Nickell’s Bag

"José Manuel Carreño, the veteran American Ballet Theater dancer, has announced he is retiring in August 2011." The Cuban-American star, who has just announced plans to lead a new dance festival in Sarasota, will continue to perform as a guest artist.... […]

"The Monte Carlo casino-resort has replaced longtime Las Vegas Strip headline magician Lance Burton with … Jabbawockeez, the first-season winner of MTV's America's Best Dance Crew" competition."... […]

"Tuesday's inaugural performance of the new White House Dance Series transformed the stately room into a stage for some of the world's most talented dancers to strut their stuff: Endless pirouettes, gravity-defying leaps, and some crazy one-handed spinning handstands, too."... […]

"The Carreño Dance Festival, named for ballet dancer José Manuel Carreño, will have two components: master classes and two performances by several guest artists in December, and a monthlong dance workshop next August, which will culminate in four performances."... […]

"A team of psychologists used video footage of men strutting their stuff to pinpoint the killer moves that separate good dancers from bad. … The dancers were judged by 37 straight women, also aged 18 to 35."... […]

Ask the genial Carlton Woods about creating an orchestra in hard economic times, and he hardly lifts an eyebrow. "If you wait for all the stars to align properly, you'll probably not start anything,"... […]

"The Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra will take its first trip to Cuba next month as part of a cultural exchange with the Cuban Institute of Music, the company will announce Thursday."... […]

"For 14 years, the Intimate Opera Company was on the move, appearing around the San Gabriel Valley in places including a bookstore-coffee shop, a retirement community and a hotel ballroom. No more. The company says it's becoming the 'opera company in residence' at the Pasadena Playhouse."... […]

BoaC executive director Kenny Savelson: "It's a melting pot. We're a bit like mad scientists putting all of this in a room with the audience and creating a new experience." BoaC co-founder Julia Wolfe: "Philadelphia is such a beautiful old historic city that, in a way, it's more radical to bring this into that environment." […]

"Yes, we realize that Klingons are actually human actors dressed up with prosthetics and make up and that the opera in question is more an artifact of extreme nerdery than a genuine work of an alien culture. Still, due to a gnawing fear of retaliation by people who have access to home-made weapons that look like they could chop off our blog-writing hand […]

"It is absolutely possible to create work for young people that is artistically thrilling for both kids and adults." Joe Giardina, director of education at the New Victory Theater in New York, offers suggestions to performers and parents alike. ("Don't ignore age recommendations.")... […]

"The appeal of a blonde-wigged and warbling Elle Woods shimmying through Legally Blonde in the Philippines, say? Or the interest in seeing Billy Elliott's gritty northern mining town replicated in South Korea? Major British productions no longer just travel back and forth across the Atlantic; they're franchised across the planet."... […]

"It's hard to say whether American re-enactors would allow a digital camera on the 19th-century battlefield. But in the U.K., rules are a bit more casual. Because there's little personal connection to the Civil War, the British can have more fun with it."... […]

Athol Fugard has "argued that writers were increasingly being pressured to write for audiences that only had 'attention spans of 10 minutes between adverts'. But do these two elements of politics and entertainment have to be mutually exclusive? Of course not."... […]

"[P]laywrights have tended to find more creative potential in triangles where the bisexuality simmers unconsummated, expressed through a shared surrogate, or where it's the fantasy of an imagination haunted by the potential torture of double exclusion." Then there's Noël Coward's Design for Living.... […]

"Signs of danger for the frescoes, which include Michelangelo's "The Last Judgement" behind the altar and the nine scenes from the Book of Genesis he painted on the ceiling of the chapel, were detected this summer during a routine dusting."... […]

"The city's bid to enlist the Los Angeles County Museum of Art as a key player in conserving the Watts Towers has hit a snag as LACMA seeks a guarantee that it won't be held financially liable for any damage to the folk-art masterpiece that might result if its work on the towers were to go awry."... […]

"Works from the three leading players in this summer's big art-photography controversy will be hung in a Los Angeles gallery on Saturday for a brief exhibition aimed at giving folks a chance to see what the hubbub is all about, and decide for themselves."... […]

"What do Marcel Duchamp's readymades have to do with a Chinese mandarin's robe? And what is the link between the crowns of African kings and a synagogue in South America? These are some of the questions raised by three contemporary artists who were asked by the Israel Museum in Jerusalem to select pieces from its vast collections to create the […]

"Gold earrings made for an Assyrian queen, a sacred 4,000-year-old statue, and 540 other looted pieces of Iraq's ancient history were formally returned to Iraq on Monday … [But] a previous shipment of 632 stolen pieces recovered in the US [went] missing after being delivered to Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's office last year."... […]