Byron Woods

I’ve basically learned to avoid those “preview” performances some companies schedule during final dress rehearsal, the night before a show opens to the public. From my own years of experience in the theater, productions almost invariably need every night of rehearsal–and then some–to iron out problems and make fundamental discoveries about characters and script. Based […]

For years John Rosemond, that joyless syndicated columnist on parenting, has basically given the same crotchety, one-size-fits-all advice: Adults are supposed to be grim, and no matter the question, children should always be told “no.” The sole performance Sunday afternoon of Woven, dancer-choreographer Rachel Brooker’s independent spring dance invitational at Carrboro’s ArtsCenter, has me re-examining […]

It doesn’t matter how great an individual work of art actually is. Not if the paper’s weak, or its fibers are high in acid content. Not if the canvas or the paint’s inferior. The magnetic coating on a thin black strip of tape doesn’t begin to care about the genius of a singer on an […]

When Laurie Anderson says “I’m haunted by a million things,” believe her. In a sense, her latest solo performance, Happiness, is a collection of really good ghost stories. But don’t be misled here–hers don’t traffic in hoary old clichés of white sheets, disturbed graves, and suddenly abandoned houses. Instead, call them postmodern ghost stories. In […]

There are debts the living owe the dead. A number of them involve documentation. On a Kernersville school bus, a Native American girl solemnly holds a photograph picturing a man in a coffin. “Look,” she says. “This is my father.” A mother videotapes her son, a member of the Almighty Latin Kings, as he dies […]

You could almost say it comes with being a city of medicine, a place with a history of healing. You get to be known as the City of the Second Opinion, the City of the Second Chance–both precious, life-saving commodities, in their turn. As the heart’s most desperate hopes take on the consistency of iron, […]

Carlota Santana laughs demurely when asked if she was surprised when back-to-back sold-out houses for Flamenco Vivo, her company’s first performance at Duke last year, introduced jaded regional dance lovers to the kind of behavior normally reserved for athletic competitions. On two cold, damp nights last March, patrons long accustomed to casually picking up dance […]

Yes, dancers and choreographers sometimes pool their resources to rent rehearsal space and share the burden of putting on a show. But there’s a lot more to a dance collective than that. Its members are gambling on synergy. They’re speculating that a configuration of multi-talented people will result in cataclysm, not gridlock; that hive mind […]