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There were moments during 2012 when the world of classical music seemed to have gone all-John-Cage, all-the-time. To commemorate the centenary of the birth of the American composer who became the godfather of avant-garde music in the second half of the 20th century, arts and musical organizations around the world staged events that turned into outpourings of affection and respect for Cage, who died in 1992.
Befitting a man who elevated silence to an art form with his 1952 composition 4'33", espoused chance as a creative discipline, created mini-gamelan orchestras by attaching assorted objects to prepared pianos, and generally, via his music, art, books, lectures, and stage events, piqued the psyche as much as the ears, the tributes ranged from the whimsical to the serious.
The titles of some of the events epitomized Cage's exuberant and impish sensibility. In November Stanford University staged Not Wanting to Say Anything About Marcel: John Cage Plexigram, a series of concerts and symposia on the composer's life and work. Down the coast Pomona College held Cage-O-Rama: A Centennial Celebration in Music in October. In New York City there were performances by the John Cage Variety Show Big Band and the ARETÉ Ensemble, which offered a Cage Hop in September.
Tributes outside the United States included the John Cage 100th Birthday Concert in Stellenbosch, S.Af.; John Cage's Musicircus, a Festival and Conference, in Moscow; Greetings to J.C. in Essel, Austria; Silence & Transmission, a Concert for John Cage, on the Isle of Lewis, Scotland; and John Cage 4'33" Lessons in Funghi in Florence, Italy. The composer's actual birthday, September 5, was declared John Cage Day in Adelaide, Australia.
Tim Schulz—dapd/APGermany was one of the epicentres of Cagemania—so much so that some concertgoers in Berlin described themselves as being Caged-out from all of the tributes staged in the city during the year. In Bochum, Ger., composer Heiner Goebbels directed Cage's Europeras 1&2, in which all aspects of the performance were governed by chance operations based on the Chinese philosophical text Yijing (I Ching). At the Ruhrtriennale festival in northwestern Germany, American theatre and opera director Robert Wilson presented his version of Cage's "Lecture on Nothing," a seminal event in the evolution of 20th-century experimental literature.
The year did have other moments not related to Cage. In May, One Sweet Morning, a symphony by American composer John Corigliano, was given its Asian debut in Shanghai. The work, cocommissioned by the Shanghai Symphony Orchestra and the New York Philharmonic Orchestra to commemorate the 10th anniversary of the September 11 terrorist attacks, was inspired by four war-themed poems, including "War South of the Great Wall," by the 8th-century Chinese poet Li Bai.
London's Royal Philharmonic Orchestra marked a sombre centenary when it premiered the Titanic Requiem, a classically based work created by former Bee Gee Robin Gibb and his son Robin-John. The work was presented on April 10, the 100th anniversary of the day the doomed ship departed on its ill-fated voyage. Gibb had been scheduled to appear in the production but canceled owing to his battle with cancer, which he lost on May 20.
Conservative Toronto Mayor Rob Ford was the subject of an opera, which debuted at the city's MacMillan Theatre in January. The aptly titled Rob Ford: The Opera was created by Michael Patrick Albano, resident stage director at the University of Toronto. Although the work included topical political subjects, Albano chose to address them in a whimsical manner.
Older music—in some cases, much older—also put in an appearance in 2012. A violin sonata by Baroque Italian composer Antonio Vivaldi received its first performance in 250 years via the Amadè Players at London's Foundling Museum in October. The Violin Sonata in D Major (RV 816) was discovered in the museum's Gerald Coke Handel Collection. The work also was given its debut recording by the ensemble the day of the concert.
In April the Israel Philharmonic gave the first complete performance of Israeli composer Paul Ben Haim's oratorio Joram. The work, which Ben Haim considered to be his grand opus, was retrieved, with his permission, from a crate in his residence in Israel by the Israeli academic Jehoash Hirshberg. It was among several manuscripts and published works that Ben Haim had put in storage when he fled Nazi Germany in 1933. The performance, at Tel Aviv University, also featured Germany's Munich Motet Choir.
In January a six-minute fragment of a violin sonata by Soviet composer Dmitry Shostakovich was given its premiere in the U.K. by Marc Daniel at the University of Manchester. The fragment was composed in 1945, and its motifs subsequently figured in the composer's Tenth Symphony (1953). That same month the U.K.'s BBC Radio 3 offered the debut of a two-minute work for piano composed by Johannes Brahms in 1853. Pianist Andras Schiff performed the work, Albumblatt, which was discovered by conductor Christopher Hogwood in the library of Princeton University. In March the radio channel also presented a "finished" version of Austrian Romantic-era composer Franz Schubert's Symphony in B Minor (Unfinished), completed by Schubert expert Brian Newbould.
The worlds of classical music and popular literature collided—or cohabited—in 2012 when an album of classical works featured in author E.L. James's torrid novel Fifty Shades of Grey (2012) was released in August. One of the 15 tracks on the album, a recording of 16th-century composer Thomas Tallis's Spem in alium, topped the singles charts in the U.K., and the album itself made the top 10 classical albums charts in the U.S., the U.K., France, Germany, and Australia. The album also included recordings of such chestnuts as Johan Pachelbel's Canon in D Major, Frédéric Chopin's Nocturne No. 1 in B Flat Minor, and the "Flower Duet" from Léo Delibes's opera Lakmé.
Old musical artifacts also made the news—and, in some cases, substantial monetary sums. In January the Brahms Institute in Lübeck, Ger., announced that it had obtained through a bequest a six-page letter handwritten in 1823 by Ludwig van Beethoven. The letter described the composer's ongoing health and financial problems and asked for help in finding buyers for his Missa Solemnis, which he had composed that year. The institute estimated the letter's value at €100,000 (about $128,000).
In June the London auction house Christie's auctioned off a partial manuscript of the 1729 cantata Ich liebe den Höchsten vom ganzem Gemüte (I Love the Almighty with All My Spirit) by Baroque German composer Johann Sebastian Bach, containing 20 bars for tenor oboe. The first sample of Bach's handwritten musical notation to be offered to the public in 16 years, it sold for £337,250 (£1 = about $1.60).
And a work by 20th-century British composer Edward Elgar was discovered in Leicestershire, Eng., in February, along with several letters by him. The manuscript of the work, Carillon Chimes, which the composer completed in 1923, was valued at £10,000.
On October 21, the World Orchestra for Peace marked the centenary of the birth of conductor Sir Georg Solti (who died in 1997) with a star-studded concert in Chicago. The two-hour event, conducted by Valery Gergiev, included performances by soprano Angela Gheorghiu and bass Rene Pape and taped video accolades from singers Renee Fleming, Kiri Te Kanawa, and Plácido Domingo; violinist Anne-Sophie Mutter; and pianists Schiff and Murray Perahia—all of whom had shared a stage or a recording with Solti over the years.
Also in October, Israeli Pres. Shimon Peres presented Indian-born conductor Zubin Mehta with the Presidential Medal of Distinction for his contributions to Israeli culture. Mehta, music director for life of the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra, was also praised for his program Mifneh (Hebrew for "turning point"), which provided music education for the country's Arab citizens.
As usual, conductors played their games of musical chairs. In September, Andrew Litton became the artistic adviser of the Colorado Symphony Orchestra. That same month Yannick Nézet-Séguin began his role as music director of the Philadelphia Orchestra. Current Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal music director Kent Nagano was named the successor to Simone Young at Germany's Hamburg State Opera in a tenure set to begin in 2015, and Sweden's Gothenberg Symphony Orchestra announced that Nagano would become its principal guest conductor and artistic adviser in 2013. Washington (D.C.) National Opera named the successor to Domingo, who had served as its artistic director for 15 years, when it announced that Francesca Zambello would take the helm in 2013.
The year was not without controversy. Much of it was focused on Germany's Nazi past, specifically as it related to the works of 19th-century composer Richard Wagner, whose operas were favourites of Adolf Hitler. In June, Germany's Margravial Opera House—the site of the annual Bayreuth Festival, the centre of the Wagner universe—was named a UNESCO World Heritage site. Weeks later, however, the festival was forced to withdraw Russian bass-baritone Yevgeny Nikitin from its production of Wagner's opera The Flying Dutchman because of a tattoo resembling a swastika that was partly visible on his chest.
A production of Wagner's opera Rienzi by Berlin's Deutsche Oper was hastily rescheduled when it was noticed that its opening night, April 20, coincided with the birthday of Hitler. The performance was moved to April 21 after a public outcry. And in June, Israel's Tel Aviv University canceled a scheduled performance of Wagner's works that would have been conducted by Asher Fisch in a concert sponsored by the Israel Wagner Society.
Controversy of a less-sinister sort erupted in May when New York City's Metropolitan Opera announced that it would no longer allow reviews of its performances to be published in Opera News. The magazine, published by the Metropolitan Opera Guild—a fundraising arm of the Met—had apparently offended management with a series of negative reviews and articles. Following a public firestorm, the company rescinded its ban.
In September the New York Times similarly stepped into hot water of its own making when it reassigned longtime classical music critic Allan Kozinn to general cultural reporting. A petition signed by more than 1,000 readers, musicians, and composers urged the newspaper to reconsider its decision.
Transition was a recurring theme of the classical year. In January German bass-baritone Thomas Quasthoff, one of the preeminent vocalists of his generation, announced his retirement from the stage after a 40-year career. He cited health reasons for his decision. Quasthoff emphasized that he would continue to give master classes and actively participate in his biennial voice competition, Das Lied.
One of the classical music icons of the Cold War era, Texas pianist Van Cliburn, was diagnosed with bone cancer in August. Cliburn became world famous in 1958 when he won the first Tchaikovsky International Competition in Moscow.
German composer Hans Werner Henze died on October 27. During his long career Henze created a substantial body of work, particularly for the stage, including the opera König Hirsch and the ballet Ondine. Over the years his music evolved in various directions, encompassing atonalism, neo-romanticism, jazz, and rock. He was 86.
One of the iconic figures of 20th- (and 21st-) century music, American composer Elliott Carter, died on November 5. The winner of two Pulitzer Prizes for music along with dozens of other accolades, Carter was consistently in the vanguard of the contemporary music scene, with a number of works, including his sonatas for cello and piano, that became part of the performance canon. Active to the end, he completed his final work, 12 Short Epigrams, in August. He was 103.
The opera world marked the passing of two notable American sopranos in 2012. Camilla Ella Williams, the first African American to receive a contract with a major U.S. opera company, died at age 93 on January 29. And Marguerite Piazza, a popular interpreter of the operatic canon onstage and on television in the 1950s, died on August 2, also at age 93.
American violinist Ruggiero Ricci, a child prodigy whose classical career began at age 10, died at age 94 on August 6. And Romanian pianist Mihaela Ursuleasa, known for her stylish interpretations of the works of Romantic-era composers, died of a cerebral hemorrhage at age 33 on August 2.
The multicultural character of jazz was further diversified in 2012 through the appearance of new albums by a host of international jazz artists. Globe-trotting Azerbaijani-born pianist Amina Figarova's sextet offered Twelve, and Chilean saxophonist Melissa Aldana, accompanied by Americans, offered Second Cycle. New fusions of jazz with Brazilian traditions were presented by Brazilian singer Ithamara Koorax on Got to Be Real and by Brazilian percussionist Duduka Da Fonseca's quintet on Samba Jazz–Jazz Samba. Hafez Modirzadeh, a saxophonist of Euro-American and Iranian heritage, blended jazz with music from the Middle East on Post-Chromodal Out!
Colleges and universities continued to pour jazz-education graduates into a slim employment market, although the presence of multiple jazz festivals around the world gave at least an impression of high activity. New York City again went without a major jazz festival. The city's smaller-scale Blue Note Festival, Festival of New Trumpet Music, and Vision Festival continued to be important events, however. Detroit hosted the year's grandest jazz festival, with a parade of stars, including saxophonists Sonny Rollins and Wayne Shorter, trumpeters Wynton Marsalis and Dave Douglas, and pianist Chick Corea and vibraphonist Gary Burton performing in duet.
The widespread acceptance of free jazz was underlined by Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick (himself the son of a free-jazz artist) when he declared that September 15 would be Marion Brown Day in honour of the late free-jazz saxophonist and Massachusetts resident. Free-jazz pioneer Cecil Taylor, 83, meanwhile, made two rare appearances playing solo piano concerts and attended a concert tribute to him by poet Amiri Baraka and pianists Amina Claudine Myers, Vijay Iyer, and Craig Taborn, all in New York in May. The most important living jazz artist, saxophonist Ornette Coleman, 82, was to headline five festivals in the second half of the year but canceled those appearances owing to poor health.
Dan Morgenstern retired as director of the Institute of Jazz Studies (IJS). For 35 years Morgenstern, originally a major critic and editor, presided over the expansion of the IJS from a largely uncataloged collection in a basement at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, N.J., to the world's most important and comprehensive jazz archive. In other news, the noted New York club Smalls began selling memberships to offset rising expenses. Premiums included all albums on the club's Smalls Live label, Web broadcasts of nightly performances, and access to recorded archives of the club's shows. A second New York club, Iridium, similarly started IridiumLive, a CD label that offered performances from its archives.
Diana Krall, who played piano on Paul McCartney's oddly titled album of standard songs Kisses on the Bottom, sang mostly 1920s songs on her own album Glad Rag Doll. New CDs by her fellow singer Catherine Russell (Strictly Romancin') and singer-bassist Esperanza Spalding (Radio Music Society) won praise. Wadada Leo Smith's Ten Freedom Summers was a four-CD collection of 19 compositions inspired by events during the American civil rights movement of the 1950s and '60s. German drummer Günter Baby Sommer teamed with Greek musicians to record Songs for Kommeno, an album that drew attention to the 1943 massacre in the Greek village Kommeno by Germany's Wehrmacht. There Now by Josh Berman and His Gang and Gather by Fred Lonberg-Holm's Fast Citizens were also valuable releases.
The jazz world lost American pianist Dave Brubeck, a torchbearer of the West Coast jazz movement of the 1950s, in December; Australian pianist Graeme Bell, a pioneer of the 1940s traditional jazz revival, in June; American tenor saxophonist Von Freeman, whose unique sound and creativity earned him a 2012 Jazz Master award from the National Endowment for the Arts, in August; and Danish free-jazz saxophonist John Tchicai, in October. Other deaths included trumpeter Ted Curson, saxophonists Byard Lancaster, Hal McKusick, and Lol Coxhill, drummer Tony Marsh, and vibraphonists Margie Hyams and Teddy Charles.
In Britain the most unusual and best-publicized international music event of 2012 centred on a railway train. Africa Express was an organization cofounded in 2006 by Damon Albarn, the British musician best known for his work with the bands Blur and Gorillaz. He had become fascinated by African music after a visit to Mali and through Africa Express had helped organize a series of concerts in Africa and Britain, where African and Western musicians performed together, with the aim of creating new fusion styles and bringing greater exposure to African music.
In September Africa Express launched its most ambitious project to date when 80 musicians boarded a special train at Euston Station, London, for a six-day journey that took them across England, Scotland, and Wales. Albarn and other British musicians, including the young group Rizzle Kicks, were joined by African celebrities such as Rokia Traoré from Mali, Baaba Maal from Senegal, Thandiswa from South Africa, Tony Allen from Nigeria, and Jupiter & Okwess International from the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
As the train chugged around the country, different combinations of musicians rehearsed in the cars or in a converted caboose, in which there were drums and a mixing desk. Each night the train stopped in a different city, where there were free events and a lengthy concert involving the full cast. At the final show, back in London, the lineup included John Paul Jones of Led Zeppelin and Paul McCartney. At one point the two veteran British rockers performed as backing musicians for Traoré.
Traoré was also involved in a series of experimental works; she gave three very different concerts of new material at various London venues in one week in June. The first showed off her traditional Malian acoustic influences and storytelling abilities; next she added her own guitar work for a performance that also included tributes to Bob Marley and Miriam Makeba; and finally she joined with rock guitarist and PJ Harvey collaborator John Parish for songs in which she incorporated rock and soul influences. A few weeks later Traoré reappeared on the London stage to star and perform more of her own new material in the experimental musical drama Desdemona, written by Toni Morrison and directed by Peter Sellars. In that adaptation the story of Shakespeare's tragic heroine is set in the underworld and presented with an African perspective.
Africa Express was partly funded by the Cultural Olympiad program as one of the celebrations to mark the 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games, held in London during the summer. The Games were preceded by River of Music, a two-day event held at six venues near the River Thames that featured musicians from all 204 countries taking part in the Games. Among the headliners on the Africa stage was the Congolese band Staff Benda Bilili, whose members included paraplegic former street musicians. With many of its members performing from wheelchairs, the band played songs from its second album, Bouger le Monde!, released during the year. In the process, those gifted individuals proved that they had overcome hardship and disability to become rousing and skilled musicians and songwriters.
The lineup on the Americas stage included Ondatrópica, a new band from Colombia, performing songs from its debut album—an upbeat varied collision of cumbia, salsa, and other local styles with hip-hop, dub, and funk performed by an intriguing blend of veteran and young musicians from across the country.
Jeff Gilbert/AlamyAnother major festival provided a showcase for new Brazilian music. Held annually in Rio de Janeiro, Back2Black celebrated the links between Brazil's black culture and Africa. The first-ever London version of the show featured the new Brazilian star Criolo along with an experimental trio made up of gravel-voiced singer Arnaldo Antunes and guitarist Edgard Scandurra from Brazil and African kora exponent Toumani Diabaté, who added exquisite decoration to the Brazilians' melodies.
The year saw the deaths of one of Mexico's best-loved female singers, Chavela Vargas, Anglo-Australian singer Robin Gibb of the Bee Gees, and Benjamín Escoriza, a singer with Radio Tarifa, a Spanish band celebrated for its fusion of flamenco and North African influences.
Pop music's most tragic and triumphant story lines intersected at the 54th Grammy Awards ceremony in February. Whitney Houston died in her room at the Beverly Hilton Hotel hours before mentor Clive Davis hosted his annual pre-Grammy party in the same building. Jennifer Hudson performed Houston's "I Will Always Love You" in tribute during the next night's Grammy telecast.
In that same telecast, Adele sang publicly for the first time since she underwent vocal-cord surgery. Confirming her commercial and critical dominance, her smash album 21 garnered six Grammys, including song, record, and album of the year.
Evan Agostini—Invision/APThe Foo Fighters' multiple Grammy wins proved bittersweet; later in the year Dave Grohl, the Foos' leader, announced an indefinite band hiatus. New Orleans' Rebirth Brass Band won the first-ever Grammy for best regional roots-music album, a new catch-all category created as part of a reduction in the overall number of categories.
Bon Iver, the Civil Wars, and the Alabama Shakes enjoyed a breakout year, as did Odd Future singer-songwriter Frank Ocean, who made headlines when he declared that his first love had been a man.
During the year, contemporary guitar hero Jack White stepped out with his first solo album, Blunderbuss. A Soundscan tally of 600,000 gave Mumford & Sons' second album, Babel, one of the year's best opening-week sales totals. The rock-blues duo the Black Keys headlined its first arena tour on the strength of El Camino. The fall promotional campaign for Green Day's Uno, the first chapter of a planned trilogy, was curtailed when frontman Billie Joe Armstrong entered rehab.
Country superstars Kenny Chesney and Tim McGraw's coheadlining Brothers of the Sun stadium extravaganza was among the year's top-grossing tours. Fellow country leading men Jason Aldean and Eric Church graduated to arena-headlining status. Carrie Underwood, Luke Bryan, and Lady Antebellum also sold significant numbers of albums and tickets.
Suzan—PA Photos/LandovCostumed deejay Deadmau5 became the first electronic-dance-music artist to appear on the cover of Rolling Stone magazine. Divas were the flavour du jour on reality TV as Christina Aguilera continued her run on The Voice, Britney Spears joined The X Factor judges panel, and Nicki Minaj and Mariah Carey bickered as new American Idol judges.
As Justin Bieber turned 18, he faced stiff competition from preteen girls' latest boy-band infatuation: British import One Direction. After appearing at nearly every large music festival in the U.S., Gary Clark, Jr., a much-acclaimed blues-based guitarist from Austin, Texas, released his full-length major-label debut, Blak and Blu. Veterans Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, and Leonard Cohen issued acclaimed albums—Tempest, Wrecking Ball, and Old Ideas, respectively—and toured extensively. Neil Young wrote a colourful memoir, Waging Heavy Peace, and reunited with his Crazy Horse combo for two recordings: the folk-standards collection Americana and a double-album of sprawling rock, Psychedelic Pill. Equally grizzled New Orleans shaman Dr. John's cross-generational collaboration with Black Keys guitarist Dan Auerbach yielded the celebrated Locked Down.
The surviving original Beach Boys, including Brian Wilson, reunited for a well-received new album, That's Why God Made the Radio, and an extensive 50th-anniversary tour. The Rolling Stones also celebrated a half century in the music business with concerts in Brooklyn, N.Y., Newark, N.J., and London and the October release of the retrospective documentary film Crossfire Hurricane. Van Halen released A Different Kind of Truth, its first full album with original vocalist David Lee Roth since 1984, but canceled the final 32 dates of an otherwise successful tour. Madonna's spectacle of a halftime performance during Super Bowl XLVI previewed her equally extravagant tour in support of her MDNA album.
The lauded documentary film Searching for Sugar Man chronicled the efforts of two South African fans to learn the fate of Rodriguez, a Mexican American folksinger from Detroit who fell into obscurity after he released two albums in the 1970s. The documentary and the accompanying sound track earned Rodriguez a previously unknown level of fame.
Lionel Richie remade previous hits as duets with country singers on Tuskegee, one of the year's top sellers. Hootie & the Blowfish vocalist Darius Rucker, enjoying a robust second career as a country singer, was inducted into the Grand Ole Opry. Miami rapper Rick Ross emerged as hip-hop's self-declared bossman, and Minaj confirmed her status as rap's reigning iconoclast with Pink Friday: Roman Reloaded.
Lee Young-ho—Sipa/APInescapable singles of 2012 included Australian singer Gotye's "Somebody That I Used to Know," fun.'s "We Are Young," and Canadian singer Carly Rae Jepsen's frothy "Call Me Maybe," which spent nine weeks in the summer at number one on the Billboard Hot 100 chart. The year's most left-field hit was South Korean rapper Psy's "Gangnam Style," which benefited from an oft-imitated and parodied viral video that rang up more than 700 million views on YouTube. "We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together," the lead single from Taylor Swift's Red album, sold 623,000 digital singles in its first week.
Leaving the music scene were Dick Clark, "America's Oldest Teenager" and longtime host of American Bandstand and New Year's Rockin' Eve; Don Cornelius, founder and host of Soul Train; Levon Helm, the drummer in the Band; and Adam ("MCA") Yauch, one-third of Beastie Boys. Other notable deaths included those of rhythm-and-blues belter Etta James, disco star Donna Summer, singer Davy Jones of the Monkees, pop lyricist Hal David, crooner Andy Williams, bassist Donald ("Duck") Dunn of Booker T & the MG's, singer and country music pioneer Kitty Wells, bluegrass titans Earl Scruggs and Doc Watson, singer and composer Johnny Otis, saxophonist Andrew Love of the Memphis Horns, guitarist Chuck Brown, the "godfather of go-go," and hard-rock guitarist Ronnie Montrose.
Andrea Mohin—The New York Times/ReduxIn 2012 several ballet companies staged original and reprised versions of The Firebird and Scheherazade, two narrative works choreographed roughly a century earlier by Michel Fokine for Serge Diaghilev's Ballets Russes. It was, however, George Balanchine's Firebird, from 1949, that ignited New York City Ballet's (NYCB's) winter season with Marc Chagall's fantastical costumes and sets and Igor Stravinsky's abbreviated orchestral suite at New York City's (NYC's) Lincoln Center (LC). In another fire-and-ice pairing, also in January, Russia's Mariinsky Ballet staged a Fokine triple bill, including Chopiniana, The Firebird, and Scheherazade, at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts (KC), Washington, D.C. In contrast to the Mariinsky's classical bent, the Alonzo King LINES Ballet presented audiences in North America and the world over with a contemporary Scheherazade, commissioned from King for the 2009 Ballets Russes festival. The year's headliner was American Ballet Theatre's (ABT's) Firebird, by artist in residence Alexei Ratmansky. Danced brilliantly by first-cast megastar Natalia Osipova and second-cast powerhouse Misty Copeland, Ratmansky's phoenix premiered at Segerstrom Center for the Arts, Costa Mesa, Calif.
In other ABT news, Kevin McKenzie celebrated his 20th year as artistic director. The company's Metropolitan Opera House engagement shone with a new production of John Cranko's Onegin, in addition to six full-length ballets and mixed-repertory bills pairing Ratmansky's Firebird with Christopher Wheeldon's Thirteen Diversions and Sir Frederick Ashton's The Dream. ABT, renowned for its star roster, saw the retirement of two beloved principals: Ethan Stiefel gave his farewell performance as Ali the Slave in Le Corsaire, and Spaniard Ángel Corella bade the audience adieu as Prince Siegfried in Swan Lake. The company did, however, lure Russian guest artist Polina Semionova to join its principal ranks full-time. The fall season at New York City Center (NYCC) offered a second Ratmansky world premiere, Symphony #9, one in a projected series of three one-act ballets set to Dmitry Shostakovich's Symphony No. 9. Other highlights included a 70th-anniversary staging of Agnes de Mille's Rodeo and a revival of José Limón's The Moor's Pavane.
Elsewhere, all eyes were on NYCB's first all-Wheeldon program. Les Carillons, Wheeldon's 18th original work for NYCB, premiered alongside two earlier pieces at LC. The winter season was otherwise jam-packed with repertoire by NYCB cofounder Balanchine, ranging from the radical leotard ballet Agon to the whirling ensemble piece Vienna Waltzes. Favourite works by Jerome Robbins included Fancy Free and The Concert. The spring season offered two stylish world premieres: French-born choreographer Benjamin Millepied's Two Hearts, which was costumed by Rodarte, and NYCB artistic director Peter Martins's Mes oiseaux, which was outfitted by Gilles Mendel. The trend continued in the fall with Italian designer Valentino Garavani's costuming of four works, one with vermillion pointe shoes, for the annual gala. In addition, hipsters delighted in NYCB corps member Justin Peck's choreography for his new work, Year of the Rabbit, set to music by Sufjan Stevens.
Among the international companies to tour North America, Paris Opéra Ballet (POB) excelled in quality and variety with the romantic ballet Giselle, Pina Bausch's contemporary classic Orpheus and Eurydice, and an all-French program of avant-garde works by Serge Lifar, Roland Petit, and Maurice Béjart. The Australian Ballet celebrated its 50th anniversary with a full-length Swan Lake and a program of repertory highlights at LC. Russia's leading classical companies, the Mariinsky and the Bolshoi Ballet, each took traditional evening-length works to North America. The standout was Sergey Vikharev's reconstruction of Marius Petipa's Coppélia, which showed the Bolshoi's signature verve to good advantage. Doubtless, the most divisive Russian offering was the Eifman Ballet of St. Petersburg's Rodin, choreographed in 2011 by company founder Boris Eifman. The dance-drama's American debut roused NYCC audiences to their feet but thoroughly appalled New York Times critic Alastair Macaulay.
In 2012 new talent emerged, and veteran ballerinas owned the stage. Sierra Leone-born Michaela DePrince, a war orphan adopted by an American family and profiled in Bess Kargman's documentary First Position (2011), made her professional debut in Le Corsaire at the Joburg Theatre, Johannesburg. The 17-year-old DePrince joined Dance Theatre of Harlem in the summer. Forty years DePrince's senior, Parisian Sylvie Guillem took the program "6000 Miles Away" to LC. The fiercely independent former POB étoile performed new choreography by William Forsythe and Mats Ek. NYCB principal Wendy Whelan, distilling technique and artistry in equal measure, wowed critics and audiences, as did Russian ABT principal Diana Vishneva, who followed Guillem by venturing outside the canon with a second one-woman show.
Large and medium-size ballet companies presented narrative works drawing on fairy tales and more-serious literary fare. In a partnership, Atlanta Ballet and Royal Winnipeg Ballet (RWB) commissioned Twyla Tharp's The Princess and the Goblin from none other than Twyla Tharp. Washington (D.C.) Ballet, transporting Paris's Rive Gauche to Foggy Bottom, unveiled artistic director Septime Webre's Hemingway: The Sun Also Rises at KC, and Seattle's Pacific Northwest Ballet gave the American debut of Ratmansky's Don Quixote at its resident theatre. Not to be outdone, Pittsburgh Ballet Theatre presented on its home stage the American premiere of John Neumeier's version of Tennessee Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire. Reprising roles from the 2011 PBS Great Performances television program, four San Francisco Ballet principals guested with Germany's Hamburg Ballet for one performance only of Neumeier's The Little Mermaid. Also noteworthy, Chicago's Joffrey Ballet, the subject of the documentary Joffrey: Mavericks of American Dance (2012), presented an 80th-anniversary staging of Kurt Jooss's The Green Table, and Ballet Arizona performed artistic director Ib Andersen's Play, in which the full company made its NYC debut.
Modern and contemporary dance thrived in 2012. The Paul Taylor Dance Company moved from NYCC to the more expansive LC, where it performed 22 works by Taylor. The season's highlight was the golden revival of Aureole, a spirited tour de force for which the company rolled back ticket prices to the 1962 level ($3.50) for one evening. Mark Morris, another music-minded dance maker, created A Choral Fantasy, in which his troupe moved at the Brooklyn Academy of Music to Beethoven's eponymous composition, wearing costumes by Isaac Mizrahi. Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, with Robert Battle at the helm, expanded its repertoire with Israeli Ohad Naharin's participatory Minus 16, from 1999. In addition to Ailey's signature work Revelations, the company performed a fresh version of his striking pure dance Streams. Martha Graham Dance Company reprised historically significant works by Graham—Every Soul Is a Circus, Night Journey, Chronicle, and Deaths and Entrances—and continued its series Lamentation Variations, for which contemporary dance makers responded to Graham's iconic Lamentation. Yvonne Rainer and Richard Move were among those who contributed new pieces to the series. Bill T. Jones made his anticipated return to the stage in Story/Time, a dance-text by Jones for the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company. Inspired by John Cage's Indeterminacy, Jones read one-minute stories that accompanied his troupe's movements, as did a score by Ted Coffey, at Montclair (N.J.) State University.
Elsewhere, Toronto's National Ballet of Canada closed its 60th-anniversary season with versatility, dancing Ashton's La Fille mal gardée with pastoral sweetness and Neumeier's version of Anton Chekhov's play The Seagull with dramatic intensity. RWB toured the U.S. Midwest with cancans and corsets galore in Jorden Morris's Moulin Rouge—The Ballet and on its home stage gave the Canadian premiere of Twyla Tharp's The Princess and the Goblin. Narrative dominated Alberta Ballet's season with artistic director Jean Grand-Maître's Cinderella and choreographer Kirk Peterson's staging of Swan Lake. In Brooklyn, N.Y., the Canadian maverick Noémie Lafrance's experimental Choreography for Audiences—Take One placed audiences at the centre of the action, using game logic to generate the work in real time.
A number of companies commemorated major anniversaries: Minneapolis-based Ragamala Dance closed its 20th season; Hubbard Street Dance Chicago launched its 35th; and Kentucky's Louisville Ballet celebrated its 60th in the spring. The Japanese duo Eiko and Koma's 40th year together culminated with a new dance installation, Fragile, in collaboration with the Kronos Quartet. Other milestones included the 80th year of the Jacob's Pillow Dance Festival and the 135th and 150th birthdays of American dance pioneers Isadora Duncan and Loie Fuller, respectively.
Three acclaimed exhibitions focused on dance: the Library of Congress's "Politics and the Dancing Body," the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston's "Dance/Draw," and the M.H. de Young Memorial Museum's "Rudolf Nureyev: A Life in Dance." The Emerging Pictures Ballet in Cinema project connected audiences with dance across the globe by screening performances of the Bolshoi Ballet and Britain's Royal Ballet.
There were some departures. Edward Villella, who in 1985 helped establish the Miami City Ballet, announced in September that he would leave his post as artistic director of that company immediately rather than in April 2013. The dance world also marked several notable deaths, including those of dancers Niles Ford (Urban Dance Collective founder and choreographer), Moscelyne Larkin (cofounder of the Tulsa [Okla.] Ballet), Shaun O'Brien (NYCB stalwart for 42 years), Miguel Terekhov (cofounder of the School of Dance at the University of Oklahoma), and Ethel Winter (standout for 30 years at the Martha Graham Dance Company).
The ramifications of Europe's financial crisis began to affect the dance scene in 2012. The few expensive new productions and repertory—certainly for the 2012–13 season—appeared to have been chosen with an eye to the box office. Funding cuts at the Royal Danish Ballet led to the loss of eight dancers. Although the Hamburg Ballet suffered no actual diminution of its subsidy, mandatory increases to the salaries of some technical staff had not been budgeted. As a result, at the end of the annual Hamburg ballet festival, director John Neumeier announced that it could for financial reasons be the last of such events. Seasoned commentators, however, suggested that funding for a suitable celebration would be found for 2013, as it would mark 40 years since the hugely popular Neumeier arrived in Hamburg.
The news for the Ballet on the Rhine, based in Düsseldorf, Ger., was not as good. That troupe, led by Martin Schläpfer, had split its performances between Düsseldorf and nearby Duisburg. In the latter city, authorities said that municipal funding would no longer be available for ballet performances. The company was reportedly trying to set up an arrangement with Cologne, which did not have a dance company.
The future of the Forsythe Company, which was supported by several German cities, was also under discussion. In Dresden, councilors queried whether the city's financial support of the company was of value, given the low attendance at its performances, but in September they agreed to provide funding until 2016. In Berlin, questions were asked about the leadership of Vladimir Malakhov, the star dancer and artistic director of the Berlin State Ballet. Principal ballerina Polina Semionova left the company mid-season to join American Ballet Theatre (ABT), and, despite at least one program of contemporary works, Malakhov was accused of having loaded the repertory with old-fashioned story ballets in which he was featured.
The situation for companies in Spain looked to be still more precarious. The eponymous troupe founded by Ángel Corella moved from its headquarters near Segovia to a base in Barcelona and was renamed Barcelona Ballet. Despite good reviews and enthusiastic audiences, the company's financial situation was so dire that at one point the dancers' salaries could not be paid. Nonetheless, the company made a U.S. tour with a program of Swan Lake and a mixed bill. Corella severed his own ties with ABT to concentrate on Barcelona Ballet.
In the Czech Republic the ballet companies of the Prague State Opera and the National Theatre were merged into a single unit under the leadership of Petr Zuska, with resultant job losses.
Changes in Amsterdam meant that by the end of 2012 the Dutch National Ballet, the Netherlands Opera, and the Amsterdam Music Theatre would form a single organization. For the Dutch National Ballet, the year began with the announcement of the death of choreographer and former director Rudi van Dantzig. The company's repertoire included substantial runs of Swan Lake and Giselle, and a highlight of the season was a celebration of the 80th birthday of choreographer Hans van Manen. December brought the premiere of a new version of Cinderella from British choreographer Christopher Wheeldon.
Express Newspapers/APIn the U.K. there were changes at the top of three of the country's main classical companies. Dame Monica Mason bowed out as artistic director of the Royal Ballet with an ambitious program of new works that was based on the legend of Diana and Actaeon as depicted by Titian in a series of paintings hung in the National Gallery. Seven choreographers were involved in the three pieces, each of which had a specially commissioned score and set decoration by a leading British visual artist.
Earlier in the Royal Ballet season, rising choreographer Liam Scarlett provided his second work for the main stage—Sweet Violets, a narrative piece inspired by the life and work of painter Walter Sickert. Though most commentators agreed that the story was overly complex, the production still represented a step forward for Scarlett. The big news at Covent Garden was the sudden departure of Sergei Polunin, the company's young Ukrainian-born star, who walked out in the middle of rehearsals. Initially it was believed that he wanted to stop dancing altogether, but he later appeared in some gala-type performances and apparently found a home with the Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko Moscow Music Theatre, whose ballet company was directed by Igor Zelensky, a former New York City Ballet and Mariinsky Ballet star.
The new Royal Ballet season kicked off with 20 performances of Swan Lake (also featured in Birmingham Royal Ballet's repertoire). Between that and the opening of The Nutcracker season, there were performances of two mixed bills, including one of short ballets by Sir Kenneth MacMillan.
English National Ballet concluded its season with a sold-out week of—what else?—Swan Lake. Following the unexpected departure in February of company director Wayne Eagling, Spanish ballerina Tamara Rojo of the Royal Ballet succeeded him in September; the appointment had been widely predicted. Rojo, who intended to continue dancing, took over a hardworking company full of talent. Finances, however, had always been tight, and it was hard to envision how she would be able to fund exciting new choreography. As a result, the company would continue to perform either The Sleeping Beauty or The Nutcracker until spring 2013.
Ashley Page's final production as the director of Scottish Ballet was a well-received A Streetcar Named Desire. His successor was Christopher Hampson, a talented and experienced young choreographer.
A particular highlight of the dance year in London was a visit by Wuppertal Dance Theatre, the company that had been headed by the late Pina Bausch. Alternating between two theatres, the company gave performances of no fewer than 10 of Bausch's city-inspired works in a monthlong sold-out season. That season stood in stark contrast to a short season by the Peter Schaufuss Ballet, which featured the Danish choreographer's own versions of the three Tchaikovsky classics (Swan Lake, The Sleeping Beauty, and The Nutcracker). Despite appearances by Irek Mukhamedov and the young Royal Danish Ballet star Alban Lendorf, reviews were terrible and house revenues poor.
Lendorf was perhaps happier in his home theatre, where he danced the hero Armand in a short season of Neumeier's Lady of the Camellias, which proved a resounding hit with Copenhagen audiences. Sadly, the Royal Theatre announced that for financial reasons there would not be a revival.
Highlighting the Paris Opéra season was a successful tour to the U.S. The home repertoire was perhaps more conservative than had sometimes been the case, but the real shock came with a letter to the French minister of culture (signed by a majority of the dancers) that asked for information about a successor to director Brigitte Lefèvre, who was reportedly greatly angered by the move. An official announcement in September said that she would be leaving in 2014. Promotions to étoile came for Josua Hoffalt, Myriam Ould Braham, and the Argentine Ludmila Pagliero.
In St. Petersburg the Mikhailovsky Ballet presented a production of Don Quixote with former Bolshoi stars Natalya Osipova and Ivan Vasiliev, who surprisingly had joined the company in 2011. At the Bolshoi Yekaterina Shipulina was promoted to principal in late 2011, and highly regarded Mariinsky soloist Yevgenya Obraztsova arrived from St. Petersburg in 2012 to become a principal.
A number of deaths occurred during the year, including, besides van Dantzig's, those of Horst Koegler (a veteran correspondent for more than 60 years in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland for Opera News) and British dance critic John Percival (who for many years covered dance for The Times and The Independent as well as several dance publications).
Facundo Arrizabalaga—EPA/LandovIn 2012, the year of Queen Elizabeth II's Diamond Jubilee and of the Olympics and Paralympics, London was truly a city of festivals. Many of them were overlapping, and most were driven by the London 2012 Cultural Olympiad, which supported events throughout Britain, from the World Shakespeare Festival in Stratford-upon-Avon to the first-ever festival celebrating Samuel Beckett, held in Northern Ireland and formally called the Happy Days Enniskillen International Beckett Festival.
Most remarkable, perhaps, was the season of all 37 of William Shakespeare's plays performed in 37 different languages by 37 visiting companies over just six weeks at Shakespeare's Globe in London: Hamlet in Lithuanian, Twelfth Night in Hindi, Henry VI, Part 2 in Albanian, and Much Ado About Nothing in French, to specify just a few. The South Bank was a babel of bardolatry and brave new worlds.
The success of the opening ceremonies of the Olympics and Paralympics was rooted in British theatrical traditions, with Ian McKellen and Kenneth Branagh both conjuring characters from Shakespeare's The Tempest. The amazing spectacles, devised by two alumni of the Royal Court Theatre, Danny Boyle and Stephen Daldry, invoked both old Albion, as in Jez Butterworth's Jerusalem (2009), and the scientific genius of Isaac Newton and Stephen Hawking, as in a putative Tom Stoppard play.
Though there was constant talk of a "shifting ecology" in the West End, of new starts and other developments, nothing much ever changed. In the 2012 Olympics year, however, when new musicals and stand-alone comedies or revivals of quality were thin on the ground, there were some significant innovations.
Mark Rylance, former artistic director of the Globe, returned to lead its company into a season at London's Apollo Theatre, where he gave one of the most surprising and nonsatanic performances of Richard III in living memory. He also offered a reprise of his elegant and deeply vulnerable Countess Olivia in Twelfth Night.
The eclipse of the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) in London was virtually complete, although it did surface briefly at the Roundhouse in north London with a so-called Shipwreck trilogy from Stratford-upon-Avon: The Comedy of Errors, Twelfth Night, and The Tempest, with Jonathan Slinger outstanding as Prospero. Gregory Doran's tremendous RSC production of Julius Caesar—set in Africa, with an all-black cast—heralded a short season at the Noël Coward Theatre (formerly the Albery Theatre).
It was the latter venue that then hosted a yearlong residency by the Michael Grandage Company, newly formed by, predictably, Michael Grandage, who had served (2002–11) as artistic director of the Donmar Warehouse, in succession to Sam Mendes. The residency started with Simon Russell Beale as the outlandish Captain Terri Dennis in a revival of Peter Nichols's Privates on Parade, a vaudevillian tragicomedy of British soldiers in Malaya in the aftermath of World War II. Grandage announced that more than 100,000 tickets would be sold at £10 each over the season, with most of them bookable in advance but some two dozen held back for sale on the day of the performance and with standing places also available at that price. Such an initiative, allied to a full educational program and postshow talks and workshops, signaled a new way of doing things in London's West End—as though Grandage's company was a branch of the National Theatre but without the public subsidy.
At the same time, the Royal Court, traditionally a home of new theatre writing, colonized the Duke of York's Theatre, first with a revival of Laura Wade's explosive Posh, which focused on bad behaviour at a University of Oxford drinking club. That was followed by April De Angelis's witty and heartfelt Jumpy, in which the standoff between mother and daughter (played by Tamsin Greig and a young Bel Powley) struck a nerve with audiences pondering the loss of radical engagement with society attributed to a younger, promiscuous, and Twitter-addicted generation. The third play in this sparky season was Nick Payne's Constellations, about a love affair between a beekeeper and a cosmologist—beautifully performed, respectively, by Rafe Spall and Sally Hawkins—who meet at a barbecue and play out their affair, their separation, and their coming together again within a formally experimental structure, sometimes repeating a scene from a different perspective.
At the Royal Court itself, Mike Bartlett's Love Love Love and David Eldridge's In Basildon were important contributions from two increasingly prominent dramatists. Bartlett's play took revenge on the baby-boom generation in a scathing critique of the fading of the 1960s and '70s hippie lifestyle into a new post-Margaret Thatcher form of capitalism; it contained a blistering performance from Victoria Hamilton as a disillusioned mother. Eldridge's play was an acutely observed family drama, with a corpse and a tussle over a will, set in the East End overspill of Essex.
A sense of the 1960s being "so over" pervaded The Last of the Haussmans, by actor-turned-writer Stephen Beresford, in which the unrepentant hippie Judy Haussman, played by Julie Walters, tried hilariously to stave off the march of time—as well as the footprints of family—in a dilapidated Art Deco house on the Devon coast. That, though far from perfect, was the best new play of the year at the National Theatre (NT), alongside a lovely adaptation by Simon Stephens of Mark Haddon's remarkable novel The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, in which an autistic teenager—performed with riveting detail and physicality by Luke Treadaway—attempted to solve the mystery of a murdered dog and track down his mother at the same time. Marianne Elliott's production evoked the dreamlike, surreal nature of the story, as well as its mathematical obsessions, in an illuminated playground of diagrams and trigonometry.
A similar poetic daring and ingenuity characterized Nicholas Hytner's NT production of Timon of Athens, a little-loved Shakespeare play (with parts by Shakespeare's contemporary Thomas Middleton) that, when given a contemporary setting, was revealed as a timely assault on the volatile banking community and the fickleness of arts patronage. Beale's initially lionized Timon turned on his former supporters and sponsors with the vitriol of a disaffected mogul, serving them excrement (instead of stones, as in the play's original text) and joining a protest encampment at London's St. Paul's Cathedral.
Even when the NT turned to George Bernard Shaw, it could not help stubbing its toes on current anxieties. The Doctor's Dilemma was, at the start of the 20th century, a prophetic play about a just health service for all, and its satiric point was renewed in a present-day dispute over the availability of breakthrough drugs for those who could afford them rather than for those who needed them most. Besides this handsome revival, and that of two other Jacobean masterpieces—Middleton and William Rowley's The Changeling, directed by Joe Hill-Gibbins at the Young Vic, and John Webster's The Duchess of Malfi (with Eve Best sumptuous in the title role) at the Old Vic, directed by Jamie Lloyd—the West End looked even less adventurous than usual. David Suchet and Laurie Metcalf (best known for her sisterly role in the American sitcom Roseanne), though, acted up a storm in Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey into Night, directed by Anthony Page, at the Apollo.
Elsewhere along London's Shaftesbury Avenue, there were disappointing routine revivals of Noël Coward (Hay Fever, set in what looked like an aircraft hangar, with Lindsay Duncan flailing archly as Judith Bliss, and the lately discovered Volcano—more of a squib than an eruption—acted out by a bunch of hedonistic expatriates in Jamaica) and Neil Simon (with Danny DeVito winning hands down in a comedic duel with an insipidly galumphing Richard Griffiths in The Sunshine Boys). Alan Ayckbourn and Joe Orton were also targeted for revivals; their Absent Friends and What the Butler Saw, respectively, were unevenly cast and acted.
Cashing in on the Olympic spirit, a staging of the 1981 movie Chariots of Fire, complete with its spine-tingling theme music and with athletes whizzing around the auditorium like leftovers from Starlight Express without roller skates, transferred to the West End from the Hampstead Theatre. The Elevator Repair Service arrived from New York City with Gatz, an eight-hour staged reading of F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby. The office-bound enervation of the setting seemed all too contagious, however, and the style was less sharp and provocative than the same company's take on Ernest Hemingway in The Sun Also Rises.
Gatz was part of the London 2012 Festival, a program masterminded by Ruth Mackenzie, formerly the executive director of Nottingham Playhouse, the general director of Scottish Opera, and the artistic director of Chichester Festival Theatre (which celebrated its 50th anniversary in 2012). Other highlights of the festival included the luminous feline Cate Blanchett in Botho Strauss's Big and Small at the Barbican Centre and Robert Wilson and Philip Glass's revival of Einstein on the Beach, also at the Barbican, which astonished a new generation all over again with its beauty, high style, and classical rigour. Thanks also to the London 2012 Festival, there was yet more Wilson; Walking was a scenic installation he devised on a Norfolk beach, and he made the European premiere of his balletic and beguiling performance in Beckett's Krapp's Last Tape the centrepiece of the Enniskillen Beckett festival.
Josie Rourke made a successful clean break with Grandage's repertoire at the Donmar Warehouse, launching her first season as artistic director with an 18th-century classic, George Farquhar's The Recruiting Officer. That was followed by an intriguing look at Friedrich Dürrenmatt's bizarre psychological farce The Physicists and a definitive affectionate revival (by Lyndsey Turner) of Philadelphia, Here I Come!, Brian Friel's first success.
In 2012 there were no fewer than four stagings of Uncle Vanya. Roger Allam led the Chichester Festival Theatre production of Anton Chekhov's masterpiece in its smaller Minerva studio; a raucous, physically and emotionally absorbing production by Lucy Bailey featured Iain Glen as Uncle Vanya and William Houston as an ebullient Astrov at the Print Room in Bayswater, a notable new fringe address; a visiting Moscow production performed, briefly, in Russian in the West End; and a full-dress West End riposte by director Lindsay Posner starred Ken Stott as Vanya, Anna Friel as Yelena, and Samuel West as the ecologically evangelical Astrov.
There were no new West End musicals to speak of, beyond a vigorously performed show in tribute to Tina Turner, Soul Sister, and an authorized Beatles compilation, Let It Be. The Chichester Festival turned big-time West End provider, following Singin' in the Rain with the superb Jonathan Kent revival of Stephen Sondheim and Hugh Wheeler's Sweeney Todd, which went to the Adelphi Theatre and starred Michael Ball and Imelda Staunton, and with Trevor Nunn's sumptuous and high-spirited version of Cole Porter's Kiss Me, Kate just in time for Christmas at the Old Vic.
Big talking points at the Edinburgh International Festival were the visits of Ariane Mnouchkine's Théâtre du Soleil with Les Naufragés du Fol Espoir (Aurores), based on a posthumous novel by Jules Verne, and of the Gate Theatre, Dublin, with Barry McGovern's sensational solo selection of texts from Beckett's novel Watt. With that performance as well as the events at the Enniskillen festival, many theatregoers surprised themselves by declaring Beckett to be the greatest Irish humourist since Jonathan Swift.
And while Beckett, no doubt to the great chagrin of the French, was reclaimed as an Irish writer, the Druid Theatre Company in Galway toured—to London, New York City, and the Dublin Theatre Festival—its superb triptych of Tom Murphy plays: Conversations on a Homecoming, A Whistle in the Dark, and Famine. They made a strong case, for the first time beyond Ireland, for Murphy's status as the greatest living Irish dramatist. Garry Hynes's superb productions—acted by a wonderful company that included Niall Buggy, Eileen Walsh, Marie Mullen, Aaron Monaghan, and Brian Doherty—explored native superstitions surrounding emigration, homecoming, death, drink, and the devil.
Theatre luminaries who died in 2012 included Irish stalwart Maureen Toal; Victor Spinetti, who appeared on Broadway in Oh! What a Lovely War, for which he won a Tony Award, and in several of the Beatles' films; Simon Ward, perhaps better known as Young Winston (Churchill) on film than for his stage career; the lovely Angharad Rees; and classical stylist John Moffatt. The year also marked the passing of the great dramatist John Arden and of leading regional theatre directors Val May and Toby Robertson.
The struggling U.S. economy was less than kind to the nation's theatres in 2012. As the year ended, box-office grosses for Broadway theatres were down, and even some of the best-reviewed shows of the season—such as the critically acclaimed revival of Edward Albee's 1962 drama Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, imported in October to New York City from Chicago's Steppenwolf Theatre Company—were playing to less-than-packed houses. Noncommercial theatres across the country were hoping for signs of a comeback in the third year of recovery after the financial crisis of 2008–09, but they had to contend with declining subscriptions (a six-year trend), rises in payroll costs and other expenses, and waning corporate and foundation funding. They responded with strategies such as instituting flexible ticket pricing, sharing expenses via co-productions, and seeking ancillary income from booked-in events, rentals, and concessions. Such efforts, plus "hard work and stamina," had helped a majority of not-for-profit theatres make it through 2011 in the black, according to Theatre Facts, the annual fiscal survey conducted by the service organization Theatre Communications Group, and analysts expected a similar result in 2012.
Regardless of the economic scrambling, the theatre establishment continued to valorize new American plays, even when they seemed a risky bet. New York City's Lincoln Center Theatre scored with Amy Herzog's 4000 Miles, a heartfelt drama in which an aging grandmother with a politically colourful past shares a few life-changing weeks with her aimless, alienated 21-year-old grandson. Herzog, whose family history often figured into her plays, also earned high marks for Belleville, a tense account of the sudden fraying of a young marriage due to long-hidden secrets and unresolved guilt. Belleville premiered at New Haven, Conn.'s Yale Repertory Theatre under Anne Kauffman's expert direction and was slated to move in 2013 to another company known as a new-play incubator, New York Theatre Workshop.
Sara Krulwich—The New York Times/ReduxIdaho-born writer Samuel D. Hunter (who at 31 was two years younger than Herzog) made a stir of his own with the debut at Denver Center Theatre Company of his drama The Whale, about the personal and spiritual struggles of a desperately unhappy 272-kg (600-lb) man. The play earned multiple awards and went on to a vivid production at New York City's Playwrights Horizons. Katori Hall—also 31 and known for her The Mountaintop, an envelope-pushing account of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s final night, in a Memphis hotel, that had its Broadway premiere in 2011—crafted a kaleidoscopic vision of contemporary black life in Hurt Village, which opened to mixed reaction at New York City's Signature Theatre Company. Will Eno's Middletown, a provocative postmodern view of small-town America, intrigued audiences in Chicago, New York City, and Austin, Texas, and Cheryl L. West's new play with music about three generations of African American train porters, Pullman Porter Blues, did the same at Seattle Repertory Theatre. The latter show moved on to Washington, D.C.'s flagship theatre, Arena Stage, in late 2012.
Playwright and activist Eve Ensler, whose testimonial-style play The Vagina Monologues helped give birth in the late 1990s to a global movement to end violence against women and girls, debuted a similarly political work, Emotional Creature, at California's Berkeley Repertory Theatre under Jo Bonney's direction. Another sort of tolerance—for sexual and gender diversity—was advocated in drag icon Taylor Mac's epic The Lily's Revenge, a community-based spectacle that graduated from modest venues such as New York City's HERE Arts Center, New Orleans's Southern Rep, and San Francisco's Magic Theatre to a lavish mounting at the venerable American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, Mass.
The 2012 Pulitzer Prize for Drama (and its $10,000 purse) went to Quiara Alegría Hudes for Water by the Spoonful, a seriocomic play about a U.S. soldier named Elliot returned from Iraq and struggling to find his place in the world. The play, which debuted at Connecticut's Hartford Stage Company in 2011, was the second installment in what Philadelphia-born Hudes called her Elliot Trilogy. The season's Tony Awards showered attention on the folk-flavoured film-derived musical Once and Rick Elice's crowd-pleasing Peter Pan prequel Peter and the Starcatcher, both of which enjoyed profitable Broadway runs through 2012.
Among the new musicals that critics found enticing in 2012 was February House, a fledgling effort by the eclectic young composer Gabriel Kahane and book writer Seth Bockley that was based on an actual 1940s experiment in communal living in a Victorian brownstone in Brooklyn Heights involving such giants of literature and music as W.H. Auden, Carson McCullers, Benjamin Britten, and, oddly, Gypsy Rose Lee. The show debuted at New Haven's Long Wharf Theatre and soon after moved to a well-received engagement at New York City's Public Theater.
Not everyone was obsessed with new plays. Repertory stalwarts such as plays by Eugene O'Neill and August Strindberg had a revelatory year, the former in an array of revivals and reenvisionings, including director Michael Kahn's muscular edit of Strange Interlude at the Shakespeare Theatre Company in Washington, D.C., and the latter in a centennial festival by San Francisco's feisty Cutting Ball Theater of five of the Swedish playwright's rarely seen late works, directed by Rob Melrose and performed in repertory.
The biggest news in Canadian theatre was the ascent of one-time actor Antoni Cimolino to the artistic directorship of the Stratford Shakespeare Festival (renamed the Stratford Festival in 2012). Cimolino, whose tenure would begin in the 2013 season, was to replace Des McAnuff, who had helmed the august institution since 2006.
Toronto's up-and-coming Berkeley Street Theatre brooked controversy in September to bring Michael Healey's Proud to the stage after a more established theatre—the 42-year-old Tarragon—refused to produce the satire over concerns that the characterization of the prime minister at the centre of the comic drama bore likeness to the current officeholder, conservative Stephen Harper. The production engendered discussions among audiences and in the press about the responsibilities of elected officials and the role of art in mirroring politics.
Losses to the American theatre community in 2012 included David Wheeler, an American Repertory Theater resident director for 27 years; Yale University-based educator Earle Gister; leading manager and cofounder of the League of Resident Theatres Donald Schoenbaum; Jiri Zizka, co-director (with former wife Blanka Zizka) of the Wilma Theater of Philadelphia; translator and critic Daniel Gerould; Arthur Ballet, a champion of playwrights and an early official at the National Endowment for the Arts; Theodore Mann, cofounder of New York City's Circle in the Square Theatre; Martin E. Segal, a longtime leader of Lincoln Center; award-winning costume designer Martin Pakledinaz; Broadway composer Marvin Hamlisch; and Judith Martin, founding artistic director of the youth-oriented Paper Bag Players. Canadians mourned the passing of actors Larry Yachimec, based in Edmonton, Alta., and Bruce Swerdfager, a Stratford regular, as well as Banff (Alta.) Playwrights Colony founder Tom Hendry.
Also laid to rest was a San Francisco-based company that had made distinctive work for more than three decades: A Traveling Jewish Theatre (renamed the Jewish Theatre in 2009), which mined Jewish identity and experience in historical, folkloric, mystical, and contemporary traditions. The company, founded in 1978 by Corey Fischer, Albert Greenberg, and Naomi Newman, ceased operations in the spring, citing an inability to raise sufficient funding.
In July 2012 the mass shooting in Aurora, Colo., during a midnight screening of the latest Batman film, the apocalyptic The Dark Knight Rises (Christopher Nolan), cast a grim shadow over Hollywood. Franchise product, often violent, nonetheless continued to dominate the release schedules, with new adventures in the Mission Impossible and Bourne series (Mission Impossible—Ghost Protocol [Brad Bird] and The Bourne Legacy [Tony Gilroy], respectively), The Amazing Spider-Man (Marc Webb), and a showcase of Marvel Comics heroes in The Avengers (Joss Whedon). One franchise ended with The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn—Part 2 (Bill Condon). Another began with Peter Jackson's laboriously painstaking The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, co-produced in New Zealand and the first of a trilogy adapted from J.R.R. Tolkien's novel, precursor to The Lord of the Rings. James Cameron's Titanic (1997) also returned to grab fresh audiences in a new 3-D edition.
Fantasy, action, and an enormous budget did not automatically guarantee success. Disney's interplanetary adventure John Carter (Andrew Stanton), produced at a cost of $275 million, performed particularly poorly at the box office. New independent filmmakers of quality were few, but Benh Zeitlin's Beasts of the Southern Wild deservedly attracted notice for its magical tale of a six-year-old in the Louisiana swamps battling against an ecological catastrophe. Dominating the output of older mavericks, Paul Thomas Anderson's The Master, hypnotic or tedious according to taste, featured Joaquin Phoenix as a troubled war veteran in the 1950s sucked into a dubious religious cult. Though the characters were unsympathetic, Philip Seymour Hoffman turned in an insidiously gripping performance as the cult leader. Wes Anderson's Moonrise Kingdom, a hymn to childhood and the romance of first love, proved decidedly warmer and sweeter. On the heels of The Tree of Life (2011), Terrence Malick returned with To the Wonder, a nuanced, visually exquisite tale of love and its aftermath, while Quentin Tarantino splattered audiences with violence and jokes in Django Unchained, a spaghetti western homage.
© Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation/Everett CollectionStanding tall among mainstream movies, Steven Spielberg's Lincoln, written by Tony Kushner, offered an intelligent if dramatically bloodless account of the drama behind the difficult passage of the U.S. Constitution's Thirteenth Amendment (1865), outlawing slavery. Daniel Day-Lewis's subtle, scrupulously researched portrayal of Pres. Abraham Lincoln commanded attention throughout. Other films vigorously reflected America's recent history. Strong on meticulous detail, weaker on visceral excitement, Kathryn Bigelow's Zero Dark Thirty followed a dogged female CIA agent through her 10-year pursuit of al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden. The September 11 attacks themselves came under the spotlight in Stephen Daldry's overly manipulative Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, while Argo, directed by its lead actor, Ben Affleck, tensely dramatized an ingenious operation in 1980 to rescue American hostages from Iran. In a different register, David Frankel's Hope Springs, featuring Meryl Streep and Tommy Lee Jones as a long-married couple, stood out for its intimate focus, honesty, and unfashionable appeal to older audiences. Notable too were Ang Lee's sumptuous 3-D spectacular Life of Pi, adapted from the 2001 novel by Yann Martel about an Indian boy cast adrift on a boat with a Bengal tiger; The Impossible, Juan Antonio Bayona's harrowingly realistic drama about the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami; and Robert Zemeckis's powerful Flight, with Denzel Washington as a tormented airline pilot.
Digitally generated animated films continued to proliferate. Pixar's Brave (Mark Andrews, Brenda Chapman, Steve Purcell) prettily exploited the Scottish Highlands setting but tripped up over its story. Disney's skillfully executed Wreck-It Ralph (Rich Moore) provided a cluttered but sweet homage to video-game arcades, while Tim Burton's Frankenweenie, using stop-motion animation, persuasively spun the warped tale of a scientifically minded boy and his revivified dog. Among live-action comedies, Woody Allen's To Rome with Love was amusing but minor, David O. Russell's Silver Linings Playbook offered romantic comedy with a subversive twist, and Seth MacFarlane's Ted appealed to those tickled by the prospect of a foul-mouthed teddy bear.
Britain's top box-office winner of the year was the eagerly awaited Skyfall, the latest James Bond adventure starring Daniel Craig. Director Sam Mendes usefully deepened the characterizations and added dark shadows while keeping the traditional lavish action scenes. Released from the Harry Potter films, Daniel Radcliffe boosted the grosses of The Woman in Black (James Watkins), though his acting proved to be the horror film's weakest point. Tom Hooper's fussily produced Les Misérables, with the strained singing of Hugh Jackman, Anne Hathaway, and Russell Crowe, magnified the stage musical's flaws. The year's unexpected success was The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (John Madden), about British retirees finding a new lease on life in India. The script was predictable, but the character actors were choice.
Using a script by Tom Stoppard, director Joe Wright took a coolly stylized approach to Tolstoy's novel Anna Karenina, presenting most of the action as if staged in a theatre. More conventionally, Mike Newell's Great Expectations scrambled through Dickens's teeming plot, short-changing the drama but allowing some memorable performances. Smaller independent films included Sally Potter's Ginger & Rosa, a film about adolescence set in the early 1960s; Ken Loach's good-natured comedy The Angels' Share; Sally El Hosaini's My Brother the Devil, an imaginative tale of inner London's mean streets; Mark McDonagh's jaunty and violent Seven Psychopaths; and Peter Strickland's horror fantasy Berberian Sound Studio. The Aardman Animations team came up with the delightful The Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists (U.S. title: The Pirates! Band of Misfits; Peter Lord, Jeff Newitt).
Two impressive Irish films focused on rural life. Stella Days (Thaddeus O'Sullivan) featured Martin Sheen as a priest in crisis, while Gerard Barrett's debut feature Pilgrim Hill took a raw and intimate look at the life of a middle-aged bachelor farmer.
In Canada, David Cronenberg offered an icy analysis of modern times in Cosmopolis, adapted from Don DeLillo's 2003 novel. No stylistic restraint was evident in Deepa Mehta's hyperactive adaptation of Midnight's Children, Salman Rushdie's allegorical tale (1980) about India's transition to independence. Quieter virtues appeared in Rafaël Ouellet's Camion, an observant drama about working-class men, while Kim Nguyen maintained a firm grip on Rebelle (War Witch), the story of a girl soldier's struggles in a war-torn African state. Australia offered Cate Shortland's German co-production Lore, an understated but powerful coming-of-age drama set in Germany in 1945. New Zealand's film activity was dominated by the production of the Hobbit films.
© Weinstein Company/Thierry Valletoux/Everett CollectionTwo contrasting French films generated much attention. Famous for his confrontational dramas, Austrian director Michael Haneke discovered a tender side in Amour, a rigorous but ultimately compassionate account of an elderly couple near the end of life; it won the Palme d'Or at Cannes as well as the top prizes of the European Film Awards. Leos Carax's Holy Motors contained within its crazy kaleidoscope a lament for the digital age and the death of the cinema experience, but serious substance took second place to displays of the director's audacity. Meatier material unfolded in Jacques Audiard's De rouille et d'os (Rust and Bone), a compelling drama about an emotionally handicapped boxer and a physically handicapped whale trainer, and Captive, Brillante Mendoza's forceful dramatization of a Philippine hostage situation. New films emerged from gifted directors François Ozon, Olivier Assayas, and the veteran Alain Resnais, though they never achieved the international spread of Walter Salles's free-wheeling English-language On the Road, adapted from Jack Kerouac's classic novel. Local audiences flocked to see Intouchables (The Intouchables), Éric Toledano and Olivier Nakache's stereotype-riddled comedy about a quadriplegic aristocrat and his black caregiver. Belgium's major offering was Joachim Lafosse's À perdre la raison (Our Children), a finely crafted tragedy about a bright young woman suffocated by domestic life.
In Denmark director Thomas Vinterberg returned to international prominence with Jagten (The Hunt), a strongly acted tale of unfairly suspected child abuse. Mads Mikkelsen, its popular star, also appeared in Nicolaj Arcel's colourful 18th-century drama En kongelig affære (A Royal Affair). Anne-Grethe Bjarup Riis's popular Hvidsten gruppen (This Life) explored Danish resistance activities during World War II, and Sweden's Simon och ekarna (Simon & the Oaks; Lisa Ohlin) was a tender drama about the precarious situation of the country's Jews in the 1940s. Audiences in Norway flocked to Kon-Tiki (Joachim Rønning, Espen Sandberg); the film was visually lavish, though the real-life adventures of Thor Heyerdahl and his companions crossing the Pacific in a balsa-wood raft could have been told with greater gusto. Icelandic director Baltasar Kormákur purposely chose a low-key delivery for his naturalistic maritime survival drama Djúpið (The Deep).
In Germany prolific actor-director Detlev Buck scored at the local box office with his comedy Rubbeldiekatz (Woman in Love), while Christian Petzold won the best director prize at the Berlin International Film Festival for Barbara, a tautly atmospheric tale of love and subterfuge, set in East Germany in the 1980s. David Wnendt's award-winning Kriegerin (Combat Girls) presented a portrait of a 20-year-old girl stirred to racist contempt in the turbulent years after the Iron Curtain's collapse. Austria's most distinguished film was Florian Flicker's Grenzgänger (Crossing Boundaries), a minimalist drama set on the marshy Austrian-Slovak border.
Italian films scooped up top prizes at two of the major film festivals, though both winners left room for improvement. Paolo and Vittorio Taviani's Cesare deve morire (Caesar Must Die), winner of Berlin's Golden Bear award, presented itself as a semidocumentary about prisoners rehearsing Shakespeare's play Julius Caesar, but an air of contrivance haunted its beautifully chiseled images. Matteo Garrone's Reality won the Grand Prize of the Jury at Cannes with a thin comic story about a Neapolitan fishmonger obsessed with reality TV. Veteran director Marco Bellocchio offered sturdier fare in Bella addormentata (Dormant Beauty), a thought-provoking contribution to the country's ongoing debate about euthanasia. A 1969 terrorist bombing in Milan received compelling treatment in Marco Tullio Giordana's Romanzo di una strage (Piazza Fontana: The Italian Conspiracy), while the country's neorealist tradition emerged revitalized in Claudio Giovannesi's Alì ha gli occhi azzurri (Alì Blue Eyes).
In the 75th anniversary year of Disney's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Spain took the fairy tale for a diverting walk in the sweetly enjoyable Blancanieves (Pablo Berger), styled as a tribute to silent cinema. Director Álex de la Iglesia soft-pedaled his anarchic tendencies in La chispa de la vida (As Luck Would Have It), a blunt satire on the modern media world. Other significant films included Patricia Ferreira's social drama Els nens salvatges (The Wild Children) and Pablo Trapero's documentary-style Elefante blanco.
In Hungary new regulations to improve film funding came into force. Benedek Fliegauf's Csak a szél (Just the Wind) made a deep impression at the Berlin International Film Festival with its raw treatment of racist violence in the country's Romany settlements. Motion pictures in Poland continued to focus on past political conflicts. Marcin Krzysztalowicz's World War II drama Oblawa (Manhunt) was grim in tone but visually dynamic. Subtler material surfaced in Zabic bobra (To Kill a Beaver; Jan Jakub Kolski), an unusual study in posttraumatic stress. Rose-tinted escapism dominated Listy do M. (Letters to Santa; Mitja Okorn), the country's box-office champion of the winter of 2011–12; it even made modern Warsaw look romantic.
The 20th century's political upheavals received further treatment in the Czech Republic's Ve stinu (In the Shadow; David Ondricek) and in several films from Serbia. Veteran director Goran Paskaljevic's Kad svane dan (When Day Breaks) offered a muted treatment of a powerful story about a musician who learns that his parents died in a Nazi death camp. Miroslav Momcilovic revealed a stiletto touch in Smrt coveka na Balkanu (Death of a Man in the Balkans), inventively shot from the fixed perspective of a computer's webcam. Sharper still, Maja Milos's debut feature Klip (Clip) explored the lost generation of contemporary Serbian youth. Further portraits of damaged societies emerged in Djeca (Children of Sarajevo; Aida Begic) from Bosnia and Herzegovina, an ambitious drama about two orphaned siblings, and the Slovak-Czech Az do mesta As (Made in Ash; Iveta Grofova), the unadorned story of a Romany girl's downward spiral.
Slovenia's most successful domestic release, lighter in mood, was Izlet (A Trip; Nejc Gazvoda), a thoughtful coming-of-age tale about three school friends reunited. Leading Romanian director Cristian Mungiu fell a little below his best form in Dupa dealuri (Beyond the Hills), an intelligent but coldly aloof drama exploring spiritual and secular tensions. Nonetheless, the film won prizes at Cannes for its script and acting. Russia's output ranged from Karen Shakhnazarov's Bely tigr (White Tiger), a boldly imagined drama about Russian troops in World War II bedeviled by a mysterious white tank, to the overacted fantasy V ozhidanii morya (Waiting for the Sea; Bakhtiyor Khudoynazarov), a Western-flavoured fairy tale of uncertain meaning.
Savaged by economic and political strife, Greece produced one film of distinction, Ektoras Lygizos's To agori troei to fagito tou pouliou (Boy Eating the Bird's Food), a stark parable of hard times. In Turkey director Zeki Demirkubuz updated Dostoyevsky's novella Notes from the Underground to gripping effect in Yeralti (Inside). Afghanistan joined with European partners for Atiq Rahimi's The Patience Stone, a thoughtful reflection on the sufferings of Afghan women, given force and heart by the powerful performance of exiled Iranian actress Golshifteh Farahani.
In Chile, Pablo Larraín completed his trilogy set during the Pinochet regime with No, a tense drama laced with black humour, about an advertising executive's campaign to defeat Gen. Augusto Pinochet in Chile's 1988 referendum on whether Pinochet should remain in power. Raoul Ruiz's posthumously released La noche de enfrente (Night Across the Street) showed the playful director in an autumnal mood. New directors of quality included Jairo Boisiér, with La jubilada (The Retiree), and Dominga Sotomayor Castillo, with De jueves a domingo (Thursday Through Sunday). Brazil presented Kleber Mendonça Filho's O som ao redor (Neighbouring Sounds), an imaginatively executed portrait of Brazilian society reflected in a single middle-class street; the film won the international film critics' prize at the Rotterdam International Film Festival. At Cannes, Mexico's Carlos Reygadas won the award for best director for Post tenebras lux, a semiautobiographical film of visual grandeur but little logical cohesion. Rodrigo Plá of Uruguay exerted a firmer grip in La demora (The Delay), a finely calibrated emotional drama about a father and daughter facing desperate times. Paraguay made a strong bid for international attention with 7 Cajas (7 Boxes; Juan Carlos Maneglia, Tana Schembori), a blisteringly entertaining chase movie, while the Dominican Republic came forward with Leticia Tonos's mildly whimsical family drama La hija natural (Love Child), the country's first film directed by a woman. Argentina's submission for Oscar consideration was Infancia clandestina (Clandestine Childhood), Benjamin Ávila's uneven fictionalized treatment of his childhood during the country's military dictatorship.
Saudi Arabia, a country with no public cinemas, provided the region's greatest surprise of the year in Haifaa Al-Mansour's Wadjda, the first feature to be shot in the country by a woman director. Gender apart, the German co-production was also notable for its charismatic lead actress, Waad Mohammed, and its focus on the limited status of Arab women. The same topic fueled Tunisia's Manmoutech (Hidden Beauties; Nouri Bouzid), an overly melodramatic affair given some grit by scenes shot in 2011 during the country's revolution. Egypt's powerful film industry mostly avoided subjects reflecting its own Arab Spring; the biggest box-office successes were broad comedies. Strong reflections of national turmoil nonetheless appeared in Yousry Nasrallah's Baad el mawkeaa (After the Battle) and Ibrahim El-Batout's El sheita elli fat (Winter of Discontent), while Hala Lotfy's Al-khoroug le-nnahar (Coming Forth by Day) distinguished itself by its rigorous aesthetic and eloquent treatment of empty lives. From Algeria, Merzak Allouache's El taaib (The Repentant) told an emotionally resonant story of religious fanaticism, tangled lives, and a past continually alive.
One of the most striking Israeli films was Rama Burshtein's debut feature Lemale et ha'halal (Fill the Void), another tale of society's pressures, set among the Haredi (ultra-Orthodox) Jews. Comedy, drama, and tenderness were convincingly blended in Shemi Zarhin's box-office hit Haolam mats'hik (The World Is Funny). Tougher material dominated Ha-mashgihim (God's Neighbors), Meny Yaesh's vigorous drama about a young man led by love to leave an extremist gang, and Sharon Bar-Ziv's Heder 514 (Room 514), a low-budget, high-octane chamber piece about a military interrogation. From the Palestinian territories Annemarie Jacir's Lamma shoftak (When I Saw You) took a gentle view of the Arab-Israeli conflict, focusing on a young boy's adventures following the 1967 Six-Day War. Film production in Jordan, aided by the country's Royal Film Commission, grew in quantity and quality; Yahya Al-Abdallah's understated comedy Al juma al akheira (The Last Friday) was particularly notable. Government pressures limited artistic achievement in Iran, though Mani Haghighi's troubling Paziraie sadeh (Modest Reception) lodged in the mind, and Yek khanévadéh-e mohtaram (A Respectable Family; Massoud Bakhshi) wrapped its story of an expatriate professor's return in a tellingly threatening atmosphere.
India's mainstream film industry continued to generate energetic features. Farhan Akhtar's action sequel Don 2, starring the popular Shah Rukh Khan, ruled the box office at the start of the year. The revenge drama Agneepath (Karan Malhotra), a remake of a 22-year-old cult favourite, and Homi Adajania's Cocktail, an exuberant mix of melodrama and romantic comedy, also drew big audiences. New director Vasan Bala displayed promising talent in the thriller Halahal (Peddlers), while Milan Luthria's The Dirty Picture attracted much attention for its racy fictionalized treatment of the life of Silk Smitha, a South Indian film goddess of the 1980s. More thoughtful films were in short supply.
In China a new trade deal boosted the number of American films allowed for export to China, immediately reducing the commercial fortunes of local product. Audiences at least flocked to Tsui Hark's action-filled period drama Long men fei jia (Flying Swords of Dragon Gate), the first Chinese film exhibited in the IMAX 3-D format. At the other end of the spectrum, Song Fang's Jiyi wangzhe wo (Memories Look at Me), shot on video, won the best first feature prize at the Locarno International Film Festival for its intimate and delicate handling of family matters and dynamics. Chen Kaige, usually synonymous with visual spectacle, adopted a plainer style in Sousuo (Caught in the Web), an engrossing social drama, while Han Yan's Diyici (First Time) inventively viewed its teenage love story from two different perspectives. Daniel Hsia's American co-production Niuyueke @ Shanghai (Shanghai Calling) was an enjoyable comedy of cultural manners.
Several Japanese films dealt with the country's earthquake and tsunami of March 2011 and the disaster at the Fukushima nuclear power plant. Kibō no kuni (The Land of Hope; Shion Sono) took a critical but humane look at two families affected by the nuclear meltdown; Itai: Asu e no tōka kan (Reunion; Ryōichi Kimizuka) soberly cataloged a city's struggle to handle the bodies and emotional turmoil left in the tsunami's wake. Happier viewing was provided by Kagi-dorobō no mesoddo (Key of Life), Kenji Uchida's amusing tale of a struggling actor and a gangster hitman who switch identities. Maverick director Takashi Miike supplied his own brand of fun in Ai to makoto (For Love's Sake), a cynical lampoon of romantic conventions, laced with splashy violence, the macabre, and tears.
South Korea's prolific output continued. The cat burglar capers and daredevil stunts of Dodookdeul (The Thieves; Choi Dong-Hoon) attracted large audiences. Im Sang-Soo's Don-ui mat (The Taste of Money), a rococo domestic drama, also scored well at the box office. Meatier entertainment emerged from Kim Ki-Duk's tidily executed Pietà, winner of the Golden Lion prize at the Venice Film Festival—an ultimately humane revenge thriller about an assassin who meets a woman claiming to be his mother. The minimalist conundrum Dareun nara-eseo (In Another Country) found director Hong Sang-Soo treading water, though Isabelle Huppert added spice playing three French tourists visiting a seaside town. Daensing Kwin (Dancing Queen; Lee Seok-Hoon) offered buoyant romantic comedy, while new director Lee Donku showed his spurs in Kashiggot (Fatal), a powerfully acted thriller tautly mounted on a tiny budget.
The Philippines' principal trophy was Brillante Mendoza's emotionally vibrant Sinapupunan (Thy Womb), featuring prominent actress Nora Aunor as an infertile midwife desperate to give her husband a child. One arcane jewel emerged from Thailand: Nawapol Thamrongrattanarit's 36—a striking meditation on photography and the importance of memory, filmed in 36 shots.
Commercial cinema production experienced a revival in South Africa, furthered by the facilities of the new Cape Town Film Studios. Craig Freimond's English-language Material, a gentle comedy about Muslim family tensions, became a sizable hit, while Wayne Thornley's animated Zambezia achieved decent family entertainment on a low budget. In Nigeria, Kunle Afolayan's Phone Swap created profitable comedy from the premise of a mobile phone mix-up.
A list of selected international film awards in 2012 is provided in the table.
|Golden Globes, awarded in Beverly Hills, California, in January 2012
|Best drama
|The Descendants (U.S.; director, Alexander Payne)
|Best musical or comedy
|The Artist (France/Belgium/U.S.; director, Michel Hazanavicius)
|Best director
|Martin Scorsese (Hugo, U.S.)
|Best actress, drama
|Meryl Streep (The Iron Lady, U.K./France)
|Best actor, drama
|George Clooney (The Descendants, U.S.)
|Best actress, musical or comedy
|Michelle Williams (My Week with Marilyn, U.K./U.S.)
|Best actor, musical or comedy
|Jean Dujardin (The Artist, France/Belgium/U.S.)
|Best foreign-language film
|Jodaeiye Nader az Simin (A Separation) (Iran; director, Asghar Farhadi)
|Sundance Film Festival, awarded in Park City, Utah, in January 2012
|Grand Jury Prize, dramatic film
|Beasts of the Southern Wild (U.S.; director, Benh Zeitlin)
|Grand Jury Prize, documentary
|The House I Live In (U.S./Netherlands/U.K./Germany/Japan/Australia; director, Eugene Jarecki)
|World Cinema Audience Award, dramatic film
|Valley of Saints (India/U.S.; director, Musa Syeed)
|World Cinema Audience Award, documentary
|Searching for Sugar Man (Sweden/U.K.; director, Malik Bendjelloul)
|World Cinema Grand Jury Prize,
dramatic film
|Violeta se fue a los cielos (Violeta Went to Heaven) (Chile/Argentina/Brazil; director, Andrés Wood)
|World Cinema Grand Jury Prize,
|Shilton ha chok (The Law in These Parts) (Israel/Occupied Palestine Territory; director, Raʿanan Alexandrowicz)
|U.S. directing award, dramatic film
|Ava DuVernay (Middle of Nowhere, U.S.)
|U.S. directing award, documentary
|Lauren Greenfield (The Queen of Versailles, U.S./Netherlands/U.K./Denmark)
|British Academy of Film and Television Arts, awarded in London in February 2012
|Best film
|The Artist (France/Belgium/U.S.; director, Michel Hazanavicius)
|Best director
|Michel Hazanavicius (The Artist, France/Belgium/U.S.)
|Best actress
|Meryl Streep (The Iron Lady, U.K./France)
|Best actor
|Jean Dujardin (The Artist, France/Belgium/U.S.)
|Best supporting actress
|Octavia Spencer (The Help, U.S./India/United Arab Emirates)
|Best supporting actor
|Christopher Plummer (Beginners, U.S.)
|Best foreign-language film
|La piel que habito (The Skin I Live In) (Spain; director, Pedro Almodóvar)
|Berlin International Film Festival, awarded in February 2012
|Golden Bear
|Cesare deve morire (Caesar Must Die) (Italy; directors, Paolo Taviani and Vittorio Taviani)
|Silver Bear (Jury Grand Prize)
|Csak a szél (Just the Wind) (Hungary/Germany/France; director, Benedek Fliegauf)
|Best director
|Christian Petzold (Barbara; Germany)
|Best actress
|Rachel Mwanza (Rebelle, Canada)
|Best actor
|Mikkel Boe Følsgaard (En kongelig affære [A Royal Affair], Denmark/Sweden/Czech Republic)
|Césars (France), awarded in Paris in February 2012
|Best film
|The Artist (France/Belgium/U.S.; director, Michel Hazanavicius)
|Best director
|Michel Hazanavicius (The Artist, France/Belgium/U.S.)
|Best actress
|Bérénice Bejo (The Artist, France/Belgium/U.S.)
|Best actor
|Omar Sy (Intouchables) [The Intouchables], France)
|Most promising actress
|Clotilde Hesme (Angèle et Tony [Angèle and Tony], France); Naidra Ayadi (Polisse, France)
|Best first film
|Le Cochon de Gaza (When Pigs Have Wings) (France/Germany/Belgium; director, Sylvain Estibal)
|Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (Oscars; U.S.), awarded in Los Angeles in February 2012
|Best film
|The Artist (France/Belgium/U.S.; director, Michel Hazanavicius)
|Best director
|Michel Hazanavicius (The Artist, France/Belgium/U.S.)
|Best actress
|Meryl Streep (The Iron Lady, U.K./France)
|Best actor
|Jean Dujardin (The Artist, France/Belgium/U.S.)
|Best supporting actress
|Octavia Spencer (The Help, U.S./India/United Arab Emirates)
|Best supporting actor
|Christopher Plummer (Beginners, U.S.)
|Best foreign-language film
|Jodaeiye Nader az Simin (A Separation) (Iran; director, Asghar Farhadi)
|Best animated film
|Rango (U.S.; director, Gore Verbinski)
|Cannes Festival, France, awarded in May 2012
|Palme d'Or
|Amour (France/Germany/Austria; director, Michael Haneke)
|Grand Prix
|Reality (Italy/France; director, Matteo Garrone)
|Jury Prize
|The Angels' Share (U.K./France/Belgium/Italy; director, Ken Loach)
|Best director
|Carlos Reygadas (Post tenebras lux, Mexico/France/Netherlands/Germany)
|Best actress
|Cristian Flutur and Cosmina Stratan (Dupa dealuri [Beyond the Hills], Romania/France/Belgium)
|Best actor
|Mads Mikkelsen (Jagten [The Hunt], Denmark)
|Caméra d'Or
|Beasts of the Southern Wild (U.S.; director, Benh Zeitlin)
|Locarno International Film Festival, Switzerland, awarded in August 2012
|Golden Leopard
|La Fille de nulle part (The Girl from Nowhere) (France; director, Jean-Claude Brisseau)
|Special Jury Prize
|Somebody up There Likes Me (U.S.; director, Bob Byington)
|Best actress
|An Nai (Wo hai you hua yao shou [When Night Falls], South Korea/China)
|Best actor
|Walter Saabel (Der Glanz des Tages, Austria)
|Montreal World Film Festival, awarded in August 2012
|Grand Prix of the Americas
(Best film)
|Atesin düstügü yer (Where the Fire Burns) (Turkey; director, Ismail Günes)
|Best actress
|Brigitte Hobmeier (Ende der Schonzeit, Germany/Israel)
|Best actor
|Karl Merkatz (Angang 80, Austria)
|Best director
|Jan Troell (Dom over död man [The Last Sentence], Sweden/Norway)
|Special Grand Prix of the Jury
|Invasion (Germany/Austria; director, Dito Tsintsadze); Miel de naranjas (Orange Honey) (Spain/Portugal; director, Imanol Uribe)
|Best screenplay
|Sanghaj (Shanghai Gypsy) (Slovenia; screenplay by Marko Nabersnik)
|International film critics award
|Atesin düstügü yer (Where the Fire Burns) (Turkey; director, Ismail Günes)
|Venice Film Festival, awarded in September 2012
|Golden Lion
|Pietà (South Korea; director, Kim Ki-Duk)
|Special Jury Prize
|Paradies: Glaube (Paradise: Faith) (Austria/Germany/France; director, Ulrich Seidl)
|Volpi Cup, Best actress
|Hadas Yaron (Lemale et ha'halal [Fill the Void], Israel)
|Volpi Cup, Best actor
|Philip Seymour Hoffman and Joaquin Phoenix (The Master, U.S.)
|Silver Lion, Best director
|Paul Thomas Anderson (The Master, U.S.)
|Marcello Mastroianni Award
(best young actor or actress)
|Fabrizio Falco (Bella addormentata [Dormant Beauty], Italy/France, and É stato il figlio, Italy)
|Luigi De Laurentiis Award
(best first film)
|Küf (Turkey/Germany; director, Ali Aydin)
|Toronto International Film Festival, awarded in September 2012
|Best Canadian feature film
|Laurence Anyways (director, Xavier Dolan)
|Best Canadian first feature
|Antiviral (director, Brandon Cronenberg); Blackbird (director, Jason Buxton)
|Best Canadian short film
|Ne crâne pas sois modeste (Keep a Modest Head) (director, Deco Dawson)
|International film critics award
|Call Girl (Sweden/Norway/Finland/Ireland; director, Mikael Marcimain)
|People's Choice Award
|Silver Linings Playbook (U.S.; director, David O. Russell)
|San Sebastián International Film Festival, Spain, awarded in September 2012
|Best film
|Dans la maison (In the House) (France; director, François Ozon)
|Special Jury Prize
|Blancanieves (Spain; director, Pablo Berger)
|Best director
|Fernando Trueba (El artista y la modelo [The Artist and the Model], Spain)
|Best actress
|Macarena García (Blancanieves, Spain); Katie Coseni (Foxfire, France)
|Best actor
|José Sacristán (El muerto y ser feliz [The Dead Man and Being Happy], Spain/France/Argentina)
|Best cinematography
|Touraj Aslani (Fasle kargadan [Rhino Season], Iran/Turkey)
|New directors prize
|Fernando Guzzoni (Carne de perro [Dog Flesh], Chile/France/Germany)
|International film critics award
|El muerto y ser feliz (The Dead Man and Being Happy) (Spain/France/Argentina; director, Javier Rebollo)
|Vancouver International Film Festival, awarded in October 2012
|Most Popular Canadian Film Award
|Becoming Redwood (director, Jesse James Miller)
|Rogers People's Choice Award
|Jagten (The Hunt) (Denmark; director, Thomas Vinterberg)
|Most Popular Canadian Documentary Award
|Blood Relative (director, Nimisha Mukerji)
|Best Canadian Feature Film
|Blackbird (director, Jason Buxton)
|Most Popular Environmental Film Award
|Revolution (Canada; director, Rob Stewart)
|Dragons and Tigers Award
for Young Cinema
|Tang huang you difu (Emperor Visits the Hell) (China; director, Luo Li)
|Chicago International Film Festival, awarded in October 2012
|Gold Hugo, best film
|Holy Motors (France/Germany; director, Leo Carax)
|Silver Hugo, Special Jury Award
|Después de Lucía (After Lucia) (Mexico/France; director, Michel Franco)
|Gold Hugo, best documentary
|The Believers (U.S.; directors, Clayton Brown and Monica Long Ross)
|European Film Awards, awarded in December 2012
|Best European Film of the Year
|Amour (Austria/France/Germany; director, Michael Haneke)
|Best actress
|Emmanuelle Riva (Amour, Austria/France/Germany)
|Best actor
|Jean-Louis Trintignant (Amour, Austria/France/Germany)
In 2012 Eugene Jarecki's documentary The House I Live In explored the history and the costs of the decades-long war on drugs. It won the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival. Where Soldiers Come From by Heather Courtney tracked three young American men from their enlistment in the National Guard through their deployment in Afghanistan and their eventual return home. The film, which originally aired on PBS, won a News and Documentary Emmy Award in 2012. Undefeated by Dan Lindsay and T.J. Martin, which won an Academy Award, followed an underdog inner-city high school football team in Memphis, Tenn., as a volunteer coach endeavoured to inspire them to improve their situations in sports and in life. In the widely screened Detropia Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady examined the deteriorated conditions in Detroit and the challenges facing the people who still lived there. Searching for Sugar Man by Malik Bendjelloul chronicled the attempt by two South Africans to unravel the mysteries surrounding Rodriguez, an unsuccessful American rock musician whose songs, recorded in the early 1970s, became extremely popular among South Africans fighting apartheid. It won the World Cinema Documentary Special Jury Prize at Sundance and audience awards at four other festivals. Ross McElwee returned with another personal film, Photographic Memory, which explored his troubled relationship with his 21-year-old son and his own youthful past in France. Named best short documentary at the AFI–Discovery Channel Silverdocs festival was Sari Gilman's Kings Point, which examined life in a large retirement community near West Palm Beach, Fla. Scott Thurman's The Revisionaries, winner of a special jury award at the Tribeca Film Festival, focused on pressure at the Texas State Board of Education to revise science textbooks to better reflect concepts of creationism.
Documentary Films
In 2012 Eugene Jarecki's documentary The House I Live In explored the history and the costs of the decades-long war on drugs. It won the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival. Where Soldiers Come From by Heather Courtney tracked three young American men from their enlistment in the National Guard through their deployment in Afghanistan and their eventual return home. The film, which originally aired on PBS, won a News and Documentary Emmy Award in 2012.
Undefeated by Dan Lindsay and T.J. Martin, which won an Academy Award, followed an underdog inner-city high school football team in Memphis, Tenn., as a volunteer coach endeavoured to inspire them to improve their situations in sports and in life. In the widely screened Detropia Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady examined the deteriorated conditions in Detroit and the challenges facing the people who still lived there.
Searching for Sugar Man by Malik Bendjelloul chronicled the attempt by two South Africans to unravel the mysteries surrounding Rodriguez, an unsuccessful American rock musician whose songs, recorded in the early 1970s, became extremely popular among South Africans fighting apartheid. It won the World Cinema Documentary Special Jury Prize at Sundance and audience awards at four other festivals. Ross McElwee returned with another personal film, Photographic Memory, which explored his troubled relationship with his 21-year-old son and his own youthful past in France.
Named best short documentary at the AFI–Discovery Channel Silverdocs festival was Sari Gilman's Kings Point, which examined life in a large retirement community near West Palm Beach, Fla. Scott Thurman's The Revisionaries, winner of a special jury award at the Tribeca Film Festival, focused on pressure at the Texas State Board of Education to revise science textbooks to better reflect concepts of creationism.