Category: Arts & Humanities

University of Wisconsin Foundation Vice President Karen Crossley has been selected as the new Dane County cultural affairs coordinator, replacing longtime coordinator Lynne Eich, who is retiring in two weeks.

County Executive Kathleen Falk announced the appointment today.

IN JANUARY, husband and wife filmmakers Tim Onosko and Beth Abrohams traveled from Madison to Austin, Texas, for a screening of their documentary, “Lost Vegas: The Lounge Era.”

….It’s nice that Onosko, who died at 60 in Madison on March 6, lived to experience the enthusiastic response in Austin to the movie he worked so hard to make happen. You don’t find a lot of first-time filmmakers in their late 50s. But as Tim told me a couple of years ago, if he was ever going to make a career change, it was time to get to it.

Three finalists, two from Madison and one from Stevens Point, have been chosen as possible successors to Lynne Eich, the longtime director of the Dane County Cultural Affairs Commission.

The final interviews were completed Monday by Dane County Executive Kathleen Falk and her staff. Falk is expected to announce her decision in one to two weeks, according to Falk spokeswoman Joanne Haas.

….(One of the three is) Karin Crossley, a vice president at the UW Foundation and oversees major gifts and development for the business school, the law school, the College of Engineering, the Division of International Studies and several campus units related to the environment.

Scoundrels, heartbreak and vengeance have changed little throughout the centuries. The University Opera of UW-Madison presents these themes with a modern twist in Mozart’s classic dark comedy “Don Giovanni.”

….The University Opera dresses up the story with modern (or at least mid-1980s) clothing and slightly updated themes, such as a short scene where Don Giovanni turns his attentions toward a young man. The modern twist was pulled off with somewhat mixed results.

If you see a classic film on the big screen sometime in Madison over the next few weeks and are amazed that it looks and sounds just as good as the brand-new films at the multiplex, you might have Michael Pogorzelski to thank.

Pogorzelski is a 1996 graduate of UW-Madison who has gone on to be director of the Academy Film Archive in Los Angeles, which preserves tens of thousands of films on behalf of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, particularly those that won or were nominated for Oscars. He has also become a respected film preservationist and film restorer who has worked on dozens of classic films.

It continues to live on in legend and lore of the ancient Classical world, a cataclysmic volcanic eruption that snuffed out a whole city by surprise and remains a symbol of nature’s power and civilization’s fragility.

When Mount Vesuvius erupted in 79 A.D. and buried Pompeii deep in ash, a town and all its citizens were wiped out. But over centuries the worldliness and beauty of Rome have also been emerging from the ruins.

A fine-looking, family-friendly piece of that history and art will go on display Saturday at the UW-Madison’s Chazen Museum of Art, 800 University Ave.

KARL HARTER was stunned Friday to learn that a movie version of his book was in the middle of shooting in eastern New York state.

“What?” Harter said. “You’re kidding me.”

No kidding. “Winter of Frozen Dreams,” Harter’s true crime account of the notorious Barbara Hoffman murder case that gripped Madison in the late 1970s, is halfway into a 35-day shoot in Schenectady, N.Y. (Hoffman was a student at UW-Madison.)

For most, Sunday nights have a kind of sanctity. For some, Sunday is the last chance to guiltlessly veg out for another five days. For others, Sunday is a night to relax with loved ones before the week begins. For procrastinators, Sunday is a last chance to finish projects before Monday’s deadlines.
For Jonathan Peterson, Sunday is the night he drives four hours to play trumpet in the Winds of Wisconsin, a new youth ensemble at the UW-Madison.

SHE HAD never before checked the satchel, but it was early and she was tired.

“It’s so heavy to carry,” Jennifer Key was saying Tuesday. “I was just tired of carrying it around.”

Key, 32, is a promising writer, promising enough to be spending this year as the Dianne Middlebrook Poetry Fellow at the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing at UW-Madison.

When the UW Belly Dance Club presents its 7th annual spring show at Union Theater on Saturday, the group wants to shake up myths about the moves and, of course, to entertain the crowd.

It’s hard to live in the Madison area without noticing hip-hop’s growing influence.
Teens participate in spoken word clubs in Madison’s biggest high schools; UW-Madison’s breakdance club has been busting moves since it began in 2002; commercial radio, including WJQM 106.7-FM “Jamz,” fill the airwaves with hip hop; and businesses such as Middleton’s Blue Chalk Club showcase DJs and MCs on a regular basis.

….”Dynamic Elements: Thoughts About Earth” is more about mysteries than celebrations. The second creative adventure of University of Wisconsin trombonist Mark Hetzler and Madison photographer Katrin Talbot will make its local debut at 8 p.m. Saturday in Mills Hall, 455 N. Park St.

Hetzler and Talbot variously dazzled, inspired and confounded listeners with their multimedia concert “Visions of America” last year. For this writer, it was one of the top 10 Madison performing arts events of 2006.

This Van Gogh has two ears. Two big, floppy ears. He’s not an artist, but a dog, a 4-year-old, 75-pound mix of Labrador retriever and Chesapeake Bay retriever.

Van Gogh is also the constant companion of James Bohnen, the former teacher and actor who is directing the University Theatre’s current production of Anton Chekhov’s classic play “Three Sisters.”

As choreographer Alwin Nikolais traveled through life, debris and ideas stuck to him like a dancing bear drenched in honey. He would pick off the best fragments and shape them into what he called total dance theater. He would roar musically, creating his own funky, jazzy electronic music scores.

….The Ririe-Woodbury Dance Company will present a multimedia dance concert of Nikolais’ works at 8 p.m. Friday in the Wisconsin Union Theater.

….It is also a celebration of the pioneering UW-Madison dance program’s 80th anniversary. The UW’s connection to Nikolais has several important threads.

Whatâ??s hip-hop to you? If itâ??s just police incidents outside Club Majestic and songs with vile lyrics set to pounding bass beats, youâ??ll be surprised to learn that the UW Arts Instituteâ??s artist in residence this spring is Marc Bamuthi Joseph, a leader in the field of hip-hop theater.

In three decades, hip-hopâ??s grown way beyond its origins as the sound of rebellious black youth. Among its diverse legions are, yes, macho thugs touting guns and drugs, but also social
activists and multi-genre artists bearing transformative messages.

A professor at the University of Wisconsin-Waukesha will have her play on racism come to life this spring in conjunction with a campus program.

If you’re looking to take lessons or participate in an art project, the Memorial Union’s Craftshop has launched a free program this semester that should appeal to a large number of people.

A star burst of yellow glass cones hanging from an oak tree makes an unlikely forest chandelier. Red reeds rise from the cactus garden. And where the macaws fly low, the pink crags are piled like a massive tower of rock candy.
Dale Chihuly’s work has transformed the Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden, adding spheres of multicolored glass to ponds where lily pads once floated alone and kaleidoscopic columns to patches of green. The reach of the world’s premier glassblower extends far beyond the cycads and palms of Coral Gables, though, to the Louvre and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, to Jerusalem and to Seoul.

Jad Adams follows Deborah Blum as she ventures into the world of Victorian mediums and psychics. A review of Ghost Hunters.

Buoyed by a warm audience reception, Li Chiao-Ping seemed happy to be home.

The UW-Madison dance professor, who last performed here in May before taking a leave of absence to teach at Mills College in Oakland, Calif., was all smiles as she took her bows Thursday night.

Bad news, Madison film fans. The UW Cinematheque has passed on the chance to show the original cut of French director Jacques Rivette’s “Out 1,” just because it’s over 12 hours long.

You laugh, but when the free on-campus film series showed Bela Tarr’s “Satantango,” which clocks in at a brisk 8 hours, 45 people showed up to see it. Perhaps more impressively, all but eight of them were still there when it was over.

Rodney gets respect for his role as a wisecracking millionaire businessman who attends college (UW- Madison, standing in for fictional Grand Lakes University) to help his struggling son.

Novelist Philip Roth is still going strong, with last year’s “Everyman” and 2005’s “The Plot Against America” hitting many best-of lists. The Classic Book and Movie Club is offering an opportunity to revisit one of his classics, “Goodbye, Columbus,” both on the page and on the screen.

At 1:30 p.m. Sunday, there will be a free showing of the 1969 adaptation of the film, starring Richard Benjamin and Ali MacGraw, at the Wisconsin Historical Society headquarters, 816 State St. After the film, UW English professor Thomas Schaub will talk about the book and the film.

Former Overture Center director Michael Goldberg has been named the first executive director of the Coronado Performing Arts Center in Rockford, Ill.

The year was 1992. Officials the University of Wisconsin’s Elvehjem Museum of Art, now called the Chazen Museum of Art, had been asked by curators in Japan if they could borrow some of the UW museum’s 2,000 woodblock prints by the Japanese artist Utagawa Hiroshige (1797-1858) for a show of his art work in his native Japan.

In turn, Elvehjem officials asked the Japanese what it would take to raise their already world-class collection of Hiroshige prints to an even higher level.

So began a kind of artistic detective story that reached its climax this fall.

Here is how you know the new independent film currently shooting in Madison is going to be good.

The hero, who attended UW-Madison and has gone on to become famous – though disillusioned – as a journalist, comes back to Madison looking for some of the idealism and hope that once fueled him, and what’s the first thing he does?

He goes to the Plaza. How many UW-Madison alumni have found their way back to the Plaza over the years? The answer is certainly in the thousands.

(Some of the “Madison” scenes will be filmed on campus.)

It was Dale Chihuly, the superstar glass artist, who made famous the concept of nestling stunning glassworks among the living masterpieces of a botanical garden.But it took Grant Zukowski to make it happen in Madison.

Meg Hamel: Film Festival director loses the “in terim” label

As interim director of the Wisconsin Film Festival, Meg Hamel helped fill 26,000 seats and show 177 films on 10 screens in 2006.

At the ninth annual festival in April, it will all come down to Hamel, who is now the event’s permanent director.

Think of them as the museum equivalent of “The Nutcracker,”Ã? a holiday attraction meant to please children and adults, novices and specialists.

The first thing you notice about the 60 Russian lacquer boxes is their size and their color. These tiny containers, which are just a few inches in dimension, seem incongruously small for a land as large as Russia, which spans 11 time zones. And the bright colors — rich reds, greens and golds — seem out of place for a country often associated with drabness and wintery white or gray.

But there they are, sitting in the small second-floor Mayer Gallery of the University of Wisconsin’s Chazen Museum of Art, 800 University Ave., through Jan. 14.

Michael Goldberg has resigned from the Overture Center for the Arts, the $205 million complex in downtown Madison that is the state’s largest arts presenter.

Goldberg, who has been the center’s interim director, announced his resignation Tuesday night in a letter to the Madison Cultural Arts District board, which oversees the operations of the center.

LOS ANGELES (Kyodo) 2006 saw the completion of two projects that challenge perceptions about Japanese soldiers and World War II.

With the June publication of cultural anthropologist Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney’s book “Kamikaze Diaries: Reflections of Japanese Student Soldiers” and the premiere of Clint Eastwood’s film “Letters from Iwo Jima,” the image of Japanese soldiers created in the milieu of World War II propaganda will receive a long-overdue makeover.

Recent works focusing on the personal writings of the Japanese who died for their country provide Americans a chance to learn, perhaps for the first time, who these soldiers actually were.

Ohnuki-Tierney, a Japanese native and a professor of anthropology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, came across the letters of Japanese “tokkotai” (special attack corps) pilots — men assigned to suicide missions — while doing research for a book about the use of symbolism and nationalism in Japanese military history.

From its opening trumpet fanfare to its closing solo soprano voice, Zoltan Kodaly’s “Te Deum” is a riveting, highly dramatic and sometimes showy composition that pulls no musical punches.

It also proved a brilliant showcase for this weekend’s performances by the University of Wisconsin Choral Union and Chamber Orchestra, one that earned cheers and a standing ovation from its Sunday audience.