Category: Arts & Humanities

In its Summer Dance Festival, presented over the weekend at UW-Madisonâ??s Lathrop Hall, Li Chiao-Ping Dance strove to feature people of various ages and abilities â??dancing through life.â? The concertâ??s seven works, three of which were premieres, did just that. On stage were children through senior citizens and professional dancers moving alongside community members who had little or no previous dance training.

This is a story about two guys who met on a game show in California, lost touch, came to Madison without the other knowing, reconnected, and are now collaborating on a play about a game show.Itâ??s called â??The Game Show Show.â? Students of Madison history will immediately recall that one of the most notorious plays ever staged in this city was called â??The Game Show,â? although the new production does not draw inspiration from its predecessor. Dennis Gordon was a UW-Madison graduate student from Chicago when he mounted â??The Game Showâ? at the Union in 1968.

Itâ??s sundown on a beautiful Monday night on the Memorial Union Terrace, and patrons are gathered around tables, pouring each other plastic cups of beer and laughing. But many of them arenâ??t looking at the orange-pink sky above or the silvery expanse of Lake Mendota, or doing the usual people-watching sport of a summertime Terrace night.

Instead, their attention is focused on a screen set up on the Terraceâ??s covered music stage, where Judd Nelson and Ally Sheedy are giving Principal Vernon (â??You just bought yourself another Saturday, pal!â?) a hard time in the seminal 1985 teen flick â??The Breakfast Club.â? Welcome to Lakeside Cinema, a Monday night ritual on the Terrace for at least 30 years.

For a musical ensemble with a famous name, legacy is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, a storied name can grab attention. On the other, an illustrious history can be burdensome when it sets up expectations that are difficult to live up to. The Pro Arte Quartet, which performed at Weill Recital Hall on Wednesday evening, is presumably acquainted with both sides of the issue.

When violist Sally Chisholm started playing with the Pro Arte Quartet nearly 20 years ago, she looked at her music and noticed the markings of the musicians that had come before.

â??I told Parry (Karp, the cellist), Iâ??m hesitant to erase anything in my part,â? Chisholm said. â??He said, â??No, no, no. We start anew each day. You take a fresh look at everything. You want to honor history, but you want to make new history every day.â??â?

Pro Arte has been the quartet in residency at the University of Wisconsin-Madison for 70 years.

Madison will become the Yiddish cultural center of the Midwest, if a Boston philanthropist has anything to say about it. Brian Bull reports. (Audio.)

Donâ??t let the title mislead: Gallery Night isnâ??t just for galleries. Instead, the twice-annual event, coming up Friday, May 7, encompasses a variety of venues as well as artistic media. With 65 locations and many more artists, this will be the largest Gallery Night yet. A sculptor, Crystal Chesnik, is installing her work in the Red Gym on the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus.

Two formidable Madison theater companies — one a mainstay, one barely a year old — have issued the lineups for their 2010-2011 seasons. University Theatre and Forward Theater Company have packed their schedules with classics, comedy, cross-dressing, and highbrow aaahhht. Oh, and a giant vibrator.

Donâ??t let the title mislead: Gallery Night isnâ??t just for galleries.

Instead, the twice-annual event, coming up Friday, May 7, encompasses a variety of venues as well as artistic media. With 65 locations and many more artists, this will be the largest Gallery Night yet.

A sculptor, Crystal Chesnik, is installing her work in the Red Gym on the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus.

Does jazz count? Not if youâ??re a college student who wants to graduate as a music major at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

When Donna Silver took a new job as secretary of the academic staff at UW-Madison, the first thing she did was transform it.

“This office was a very dreary, dark, not-welcoming place,” Silver said.

With the help of Helen Klebesadel, director of the UW System Womenâ??s Studies Consortium and a local watercolor painter, Silver installed track lighting, hooks and nine of Klebesadelâ??s richly textured paintings.

The Madison Trust for Historic Preservation welcomes Whitney Gould, a Madison native and former urban landscape writer and architecture critic for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, as the featured speaker at the annual awards presentation. Being honored are the Barbara Hochberg Center for Jewish Student Life, 611 Langdon St.; and the Washburn Observatory on Observatory Drive on the UW-Madison campus, built in 1878

Yo, check this out. A workshop at the University of Wisconsin-Madison this summer instructs teachers and others how to use hip hop in the classroom.

Troubled waters arenâ??t being bridged for local Simon & Garfunkel fans.

After announcing Thursday that a May 9 concert by the duo had to be postponed to July 14 due to a vocal strain by Art Garfunkel, the venue is now switching from the Kohl Center to the Coliseum. The topper? The tickets for the Kohl Center canâ??t be used at the Coliseum, and ticket holders must get refunds from the Kohl Center and then purchase tickets at the Coliseum.

Simon & Garfunkel have rescheduled their entire spring tour, including a May 9 stop at the Kohl Center, the duoâ??s website announced Thursday morning.

Last Sunday the film historian David Bordwell watched movies from Spain, Denmark and Romania at the Wisconsin Film Festival here in Madison, where he has lived if rarely stayed still for four decades. He had just returned from the Hong Kong International Film Festival, after which he drove some 400 miles (and back) from Madison to Bloomington, Ind., to deliver a lecture.

“Lost” writer and producer Adam Horowitz knows exactly what he wants to do after the long-running ABC show wraps up its last episode on May 23.

“After the last episode, I want to go to a bar and have all the â??Lostâ?? fans come up and be able to say â??Yep, thatâ??s what happened,â??” he said in a phone interview from Los Angeles. “Thereâ??s nothing to hold back. You just saw it!”

For the showâ??s entire six-year run, Horowitz and his writing and producing partner Edward Kitsis, both UW-Madison graduates, had to keep their lips zipped about all the secrets they knew about on the show.

“Donâ??t push me,” cautions Marc Bamuthi Joseph. “I am an American on the edge … and Iâ??m trying.”

Joseph takes on murky questions of race, identity, history and art in “the break/s”, a 90-minute genre-busting show that played the Wisconsin Union Theater on Saturday night. The event capped two weeks of the Office of Multicultural Arts Initiativesâ?? Line Breaks Festival, which Joseph helped found three years ago.

For many of us, chemistry is something we remember with groans from high school. Periodic Table of the Elementsâ??what a pain to memorize, and what was the point, anyway?

The University of Wisconsin-Madison will establish a center for Yiddish culture, to be directed by Henry Sapoznik, an expert on klezmer music and Yiddish and American popular culture. The Mayrent Insitute of Yiddish Culture will be funded by a $1 million endowment from Sherry Mayrent and Carol Masters via the Corners Fund for Traditional Cultures, a donor advised fund of Bostonâ??s Combined Jewish Philanthropies.

The Wisconsin Film Festival has “summarily rejected” Christopher Ewingâ??s and Jacob Strunkâ??s films for years, as Strunk put it. This year they finally got in: Ewingâ??s “Thru” and Strunkâ??s “This Is the Place” screened as part of a series of five shorts Friday night at the Cinematheque.

Both filmmakers have local connections (Ewing graduated from UW-Madison, Strunk grew up in Oconomowoc) and live in Los Angeles doing film-related work and making shorts on the side.

â??Bel canto” might be nicknamed “opera for divas.” The Italian phrase means “beautiful singing,” and itâ??s designed to show off the best trills, frills and ornamentations a singer can produce.

“It would not be possible to do this opera if it were not for the extraordinary singers that will be performing in it,” said William Farlow, director of University Opera.

“Paddle to Seattle” is one of those movies that is summed up neatly by its title. Itâ??s about two guys who, well, paddle to Seattle. In 2008, J.J. Kelley and Josh Thomas built their own kayaks and paddled 1,300 miles from Alaska to Seattle along the Pacific shoreline, filming along the way.

The feature-length documentary, edited by UW-Madison graduate Ben Gottfried, screened Sunday afternoon to an enthusiastic crowd in the Wisconsin Union Theater as part of the Wisconsin Film Festival.

The stateâ??s largest film festival continues in Madison with one movie thatâ??s generating quite a buzz. Wisconsin Film Festival Director Meg Hamel was surprised when the film â??Svetlana about Svetlanaâ? made so much news. The documentary highlights Joseph Stalinâ??s reclusive daughter, who many area people had already known is a badger state resident.

Even the most diehard cinephile is only going to see a fraction of the 192 films that are playing at this yearâ??s Wisconsin Film Festival, which runs Wednesday, April 14, through Sunday, Spril 18, at several downtown and campus venues, including the Orpheum Theatre, Wisconsin Union Theater and Madison Museum of Contemporary Art.

All 192 movies â?? thatâ??s a lot of to choose from, and somewhere in that massive schedule at wifilmfest.org is something for everybody.

Big fun was had by all at the big band dance party on April 7 at Monona Terrace, with the UW-Madison Jazz Orchestra swinging through the sweet sounds of Benny Goodman, Woody Herman, Tommy Dorsey, Duke Ellington and Glenn Miller, music that first revved the engines of the orchestra membersâ?? grandparents and continues to keep a stomp in the Savoy step of be-boppers today.

The free event was part of the Tunes at Monona Terrace series, which features local musicians and dancers from a wide spectrum of sounds and styles.

Sometimes, itâ??s difficult to keep a solid grasp on reality. With the many self-conscious, self-indulgent neuroses we as humans possess, it is amazing we can manage to walk down the street without consuming ourselves in overwhelming feelings of guilt, fear, doubt, love and anxiety. But this is life. As the movie says: â??This is just something to get through, thatâ??s all.â? And this is the simple truth of Christopher Ewingâ??s short film â??THRU,â? screening Friday at the Wisconsin Film Festival.

The reclusive daughter of former Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin was interviewed in Wisconsin by an independent filmmaker, some two decades after she spoke with a WKOW 27 news reporter. The film, “Svetlana About Svetlana,” is scheduled to be screened this weekend during the Wisconsin Film Festival in Madison.

While Madison has certainly carved its initials deep into the grunge tree, it has never been acknowledged as a booming hip-hop community. However, in recent years, some at UW-Madison have been working tirelessly to change thatâ??whether by bringing in the iconic Chuck D for the Hip Hop As A Movement Week conference in 2008 or throwing a bad-ass international break-dancing competition called Breakinâ?? The Law.

There are probably a lot of 70-year-old men who owe Bert I. Gordon a big debt of gratitude.

Back in the 1950s, when those guys were teenagers at the drive-in movies, giant bald men (“The Amazing Colossal Man”), giant spiders (“Earth Vs. The Spider”) or giant grasshoppers (“The Beginning of the End”) rampaged across the screen in one of Gordonâ??s monster movies, Those guys probably got some serious cuddle action from their dates.

Itâ??s unlikely that theyâ??ll reveal any substantial spoilers about how the epic television series “Lost” will end (in only five more episodes!).

When “Lost” co-writers and executive producers Adam Horowitz and Edward Kitsis visit UW-Madison next Wednesday, theyâ??ll more likely share how they went from UW-Madison students to major players in show business.