIO) is the company that gives most hope for the future of the form. They are fleet, inclusive and steeped in the history of the opera. Most importantly, they have extended the camp story-telling which characterizes the form. For all the beauty of classic operas, let’s face it: they are camp. A new podcast series has just been released by the group.
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James Darrah At Boston Lyric Opera Front Page
Creating Streamed Opera
By: - Nov 25th, 2020Boston Lyric Opera, ever on the lookout for startling innovations that work, has hired Darrah to produce a stop motion feature-length animated version of Philip Glass’s The Fall of the House of Usher.
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James Darrah At Boston Lyric Opera Front Page
Creating Streamed Productions
By: - Nov 24th, 2020Boston Lyric Opera, ever on the lookout for startling innovations that work, has hired Darrah to produce a stop motion feature-length animated version of Philip Glass’s The Fall of the House of Usher.
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Edward Smadone's Once and Again Front Page
A Recording for Our Time
By: - Nov 23rd, 2020Edward Smaldone is a contemporary composer of classical music. His distinctive textures include unusual combinations of instruments, odd beats, counterpoint and rich harmonics. These elements blend but do not merge. Rough edges combined with smooth melodic lines are ear catching. Lines often stretch wide and giant leaps leave gaping spaces between notes.
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Bard Conservatory Orchestra Features Wesley Sprott Front Page
Fanfares, Serenades, Concertina
By: - Nov 20th, 2020Count on Bard to bring us unexpected, deserving programs concert after concert. Henri Tomasi’s Fanfares Liturgigues opened this program. The fanfares were conceived as part of Tomasi’s opera Don Juan de Manara. They premiered as a stand alone a decade before the opera opened in Munich. What a splendid work.
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Kev Berry at The Tank Front Page
A Hefty, Engaging Monologue
By: - Nov 19th, 2020Kev Berry is an award-winning playwright and a superb monologist. In Harsh Cacophonies I and II,, he is directed by his usual collaborator, Alex Tobey. The monologue was created in three separate pieces, which can be performed as stand alones. The three are joined for this production and work well together. Two hours fly by, in part because Berry is in a manic state. His speech and stories are always clear, but often rush. This locates us in the urgent terrain from which his stories grow.
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The Orchestra Now at Bard Front Page
Chamber Ensembles Intrigue
By: - Nov 19th, 2020Bard’s The Orchestra Now (TON) gives live performances in the time of Covid. Recently they performed a challenging and revealing program in Annandale, NY. Selections were made with attention to the number of instrumentalists required and ability to social distance on stage.
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Young Musicians Tune Out Covid Front Page
At The Monmouth Conservatory of Music
By: - Nov 10th, 2020Where once technology was thought to be the death knell of human social interaction, it is now bringing us together. During this pandemic, arts institutions worldwide have been regrouping and finding ways to keep going virtually. The Monmouth Conservatory of Music is no exception. Living in this altered reality, unable to gather in-person as they normally would, the school has gone all-out to ensure the beat goes on for its young musicians (some as young as 5!)
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Woodie King Jr. Wraps Up Octoberfest Front Page
Stories About the Old Days by Bill Harris
By: - Nov 03rd, 2020Stories About The Old Days closes this delightful retrospective with a nostalgic reflection on the meaning of faith, art and friendship. Richardson-Jackson's direction provides an evocatively genuine space as the light filters through the red and gold stained glass windows of an old church. This two-person piece, is atmospheric, a feat which masterfully conquers the restrictions of the “zoom” style presentation.
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Irish Repertory Theatre's Touch of the Poet Front Page
Ciarán O’Reilly Directs
By: - Nov 01st, 2020The Irish Repertory Theatre was preparing to present Eugene O’Neill’s Touch of the Poet when Covid struck and theatres closed. Sets were ready. Costumes had been fitted. Most importantly, rehearsals were underway. Ever inventive, the troupe has re-grouped to put the production on streaming. The advantage of a set richly reflecting the progress of the drama is immediately evident. Our eyes rest on the stage.
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Tyshawn Sorey Plays His Deck Front Page
Alarum Will Sound in Video Chat
By: - Oct 31st, 2020Newark, New Jersey has given us Philip Roth and LeRoi Jones among others. Now we have Tyshawn Sorey, moved south to a studio in Philadelphia, 'conducioning' at a triptych of computer screens on which seventeen performers have gathered to create one of Sorey’s Autoschhiams, a spontaneous composition.
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