Category: Arts & Humanities

MADISON, Wis. — The Babcock Hall Dairy Store on the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus is teaming up with the Wisconsin Film Festival to create a new ice cream flavor.

Ah, what fools we mortals are.

With “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” Shakespeare gave the English-speaking world a nice bit of escapism, the kind of play it’s fun to see as the roads ice over and skies remain gray.

In a sensual, Caribbean staging with hanging vines and an onstage waterfall, University Theatre interprets the beloved comedy with a good dash of Latina flair. A lively opening dance sets the heady tone for the evening: warm, breezy and boldly physical.

It was the age of Peter Pan, Alice in Wonderland, and Dorothy in the land of Oz. Theatrical “fairy spectacles,” with special effects to evoke moonlight, were a huge hit. Even newspaper reporters would gush over artworks and exhibitions as “veritable fairylands” that would “enchant” the viewer.

From literature to theater to everyday life, something magical was in the air as American popular culture turned the corner from the 19th century to the 20th. Fantasy made anything possible. In that spirit, women picked up their sewing needles, and the craze was on.

“A Fairyland of Fabrics: The Victorian Crazy Quilt,” on exhibit at the Design Gallery at UW-Madison through March 8, brings back a time when amateur needle workers fashioned scraps into artworks that sparkle with inventiveness and play.

“They live in a small country that has often found itself in the path of imperial powers, a condition they address with guile, stubbornness and a measure of grace. And lately with some pretty great movies.”

That’s how film critic A.O. Scott concluded his rave review of the Romanian film “California Dreamin'” in the New York Times in January. “California” is just the latest film out of the relatively small Eastern European country of Romania, along with “4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days” and “The Death of Mr. Lazarescu,” to gain international acclaim.

When it comes to watching movies, there’s no snack quite like buttered popcorn sorry, you Milk Duds zealots out there. But Babcock Hall has a tasty promotional idea in conjunction with this year’s Wisconsin Film Festival — a new festival-themed flavor of ice cream.

On his way to claiming third place in the 1993 Van Cliburn International Piano Competition in Fort Worth, a 23-year-old Christopher Taylor impressed the jurors and the rest of us in attendance as much for his enterprising spirit as for the security of his playing. The competition eliminated its repertory requirements that year, allowing players to roam far beyond standard competition fare, and Mr. Taylor responded imaginatively with Bachâ??s â??Goldbergâ? Variations, Pierre Boulezâ??s Second Sonata and other adventures.

As one of the world’s premier bass players, Richard Davis’s music has touched the lives of countless fans, and his teaching has inspired generations of students in the classroom as well as with the Richard Davis Foundation for Young Bassists, Inc., which provides musical instruction for financially challenged youth.

The tumultuous relationship between brilliant artists Lee Krasner and Jackson Pollock seems designed for opera — it’s dramatic, passionate and artistically inspired.

So thought Minnesota-based composer Maura Bosch, who wrote “Art and Desire” about the two 20th century abstract artists. University Opera gives the work a world premiere on Feb. 20 and 22 in UW-Madison’s Music Hall.

Barely two months remain before the opening of the eleventh Wisconsin Film Festival, and preparations for it are in high gear. Though the final selection of films has yet to be determined and ticket sales are a month away, there has already been a tremendous response from persons interested in volunteering for this celebration of cinema.

Kathleen Horning, director of the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Cooperative Children’s Book Center, has won a prestigious honor from the American Library Association.

The association, at its midwinter meeting last week in Denver, chose Horning to deliver the 2010 May Hill Arbuthnot Honor Lecture. The award is given to an individual who has distinguished themselves nationally in the field of children’s literature.

Chris Walker dances with the orishas in the university’s hallowed Lathrop Hall. The UW Dance Program assistant prof is a long way from his native Jamaica, but the walls of his cozy fourth-floor office sport big pictures of Ochun, Oyá, Obatalá, Changó and Yemayá. Even in the dead of winter the Afro-Caribbean saints seem content in their new surroundings.

A story about Henry Sapoznik, artist-in-residence at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has become a classic, appearing in many accounts of the modern revival of klezmer, the folk music of Yiddish-speaking Eastern European Jewry.

It happened in 1977 when Sapoznik, a banjo player, was studying American old time music in North Carolina.

With about 500 items from more than a dozen different Asian cultures, “Writing with Thread: Traditional Textiles of Southwest Chinese Minorities” communicates values through piles of silver necklaces, elaborate headdresses, delicate embroidery and ancestral images. Chinese miniskirts are among the items on display at the exhibit, which opens at the Chazen on Friday, Jan. 30.

When clothes become more than a functional outer layer, high fashion can cross into high art. Three art exhibits opening and ending this month capitalize on our collective fascination with fabrics, style and status.

With about 500 items from more than a dozen different Asian cultures, “Writing with Thread: Traditional Textiles of Southwest Chinese Minorities” communicates values through piles of silver necklaces, elaborate headdresses, delicate embroidery and ancestral images. Chinese miniskirts are among the items on display at the exhibit, which opens at the Chazen on Friday, Jan. 30.

….In a different way, American crazy quilts reveal cultural values. “A Fairyland of Fabrics: The Victorian Crazy Quilt,” a new show at the Design Gallery in the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Human Ecology, describes how “maid, wife and widow” (to quote an 1890 “Good Housekeeping” poem) were caught up in “crazy quilt mania.”

University Theatre Director Tony Simotes will leave Madison to lead Shakespeare & Company, a theater company in Massachusetts that he helped found.

Simotes, who has been a professor in the Department of Theatre and Drama at the University of Wisconsin-Madison since 2002, has led University Theatre since fall 2006. He most recently directed “The War of the Worlds” in the Mitchell Theatre in October 2008.

Pop superstars Elton John and Billy Joel will perform a joint concert in the Kohl Center at 7:30 p.m. Thursday, May 7. Tickets, ranging from $55 to $180, go on sale at 10 a.m. Saturday, Jan. 31.

Part of the “Face 2 Face” tour, the show features solo sets by each performer then a combined set by the two legends.

Noted: The 5,000 specimens in â??Insect Fantasiaâ? represent about a quarter of her collection; the installation, by Ms. Angus and two assistants from the University of Wisconsin, where she is associate professor in the environment, textiles and design department, took one week.

The arts are in trouble.

Or are they? “The good news is that the arts seem a little bit immune to challenging economic times. Donations to arts groups sometimes stay the same or go up,” says Samantha Crownover, one of the organizers of the Arts Enterprise Symposium at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Layoffs from arts groups may be the result of past difficulties that the economy only exacerbated, Crownover suggests. Still, even in good times, funding is dependent on at least rudimentary business and marketing skills that are seldom taught in conservatories or

Maybe it’s the flaming figgy pudding. Maybe it’s the carols, or the decorations, or the seemingly endless hors d’oeurves and bottomless wassail in the Great Hall.

Whatever its secret, the Tudor Dinner at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Memorial Union has lasted for 75 years, through world wars, recessions and campus troubles of all kinds.

Art glass lovers will get a chance to see how it’s made and also buy affordable pieces during the UW-Madison Glass Lab open house Saturday and Sunday.

The lab, at 630 W. Mifflin St., is the oldest university glass program in the country, starting in 1962.

The numbers tell the story.

Twenty movements of dense piano playing over a 120-minute span: Pianist Christopher Taylor performs the massive “Vingt Regards sur L’Enfant-Jesus” by Olivier Messiaen completely by memory.

By any account, that’s a formidable task. It’s one that had its start seven years ago when Taylor first played all the movements at Columbia University.

Her hands are demonstrative. When Laura Elise Schwendinger talks about getting down to work, her hands mime the rolling up of sleeves. As she describes a violin composition, they play an imaginary violin in a manner that almost conjures it visible. Whenever she sits back up after doubling over in one of the delighted full-body laughs that consume her, they sweep her blond hair back over her ears and push her glasses back up to the bridge of her nose. It is as if the contemporary composer, in depriving her hands of the piano keyboard and whatever manuscript she is working on at the moment, has let them off-leash. They are restless, rambunctious, as if they can’t wait to return to the service of Schwendinger’s creative impulse.

It’s said that art imitates life.

On a cold November night, with papers bearing bad news and autumn hues gone gray, the UW Dance Program took a somber turn.

Madison Repertory Theatre’s production of The Greeks, performed in partnership with the University of Wisconsin’s Department of Theatre and Drama, avoids the pitfall of trying to portray the epic scale of the Trojan Wars, choosing instead to focus on the terrible toll that those events inflicted on ordinary people. And, in that sense, the production is a success. By personalizing the crushing impact of the war the play reaches its audience in ways that mere bombast and bloodletting could not.

Muscle and ferocity are the most apparent qualities of Li Chiao-Ping’s dancing. She’s one tough dancer.

UW-Madison’s Homegrown Hip-Hop Festival put our city on the map last year as a destination for the best regional hip-hop artists. This year, planners of the free, three-day fest hope to illustrate just how much the Midwest contributes to hip-hop across the country, from the small towns of Wisconsin to the clubs and record labels of New York and L.A.

Matt Forrest, a UW junior who launched the fest last year, says a great deal of the innovation going on in hip-hop now happens in the Great Lakes region, and not either coast. “One of our two headliners, Kid Sister, really embodies the Chicago sound, which has burst onto the national scene in the last year,” he says.

The title of the Chazen Museum of Art’s new exhibition, Mami Wata: Arts for Water Spirits in Africa and Its Diasporas, is telling. Note that it’s not arts about water spirits; it’s arts for water spirits, in the sense that the makers of these artworks are invested in Mami Wata’s powers and possibilities, both good and bad. We’re talking connection, not mere depiction.

Mami Wata (her name is pidgin English for “Mother Water”) is an African water spirit thought to reside in rivers, seas and other bodies of water. She’s remarkable in her multivalence. She appears in numerous guises, most frequently as a mermaid or snake charmer, and has associations that are both positive and negative, from nurturing mother to dangerous temptress.

The UW-Madison School of Music has a similar program, called Piano Pioneers, where graduate students give piano lessons to children and adults who otherwise could not afford them.

Allen Ebert, executive director of the La Crosse Community Theater, has been named co-director of the University of Wisconsin-Madison Art Institute’s Wisconsin Film Festival. His last day with the La Crosse Community Theater is Nov. 14.

Ebert will rejoin Norma Saldivar, a professor with whom he studied while earning his bachelor’s degree in theater and drama at UW-Madison.

There is a new documentary, “Trumbo,” opening at Sundance in Madison Friday. It arrives with great reviews for its portrayal of the blacklisted writer Dalton Trumbo.
Stephen Holden in the New York Times called it a “stirring documentary” that “gives you reason to cheer but also to weep.”

Thursday, I climbed some stairs to get a look at the film’s genesis: Trumbo’s letters, which are stored on the fourth floor of the Wisconsin Historical Society in Madison.

Song and dance will mix with the goals and challenges of running a major university Thursday at the public’s first chance to meet and greet new UW-Madison Chancellor Carolyn “Biddy” Martin.

Eastern influences are in the spotlight this weekend in a UW-Madison dance concert that melds traditional Indian, Taiwanese and Chinese movement and music.

“Refiguring A/musing” features the choreography of UW Dance Program Chairman Jin-Wen Yu, who is Taiwanese, and Indian guest artist Parul Shah, a dance professor at Maharaja Sayajirao University in Baroda, India. Yu and Shah both dance in the program, joined intermittently by two dozen UW student dancers and a handful of local residents who practice Tai Chi, a form of Chinese martial arts.

Dance and theater, improvisation and structure, Europe and Japan: For Kate Corby, contemporary dance is all about blending. And no matter where the influences emerge, Corby, the newest dance professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, will always “begin with and return to the body.”

A floating tribute to the water deity Mami Wata (pidgin English for “Mother Water”) set sail on Lake Mendota on Saturday to kick off the upcoming Chazen Museum of Art’s “Mami Wata: Arts for Water Spirits in Africa and Its Diasporas.”

Local artists and art organizations painted sails for the regatta, which was organized with help from Hoofer Sailing Club. A parade of lighted boats wrapped up the event.