TONIGHT AND TOMORROW in Durham // Duke Divinity School Broadway Revue

Come enjoy your favorite Broadway Tunes!
Admission is FREE!
Tickets are available at Duke Divinity School or by email request. [linnyb12@gmail.com]

Friday, April 15 and Saturday, April 16
Doors open at 6:30, show begins at 7:00
Hayti Heritage Center

804 Old Fayetteville Street

Durham, NC

‘Kind of Blue’: Senior Debuts Jazz-Inspired Play About Male Identity // UNC Student Kuamel Stewart

Full article here // Excerpt below

Senior communication studies major Kuamel Stewart is passionate about jazz music and playwriting. He combines those two loves into one with the Feb. 23 debut of “Kind of Blue,” a play he wrote that explores male identity. The title of the play comes from the 1959 Miles Davis’ modal jazz album, “Kind of Blue.”

[...]

Preview night is 6 p.m. Feb. 23. The play will be performed Feb. 24-28 at 7 p.m. and Feb. 26-27 at 2 p.m in Playmakers Theatre, 202 E. Cameron Ave. After the Feb. 24 show, theater-goers can enjoy a free live performance of Miles Davis’ iconic album at 10 p.m. in Room 1201 of the Kenan Music Building as part of the Carolina Jazz Festival. Free tickets to the play are available at the Memorial Hall Box Office in person, by calling (919) 843-3333 or online at http://memorialhall.unc.edu. On March 1, the cast and crew will hold a “talk back” session to further explore the themes of masculinity at 7 p.m. in the Carmichael Dormitory ballroom.

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In London, Climate Change Comes to the Stage // "Greenland" at the National Theater

Full article here // Excerpt below

By Matt Wolf

It’s not often that the mundane activities of an audience directly fly in the face of what is happening on stage. But there I was the other night at “Greenland,” the National Theatre’s admonitory potpourri of a drama about climate change, when I became all too aware of my fellow spectators crumpling packets of this or that or popping plastic water bottles like (very) cheap champagne.

“Hang on!” I wanted to call out, as images of the plastic trash-turned-land mass that is gradually despoiling our earth unfurled before me. (The production runs in repertory at the Lyttelton through April 2). “Is no one paying this show any heed?” Or perhaps the sorry truth is that even plays considerably better than “Greenland” can hector till the cows come home, and yet we still aren’t as conscientious as we ought to be. Recycle, recycle, recycle, I muttered all the way home.

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Does One Need Sight to Grasp the World? // Brian Friel's 'Molly Sweeney' at Irish Rep (and Ken Medema)

Full article here // Excerpt below

By Ken Jaworowski

It takes two hours to watch “Molly Sweeney” at the Irish Repertory Theater. But you’ll spend much more time thinking about it afterward. A deeply moving meditation on hope, change and despair, it’s a compelling piece of theater, one in which the ending applause is only the beginning of the play’s effects.

Molly, who has been blind almost since birth, starts off by recounting her life, one blessed with friends and a recent marriage. Her ever-enthusiastic husband, Frank, embarks on a plan to restore her sight and seeks out Mr. Rice, a once-promising eye surgeon who has gone into near-seclusion. “What has she to lose?” Mr. Rice asks as he agrees to operate on her. That question will haunt them all.

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Sidebar: This past weekend at the Calvin Symposium on Worship, I was blessed to be in a worship service and a songwriting workshop led by Ken Medema. Though blind from birth, Ken is one of the most effective songwriters and worship leaders I have come across. I encourage you to check out his work, and to consider this question: how do you think the lack of one of the five senses might hinder--or enhance--one's appreciation and/or creation of art and beauty?
-- Sarah

Writing the Play His Curiosity Led Him To // Playwright Matthew Lopez and 'The Whipping Man'

Full article here // Excerpt below

By Felicia R. Lee

Matthew Lopez is ready for the question but continues to refine the answer. How did he, a self-described “foxhole Episcopalian” from the Florida Panhandle, the son of a Puerto Rican father and a Polish-Russian mother, come to write a play about a Jewish Confederate soldier and two former slaves raised as Jews who, in the charred wreck of a Virginia home after the Civil War, celebrate Passover together?

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On a similar subject (sort of), a book club at Judea Reform Congregation in Durham looked this past month at Dara Horn's novel All Other Nights, about a Jewish spy in the Civil War.

Tracy Radosevic: The Sounds of a Living Tradition // From Faith and Leadership

Full article here // Excerpt below

Because Bible stories were initially communicated orally -- with breath, sound and movement -- the sounds of the story still matter today, said storyteller Tracy Radosevic. Asking questions such as “Who was the audience?” and “What was going on socially, politically and economically?” when the story was first told allows the current meaning of the story to express itself through the teller, she said.

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The L.A Times lists its Top 10 Theater/Art/Architecture/Classical/Jazz of 2010

The L.A. Times has its Top 10 lists up for the The Year in The Arts, 2010. Each are listed/linked below by medium. Happy New Year! -- Leif

Top 10 / Theater

Top 10 / Art

Top 10 / Architecture

Top 10 / Classical Music

Top 10 / Jazz

The Arts in 2010 // 'Spider-Man' to Facebook to Arcade Fire

Memorable Moments of 2010: Arts

A Walltown Nutcracker // Durham Children's Theater Puts a New Spin on Holiday Classic

Full article here // Excerpt below

By Jim Wise

Wanona Satcher has seen a lot of 'Nutcrackers,' but she's never seen one like the one she's producing in Durham.

It's likely nobody else has, either.

Satcher, an urban planner and landscape architect by trade, has taken Tchaikovsky's Christmas chestnut and made it into a musical, a ballet-within-a-play set in the 1980s with some multicultural add-ins. [...]

"It's very Durhamesque," said Satcher, a 29-year old making her debut as a theatrical producer.

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Moved by the Spirit: Celebrating 'Revelations' at 50

Full Article Here // Excerpt Below

by Gia Kourlas

Members of Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater perform “Revelations” nearly as often as ordinary people brush their teeth. This magnificent work, created by Alvin Ailey in 1960, is a dance on land and in water, a journey through African-American spiritual music and, for dancers, an act of reverence for the generations that came before.

“It doesn’t matter how tired I am,” said Briana Reed, a company member since 1998. “As soon as the music starts, I feel myself transported to another place.” Told in three sections —“Pilgrim of Sorrow,” “Take Me to the Water” and “Move, Members, Move” — Ailey’s burning exploration of grief and joy celebrates its 50th anniversary on Wednesday at City Center.

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In New York, @ Union Theological on Dec. 1 // Art, Religion, and Social Justice speaker series continues

Link to main page here // Excerpt regarding December 1st speaker below

The Series' Introductory Statement:

In a world where art is judged by market value, and where MFA programs promote gallery representation more than vocational calling, this series of lectures by visual artists will investigate social justice as a driving motivation. Exploring the social, philosophical and spiritual traditions that offer resources for artists to imagine justice and new visions of human flourishing, these lectures draw on the creative tension of their setting in a historic theological seminary, suggesting a new commonality between art and religion in the shared pursuit of social justice.

December 1st Speaker: Paul Chan

Internationally acclaimed artist Paul Chan lives and works in New York. His work has been exhibited widely in many international shows including: Making Worlds, 53rd Venice Biennale, 2009; Medium Religion, ZKM, Karlsruhe, 2008; Traces du sacrê, Centre Pompidou, Paris, 2008; and Paul Chan: The 7 Lights, Serpentine Gallery, London, and New Museum, New York, 2007–2008; Paul Chan—Lights and Drawings, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam.

In November 2007, Chan collaborated with the Classical Theatre of Harlem and Creative Time to stage five free site-specific performances of Samuel Beckett's play Waiting for Godot in two New Orleans neighborhoods that had been destroyed by the flooding caused by the levee breaks during Hurricane Katrina. The performances were part of a larger project, which also included a fund to help local rebuilding and reorganization efforts, plus a series of dinners, lectures, classes, and events that unfolded throughout the city during the fall of 2007. Paul will discuss the organizing and aesthetic ideas around the project and show clips from the performance in the Lower Ninth Ward. He will also talk about the installation of the Godot archive at MoMA (now on exhibit until September 2011).

'Spider-Man' starts to emerge from secrecy // An unprecedented show that may be born premature

Full Article Here // Excerpt Below

by Patrick Healy

We know him, but we may not know him, at least according to the musical’s creators. In their eyes, Peter Parker (and his alter ego, Spider-Man) is a character on a spiritual quest to reconcile human frailty with the possibility of greatness. It’s an idea that so enraptured the director, Julie Taymor, and the composers, Bono and the Edge, of U2, that they have built a $65 million (and counting) show around him, replete with perspective-skewing scenery and flying sequences that are unprecedented for Broadway.

“Peter Parker is the one,” in Ms. Taymor’s words, “who shows us how to soar above our petty selves.”

If he can soar, that is. Four minutes into the Act I rehearsal, a “Spider-Man” crew member announced on his mic, “We’re gonna hold.” It was the first of several pauses to deal with technical glitches, mostly in transitions between scenes. By the dinner break, only 15 minutes of the two-and-a-half-hour show had unfolded. And the first scheduled performance (this Sunday at 6:30 p.m.) was just eight days away.

In the last week, the nervous creators of the show, the most expensive in Broadway history, have begun to see the hand-drawn sketches, the digitally animated videos, the comic-book-inspired costumes come to life — to see “Spider-Man” finally, literally, take flight.

“Creating art that has never been done before is the reason I get out of bed in the morning,” said Bono, leaning forward in Row A on the aisle, as Reeve Carney, playing Spidey, rehearsed onstage. “This feels like it.”

Yet time is running out.

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State of the Arts // As Film goes 3-D, Theater goes 2-D

Full Article Here // Excerpt Below

by Ben Brantley

One great and glorious advantage that the theater used to have over the movies was the third dimension. You knew that when you watched actors on stage that they were just as fully rounded – physically, I mean – as the people in the lobby at intermission.

In the past few years, though, filmmakers have been co-opting the third dimension for themselves. Once James Cameron’s “Avatar” broke box office records with the help of silly-looking 3-D glasses, what had been a novelty (and a punch line) in the 1950s started to be taken very seriously.

Now, as if from some perverse competitive spirit, the theater has decided to step back into two dimensions, in a big way. True, actors remain irreducibly of flesh and blood. But that doesn’t mean that what’s around them has to share their unchangeable spatial identities. In scenic design these days, the biggest thing in the theater is film.

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Two Worlds // Torn Between the Artistic and Religious establishments

The hits keep coming from Transpositions, the blog of the Institute for Theology, Imagination and the Arts at the University of St. Andrews. Their latest must-read arrives via Tanya Walker, a PhD student in Divinity at St. Andrews, on young Christian artists being torn between the aesthetic and religious establishments. An excellent piece. Enjoy! -- Leif

Full Essay Here // Excerpt Below

by Tanya Walker

I recently asked 24 young artists who were Christians to consider two questions:

What does your craft require of you?

What does the church require of your craft?

Their answers revealed the tensions they felt trying to “fit” into two worlds whose differing values seemed to pull them in opposite directions.

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"Church Beyond The Fourth Wall" // What the Church can learn from Theater

Wes Vander Lugt, a PhD student at St. Andrews in Theology and The Arts who is also the editor of the ITIA Blog Transpositions, has a thought provoking and cogent post inquiring into what the church can learn from theater, specifically regarding the relation between "actors/Christians" and "audience/non-Christians." Check out his "Church Beyond the Fourth Wall" in its entirety by following this link or take in a sample by way of the excerpt below. Enjoy! -- Leif

---- Excerpt ----

I am suggesting that interactive theatre provides a compelling model by which to re-imagine Christian mission, not as a mission to unbelievers through an impenetrable fourth wall or a mission with others where no fourth wall exists, but a mission among and in interaction with unbelieving guests in the context of our everyday lives. In order to participate in God’s mission, we need to take church beyond the fourth wall.

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At The Whitney // Challenging traditional ideas of making and viewing art

Full Article Here // Excerpt Below

by Roslyn Sulcas

As Stephen Petronio leaned out face-forward horizontally into space on Thursday afternoon, only his feet touching the edge of the roof at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the crowd below gave a stifled gasp. Mr. Petronio was about to begin his short and hair-raising re-enactment of Trisha Brown’s 1970 “Man Walking Down the Side of a Building,” and it was a scary, exhilarating sight.

“Man Walking,” like Ms. Brown’s other pieces shown at the Whitney on Thursday, was Part 2 of “Off the Wall,” an exhibition about ways in which artists have questioned traditional ideas about viewing art. Ms. Brown, one of the original members of the Judson Dance Theater in the 1960s and the improvisational Grand Union in the 1970s, was part of a group of artists who were instrumental in radically transforming ideas about making and watching art during those decades.

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The New Season // The NY Times profiles the nation's Arts in Autumn

Link to full list of articles here // Excerpts below

The New Season

Joon Mo Kang

Are Films Bad, or Is TV Just Better?

By A. O. SCOTT

Attendance is down. At the water cooler, they’re talking about “Mad Men.” It’s hand-wringing time for cinephiles.

• 
  

Think You’ve Seen It All? You Have

By BEN BRANTLEY

Broadway this season is the land of second chances for celebrities looking to reignite their careers and for plays that failed miserably in their first outings.

Embracing Malaise as a Plot Point

By ALESSANDRA STANLEY

New fall sitcoms (like “Raising Hope” and “Outsourced”) and dramas (“My Generation”) suggest a pervasive national sense of pessimism and decline.

Globetrotting While Staying Close to Home

By HOLLAND COTTER

Coming exhibitions provide familiarity with the rest of the world’s art, which means exposure to ideas and values that keeps museumgoers in the cosmopolitan loop.

Visions of India, Plum Fairies And a War

By ALASTAIR MACAULAY

The dance season includes Merce Cunningham’s “Xover” and a world premiere “Nutcracker” by Alexei Ratmansky for American Ballet Theater.

Wary Coronation

By JON PARELES

Kings of Leon, a grungy, nervy Southern rock band, has developed into full-fledged American hit makers, a commercial but unsettling position.

A Rock Impresario Gambles on 'Spiderman' // Michael Cohl bets the farm on 3 artists he believes in

Full Article Here // Excerpt Below

A high-school dropout who became a powerful rock-music promoter for U2 and the Rolling Stones, all but inventing the modern concert tour, Mr. Cohl is the potential savior of the $60 million show, which begins performances on Nov. 14. He was recruited a year ago by U2’s Bono and the Edge — the first-time theatrical composers for “Spider-Man” — to try to salvage the show from a premature death when money ran out.

Bono, replying to questions on Thursday by e-mail, said he first reached out to Mr. Cohl last August when Mr. Cohl was on vacation in Spain and pleaded with him to take over the show. “U2 were used to risking and sometimes losing our own money, trying to push the envelope on what was possible with our stage shows,” Bono wrote in the e-mail. Referring to Mr. Cohl, he added, “His experience with Pink Floyd and the Rolling Stones had confirmed his theory that the public understands production value and will reward risk-takers if the end result is superlative, not overindulgent.”

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"What is the point of Christian Arts?" // From the blog 'Transpositions'

It turns out that the Institute for Theology, Imagination and the Arts at The University of St. Andrews gave birth to its own blog sometime this summer. The arrival of Transpositions is flat-out awesome news for those of us interested in the interface between theology and the arts (which no doubt includes you, dear reader). Of their many excellent recent posts this one, "What is the point of Christian Arts?"(briefly excerpted below), looks like a must-read. You might also want to check out this mid-July post entitled "All That Jazz" which explores the endurance of the jazz metaphor within ministry and theology. To learn more about Transpositions and its contributors, please follow this link. -- Leif

Full Post Here // Excerpt Below

by Sara

The week of 23 August, the Guardian website ran a series of responses to the question: ‘What is the point of Christian arts?’. Three writers respond to the question posed: Harriet Baber, Roz Kaveney, and Maggi Dawn... What strikes me about the responses is the role given to Christian faith and belief, primarily providing a framework for understanding when approaching works of art.

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Welcome to "The Memory Show" // Re-imagining the musical to encompass the elusive

Full Article Here // Excerpt Below

by Ben Brantley

PITTSFIELD, Mass. — “The Memory Show,” which recently opened at Barrington Stage Company here, is a musical in search of a melody. That is what it intends to be. In shaping a portrait of a mother with Alzheimer’s disease and the angry, impotent daughter who cares for her, the young composer Zach Redler has written a score that follows the patterns of minds grasping, often in vain, for clarity, conviction and lost time.

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