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Hi! Happy weekend.
How’re y’all? I’m tired of the rain, and so is my dog, who has been on a walk strike since the last bout of bad thunderstorms, when her thunder jacket proved insufficient. Sun soon, please!
One sunny event, at least, is RECITAL, the subject of this week’s cover story. The three-night show is pretty much what it sounds like: A recital for adults, or, as dancer Chris Strauss, who runs the show alongside co-founder Alyssa Noble says, a repository for “working professional artists making the things that may not be considered, like, capital A art, but that brought them a lot of joy?’”
Think serious-minded dancers letting loose, reenactments of Britney Spears’ “Oops, I Did It Again” video, contemporary clowning, and jazz hands. It was a delight to talk to a handful of participants who voiced how wonderful it is to have a space where genres and performance world expectations break down and artists can make what they want.
RECITAL runs at Barriskill Dance Theatre School June 5-7. Read the story here.
More INDY stories below, along with a few links from around the web. Thanks for reading!
Mauri Connors and Silvia Sheffield at the 2022 RECITAL. Photo courtesy of Bull City Photography. Read the story here.
elsewhere in the culture section
This week’s INDY Selects include an apocalypse-themed event, featuring a sludge metal band (Doomsday Profit) and a Duke professor, as well as a storytelling event with a unique prompt: Fish. Read all our picks here!
I spoke with David Brower, executive director of PineCone, about the new festival rising in World of Bluegrass’s stead—Raleigh Wide Open, which takes place October 3-4 and just released its lineup. Read the story here. Here’s what he has to say about square dancing, which will take place across the festival’s two evenings:
“[It’s] at the core of what PineCone was founded to do, which is, bring people together around fiddles and banjos for this shared cultural experience,” Brower says. “There are so few things in life these days where we’re actually together, moving physically with strangers—you know, reaching out to grab the hand of your neighbor and spin around a couple of times. Hopefully in time.”
A dispatch from Pints & Pups night. An interview with Denali Sai Nalamalapu, author of a new graphic novel about the Mountain Valley Pipeline. (Story courtesy of our friends at Grist/BPR!). And if you somehow missed Lena Geller’s semi-viral story on confusing yet lucrative end-of-Duke-semester dumpster diving, you’re gonna want to read it.
Finally, Glenn McDonald has thoughts on the new Tom Cruise film: “If you want something to chew on while the technobabble is recited, pay attention to the architecture of the story underneath: director and co-screenwriter Christopher McQuarrie has some things to say about fearmongering, polarization, media manipulation, and personality cults … The subtextual messaging of big dumb action movies is getting better. It can’t hurt, I suppose.”
ICYMI: Songs about “King Trump.” Talking about fireflies with Georgeann Eubanks. And Lunch Money: Apex edition.
out and about in the triangle
A few links from around the Triangle: An interview with local band Private Cathedral. The lowdown on NCMA’s summer expansion plans. Spots where you can still go pick strawberries. This exhibition (opening tonight!) looks good. Raleigh restaurant owners are teaming up for a new project.
out and about in the world
A few links from around the world: A (long!) Oxford American profile of Waxahatchee. In New York Magazine, Mahmoud Khalil’s wife Noor Abdalla on her first month of single parenthood. A beautiful essay on Hurricane Helene and mothering “at the end of the world” in the Bitter Southerner. “Confronting History, Family and Race on a Road Trip to New Orleans” in the New York Times.
— Sarah Edwards —
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