Category: Arts & Humanities

Dressed in a blazing red Bucky Badger baseball cap and a neck-to-toe purple jump suit, Andre De Shields is the thinking man’s cheerleader.

“When in Rome do as the Romans do,” he quips. Pivoting smartly, he leads a reporter into the Concourse Hotel’s darkened jazz bar and you detect the dancer in his stride.

But what many people can’t see under the hat is the philosopher in his brain. That’s what he counts on revealing in the next few months — the Bucky hat will fly off to reveal the universal mind of the Stage Manager, the omniscient narrator in Madison-native Thornton Wilder’s famous 1937 play, “Our Town.”

These troubled times call for a fresh understanding of what America means. That’s the intended effect of “Visions of America,” a multimedia program created by UW-Madison professor and trombonist Mark Hetzler and Madison photographer Katrin Talbot at 8 p.m. Friday in Mills Hall.

Friday is the busy night of this classical music week, and Friday is also the night when one of the most unusual events of the season will take place.

On Friday in Mills Hall at 8 p.m. (though early arrival for the preconcert show at 7:30 is strongly suggested) the UW Faculty Concert Series will present “Visions of America,” a multimedia program created by UW trombonist Mark Hetzler, who tours with the Empire Brass and performs in the Wisconsin Brass Quintet, and Madison photographer Katrin Talbot.

“Mozart sure brings them out,” one University of Wisconsin piano teacher quipped while looking at the crowd eating cake during an intermission.

He wasn’t kidding.

By just about any standard you care to choose — attendance, artistic quality, money — the six-hour Mozart piano sonata marathon, held Sunday afternoon to mark the 250th anniversary of Mozart’s birth, was an unqualified success.

Madison’s third-annual Teen Spoken Word Finals will feature winners from tournaments this week in four area high schools, as well as the college-prep People Program and the Warner Community Center. The 7 p.m. show will be followed by a performance of the Senegalese hip-hop group Daara J, with an after- show dance party.

It’s the culminating event this year for Youth Speaks Wisconsin, an organization designed to integrate the art of spoken word into the classroom and into young people’s lives. Tonight’s winners will receive an expenses-paid trip to the Brave New Voices International Poetry Festival in New York in April, where they’ll compete with teens from more than 40 cities in the United States and England.

If you had to pick one week to designate as “Mozart Week in Madison,” this would have to be it. It is centered around Jan. 27, the actual 250th anniversary of Mozart’s birth, which falls on Friday.

Curiously no Mozart concert is taking place that particular night. Still, this week there will be no shortage of Mozart in Madison:

ââ?¬Â¢ Tonight at 7:30 in Mills Hall, eight faculty members of the University of Wisconsin School of Music will join in various ensembles to perform some lesser known chamber music. (One wonders: Wouldn’t a weekend booking have brought in a bigger audience?)

It doesn’t take much: A single note can turn a major key into a minor key, or vice versa.

These days, Baoli Liu, the head piano tuner at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, is hoping to hear the one note that could turn his sad story into a happy one.

A native of mainland China, Liu first came to the United States sponsored by the Chinese government and received a U.S. visa that required him to return to his homeland for two years if he ever chose to stay and apply for green card. That day has arrived, but with a Catch-22: Going home to keep his job will mean losing his job.

A Q&A interview with Tomislav Longinovic, a University of Wisconsin-Madison professor of Slavic and comparative literature, who is offering a course called “The Vampire in Literature and Film.”

“Tandem Press Highlights: 1995-2005” is at the University of Wisconsin’s Chazen Museum of Art, 800 University Ave. It opens today and runs through April 9, and features selections from more than 200 prints. The printmaking workshop, located on Madison’s near east side, is a teaching facility associated with the UW-Madison and is directed by Paula McCarthy Panczenko.

“Tandem Press Highlights: 1995-2005” is at the University of Wisconsin’s Chazen Museum of Art, 800 University Ave. It opened Friday and runs through April 9, and features selections from more than 200 prints. The printmaking workshop, located on Madison’s near east side, is a teaching facility associated with the UW-Madison and is directed by Paula McCarthy Panczenko.

Here are 10 of the most intriguing films that the UW Cinematheque will be screening this spring.

Sometimes, if you want to get something done, you have to go to the top. That’s what happened when the UW Cinematheque film series tried to secure a copy of “Kiki’s Delivery Service,” the acclaimed animated feature by legendary Japanese director Hayao Miyazaki, for its spring season.

Ironically, the film is available at the corner video store on video or DVD, having been distributed by Walt Disney Pictures. But finding an actual film print to screen was much harder, and it ended up that Miyazaki himself had to personally approve a Madison screening, Cinematheque programmer Tom Yoshikami says.

MILWAUKEE — The critically-acclaimed movie “Brokeback Mountain” about a homosexual romance has a Wisconsin connection.

Milwaukee writer Will Fellows said that he recently learned that a book that he wrote in 1996 was suggested reading for the stars of the film, to help them develop their characters.

Canadian-born, Wisconsin-based artist Jennifer Angus (she teaches at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the Department of Textile Art and Design), has used thousands of insects from her own vast collection.

For a city this size, Madison’s offering of indie and foreign films is absurd. For a much bigger city, it still would be surprising.

Currently, there are eight screens showing non-mainstream movies — two at Hilldale Theatre, four at Westgate Art Cinemas, and two at the Orpheum Theatre.

Then there is UW-Madison’s Cinematheque, which holds retrospectives of film makers, and in its words, showcases “films which would otherwise never reach Madison screens.” And Madison has a fabulous DVD rental store, Four Star Video.

If that weren’t enough, there is the annual Wisconsin Film Festival.

That’s right, Governor Doyle has agreed to appear in a movie that starts shooting at the end of January in Madison. It’s called “Winter Of Frozen Dreams”. The independent film is based on the true story of Barbara Hoffman a UW student who was convicted of murdering at least one man with cyanide in the 1970’s

Among Kevin Lynch’s top 10 picks for the best performing arts events of 2005 are the Nov. 18 UW-Madison Faculty Dance Concert and “The Music of Gunther Schuller” on Oct. 27.

Madison visual arts felt depleted in 2005 with the transitional limbo of the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art (waiting for its new home in Overture to open in the spring), and the losses of Spaightwood Galleries, Wendy Cooper Gallery and Art Beat Gallery & Studio.

Then came the astonishing gift of the Chazens (prompting the controversial renaming of the Elvehjem), which projected a bright future for the city’s cramped public art museum, to more than double gallery size and add a dazzling collection of contemporary art, among other enhancements. The sudden renaming is ultimately appropriate: The Chazens have allowed a very good museum to court greatness….

From “Bambi” to “Free Willy” to “March of the Penguins,” movies about animals have historically been a big hit at the box office. The latest creature to capture the hearts of movie-goers is King Kong – who stars in the latest remake of the 1933 classic film. University of Wisconsin-Madison professor Gregg Mitman, author of the book, “Reel Nature: America’s Romance with Wildlife on Film,” was interviewed via e-mail by the Journal Sentinel’s Mark Maley about the giant ape and how animals are depicted on the silver screen. Mitman is a professor of the history of science at UW-Madison.

For five years, Meg Hamel has been running hard as a volunteer for the Wisconsin Film Festival. This year, she’ll run the event.

Art has a long history of putting into images what escapes words. One of the greatest of those expressions is in Madison right now.

On the third floor of the University of Wisconsin’s Chazen Museum of Art, you will find Robert Motherwell’s “Homage to the Spanish Republic No. 125,” on loan from the collection of UW alumni Simona and Jerome A. Chazen of New York.

For the 44-year-old Jennifer Angus, now teaching textile art at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, the pairing of insects with Victorian toile-de-jouy patterns taps into the world of childhood wonder, another very Victorian place to be.

For five years, Meg Hamel has been running hard as a volunteer for the Wisconsin Film Festival. This year, she’ll run the event.

THE MOVIE of “Winter of Frozen Dreams,” Karl Harter’s 1990 book on the Barbara Hoffman murder case, is heating up.

….Hoffman was a brilliant and beautiful UW student who inexplicably took a job at a massage parlor and wound up accused of the cyanide murders of two of her customers, Gerald Davies and Harry Berge, who left her money in their wills.

Here are five gift ideas that deal with classical music, the visual arts and the theater. Of course, all of them can be, and should be, customized to your financial resources as a giver and to the taste of the recipient.

All these suggestions have one thing in common: The notion, which grows deeper as I age, that the ultimate gift is companionship.

(The UW-Madison School of Music, Cinematheque, Memorial Union and Chazen Museum of Art are among several recommended sources of gifts involving the university.)

Writer-director Kathleen Slattery-Moschkau’s didn’t follow a traditional path to a film career. She grew up in Ladysmith, earned a degree in political science from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and then, for the next decade, worked in the pharmaceutical industry. Q&A interview.

One of the great lessons of the must-see show “Dual Vision” at the University of Wisconsin Chazen Museum of Art is that there are so many ways to approach it and appreciate it.

This big and beautiful blockbuster show includes works by some of the biggest names in 20th century art: George Grosz, Robert Motherwell, Dale Chihuly, Larry Rivers, David Hockney and Roy Lichtenstein.

Appropriately, Matthew Slaats was hoping to install his final art exhibit as a UW-Madison graduate art student in the Field House – but the logistics didn’t quite work out. Instead, his short-term show “1v1” is tucked way up in the seventh-floor student art gallery in the Humanities Building, 455 N. Park St.

On the half-complete stage set, the cast and crew of University Theatre’s ” ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore” prepares to fight. Fake fighting.

Bill Evans has his father to thank for letting him become a dance legend and one of the premiere rhythm tap artists in the nation.

And Evans does thank him, in his solo tap work “Blues for My Father,” one of six diverse pieces to be performed tonight and Saturday in the UW-Madison dance program’s fall faculty concert.

There is plenty more classical music on tap this week, especially at the UW School of Music.

When members of the UW-Madison DanceSport competitive ballroom dance team rehearse for an upcoming performance, the steps sizzle. The skirts flap. The turns snap.

Or they’re supposed to, anyway, with a little practice.

Armchair critics are engaged in a verbal punt, pass and kick competition over Donald Lipski’s recently erected football sculpture at Camp Randall Stadium.

Meanwhile, the city has quietly installed another new piece of public art that also uses stylized symbolism to represent the function of a public facility. The sculpture, by Madison artist Gail Simpson, is located outside of the Water Utility Building, 119 E. Olin Ave. The artwork was commissioned by the Madison Arts Commission (formerly CitiARTS) at a cost of $25,000.

….Simpson, a UW-Madison professor of art, is a partner in a local art company, Actual Size Artwork, with Aris Georgiades. The professional artists have collaborated on commissioned public artworks since 1992.

After raising five children and reaching the other side of 50, Susan McBride Gilgen launched a new career in 1997 as an artist of landscape quilting. Within months, her creations were winning “big league” awards in the world of fiber art and quilting.

Gilgen’s quilts have garnered awards and accolades from major shows in the United States and Europe.

….She will be one of the presenters at the second annual Conference on Arts, Curriculum and Community from Friday to Sunday at Monona Terrace. The event is sponsored by University of Wisconsin-Madison Education Outreach and the Wisconsin Arts Board.

Walter Hamady, often credited with helping the art world see the book in a new way, is the featured artist in a vast and yet intimate one-man show at the Watrous Gallery at the Overture Center for the Arts. “Juxtamorphing Space,” which runs through Nov. 20, is a collection of collages, assemblages and books he has composed, crafted or published at The Perishable Press Limited, which he operates out of his home and old dairy barn south of Mount Horeb.

Hamady (pronounced ha-MAH-dee) also is a former UW-Madison art professor, a poet, papermaker, designer, chronicler and prolific letter writer, and in the world of book artistry, a trailblazer.

“OK, John, whenever you’re ready.”

UW-Madison art professor Pat Fennell calls to me behind a closed door. I stand nearly naked and alone in a small storage room on the sixth floor of the Humanities Building.