The dance is already in progress, no matter when we join it. The soloists and the groups, the residents and the summer pilgrimages are all in motion. Each adds to the strangest of constellations, an alternative zodiac whose nodes stretch from Raleigh’s BTI Center to the Ark, Duke University’s amazing 105-year-old dance studio, from Carolina […]
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 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
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 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
Five’ll get you 10
It’s a rubric of theater criticism and something of a gentle reminder: Every show has its individual strength; each play has its unique problem. To be sure, there were strengths on display during this year’s iteration of 10 by 10, Carrboro ArtsCenter’s 10-minute play festival. But the same difficulties kept cropping up far too often […]
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 […]