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What if Perkins made you pay a dollar every time you wanted to use the bathroom? What if the Shooters cover charge was replaced with a facilities fee for each trip to the toilet?
You're on Foster Street, just outside Trotter Building. You peek through the windows of the converted gymnasium on Thursday morning, opening day of Little Green Pig Theatrical Concern's eighth season starter, Thornton Wilder's Pulitzer-winner “Our Town.” Inside, you see some off-white paper lantern lights. A few black umbrellas hanging on old radiators. Costumes. A bike. You ain't seen nothing yet.
Photo credit: Alan Dehmer
What is it about Decatur County, Georgia—a small agricultural community just outside Atlanta—that fascinated the late Paul Kwilecki? Why would he spend a lifetime exclusively photographing one place? What kind of understanding does that depth of study bring?
Composer and music professor emeritus Robert Ward, who died last week at the age of 95, created award-winning operas, symphonies and instrumental pieces and enriched the world of music as an avid educator, administrator, jazz band leader, publisher and musician.
If anyone has earned the right to indulge in perpetual existential crisis, it’s David Bowie. Simultaneously initiator and victim of pop culture trends of the last three decades, Bowie thrives in situations of ambiguous identity. Yet the irony of Bowie’s latest album The Next Day is that, for all the artist’s self-doubt, the record is most appealing for its references to the vast and varied Bowie legacy.
At parties, dances or in the car during late night trips to burger joints, I was never the one to set the playlist. I never messed with a sound system in public or whipped out my iPod and said, “Hey, who knows X?”
Having rehearsed the story of my “first time” for a couple of hours this past weekend, I was confident I’d be one of the more stage-ready contestants at Tuesday night’s StorySLAM at Motorco Music Hall. I was so wrong. That has to be the only open mic night I’ve been to where there hasn’t been a single painfully awkward, long performance. The level of professionalism and effort put forth by predominately amateur storytellers was humbling, to say the least.
In its aesthetic austerity, Diavolo Dance Theater’s Fearful Symmetries is just the deconstruction of a cube, and Trajectoire is simply the revolution of a large semicircular prism. But when embodied onstage with heart-racing acrobatics, choreographer Jacques Heim’s latest works transcend their exterior geometries to create emotionally charged, adrenaline-infused performances. On tour away from their native Los Angeles, Diavolo will show both performances back-to-back as part Duke Performances spring series at 8 p.m. this Friday and Saturday in Reynolds Industries Theater. One of the few consistently producing LA-based dance companies, Diavolo brings a distinctive West Coast attitude and outlook to Durham.
When Orsino laments his unrequited passion for Countess Olivia in Twelfth Night, he offers the ultimate recipe for numbing heartbreak: “If music be the food of love, play on.” Today his words echo with artists of all types. It’s a rare occasion, however, when seemingly disconnected modes of performance—chamber music and theatre—share a stage.
To say that Scott Walker is pushing the boundaries of experimental music is to assume that the reclusive poet and ex-crooner isn’t already in a universe of his own. I don’t know what state of mind Walker was in during the 1960s when he covered pop/rock ballads, but he’s been almost unrecognizably transformed since.
My first climb up the Arts Annex walkway was dark, uninviting and completely misleading. At 6:30 p.m. on Tuesday, the path towards the back entrance of the Annex was forebodingly quiet. The chainlink keycard gate seemed like the entrance to a military compound. The only evidence of student activity was a series of finished canvases hanging on a cable between the trees; but even then, with only lamplight to illuminate the works, the mini-gallery had a multicolored glow that suggested the presence of some secret art cult.
Ever since Disney released an edited version of Naussicaä of the Valley of the Wind to director Hayao Miyazaki’s dissatisfaction, American distributors have struggled to bring his anime masterpieces to English-speaking audiences. Story has it that a producer for the Japanese film distributor Toho Company Ltd. sent a samurai sword to Miramax’s Harvey Weinstein with a note saying “no cuts” in order to emphasize that Miyazaki prohibited any changes for the American releases of his films.
For the media-soaked American viewer, the incisive humor behind Alexander Kosolapov’s 1988 screenprint Lenin-Coca-Cola is its ambiguity of target. Part of the Nasher’s new Education Corridor exhibition, The Subverted Icon: Images of Power in Soviet Art (1970-1995), Kosolapov’s work sweeps satire across two nations and cultures. The Marxist revolutionary and the icon of capitalism face each other, both stenciled in the Coke/communist-red-on-white decor of classic ‘50s billboards, to create a bizarre contrast. An uncharacteristically informal quote by Lenin promoting the soft drink—“It’s the Real Thing”—gives the fake-ad the explicitly dissident comedy the artist intended.
There’s an intentional deception behind the work of Hoof’n’Horn’s publicity team in their advertisements for their fall semester musical, Avenue Q; posters guilefully market the show as something innocent and blissfully immature. On their main playbill, a row of Sesame Street-style puppets hover above a banner, arms around each other, flashing open-mouthed smiles. Since the aesthetic of Avenue Q takes implicit inspiration from the Sesame Workshop and Jim Henson’s Muppet franchise, it’s easy to imagine that Hoof ‘n’ Horn’s production will be a gleeful, innocuous jaunt down PBS’s memory lane.
When the 1950s replica pendant lights darken on the abstract painter Mark Rothko, portrayed with virile and unnerving authority by Stephen Caffrey, there’s a real fear that Rothko’s nightmare will be realized, that “one day the black will swallow the red.” Such is the power with which Caffrey, and his counterpart Matt Gardner (as Rothko’s employee Ken), vivify John Logan’s Tony-award winning one-act, Red. Produced by PlayMakers’ Repertory Theater at UNC-Chapel Hill, the drama synchronizes all levels of theatrical technique to tease the passion out of Logan’s highly intellectual dialogue on artistic expression.
It’s unlikely that Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright August Wilson would have chosen The Spice Girls as pre-show music for Radio Golf, the concluding play in his 10-part series The Pittsburgh Cycle. Yet Deep Dish Theater Company believed it was an appropriate introduction to his highly political play that documents the struggle of black Americans against de facto segregation and urban redevelopment. While the Chapel Hill venue did advertise their season-opening performance as a “comic drama,” the girl group’s hit “Wannabe” created a misleading atmosphere for a work that deals with gentrification and the widening socioeconomic gap between poverty-line blacks and elites.
