Chamber music on high — in sync with science & nature 1

Music
Zelter String Quartet It was so fantastic. I had never made the climb up Mt. Wilson, but rectified that mid-day Sunday urging my 2003 Honda Civic through the ricocheting twists and turns of Angeles Crest Highway toward my destination. The draw? Impresario Cécilia Tsan’s “Sunday Afternoon Concerts in the Dome,” a six-year running classical chamber ...

Smashingly trashy: John Waters retrospective at AMPAS Museum

Film
John Waters: Pope of Trash, the first comprehensive exhibition dedicated to the eponymous artist’s contributions to cinema, opens at The Academy Museum of Motion Pictures on September 17, 2023. The exhibition will trace the grotesque, daring, tacky, hilarious, and salacious elements that recur throughout Waters’s sixty-year career of filmmaking and reveal how his movies have ...

Of human desire: Adrian Danchig-Waring at Lake Tahoe Dance Festival

Dance
Lake Tahoe Dance Festival, Tahoe City, July 27, 2023 Photo: Erin Baiano It is a danced solo for a great dancer of our time, Adrian Danchig-Waring. The muscular yet faultlessly precise twenty-year principal of New York City Ballet ascended the stage in the guise of a 19th century poet: handsome in grey trousers and a ...

Review: Restive political offspring find romance in ‘Red, White & Royal Blue,’ the movie

Film · Reviews
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Anyone who read Casey McQuiston’s best-selling 2019 novel, Red, White & Royal Blue, or who continues to be thoroughly demoralized by all-things-MAGA, will be thrilled to stream this rom-com/ alternate-reality/LGBTQ fantasy-fairy-tale produced by Amazon Studios and directed by Matthew Lopez (the acclaimed playwright of The Inheritance). The story imagines a world in which the son ...

REVIEW: Fascinating time-travel with Mark Morris Dance Group at the Joyce Theater 1

Dance · Reviews
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numerator, photo: christopher duggan Mark Morris Dance Group was formed in 1980. The Joyce Theater opened doors in 1983. Yet while it has presented dance companies eleven months of the year, the Joyce stage had never hosted a MMDG season until now. So Tuesday’s opening night felt momentous – even historic – as MMDG finally ...

Beyond Barbenheimer: small & good summer Euro-movies

Film
Hey guys, there’s more to movie life than the bizarre blockbuster hits of summer 2023, BARBIE and OPPENHEIMER. There are at least two small, artful European films worthy of your popcorn budget. A movie about a verrrry messy love triangle, set in Paris, tells the tale of a German film director Tomas (Franz Rogowski), who ...

Lake Tahoe Dance Festival: dances for kids with baby on board!

Dance
Lake Tahoe Dance Festival Opening Night Gala, July 26, 2023. photo by erin baiano When Founder Christin Hanna and her co-director Constantine Baecher of the eleven-year-running Lake Tahoe Dance Festival, now on in Truckee and Tahoe City, California, call their event ‘family-oriented,’ the community responds positively. Chatting after her successful Gala opening night, Ms. Hanna ...

In Tahoe, for Dance Festival 1

Dance
stephen hanna, photo: erin baiano “There will be bears in Tahoe,” Festival intern Summer Hatcher warned me — a dance writer who has never lived beyond a five-mile radius from a performing arts center. As we departed Reno Airport, she explained that I should wave arms at the creatures. Summer was navigating Interstate 80’s sweeping ...

Northward bound, for Lake Tahoe Dance Festival

Dance
It’s a well-kept secret, except for ballet aficionados. One of the most beautiful and natural environments in our nation, Lake Tahoe, California, the massive freshwater lake in the Sierra Nevada straddling the border between California and Nevada, is home to an engaging dance festival that marked its tenth anniversary last year, and enters its eleventh, ...

New book links American teen culture of 50s/60s to local televised dance programs

Dance · Music
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Host and deejay Art Laboe, of The Art Laboe Show with Jerry Lee Lewis at the El Monte Legion Stadium in East Los Angeles, ca. 1958. Courtesy of the Art Laboe Archives. Ed. note: artsmeme is delighted to share with readers the first of three excerpts from an exciting new book by author Julie Malnig. ...