Exclusive photo call footage of Emanuel Gat’s Winter Variations at the 2009 American Dance Festival. Dancers: Emanuel Gat and Roy Assaf. Commentary: Dance critic and correspondent Byron Woods. Produced by: Belem Destefani and Sarah Ewald.
Byron Woods
Bio: Byron Woods is the INDY's theater and dance critic.Email: [email protected]: http://twitter.com/byronwoods
Posted inArt
Season preview: American Dance Festival
Each season, director Charles Reinhart can be counted on to voice one of his favorite mottos about the American Dance Festival: “Onwardsand sideways!” This summer the aphorism seems unusually appropriate. With the move to the Durham Performing Arts Center, the festival gets a major upgrade, but while a budgetary crisis has forced the festival to […]
Posted inArt
Manbites Dog’s Age of Arousal
Age of Arousal Manbites Dog Theater Through June 13 There’s more than a whiff of paleontology to the words “our most recent ancestors,” which playwright Linda Griffiths uses to refer to the Victorians in an explanatory essay included in the published version of Age of Arousal. But before the end of that play’s first act, […]
Posted inArt
Why make a stage adaptation of The Wizard of Oz?
The Wizard of Oz Broadway Series South Through May 10 At first blush, an enterprise like The Wizard of Oz seems the kind of marketing slam dunk producers would fairly drool over. With all but universal name recognition and an iconic story and score everyone fondly remembers from childhood, the property is practically the working […]
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Black community under siege in Jitney
Jitney Deep Dish Theater Through May 23 The falling action has already been going on for some 20 years in Pittsburgh’s Hill District when Darnell, dubbed Youngblood by his friends, says his first line in August Wilson’s Jitney. By that time, the fine print of urban renewal had long since morphed into the handwriting on […]
Posted inTheater
Iraq and feminism last weekend at PlayMakers
9 Parts of Desire PRC2 @ PlayMakers Rep Closed April 26 If it’s difficult to read stories from a time of war, it’s even more difficult to stage them. If a playwright, an actor, a director can be said to walk a tightrope when they do, in works like 9 Parts of Desire, which closed […]
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Spelling secrets in Eleemosynary
Eleemosynary Raleigh Ensemble Players Through April 26 Charity takes the strangest forms in fairy tales. Moreover, it’s not always the easiest thing to spot: A locked box that no key opens, a small trinket in the shape of an animal, or a sewing needle that hangs, suspended under glass, by a single human hair. No […]
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Burning Coal’s 1960: Telling the story of school desegregation
1960 Burning Coal Theater Through April 26 Literary theorists like to remind us that we always meet a story’s characters in the middle of thingsor, in the Latin, in medias res. Even if someone is being born or dying as we first encounter them, the culture and the world that character is entering or exiting […]
Posted inCulture
ADF announces 2009 season: new venue, usual suspects, cuts in programming…
The American Dance Festival announced the lineup for its 2009 season at the end of last week. Dance cognoscenti had braced for the worst, given warnings earlier in the year about financial reversals in support due to the economic maelstrom. Rumor confirmed: the 2009 season will be one week shorter than usual, covering five and […]
Posted inArt
Where ballet and modern might meet
The American Dance Festival announced the lineup for its 2009 season at the end of last week. Dance cognoscenti had braced for the worst, given warnings earlier in the year about financial reversals in support due to the economic maelstrom. Rumor confirmed: the 2009 season will be one week shorter than usual, covering five and […]
