Culture Flash!

• To help Ballet Austin in its final push to fund the Butler Dance Education Center, local philanthropists Sarah and Ernest Butler – the couple whose name will grace this new Downtown facility with offices, rental space, and seven dance studios – have given another million dollars to the capital campaign on top of their original $2.5 million gift and have challenged the community to match that amount. That contribution from the public would be the final million needed to pay for the $10.3 million facility at West Third and San Antonio. Construction has been under way since last summer and is scheduled to be complete in time for the center to open in September. To make a donation or obtain more information, call development associate Brooke Davis at 476-9151 x114 or visit www.balletaustin.org/contribute.

• UT's Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center has added to its already substantial Samuel Beckett holdings. Through Richard Seaver, Beckett's former editor at Grove Press, the center acquired some 60 letters from Beckett to Seaver from 1953 to 1973, covering the publication and translation of Beckett's texts, Beckett's editorial changes, performances and films of his plays, and his travels and friendships; corrected galleys for his one-act play "Words and Music" and his short stories "The Calmative," "The End," and "The Expelled"; corrected typescripts of "The End," of Mercier et Camier (Beckett's first novel in French), and of his play Eleuthéria (in French); and a setting copy of the first American edition of Happy Days. To see the center's online exhibition "Fathoms From Anywhere: A Samuel Beckett Centenary Exhibition," visit www.hrc.utexas.edu/beckett.