Some say it’s a mistake to look back. An absent friend in anthropology would remind me that an observer’s presence changes the habitat, not always as intended and not always for the better. Both are part of the critics’ dilemma then, since both form a part of their duty. I returned to see Nixon’s Nixon […]
Byron Woods
Bio: Byron Woods is the INDY's theater and dance critic.Email: [email protected]: http://twitter.com/byronwoods
Posted inArt
Starting here, starting now
The 2004 fall theater season began last weekend with a bang: three majors whose triumphs and struggles provide a decent introduction to this community’s artistic achievements as well as its complexities. Things only promise to intensify this week. Since it only comes ’round once a year, cross out the plans you had for Friday night. […]
Posted inNews
As our rarer monsters are
The postcard for the play puts it succinctly: “A country divided by war. An embattled President caught in a web of lies.” Surprisingly perhaps, the words don’t refer to any current political state, but events that happened 30 years ago this week. Two days before his Aug. 9, 1974 resignation on television before a national […]
Posted inArt
Extra crayons, paper, chalk–and matches…
In this final dispatch we return to the map, the potent–and cautionary–metaphor that the American Dance Festival chose for its 2004 season in its title, “Mapping Modern Dance.” For the new turf uncovered in just over six week’s time–and sections of the old turf now found to be partially or completely defamiliarized–both bear witness to […]
Posted inNews
Road show
If Wordshed Productions weren’t prepared by now to perform the short stories of John Cheever at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, there’d be serious cause for concern. After all, last weekend’s performances of A Paradise it Seems marked the third time this noteworthy company has visited the same works by Cheever in recent years. Wordshed initially […]
Posted inArt
A change in the weather
The scudding, iron skies over Duke Chapel accompanied a sudden drop in temperature Saturday evening. Nope, pathetic fallacies just don’t get much more pathetic than the weather that ushered out the 2004 American Dance Festival in Durham last weekend. It was a more than usually good thing, then, that the work inside that night warmed […]
Posted inNews
Hot, hot, hot?
I’ve really enjoyed cartoonist/musician Brian Walsby’s manic, wordy comic-strip chronicles of punk culture and band life. At their best, his illustrated experiences in alternative music read like some strange combination of Harvey Pekar and Hunter Thompson as if drawn by MAD Magazine’s Jack Davis. Elsewhere, a few savage strokes of Walsby’s pen mercilessly caricature a […]
Posted inNews
Walking, slowly, toward the peace
You might have missed them if you were running late on your way to the American Dance Festival on Monday night. The hard rain had come by then, washing out the list of words chalked in meridians radiating out from the traffic circle in front of Duke University’s Bryan Center: forgiveness, empathy, elevate, respond…. An […]
Posted inNews
in kingly affairs
After Loretta Swit charmed the husk right off of the corn in a springtime showing of Mame, North Carolina Theatre stays plugged into the celebrity circuit when Lou Diamond Phillips reprises his 1996 Tony-nominated Broadway turn in The King and I. For first timers, this Raleigh-based professional company exists solely to put on archive-level productions […]
Posted inArt
Sam Beckett’s Argentinian fling
Medical woes, trouble in transit and mid-performance fire drills made for a week of obstacles at American Dance Festival–one in which one company alone would emerge from the gauntlet unscathed: Argentina’s Grupo Krapp. By the time the fire alarms went off in Bryan Center on Monday night, the South American dance theater group had fully […]
