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Austin360 blogs > Austin Arts: Seeing Things > Archives > 2009 > February > 17
Tuesday, February 17, 2009
‘Lion King’ choreographer comes to Austin
For more than three decades, Jamaica-born dancer has been crafting a singular style of dance sourced in many origins: the torso-centered movement and energy of Afro-Caribbean dance, the speed and precision of ballet and the rule-breaking experimentation of the social and street dance.
That singularity netted Fagan a Tony Award for his choreography in Disney’s “The Lion King.”
Now, his Rochester, NY-based company comes to Austin.
Garth Fagan Dance performs at the Long Center for the Performing Arts at 8 p.m. Wednesday, Feb. 18. Go to www.TheLongCenter.org for tix and info.
“The dancers he has trained,” writes Ballet Review, “are virtuosi, no doubt about it, and fearless too, able to sustain long adagio balances, to change direction in mid-air, to vary the dynamic of a turn, to stop on a dime.”
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YouTube creates an orchestra
Consider a 21st century version of a standard joke:
How do you get to Carnegie Hall? YouTube, YouTube, YouTube.
Mixing internet technology with “American Idol” sensibilities, YouTube is putting together the first orchestra selected entirely from video auditions posted online and chosen in part by online votes.
Through Feb. 22, you can vote online at www.youtube.com/symphony for one of the 200 finalists which have been culled from more than 3,000 video submissions from 70-plus countries.
About 80 musicians will be selected and results will be announced March 2.
On April 15, the YouTube Symphony Orchestra will premiere at Carnegie Hall on under the direction of conductor Michael Tilson Thomas.
Auditions were open to any musicians, professional or amateur playing any instrument. A panel of judges from leading symphony orchestras culled the 3,000 submissions to the 200 up for the current final audition. In suitable e-democratic fashion, there’s little info on the individual musicians. You have to vote based simply on the quality of their playing.
Video auditions aren’t entirely new to the opera and symphony world. Plenty of producers and directors pre-screen performance candidates via online videos. But assembling an international orchestra entirely from video auditions arguably hasn’t been done before.
Some of the first-round entrants took on the challenge set-up by YouTube and posted video performance of snippets from Tan Dun’s “Internet Symphony for YouTube,” a new piece written for the occasion by the renowned Chinese composer. Members of the London Symphony Orchestra posted master classes to offer tips on how to tackle the Tan Dun piece and more general advice on auditions.
A spirited fanfare inspired by street sounds the world over, Tan Dun says of his symphony in a YouTube interview, “It’s very important to have symphony culture relate to today’s street sounds because there are oh so many invisible Beethovens behind YouTube.”
All the Tan Dun submissions will be compiled into a mashup video which will be premiered at Carnegie Hall on April 15 and will be hosted on YouTube on April 16. No other news on what will be on the Carnegie Hall program though likely Tilson Thomas will pull together his own mashup of what classical music can be in the year 2009.
Here’s Tan Dun talking more about his “Internet Symphony for YouTube” and workshopping it with the London Symphony Orchestra:
Permalink | Comments (1) | Post your comment Categories: Music
