In the Arts: San Antonio Opera to File for Bankruptcy
April 18, 2012 | Read Time: 2 minutes
Three months after closing its offices, the San Antonio Opera announced Monday that it would file for bankruptcy within 20 days, the San Antonio Express-News reports.
The company has canceled its remaining productions this year and has no assets or staff, according to its lawyer, Randy Osherow.
The announcement came four days after a local musicians’ union filed a federal lawsuit alleging the opera still owes players payments under a settlement stemming from a canceled January 2010 production.
In other arts news:
• A longtime guiding light of the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater is leaving the organization after more than four decades, The New York Times says.
Sylvia Waters joined Ailey as a dancer in 1968 and for the past 38 years has been artistic director of Ailey II, the theater’s second company and a primary supplier of performers for its principal troupe. The main organization’s artistic director, choreographer Robert Battle, joined Ailey under her wing in 1999.
“It’s the kind of job you could do almost forever … but you don’t want to be a fixture,” Ms. Waters told the Times. “I believe in renewal; I believe in change, I really do.”
• Italy’s government is ousting the board that runs the Maxxi, the country’s national museum of contemporary art, in a dispute over the institution’s inability to boost fundraising to make up for cuts in public subsidies, reports The New York Times.
The Culture Ministry initiated steps Friday to replace the board of the Maxxi Foundation with a government-appointed administrator, citing the board’s failure to approve a 2012 budget.
Amid drastic cuts in public arts spending, the state is reducing its contribution to the two-year-old Maxxi’s $12-million budget from $5-million a year to about $2.6-million. Museum officials say their efforts to enlist major private sponsors have been hamstrung by Italy’s lack of economic incentives or tax breaks for cultural philanthropy.
