1. Former director of the Kimbell Art Museum, Edmund Pillsbury, passed away Friday. Pillsbury led the Fort Worth museum for 18 years and had much to do with its emergence as a world-renowned institution. After he left the Kimbell, Pillsbury was director of the Meadows Museum for two years.

2. A smaller version of The Battle of San Jacinto, a painting by H.A. McArdle, turned up in an attic in West Virginia. The painting was completed three years after the famed mural in the Texas Capitol by McArdle, and has been in his family’s possession ever since because the artist was never paid for the work.

3. Rumors have been circulating that a citywide festival featuring the works of late-playwright Horton Foote was in the works. Word came Friday via the DTC, the festival will indeed happen. Lawson Taitte has the details.

What a difference a movie makes. Five years ago the production of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe at the Dallas Children’s Theater would have sailed over the heads of many of the young children at the Saturday matinee I attended in the Rosewood Center for Family Arts, while a handful of their older brothers and sisters eagerly awaited key plot points from C.S. Lewis’ classic story to come alive on stage.  But even the youngest children who attended ..read more

Red Riding’s Yorkshire is dreary and harsh, populated with sour-faced characters who move about in a disturbingly dark version of small-town life, where real estate developers lord over an empire of corruption and vice. The three films that make up the Red Riding trilogy, In The Year of Our Lord: 1974, In The Year of Our Lord: 1980, and In The Year of Our Lord: 1983, are dank and pungent like strong scotch. The sound of the Yorkshire dialect and the vivid faces of the locals who populate the screen are as fascinating as the drama itself. The films, an adaptation of novelist David Peace’s Red Riding Quartet, were originally shown in the United Kingdom as a mini-series on Channel Four, but Red Riding holds up as an epic-length movie. All three parts will open at the Angelika Film Center this weekend.

But there is a problem with Red Riding as a theatrical release. The film is best viewed as a trilogy, and only die-hard movie goers are likely to see all three installments in the theater. Although each of the three movies are designed to stand on their own, when taken as singular films, each has flaws. The first in the trilogy, 1974, focuses on a young journalist, Eddie Dunford (Andrew Garfield), who gets a job for the Yorkshire Post as a crime reporter and begins to investigate the disappearance of a young girl. As he digs he discovers corruption within the police department and suspects a powerful real estate developer, John Dawson (Sean Bean), as the culprit. The more he digs, the more he is pushed away and intimidated, by the police and his own editors. It is a harrowing, Kafka-esque study of frustration and injustice, but it also suffers from familiar flaws of novelistic adaptation. Eddie seems lean as a character, and you can’t shake the sense that there are scenes from the novel missing in the movie that flesh him out. And while 1974’s conclusion is as thrilling as it is troubling, it feels rushed and incomplete, like the beginning, not the end of a story. Because it is. Eddie is only an introduction to a world that is fleshed-out in the later films.

If any of these movies stand on its own, it is 1980, and yet the second installment feels most out of place in the trilogy. Whereas 1974 and 1983 focus on the child abductions, 1980 is caught up in the case of the Yorkshire Ripper, a serial killer who has claimed 13 victims. A special investigative team from outside Yorkshire is formed to track down the killer, bringing in investigator Peter Hunter (Paddy Considine) from Manchester. Hunter encounters a stubborn, myopic West Yorkshire police force that would rather see the case go unsolved than have an outsider catch “their ripper.” General rudeness turns to all-out intimidation and harassment as the case heats up. Hunter is blackmailed, his house is burned down, and the subjects of his investigation keep showing up dead. Like Eddie, Hunter is frustrated by the corruption and tries to take justice into his own hands.

The third installment, 1983, is just simply not a stand-alone film; its plot is too firmly rooted in the first film, 1974, with extended flashback sequences that would be difficult to decipher without the first movie. Beyond mere clarity, without the world built up around the story over the previous two installments, the great dramatic climax – the significance and horror of the trilogy’s resolution – doesn’t have sufficient weight. The final film looks back on the events of 1974 after a girl has gone missing. After the first film, everyone has assumed that the right person was locked up for the child abductions (the handicapped boy Michael Myshkin (Daniel Mays)) because no more girls have been killed. The new incident sets in motion Michael’s parents, who hire the slovenly, drunkard lawyer John Piggot (Mark Addy) to file an appeal, and Maurice Jobson (David Morrissey), a police detective whose conscious begins to weigh on him after years of witnessing extreme corruption within the force. The two begin to undercover what looks like a pedophilia ring that goes straight to the highest levels of local society and power.

Coming to the third film after the first two is an incredible experience. By that point, you feel like you are at least familiar with the ways of Yorkshire and desensitized from its evil, but the film manages to break you down, unsettle you, and make you vulnerable to its final horror. This effect is achieved not from any great plot or singular performance, but from the steady wear and tear of being immersed in the world of the Red Riding trilogy for the full six hours. The world Red Riding creates is ultimately the star of the film, and Red Riding succeeds by winning a war of attrition with the viewer, just as the corrupt world of Yorkshire wears down the film’s central protagonists.

The series ends with a voice over from BJ (Robert Sheehan), a young male prostitute who helps unite all three segments as kind of street sage; he knows all the town’s secrets because of his profession. BJ’s monologue is dense, the language rich and rapid-fire, and you glimpse the world Peace created in his prose. By the end of the three films, you know the old cliché that the book is better than the movie is right again – even if you have never read Peace’s four novels. Red Riding never achieves the same stirring heights as this language, but six hours of staring at these long-faced Yorkshiremen still gets you mighty close.

Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana, performed Thursday night at Morton H. Meyerson Symphony Center by the Dallas Symphony Orchestra and chorus, with guest conductor Yan Pascal Tortelier, is easy to criticize—but hard to resist. Traditionalists and academicians disdain the relentless rhythms and facile harmonies, but American audiences have consistently loved the piece for over half a century.

And with good reason. The texts, drawn from medieval lyrics rediscovered in the nineteenth century, describe lust, love, desire for alcohol, despair, and rage ..read more

At the beginning of Chloe, the latest film by Canadian filmmaker Atom Egoyan (Exotica, The Sweet Hereafter), gynecologist Catherine Stewart (Julianne Moore) tells one of her patients that an orgasm is simply the contraction of vaginal muscles – a basic stimulus response reaction. “There’s nothing magical about it,” she says. The rest of Chloe seems bent on proving Catherine wrong. Egoyan, as he has shown in a number of his other films, believes there is a whole lot more to ..read more

Michael Craig-Martin, the celebrated Anglo/Irish/American artist who lives and works in London, is currently exhibiting at the Goss-Michael Foundation. His long and varied career is glimpsed through a small selection of new paintings and video-paintings. Step inside and find a very British artist. To the uninitiated, there are reverberations of iconic American pop art. Look again. There are none of the devices of distance and mediation that lodge ‘pop’ in between its parent imagery and its predicated audience. The tuned-in ..read more

Mike Daisey noticed our post about the Brierley gift of $1 million to the Dallas Theater Center’s resident acting company, and while he commends the gift on his blog as the “right kind of news,” he also says it “is a starting point- not the end — for this conversation.” From Daisey:

Let’s make no mistake–in these economic times with careful stewardship, I’ve been told that a 5% return on an endowment is a rough guideline for back of the envelope calculations. At $1 million, that gift should then generate $50,000 a year for the actors–enough to pay one person’s salary, or  not quite two at the low, low rates actors are accustomed to in the American theater.”

That said, the Brierley gift was a naming grant, not a founding grant, and since the DTC’s troupe has been around for some time, I imagine it is being added to an already existent pile of cash.  I have an inquiry into the DTC to try to get a sense of what the size of their current endowment is. I’ll update this space when I hear back.

UPDATE: From the DTC:

An acting company-specific endowment does not exist, and the Brierley’s gift does not exclusively support the acting company. Rather, as stated in the press release, it “will support DTC’s artistic programming, which includes its commitment to productions of classics, new plays and musicals of the highest caliber, meaningful community partnerships, and a resident company of professional actors.”

The acting company is a part of DTC’s artistic programming, and the Brierley’s gift will support the artistic programming as a whole. DTC renamed the resident acting company to the Brierley Resident Acting Company to acknowledge the gift and honor the Brierleys.

When Mike Daisey was in town, he criticized the current state of the American theater. One of his complaints: how come the money spent on fancy buildings for theater didn’t go to endow resident acting companies? Well the Dallas Theater Center has a really fancy building, but thanks to a gift from Diane and Hal Brierley, they now have an extra $1 million for their acting company. The gift from the longtime Dallas arts patrons means the company will now be called the Diane and Hal Brierley Resident Acting Company. Here’s the full release:

Donors’ $1 million gift supporting Dallas Theater Center

renames Resident Acting Company

DALLAS (March 19, 2010) – In honor of a $1 million contribution from dedicated arts patrons Diane and Hal Brierley, Dallas Theater Center will rename its Resident Acting Company to the Diane and Hal Brierley Resident Acting Company.

The Brierley’s generosity will support DTC’s artistic programming, which includes its commitment to productions of classics, new plays and musicals of the highest caliber, meaningful community partnerships, and a resident company of professional actors.

“The passion and support that Diane and Hal have shown for the arts and for Dallas Theater Center through their generous donations, tireless efforts as board members and volunteers herald them as true champions of the arts in Dallas,” says DTC Managing Director Mark Hadley. “Without the confidence and faith of benefactors like the Brierleys, DTC’s work simply wouldn’t be possible.”

The $1 million gift comes just one year after DTC Artistic Director Kevin Moriarty announced the re-establishment of a resident acting company, which includes Hassan El-Amin, Chamblee Ferguson, Matthew Gray, Sean Hennigan, Liz Mikel, Cedric Neal, Lee Trull, Sally Nystuen Vahle and Christina Vela.

“The Brierley’s gift recognizing the importance and scope of Dallas Theater Center’s work is an incredible honor,” said DTC Artistic Director Kevin Moriarty. “The members of our acting company are resident artists, teachers and citizens of Dallas. They are the theater’s ambassadors, actively engaged with the community and other organizations to create powerful art that is meaningful to our city. The gift allows us to strive to raise the quality of our work higher and higher.”

“The arts are very important to a city’s civic health and vitality, and Dallas Theater Center is an organization dear to us that consistently produces work of the highest quality for our community,” says Diane Brierley. “From the topnotch artistry onstage to the community outreach of its education programs, to their productive collaborations with other organizations, DTC is a vital arts organization in Dallas.”

Members of the Diane and Hal Brierley Resident Acting Company will be seen in the remaining shows of the season: The Beauty Plays (Feb. 23 – May 23), Death of a Salesman (April 16 – May 16), It’s a Bird…It’s a Plane…It’s Superman (June 18 – July 25), and member Matthew Gray, in addition to appearing in Death of a Salesman, directs The Shape of Things from The Beauty Plays series.

The subject gains access to bliss by the cohabitation of languages working side by side: the text of pleasure is sanctioned in Babel. (The Pleasure of the Text – Roland Barthes)

I am all for the ecstasy of reading texts against each other. The frisson of comparison is generative for the reader. We make meaning of things based on what we already know; we see what we are already paying attention to. One function of art is to open up new ..read more