How obvious is Donald Margulies’ literary play Collected Stories? Begin with the list I started during the first 10 minutes of the show: “Lines that will Inexorably Return to Haunt the Speaker.” For while literary lioness Ruth Steiner sets the ground rules for tutorials with her disturbingly eager student Lisa, the playwright is just as […]
Byron Woods
Bio: Byron Woods is the INDY's theater and dance critic.Email: [email protected]: http://twitter.com/byronwoods
Posted inArt
What we know now, part 2
The subject was passion: Audience members refreshed by its appearance during Noche Flamenca‘s concert could have easily wondered where it had been hiding during much of the 2006 American Dance Festival. Its unsuccessful counterfeit marred the first work on the first night of the season, in a harbinger of things to come. Few things look […]
Posted inArt
What we know now, part 1
Sometimes the questions are clear, in the end. This pair arrived at the end of the concert by Noche Flamenca, ostensibly the closing act of the American Dance Festival’s 2006 season: What should the ratio of passion to intellect be? What happens when that correlation wanders out of balance? Brief questions, but far from simple. […]
Posted inArt
Magic lessons and the technology of dreams
The waters were dark and the seaweed was an electric green, and the two-story jellyfish that slowly pulsed above our heads were a delicate lavender. A constellation of air bubbles slowly drifted past as gridded schools of fish darted about us. Their fast but focused choreography seemed borrowed from a certain festival I’d spent some […]
Posted inArt
New–but not necessarily improved
At this point, a critic almost isn’t needed for both hands theatre company’s brooms: a play about saying yes. The work virtually judges itself. The all but fully staged readings Cheryl Chamblee and Tamara Kissane’s polyphonic matrimony play enjoyed in the summer of 2004 wowed capacity crowds and those critics who showed up. At the […]
Posted inArt
The shock of the new
The concerts of the International Choreographers Commissioning Program are an annual favorite of the parents of students enrolled in the American Dance Festival’s intensive six-week school. Still, I don’t think the folks are always ready to see exactly how their children are transformed upon the stage. One’s a shrieking harridan in a clingy red dress […]
Posted inArt
Grilling the audience
Perhaps director Jay O’Berski merely wanted to give us a taste of the actual hardships historical dissidents incurred; a fresh new twist on the theater of cruelty. Or maybe Traction, that up-and-coming network of up-and-coming regional activists, figured it needed to see what its supporters would do when the heat was really on. Whatever the […]
Posted inGuides
A casual place for serious art
Tucked away on a side street near Raleigh’s Five Points neighborhood, the cinderblock-and-glass building barely stands out from the light-grade industrial buildings around it. Bickett Gallery’s logo–a stack of three circles, light blue on rust-red on tan, on a pale blue background–painted on the outside is the only clue that what’s been going on inside […]
Posted inArt
Will the circle be unbroken?
The first lesson in nonattachment came early during the world premiere of Shen Wei’s Re–, Monday night at the American Dance Festival. Judging by the quiet gasps and murmurs heard throughout the audience, it doesn’t matter that we intellectually understand that a Buddhist sand mandala was meant to be broken at the instant of its […]
Posted inArt
Wedded diss
Sure, we’ve seen ’70s flashbacks on stage before. Still, this one is wicked. Walled off behind a pair of Jackie O. sunglasses, helmeted in a blow-dried, feather-backed tribute to Farrah Fawcett-Majors, garbed in a filmy, opal cocktail dress an untold number of polyesters gave their lives for, actor Nicole Farmer stares blankly at her audience. […]
