Category: Arts & Humanities

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.

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.

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.

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 � 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.