Category: Arts & Humanities

The eighth annual Madison Early Music Festival will finish up over the next four days.

10 PERFECT, a provocative new script written by and featuring Patrick Sims, an Old Lyric Repertory Company visiting director and assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, will have two performances this month.

      “10 Perfect” is a one-person show inspired by the life of James Cameron, the only known survivor of a lynching in United States history. Cameron died in July 2006, just five months before the play had its first staged reading in Madison, Wis.

Dramatic history: “10 Perfect,” a new one-man show about the only known survivor of a lynching in U.S. history, will be performed at Logan’s Caine Lyric Theatre as a special event that’s part of the Old Lyric Repertory Company summer stock season.

The show, which contains adult language and content, will be performed by Patrick Sims, a visiting director at Utah State University’s Old Lyric Repertory Company and an assistant professor of theater at University of Wisconsin-Madison. The fictional work is about a black boy and a white boy, raised in Northern Klu Klux Klan territory, whose childhood friendship is ripped apart in August 1938. “10 Perfect” was inspired by the life of James Cameron, a lynching survivor Sims met in 1998.

…for movie lovers who savored each of his films, great and small, for the way they used improvised dialogue, group dynamics and loose plotting to capture the chaos of modern life, (Robert) Altman’s passing felt pretty close to a tragedy. Which is why it’s gratifying that the UW-Cinematheque, the free on-campus film series, is featuring four of his 1970s films as part of its summer schedule.

The summer series, which screens at 4070 Vilas Hall, 821 University Ave., on Thursday and Friday nights in July, also features a four-film series of award-winning African films.

To immigrants Simon and Rosemary Chen, donating their $1.5 million collection of modern Chinese art to the University of Wisconsin’s Chazen Museum seemed a simple act of loyalty, fairness and gratitude.

“We like America, and we like Madison,” says Simon, a UW alumnus and successful entrepreneur who is 83 and about to retire in the coming weeks. “We got everything here, our education and our kids. We immigrated, and we want to be a part of the USA.”

Certain periods of art are forever linked to certain places. Renaissance art and Florence. Impressionism and Paris. Abstract Expressionism and New York. Some musicians think that the Flemish countries in the 15th and 16th centuries deserve a similar status for early music.

“One reason we chose this topic is that in the 1400s and 1500s, and even into the 1600s, almost every musical center in Europe was run by someone from the Low Countries,” says Madison soprano Cheryl Bensman Rowe, who co-directs the upcoming eighth annual Madison Early Music Festival with her husband, University of Wisconsin-Madison baritone Paul Rowe. The festival, which starts Saturday and runs through July 14, will specialize in “The Age of the Netherlanders.”

Is there a chance the Madison Early Music Festival might expand its public appeal by moving more into mainstream baroque music or even the early Classical period with famous and familiar names like Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven and Schubert that might, in turn, attract a bigger public?

It’s possible but not likely, says a longtime festival participant who also serves as an artistic adviser to the festival’s board of directors.

For the first time Henry and Walter Kissinger, whose German Jewish family fled the Nazis in 1938, talk about their odyssey from the small Bavarian town of Fürth to America, and their confrontation with anti-Semitism.

“I never give interviews about my personal life,” said Henry Kissinger in response to a letter from Germany in 2003. But Evi Kurz, the author of the recently released “The Kissinger Saga: Two Brothers from Fürth,” persisted. The book is based on Kurz’s film documentary, which was aired earlier this year on German television.

A legendary figure of hip-hop history, DJ Kool Herc, will perform at the First Wave Jumpoff Concert with Clyde Stubblefield, Dumante, Baba Israel and Queen God-Is at 9 tonight on the Union Terrace.

It’s not often that Stubblefield, father of the funk beat, has the most boring moniker in a concert lineup. But that’s hip show biz these days. But he’s not the only rhythmic father in this house. DJ Kool Herc is known as the father of the DJ breakbeat….

While she was a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the mid-1970s, artist Jane Hammond worked in just about every medium. Except paper.

Yet ironically, now it is her works on paper — not her sculpture or painting — that have brought her national and international critical acclaim and are bringing her back to Madison in a triumphant homecoming.

University Theatre is trimming its summer season from the usual three productions to just one because of equipment repairs and major outside construction involving the Mitchell Theatre in Vilas Hall, 820 University Ave.

“There are many things that need to be done,” said Michele Traband, the theater’s general manager for the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “The UW will also perform maintenance and upkeep on some of the Mitchell’s lighting and sound equipment, which is showing wear and tear from years of constant use.”

Deborah Blum, a professor of science journalism at the University of Wisconsin, offers a fascinating account of how a group of 19th-century scholars known as the Society for Psychical Research â?? which included the eminent Harvard psychologist William James â?? attempted to provide rigorous, empirical evidence of a spiritual realm.

MADISON, Wis. — A new play festival is putting local writers in the spotlight this weekend.

Wisconsin Wrights play festival opened Thursday night at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

The festival features three new plays all by Wisconsin writers. Each play was selected by a panel of judges from a group of 45 submissions.

Actors and directors said it is exciting to have the “first crack” at the new material.

NOBODY REALLY knows how a writer’s mind works, which is likely a good thing, but there came a night some years ago when David Stieve was half-watching one of his favorite horror films, “Halloween,” on television and he had an epiphany. It arrived in the form of a question.

What does Michael Myers, or Freddy Krueger, or any mad movie slasher do on a weekday afternoon?

“It can’t always be a full moon over the lake,” Stieve was saying Wednesday, from a car lodged in traffic on a southern California freeway.

It’s art, not science, that possesses the secret to time travel.

If you want to test that for yourself, you have only about 10 days left to see one of the most spectacular art shows that Madison has seen this year, or indeed in any year.

Breathe easily, residents of small-town Wisconsin. Marshall Cook is outsourcing his mayhem to Iowa this time around.

Cook is the UW-Madison professor and mystery author who has turned the fictional town of Mitchell, Wis., into a hotbed of larceny and homicide in his last two books, “Murder Over Easy” and “Murder at Midnight.” Both books were based on actual murders; “Midnight” was a fictionalized take on the notorious unsolved 1998 murder of Dane priest Rev. Alfred Kunz.

For his follow-up, “Twin Killing,” Cook decided to send his sleuth, community newspaper editor Monona Quinn, out of state rather than make Mitchell as deadly as the little seaside community on “Murder, She Wrote.”

Next time the Madison Symphony Orchestra wants to find an outstanding guest artist, it needn’t look any further than its own back yard. Or, perhaps, Middleton.

Pianist Christopher Taylor, associate professor of piano performance at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a Middleton resident, figuratively took the roof off Overture Hall on Friday with an outstanding performance of George Gershwin’s “Concerto in F,” a performance that was one of the brightest lights of MSO’s entire season.

What’s the first thing a couple of film scholars do when they come to New Zealand? Go to the beach, of course. But not just any beach. The stretch of sand in question is the black, wave-tormented north end of Karekare, west of Auckland where Holly Hunter, Anna Paquin and a baby grand landed in Jane Campion’s colonial-era bodice-ripper.

There they are, Professor David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson, on the blog they maintain at www.davidbordwell.net There’s even a cover-shot of the script, held up in front of the distinctive ridgeline, cineastes’ cyberproof that they really were there.

Sensuality and spirituality tend to operate at odds, at least on a theoretical plain, with one transcending the other, or at least both occupying their separate realms of reason. It’s often the arts that marry the two, and the success of that union depends on the skills of both the artist and his or her interpreters.

The considerable talents of the UW Choral Union, supported by the UW Symphony Orchestra, helped uncover the sensual nuances of Francis Poulenc’s music Saturday at Mills Hall on the University of Wisconsin campus.

Here’s the latest buzz. Madison art museums are infested with insects. It started at the Chazen Museum of Art and has spread to the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art.

But these are cultivated bugs who don’t swarm. They stay synchronized — in artful rigor mortis.

To the flock of schoolkids chattering their way through the Chazen Museum of Art, checking out the exotic-insects- as-art exhibition or the display of 19th-century paintings might be just another field trip.
But to ardent devotees of the arts, such visits – at any age – also present an opportunity, a chance to crack open a window to the expansive and enriching world that comes with an appreciation for the arts.

Friday should be memorable artistically for many reasons.

From 5 to 9 p.m. it is Madison’s Gallery Night, which takes place every fall and spring, and this time it is especially noteworthy: A record-setting 51 venues have signed on to the event that is organized by the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art.

“Henry James is the greatest novelist that American literature has ever produced,” says retired University of Wisconsin-Madison English professor Joseph Wiesenfarth, who adds that only Mark Twain rivals James.

Wiesenfarth, who taught James and published a book about his use of drama in his novels, will makes his case publicly when he introduces the film adaptation of James’ 1881 novel “Washington Square” on Sunday, May 6, at 1:30 p.m. in the first-floor, 300-seat auditorium of the Wisconsin Historical Society, 816 State St., on the Library Mall.

The cultural gap between Americans and Iraqis yawned especially wide one day during Josh McAuliffe’s tour of duty in Iraq. McAuliffe was a member of the National Guard’s 389th Engineering Battalion and served in Iraq from May 2003 to May 2004, and one of his duties was to head out into Baghdad with an Iraqi translator to find local workers for reconstruction projects.

As they drove around, everything was going fine between McAuliffe and the translator. Until the topic turned to music.

….Now a senior at the UW-Madison studying psychology and sociology, McAuliffe says songs by hard rock acts Tool, Disturbed and Drowning Pool were listening favorites when his unit went out on patrol, vulnerable to roadside bombs and other insurgent attacks.

Thousands of dancers have come and gone at UW-Madison over 80 years, pushing the envelope with their era’s hottest moves while learning to appreciate the contributions of past choreographers.

On Thursday night, a wonderfully appreciative audience got a taste of past and present.

In 1926 Margaret H’Doubler pioneered a dance program and an amazing array of talent has followed her path into history.

UW-Madison is celebrating the 80th anniversary of America’s oldest dance degree-granting program this week. Alumni dancers, choreographers and teachers are returning to perform, teach master classes, and lead panel discussions.

In searching for the perfect title for the donor’s fund for the Wisconsin Film Festival, which celebrated its 9th year running last weekend, festival director Meg Hamel hit upon the idea of “The Real Butter Fund”. “I didn’t want to call it the ‘Platinum Fund’ or the ‘VIP Club’ or anything so exclusive,” says Hamel. “I figured Wisconsin, dairy. It has to be butter… real butter represents the deepest, truest essence of what’s good in Wisconsin, and what’s good in film.” Hamel, in her second year as director (and seventh involved in the festival), knows her audience well; applause met each mention of The Real Butter Fund during the trailers for all 185 films in the festival’s four-day run.

A musical about a mythical land and a revolutionary hero leading his people to freedom made its Madison debut this weekend.

It featured stellar performances, entertaining choreography, upbeat musical numbers and a spectacular set complete with hydraulics. The audience, filling the theater to capacity on opening night, laughed and cheered throughout the performance.

Television swept across American society as rapidly as the Internet is sweeping across it nowâ??and with even greater immediate effects. At the midpoint of the twentieth century, radio was the dominant broadcast medium, newspapers were the dominant news medium, and movies were the most popular form of visual entertainment. Within ten years, television had taken over. Vast wasteland though it may have been (Newton Minow, the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, called it that in 1961), television had become the basic forum of American culture.

So itâ??s easy to forget that everything about it was once up for grabs. There was a lot of earnest debate about what form it ought to take, and people in the business stumbled around trying to figure out how to make money at it. In â??Same Time, Same Station: Creating American Television, 1948-1961â? (Johns Hopkins; $35), James L. Baughman performs the basic historianâ??s function of taking a story whose conclusion we all know and showing that it didnâ??t necessarily have to turn out that way.

It’s a busy week for free events over at the UW School of Music.

The ninth annual Wisconsin Film Festival drew in a record attendance of 28,700, according to final ticket tallies released Thursday.

The four-day festival exceeded last year’s tally of 26,000, taking over 10 theaters in downtown Madison last weekend with a mix of independent, foreign and classic films.

Festival director Meg Hamel said she doesn’t consider the raw attendance figures to necessarily be a benchmark for the festival’s success. She said she puts more weight on the quality of the audience’s experience at the festival.

The strategy that Ralph Russo has for increasing attendance and visibility at the Wisconsin Union Theater takes many forms.

The equipment is still being packed and the tickets still being counted, but Wisconsin Film Festival director Meg Hamel is confident that festival attendance hit record levels this past weekend.

Hamel, in her first full year as permanent festival director, seemed ecstatic with how things went at the ninth annual festival, which brought 182 foreign, classic and independent films to 10 downtown and campus venues. Last year, a record 26,000 advance tickets were sold.

These are not your typical potholders. They show, in embroidered images, major moments in the history of the war in Iraq, like the tragically premature “Mission Accomplished” statement by President Bush.

So where has feminist art gone during the past 30 years or so? And where is it going in the future?

Such questions are meant come to mind when you look at a new show, “Intersectionalities: The Feminist in Art,” that’s running at the Pyle Center, 702 Langdon St., through April 21.

Wouldn’t it be great if fans dressed up for the indie and foreign films at the Wisconsin Film Festival the way the way “Star Wars” fans dressed up?

Guys with shaved heads and long robes would wait in line for the austere monk documentary “Into Great Silence,” or wear dirty hip waders for the clam diggers comedy-drama “Diggers,” or soccer uniforms for “Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait.”

It won’t happen, most likely, and the only people to come out in costume at this year’s festival were, of course, “Star Wars” fans. There was a Darth Vader and about a half-dozen Stormtroopers in the audience Thursday night at the Wisconsin Union Theater for “Heart of an Empire,” a moving documentary about some big-hearted fans.

Remember that movie ticket you meant to buy in advance for the Wisconsin Film Festival? Somebody might have beaten you to it.
Dozens of the 182 films scheduled for the four-day festival, which begins tonight, are already sold out.

The season also will be marked by the March 2008 world premiere of “Concerto for Cello and Oud” by Joel Hoffman, performed by Israeli cellist Uri Vardi, a UW-Madison music professor, and Palestinian oud player Taiseer Elias.

….”It’s been called dead since the ’70s,” filmmaker Susan Dynner says. “And clearly it’s not. There’s still kids getting into it, there are still kids that have a lot to say. These bands have been touring for 30 years, and there are still audiences who want to go see them.”

While there have been great documentaries made about 1970s punk icons like the Ramones, the Clash and the Sex Pistols, those that came after have been underrepresented on the big screen. Dynner, a 1988 UW graduate, aims to change that with her new documentary, “Punk’s Not Dead,” which will play as part of the Wisconsin Film Festival at 10 p.m. Saturday at the Bartell Theatre.

All over downtown Madison, projector bulbs are being replaced, sound systems are being tweaked and new high-end equipment is being installed as volunteers get ready for this year’s Wisconsin Film Festival to kick off Thursday.

The ninth-annual Wisconsin Film Festival officially begins Thursday evening with a screening of “Chalk” – an apt choice for the occasion. A faux-doc comedy, “Chalk” is well-crafted in the post-millennium mockumentary style: tight, wobbly zooms and intimate straight-into-the-camera confessions.

Mike Relm knows he has an awesome responsibility on his shoulders when he steps onstage Tuesday night at the Kohl Center to open for the Blue Man Group.

For many of those in the audience, this will be their first time seeing a DJ perform live, apart from the ones who take requests for the “Electric Slide” at weddings.

‘The air is now completely filled with cowboys, fertilizers and inanity,” Groucho Marx growled in 1959. “The country is full of jerks, and they’re now getting exactly what they deserve.” Two years later, Newton Minnow, chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, agreed that television was “a vast wasteland.” Network executives, he claimed, were bottom-line businessmen who reached for the largest – and lowest – common denominator.