CHARLES BETHEA, executive director of the Lied Center for Performing Arts, will lead the facHity into its second decade of existence. Bethea said programming at
the Lied Center requires attention not only to diversity, but also to financial limitations.
Lied Center to open
Program
organizers
hope for
diverse
season
*
ByLeaHoumeier
Senior staff writer
As the Lied Center approaches its
10th anniversary season, it prepares Yor
a decade of new challenges and possi
bilities.
“(The anniversary) is an opportuni
ty to look at where we’ve come from
and what we’ve become,” said Charles
Bethea, die Lied’s executive director.
During its 10-year life span, the
Lied’s mission has remained constant:
to present the highest caliber of cultural
programming possible.
Over the years, some of the chal
lenges of meeting that mission have
changed.
All arts institutions and organiza
tions strive to achieve financial stability
and, if possible, financial growth. A
decade ago, much of that financial sta
bility came from government funding
for the arts.
As public funding has continued to
decrease, arts organizations like the
Lied turn more and more to corpora
tions for support
Bethea said the challenge then
becomes establishing and maintaining
relationships with corporate funding
sources.
“Corporations get a lot of inquiries
for money,” he said.
The Lied’s high profile has helped it
to gamer corporate funds. A corpora
tion’s relationship with the Lied helps
make the business’s presence known in
the community, Bethea said.
Despite the fiscal challenges,
Bethea said, the center strives to keep
Please see LIED on 14
Ued Center Anniversary Celebration
Harry Belafonte
Sept 22,1999
10th Year Anniversary Festival
BeauSoieil avec Michael Doucet
Sept 24,1999 .
Lied Plaza
Moscow State Radio Symphony
Orchestra and Chorus
Nikolai Alexeyev, Music Director
Verdi’s “Reqi|em”
Oct 3,1999 r
l§ .„ .. _ /Orchestra
I Leonard SL . Conductor
“Cats’
Oct 26 through 29,1999
The Watts Prophets
“Talk Up/Not Down"
Nov 12,1999 -
Johnny Carson Theater
Big Apple Circus “On Stage”
Dec z through 5,1999
Yo-Yo Ma, cello
Kathryn Stott, piano
Jan 25, 2000
Ballet de I’Opera de Bordeaux
Feb 2,*2000
"\
Johnny Carson Theijhr
m Richard
Chorus m I
and Orchestra §
Feb 25.2000
The Carnage Hall Jazz Band
Jon Raddis, Music Director
Feb 27, 2000 • '
New York City Opera National
Company
“The Baroer of Seville"
March 9, 2000
Poncho Sanchez
Latin Jazz Band
March 11,1999
“Fiddler on the Roof
April 6 through 9, 2000
Gregory Hines
ApnT29, 2000
Matt Haney/DN
Spate’s writers fulfill creative vision
By Bret Schulte
, Senior editor
Allen Ginsburg once wrote, “Writers are, in a
way, very powerful indeed. They write the script
for the reality film.”
These words hang in the Daily Nebraskan,
and were posted to refresh our sense of aesthetics
after hours of sifting through strings of quotes
and hours of telephone calls. When the “Resident
Writers” series began partway through the spring
semester, the idea of writers as powerful and
shapers of reality indeed became a force to reck
on with.
Playwrights, authors, humorists, actors, pub
lishers: They are all players in the reality film,
and they shape - in varying degrees of subtlety -
our own big scene in the grown-over and fre
quently forlorn studio called Nebraska.
Our state is the terrain of best-selling critical
authors such as Richard Dooling, the workspace
of widely read psychologists in the form of Mary
Pipher and offers classrooms to world-class cre
ative energies -» English professor Marly Swick,
for instance.
/^^Resident
/ Writers
A semesterlong look at
Nebraska literary culture and
the people who create it.
It is a vibrant and surprisingly successful
community: The efforts of Nebraska playwrights
are brought to life on stages small and large
across the country. Omahan Robert Vivian stays
in Nebraska despite continued success in New
York playhouses. According to Vivian, staying
here means you have to work even harder if you
want to be heard in New York.
“You must forge your own voice in
Nebraska,” he says. “You’re pretty much on your
own. It’s a strange kind of blessing in a way.”
Max Sparber, also of Omaha, was floored to
hear that his first play ever produced was going to
New York, where it has since been re-contracted
for a larger venue and nominated for an
Oppenheimer award.
Today, he continues working like before as
the culture editor for The Reader.
This type of pragmatism is not often associat
ed with those of a romantic bent, but it is a distin
guishing characteristic of the Nebraska writers
scene. They write. They work. They raise fami
lies.
They are not so much writers as they are peo
ple who write.
Lincoln resident Tom Frye never found a*
voice in fiction until he met a drug-addicted teen
ager whose visions of dragons led him to
attempted suicide. Frye began to write stories to
set teen problems in perspective.
He writes, he edits, he typesets and he gets
them published himself. And he’s been doing it
for 15 years. Try getting that much work done
when you’re not the foster parent of nine kids.
Duane Hutchinson retired as an on-campus
chaplain to become a storyteller in the classic
sense. It doesn’t matter if they are kindergartners
or college seniors, he will tell them ghost stories;
he will tell them Tolstoy stories; and finally he
will embolden them with their own stories.
Please see WRITERS on 14
RickTownlfy/DN
GERRY COX, a retired English professor,
co-wrote the Geide to Nebraska Aethers,
which inclodes short biographies of awn
than 700 writers.