The Overture Center for the Arts had barely opened its doors, and already people were doing the chicken dance on the balconies in the main hall. Uproarious silliness is perhaps the best thing that could happen to the Overture, according to Nancy Birmingham, an office manager in the building.
OREGON –Li Chiao-Ping established her nationally renowned dance company, which is based at her studio on Purcell Road in the town of Oregon, almost 15 years ago
Not all the action on State Street this weekend is happening at the Overture Center. At the other end of the street, at the Memorial Union, the first annual Madison World Music Festival will kick off Thursday, bringing artists from all four corners of the world to the shores of Lake Mendota.
Some musicians sing. Some musicians play the piano. But only a few can do both at the same time, at least up to professional performance standards. One of those is Martha Fischer, a mezzo-soprano who teaches accompanying (or, more accurately, “collaboration”) at the University of Wisconsin School of Music.
This is the School of Music, a hive of cultural activity for musically inclined students and faculty, and a little known treasure for the community. More than 200 times a year, free or low-cost performances will be held in one of the building’s fine small halls (Morphy, Mills and Eastman; see accompanying schedule).
List of interesting facts about the School of Music.
The traditional kick-off to the School of Music season is the Karp Family Opening Concert. This year would have been the 29th annual event, but the performance, originally scheduled for Monday, was cancelled due to illness.
The new classical music season is starting off on a propitious note: While the cost of almost everything else goes up, tickets to the University of Wisconsin’s School of Music Faculty Concert Series — and to several other major groups, including the Madison Symphony Orchestra and the Madison Opera — will cost the same as last yea
The “Frank Lloyd Wright and the Japanese Print” exhibit, will open at the University of Wisconsin’s Elvehjem Museum of Art, 800 University Ave., with a free public reception from 6 to 8 p.m. Friday for the Wright show and a new installation by internationally acclaimed contemporary artist Xu Bing. The Wright show runs through Nov. 7.
To film historian and retired University of Wisconsin-Madison Professor David Bordwell, he is “the greatest of all directors.” And the UW-Cinematheque is treating Japanese film director Yasujiro Ozu as such.
Imagine Frank Lloyd Wright selling his beloved Japanese art prints for a buck apiece. The truth is that this man of seemingly unfathomable greatness was vulnerable to being tricked and exploited. (Capital Times article re: “Frank Lloyd Wright and the Japanese Print” exhibit opening Friday)
Musically speaking, autumn seems to be coming a little early this year.
It’s still the last full week in August, but one could make a case that the fall concert season in Madison starts now….We may need the early start because this is looking to be one of the busiest concert seasons in recent memory.
Around 1:30 in the afternoon of December 7, 1941, Erwin Kissling strolled into Rennebohm’s Pharmacy, on the edge of the University of Wisconsin campus.
Madison’s Park Commission deserves praise for supporting a hip-hop concert this Thursday on the Library Mall. Promoter Florenzo Cribbs had sought a permit to hold the concert at Peace Park on State Street but couldn’t come up with the $1,000 deposit needed to use a city park.
It won’t be at the site he was hoping for, but hip-hop promoter Florenzo Cribbs says he’ll pursue his plans for a free concert Aug. 20 – on the Library Mall, not down State Street in Peace Park.
MADISON, WIS. — Even offstage, Jamie Marie Waelchli is Audrey Seiler: shy, vulnerable, unsure of either today or tomorrow.
As she walks the streets of New York City on a “really pretty” afternoon, Toby Lightman talks about pushing herself.
Paris Texas (without a comma) lead guitarist Nick Zinkgraf says the group started playing together four years ago at the University of Wisconsin in Madison while doing what all great college rock bands do ââ?¬â? party.
Xu Bing, the 49-year-old Chinese-born artist who fled into exile and now lives in Brooklyn, N.Y., is one of the art world’s hot names right now. And to think he got his start a decade ago at the University of Wisconsin’s Elvehjem Museum. He will have a major show opening here in September. (See 7/30/04 Capital Times print edition)
The new play opening Friday at Broom Street Theater is called “Audrey Seiler, Where Are You?” But writer John Sable and director Dana Pellebon are actually not that interested in where the UW-Madison college student went for four days when she faked her abduction last March.
The new book “Woodland Reflections: The Art of Truman Lowe” serves a very important cultural function. At a time when the renewed culture wars tend to undercut the accomplishments of non-white artists, Jo Ortel’s impressive monograph provides major critical documentation of this American Indian sculptor’s accomplishments.
When Mark Bugher, director of University Research Park, sat down recently to woo a still unnamed biotech company, the former state Department of Revenue head didn’t talk taxes. Bugher said members of the Charlottesville, Va., firm, which specializes in manipulating biological cells, were more interested in hearing about local cultural offerings like the soon-to-open Overture Center.
“Basically, we’ve been living in 17th century Venice all week,” artistic director and University of Wisconsin baritone Paul Rowe said just before the faculty and participants of the Madison Early Music Festival played their final notes in Saturday’s All-Festival Concert.
And despite the stark white walls and geometri
When Jim Ferris was a doctoral student, he directed a theatrical production in which each cast member had a disability. All but one of the performers used a wheelchair, so that put a woman who could walk in the minority. “Where do I fit?” she asked. It is a fundamental question for people who live with a disability, says Ferris, a poet who also teaches at the University of Wisconsin and has succeeded in making disability studies an interdisciplinary program there.
Among the five fellows inducted into the Wisconsin Academy of Science, Arts and Letters during ceremonies Sunday, July 11, at Monona Terrace were: Michael Fiore, who has pioneered smoking cessation at UW Hospital & Clinics; UW Professor Richard Davidson, who has pioneered Eastern spiritual practices in physical and mental health; and UW Professor Richard Davis, nationally acclaimed jazz bassist. Other inductees were Ellen Kort, Wisconsin’s poet laureate, and Tom Uttech, a renowned landscape painter who taught art for 30 years at UW-Milwaukee. (Caption only)
Socrates said an unexamined life is not worth living. What the philosopher failed to point out, however, is that the results of that examination typically fascinate only those immediately involved. For the rest of us, the examiner’s Sturm und Drang revelations can read like a protracted navel gaze.
Several local performing arts groups and presenters (including the Wisconsin Union Theater) will meet Monday night to find ways they hope will help them from drowning in the tidal wave of publicity generated by the new Overture Center.
The annual Madison Early Music Festival, which will begin Saturday, has reached a turning point. UW-Madison baritone Paul Rowe, co-director of the festival, says “This is the first year we feel we’re not making wholesale changes.”
Hey, it’s summer. And, just as you might catch your European classics professor wearing flip-flops to class, the UW-Cinematheque film series is loosening up a little.
Book review. Joanne Cantor, a nationally recognized authority on the media and children and professor emerita of the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
About 900 middle- and high-school students are not only taking band, orchestra, jazz ensemble and choir at the UW-Madison Summer Music Clinic, they’re taking special classes on dance, John Philip Sousa, famous jazz musicians and humor in music
The UW Summer Music Clinic, a two-week summer program for junior high and high school students, is celebrating its 75th year of teaching everything from “Jazz Ensemble” to “Latin Ballroom” and “Humor in Music” this month.
Through July 11, a newly purchased drawing is on show at the University of Wisconsin’s Elvehjem Museum of Art, 800 University Ave.
The university publishing industry has long struggled to survive financially, but the announced closings of two small academic presses this year reflect increased pressures just as publishers had begun to benefit from an improved economy.
Nationally, university presses may be in trouble, but the University of Wisconsin Press needn’t worry too much. The editors at the Madison-based publisher consistently make smart choices – the kinds of choices that are necessary in an increasingly competitive publishing industry.
The University of Wisconsin’s Elvehjem Museum of Art, 800 University Ave., Madison, is benefiting, by proxy, from Frederick Layton’s big heart and eye for quality
U-W student Audrey Seiler put the national spotlight on Madison when she faked her own kidnapping. Now, some local artists are putting the spotlight on Audrey Seiler and her story… literally
Quoted: Marureen Janson, a part-time instructor at UW-Madison.
Quoted: Cynthia Laitman, who works at the University of Wisconsin Medical School
An assistant professor of Afro-American Studies at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, Tyson lived four years in Oxford. Tyson, 44, is a white academic who hasn�t given up the two defining Southern obsessions: knowing your kinfolk and knowing how to tell a story.
