Tate Modern Director Chris Dercon will leave the museum to head up Berlin’s experimental theatre landmark, the Volksbühne in 2017, The Guardian reports.  “Chris Dercon is helping to open Tate Modern to a wider world and more diverse audiences through his support for a more international programme, photography, live performance and film,” says Tate head Nicolas Serota. “We look forward to working with him on the opening of the new Tate Modern and until he takes up his appointment in Berlin in 2017.” (more…)

Robert Wilson, Shakespeare’s Sonnets, via BAM

Shakespeare’s sonnets were never intended as a theatrical work, a set of poems that extend the Bard’s legendary repertoire beyond a cache of plays that already constitutes a sizable portion of the western theatrical canon.  But that doesn’t seem to have stopped Robert Wilson, who has revived Shakespeare’s Iambic Pentameter for his production currently showing at Brooklyn Academy of Music. (more…)

Giacomo Balla, Mercury Passing Before the Sun (1914), via Art Observed

From the opening lines of the The Futurist Manifesto, on view near the ground floor of the Guggenheim’s current historical survey of the early 20th century Italian avant-garde, one can detect a certain mechanistic determinism, a powerful, single-minded focus on the power of industry, science and machines.  F.T. Marinetti’s famous lines summon the roar of the engine, and the hum of electricity in equal measure, damning an Italy obsessed with its own past, and embracing a new future as a world power.

Umberto Boccioni, Elasticity (Elasticità), (1912), Courtesy Guggenheim Museum (more…)

Aki Sasamoto, Sunny in the Furnace, via Aki Sasamoto

Late this week, amid the hustle and bustle of Armory Week in New York, The Kitchen will open artist Aki Sasamoto’s newest performance, Sunny in the Furnace, running from March 6th to the 8th in the organization’s theatre space.  Incorporating Sasamoto’s playful, intricate series of object-oriented encounters and reflections, the work will see her expand her practice onto a larger scale, incorporating the work of fellow artists Sam Ekwurtzel, Jessica Weinstein, Pau Atela, and Madeline Best, as well as live music by percussionist John Bollinger. taking Sasamoto’s recurring focus on memory and material to new levels of complexity.

Aki spoke with Art Observed this past week to preview her show, and talk a bit about her personal creative process. (more…)

Artists Barbara Kruger and Sterling Ruby are collaborating with Benjamin Millepied’s L.A. Dance Projects to present a pair of performances at a 1,600 seat historic theater built in 1921 at the newly opened Ace Hotel in Los Angeles.  The artists each provided visual concepts for one performance, with Kruger collaborating with Millepied on his piece Reflections, and Ruby working on Murder Ballads by Justin Peck.  The works will be performed on February 20^th, 21^st and 22^nd at the Theatre at Ace Hotel Los Angeles. (more…)

The Bruce High-Quality Foundation University has announced an ambitious project for early 2014: a full production of the 1957 musical West Side Story.  Directed by artist and thespian Peter Zohore, the West Side Story project is beginning this month, and will run throughout the beginning of the year. (more…)

In his largest U.S. exhibition to date, Los Angeles-based artist Paul McCarthy will present a re-imagining of Snow White at the Park Avenue Armory this summer as part of the institution’s 2013 season.  The season also includes a staging of Marina Abramovic’s opera, and a performance of Stockhausen’s “Licht,” with a moonscape designed by Rirkrit Tiravanija.  According to Rebecca Robertson, the armory’s president and executive producer, the varied calendar of works is intended to “blur the line between high art and popular culture” and “ask tough questions about the world in which we live.” (more…)

#AIWW: The Arrest of Ai Weiwei, a new play detailing the arrest and detainment of Chinese artist Ai Weiwei in April of 2011, will open this year in London.  Based on conversations between the artist and author Barnaby Martin following Ai’s release in June of 2011, the show will depict the series of events leading up to and during his detainment.  “Weiwei is a natural raconteur and although he was still deeply traumatised by his experience inside, he went back through the experiences of his detention and recounted, in his inimitable English, the most incredible and bizarre story I have ever heard,” says Martin. (more…)