Byron Woods

Arts advocates and activists are mounting a “call to arms” in response to Governor Mike Easley’s proposed funding cuts in the 2003-2005 state budget. The governor’s budget, released March 5, calls for a $626,000 cut in funds for the North Carolina Arts Council–a 12.8 percent reduction from last year. The cut occurs in the context […]

They’re back. Those enigmatic Independent Dancemakers, whose seven shows–in seven years–have regularly established new choreographic benchmarks in regional modern dance, are surfacing again this weekend, just in time to shake up everyone’s ideas of what local dance should look like, act like and where it should occur. Just don’t go looking for them at Duke’s […]

Sometimes the more you throw against the wall, the less anything sticks. Case in point: Accomplices, the first joint offering by Wordshed Productions and Ghost and Spice Productions, currently showing at UNC’s Swain Hall. For despite individually bright moments, this compendium of one-acts by Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter, bookended by the opening and closing […]

A confession: Mathematics was always my worst subject. Perhaps that’s why I take no comfort at all in the expanding role it’s being given in the ethical dilemmas of our day. While Magdalena Santillan and Melecio Huerta mourn the death of their daughter, Jesica, legislators seek to limit the amount of money that can be […]

By now, most of us have endured one live show or movie plagued by unscripted audience participation. Sometimes it’s from the terminally clueless, like the undernourished Duke professor who brought a crinkly paper bag of Wendy’s French fries (and a medium Frosty–which he slurped through a straw) to Ariel Dorfman’s performance of Picasso’s Closet, two […]

Call it the week of strange valentines. I actually sent–and received–one or two of them myself. As millions took to the streets across the globe on Saturday, thousands joined them in Raleigh, gathering around the old Capitol Building to demonstrate their love of peace. While it may have been the oddest–and most passionate–valentine I’d seen […]

It seemed an important question about civic dialogue for a conversation with Anna Deavere Smith: Did she think it was still possible? The question was left up in the air at the end of her latest book, Talk to Me: Travels in Media and Politics. The book provides a detailed account of the years she […]

It’s the tag line of an old country song: For every woman who’s made a fool of a man, there’s a woman who’s made a man of a fool. Having seen Neil LaBute’s The Shape of Things, we now know it’s possible to do both simultaneously. By now, LaBute, a spellbinding and improbably modern Mormon […]

It’s the one thing dance-goers always love about January: Congress is back in session, at long last. No, not the deliberative bodies some 300 miles north by northeast of here. We refer instead to the contemplative, performative–and, above all, kinetic–bodies which convene this weekend in Raleigh at Meredith College. It’s the North Carolina Dance Festival, […]