Martha Graham was one of the most influential figures in 20th-century dance, but nine years after her death at age of 96, her legacy is in trouble. The Martha Graham Dance Centre has closed and all forthcoming productions of her work have been cancelled.
The problems date back to before Graham died when she named Ron Protas, a photographer and former lawyer, as the centre's next artistic director. He also became director of the Martha Graham Trust on her death, and inherited the rights to her name and the licence to all of her works.
Potential sponsors kept their distance, and the recent US tour generated a deficit of $300,000. After some pressure, Protas agreed in 1999 to relinquish his position of artistic director of the centre within a year to Janet Eibir, a former dancer. In March, however, suspecting that he intended to renege on this agreement, the board successfully voted to oust him.
The ensuing instability exacerbated the centre's perilous financial position and led to its closure. The board has bullishly asserted that this is just a temporary measure but it would seem difficult for them to reopen without Protas's support. As director of the trust (which is independent of the centre) and as copyright-holder for the Graham works, Protas holds the trump card - permission to perform the works.
The controversy will no doubt boil on at the major American dance festival, Jacob's Pillow, in Massachusetts, where tonight the Irish company Coisceim performs its show, Ballads.
He likes to work from noon until 10 p.m., with no breaks and lots of coffee - that's the style of the eminent Catalan director, Calixto Bieito, who is in Dublin directing the Abbey Theatre/ Edinburgh Festival in Barbaric Comedies, by Valle-Inclan in a version by Frank McGuinness. The cast adjusting to this time- table includes: Mark Lambert, Kate O'Toole, Eamon Morrissey, Joan O'Hara, Derry Power, Anthony Brophy, Garrett Keogh, Cathy White, Lalor Roddy and Eleanor Methven.
Remco de Fouw is amused that he is called "Celtic" on the press announcement that he has won an international competition to design a sculpture for Festival Square at the Edinburgh International Conference Centre. Perhaps it was to sweeten the pill that a Scot hadn't won. He's Irish, alright, but no more or less Celtic than the rest of us, being born of Dutch parents. De Fouw's sculpture for this prestigious site, well known to Edinburgh Festival-goers, is based on the neolithic spheres which are found all over Scotland and almost nowhere else (one or two were found in Knowth). No-one knows what they were for. Says de Fouw: "I felt that was needed, in the context of the International Conference Centre. They provoke the viewer to make all sorts of references."
"The ticket prices here are chronically out of synch. They're off the beam." There's no denying that John Costigan, Executive Director of the Gaiety Theatre, is a brave man. He is bringing Gaiety Theatre ticket prices up, and he's not fudging it: "Theatre-goers have been benefiting from artificially low ticket prices. If they'll spend £22 on a bottle of wine in a restaurant, why not on a theatre ticket?"
Historically, he says, ticket prices were kept low to compete with the Abbey and other theatres. He says, however, that there is a residual fear in subsidised theatres that higher prices will affect their Arts Council funding. Costigan says he might pitch a top ticket price as high as £27, depending on the show. The top ticket price for the Druid/Royal Court production of Martin McDonagh's The Beauty Queen of Leenane, which opens on Monday, July 17th, will be £21.
Do not, whatever you do, forget "Access to What?", a debate today at 3 p.m. at the Irish Writers' Centre, focusing on "the issues that arise in supporting the integrity of the artist while trying to serve a wider audience". Co-produced here by Ali Curran of the Dublin Fringe Festival, it's part of a month-long dazzling British initiative called The Institute of Ideas, which aims to set cats among intellectual and moral pigeons all over the place - phone 01-8729016 for your free ticket . . . Morphic Fields, choreographed by Cathy O'Kennedy of Fluxus Dance, devised on an abandoned space on the Bog of Allen, is part of a programme of dance which runs for three nights from tonight at the Samuel Beckett Theatre, Trinity College, and includes work by, and co-devised with, New York choreographer Michael Foley (01- 6082561) . . .
