Category: Arts & Humanities

Long before Michael Moore took the nation’s temperature with “Fahrenheit 9/11” and Errol Morris cleared away “The Fog of War,” Saul Landau had a camera on his shoulder. The UW-Madison graduate has made over 40 films looking at social and political issues around the world….

Because of his particular devotion to issues affecting Latin America, the Cinefest Nuestra film festival has decided to make this year’s event a salute to Landau’s work.

It took only two songs before the first members of the Wisconsin Union Theater audience got up to dance to the music of Habib Koite and his band, Bamada. The number of dancers grew larger as the evening wore on.

…Koite is lending his image to an Oxfam America brochure calling for caps on federal trade subsidies for U.S. cotton exports to central and west Africa, where local farmers are unable to sell their own crops due a glut of cheap, subsidized U.S. cotton. Oxfam volunteers circulated in the crowd, collecting signatures to send to legislators.

Madison’s third Cuban Film Festival will be held Feb. 24-March 4 on the UW-Madison and Edgewood College campuses. The festival will offer eight films with English subtitles, produced on and off the island in 2003 and 2004.

UW-MADISON graduate student Dave Beck thinks of himself more as a sculptor than a performance artist, but he does not deny the element of performance art that’s in one of two pieces he has in a campus show that opens Saturday night.

The University of Wisconsin announced a new director for the Arts Institute Monday. Susan Cook, professor of music and director of graduate studies in the School of Music will replace retiring communication arts professor Tino Balio.

THE MOVIE to be made of David Maraniss’ 2003 book, “They Marched Into Sunlight,” a substantial part of which is set in Madison during the 1967 Dow Chemical riots, now has a studio and writer-director to go along with producer Tom Hanks, who bought the film rights with his partner Gary Goetzman.

If you want to see where some of your tax dollars go when it comes to the fine arts, you might want to take in the new show in the James Watrous Gallery on the third floor of the Overture Center. The public reception for the show, which runs through March 13, is tonight from 5 to 8 p.m.

The exhibit, “In Good Company,” honors the Wisconsin Arts Board visual arts fellows from 2004. They include seven visual artists from around the state. Among them is painter Nancy Mladenoff, a UW assistant professor of art.

NEW YORK — Bob Dylan, the unofficial poet laureate of the rock ‘n’ roll generation, has now been officially placed alongside such literary greats as Philip Roth and Adrienne Rich, not to mention biographies of Shakespeare and Willem de Kooning. All were among nominees announced Saturday for the National Book Critics Circle prizes.

Among the nominees for general nonfiction was UW-Madison Afro-American studies professor Tim Tyson’s “Blood Done Sign My Name: A True Story.”

Be forewarned: The poems in Jim Ferris’ newly published collection, “The Hospital Poems,” grab the reader by the neck and give a good shake. The collection, which was chosen for the 2004 Main Street Rag Poetry Book Award, chronicles Ferris’ childhood and teen years, many of which were spent in operating rooms and hospital beds.

Ferris teaches disability studies and communication arts at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Chris Trumbo’s one-man show about his Hollywood screenwriter father, Dalton Trumbo, is drawn from published letters housed at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and at the University of California, Los Angeles.

FORMER MADISON multimedia guy Steve Marmel has a chance to win an “Annie” award when the Oscars of animation are handed out Sunday night in a ceremony at the historic Alex Theatre in Glendale, Calif.

Marmel attended UW-Madison in the 1980s and ran a joke campaign for Wisconsin Student Association president (his party: The Bob Kasten School of Driving).

Inside France, director Maurice Pialat was considered a genius, the heir to legendary French auteurs like Bresson and Renoir. When he died in 2003, he was honored by French President Jacques Chirac, and one critic grieved, “French cinema has been orphaned.”

Outside France, even among Francophile film buffs, few people really know Pialat’s work. This sounds like a job for the UW-Cinematheque.

For the first time, audiences who attend the Wisconsin Film Festival this year will get to honor the films they liked best. Now in its seventh year, the popular festival has given out prizes to filmmakers who were chosen by a jury of filmmakers and film professionals.

For this year’s festival, which runs March 31 through April 3 at several downtown and campus venues, the public will get to hand out an Audience Award as well.

Two grand masters of political filmmaking will be in Madison next month as the CineFest Nuestra Film Festival devotes itself to a retrospective celebration of their work.

Saul Landau and Haskell Wexler, who have both devoted a significant portion of their long careers to making films about Latin American issues, will be the focus of this year’s festival, running in several venues on and off campus Feb. 24-26.
Landau is a graduate of the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s history program.

CHAPEL HILL — A campus committee is leaning toward a book on a southern racial uprising for use as UNC’s 2005 summer reading program text.

A nine-member committee is expected to select “Blood Done Sign My Name: A True Story,” by Timothy Tyson. Tyson, a professor of Afro-American Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, grew up in Oxford, in Granville County.

A new “niche” show of African pottery has been on display at the University of Wisconsin’s Elvehjem Museum of Art since December. It is located in a display case between Galleries IV and V and will be up through Jan. 16.

The curator of the show is Nichole Bridges, a graduate student in art history who is pursuing her doctorate with the internationally recognized UW scholar Henry Drewal.

David Hottman, a longtime professor of voice at the University of Wisconsin School of Music who often sang baritone roles with the Madison Opera, died Sunday afternoon. Hottman, 71, had been in a local nursing home for several months following a stroke. He retired from the university in 1998. Funeral arrangements and plans for a memorial service are pending. (Capital Times)

Among the local arts highlights of 2004 listed by Jacob Stockinger are several from UW-Madison, including the Elvehjem Museum of Art.

“The University of Wisconsin’s Elvehjem Museum of Art just keeps hosting better and better shows and making more and more of its permanent collection. It needs and deserves the bigger space it has been promised.”

When it comes to classical music, it has been a record year, so to speak, with a dozen new CDs put out by local individuals and groups. These new CDs, which usually cost $12 to $15 a disc, are available at many local bookstores and record stores as well as online at www.music.wisc.edu. (Among those mentioned are the UW School of Music’s Christopher Taylor, Vartan Manoogian, and the UW Concert Choir.)

Hongdi Liu’s artistic style is located on an island somewhere between traditional Chinese art and modern abstraction. It is inhabited by sensual yet demure maidens and mythical animals. His current exhibit, “Science and Nature,” is influenced by his work in ophthalmology and visual sciences at the UW-Madison Medical School and his experiences in a labor camp during the Chinese Cultural Revolution.

Jacob Stockinger: The older I get, the more I value the gifts of time and companionship. Whether it is a play or a movie, a concert or a dance performance, an art show or a gallery reception, the best gift you can make is to go in person with someone you know to one of the ever-growing arts and entertainment events in the Madison area.

Madison’s most critically acclaimed writer, Lorrie Moore, will make a rare public appearance when she speaks at Borders West at 7 p.m. Tuesday.

Regardless, expect an enlightening discussion with Moore, who has long established herself as a must-read short-story writer. The UW professor, now 47, was the youngest author included in the book “Best American Short Stories of the Century” in 1998 with her piece, “You’re Ugly Too.”

“…The sentiments driving the sometimes somber but always powerful 65-minute composition seemed to have found similar inspiration among members of the University of Wisconsin Choral Union, who gave a flawless performance of the work before nearly sellout crowds over the weekend at Mills Concert Hall on the UW campus.

The UW Symphony Orchestra, under the direction of Beverly Taylor, supported the 200-voice chorus with what may have been their most outstanding performance.”

WAUSAU — To most people, a chest is just a place to stash polished silverware, tattered underwear, love letters, junk, jewelry, secrets, treasures. It is furniture with a predictable purpose, not interactive artwork. Until now.

“More Than Drawers: Wisconsin Cabinets,” a new exhibit at the Leigh Yawkey Woodson Art Museum, is an exercise in broken stereotypes. Eight of the show’s nine woodworkers live in Dane County. (One of them is UW-Madison art professor Tom Loeser)

It’s another wild weekend in the Humanities building on the UW-Madison campus.

Men and women climb over chairs in the auditorium like hyperactive monkeys, chattering about classes, movies and the Internet while trying to set up a DVD player. Leftover Halloween candy and other snacks provide the fuel the audience will need to stay up late to watch and discuss the cultural implications of . . . schoolgirl nun exorcists in the roaring ’20s?

In this most celebratory of seasons, when both sacred and secular collide in a riot of faith and sentimentality, the University Theatre reminds us of the importance of thought and free will. And it does so with a play of historic significance.

“While reading ‘Best New American Voices 2005,’ I had to keep reminding myself that the book was not intended to showcase the best writers in the country, but rather those writers who might one day develop into the best,” says La Follette High School English and creative writing teacher Andrew McCuaig in this review of a collection that includes Frances Hwang, a fellow at the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing .

The music was often harshly industrial, the movements and lines undeniably, sharply modern. But somehow, Li Chiao-Ping made it all look classically lyrical.
That seemingly effortless blending of styles made the University of Wisconsin-Madison dance professor’s premiere of “Processing” a joy to watch.

The hundreds of people who saw the Madison East High School production of “The Laramie Project” last weekend may find this week’s “20/20” broadcast of particular interest.

Local great James Watrous gets his due in a new exhibition.

One of artist (& art professor emeritus) Ray Gloeckler’s various self-portraits is “Woodcutter Mouse,” a hairy, hunched and bespectacled creature scratching obsessively on a hunk of wood with a sharp little tool. What foolish behavior, the image says to us, and that mouse seems to signify most humans at some time or other, especially the biggest and most powerful. That view of the world emerges from a delightfully engrossing exhibit, “Woodcuts by Ray Gloeckler,” running through Jan. 23 at the University of Wisconsin’s Elvehjem Museum of Art.

The Elvehjem Museum of Art, 800 University Ave., will host a free reception to celebrate the opening of the exhibition “Woodcuts by Ray Gloeckler” on Saturday from 6 to 7:30 p.m. University of Wisconsin-Madison faculty member Ray Gloeckler has become nationally recognized as a leader in the field of woodcuts.

When it premiered in 1928, “The Threepenny Opera” created quite a stir with its cast of low characters, music hall style and anti-bourgeois social agenda. University Theatre’s production of the Bertolt Brecht/Kurt Weill classic also will draw strong comments, but for all the wrong reasons.

In light of the momentous presidential election, this show may be must viewing. “The Threepenny Opera” opens tonight in Vilas Hall’s Mitchell Theatre, 821 University Ave., and will run through Nov. 20….The joint production of the University Theatre and the University Opera has been described as futuristic. In this show Germany’s future resembles America’s present, the director says.

For any dancer who has ever fantasized about becoming the director of his or her own company, UW dance program alumna Nora Stephens returns to Madison to show her young peers it is a dream that can come true with some love and perseverance, a dash of collaboration and an inflatable costume. Four years after graduating from UW, she has established herself in the New York experimental modern dance scene and her choreography is flourishing.

Modern dance, generally

Painter-printmaker Warrington Colescott — a retired UW-Madison faculty member — has capped his 44-year relationship with the Milwaukee Art Museum by donating 178 works in a variety of media to the museum’s Herzfeld Foundation Print, Drawing and Photography Study Center.

“Copenhagen” was written in 1998 by journalist, novelist and playwright Michael Frayn, author of the earlier hit, “Noises Off,” among others. “Copenhagen” began garnering recognition immediately, culminating in three 2000 Tony Awards, including Best Play.

UW-Madison professor Lorrie Moore has been awarded the $30,000 Rea Award for the Short Story, the award’s sponsors announced Tuesday.

Backstage at the Union Theater in the Memorial Union slumber two giants: a pair of Steinway grands, sleek and elegant, bearing the marks of greatness. Alfred Brendel, Murray Perahia, Emanuel Ax, Micha Dichter, Andras Schiff, Andre Watts, Rudolph and Peter Serkin and on and on.

You should feel sorry for any Republican Dave Matthews fans who skipped Tuesday’s Vote for Change benefit concert at the Kohl Center, afraid that the event would turn into an anti-Bush rally.

Visionary painting and scientific inquiry aren’t the most comfortable of bedfellows, nor are they fashionable in our post-modern, post-Freudian era. But they mesh in a Milwaukee exhibit featuring the works of Christiane Clados, who is in residence at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s department of anthropology this semester, thanks to the outreach efforts of the German Academic Exchange Program.

He could have been just another one of the thousands of red-sweatered folks milling around downtown Madison late Saturday afternoon, still flush with excitement at the Badgers’ win. But the gray-haired man in the Bucky Badger sweatshirt and slippers happened to be America’s greatest living stand-up comic.

Last night the University of Wisconsin-Madison put on a student performance unlike any other. The two free Monday evening performances, one at 5 p.m. and one at 7:30, held in the new Overture Hall, were a far cry from a suspect stint on some less-than-stellar auditorium stage.