Category: Performing Arts

Culture Dance Performing Arts

Straight from the Can: Tin Can Studio serves up food for the soul and then some

In keeping with her art’s humble origins, Hayes and her husband Michael White Hayes drew their new art space’s moniker from a similar pool. “We were very deliberate about choosing the name Tin Can Studio. A tin can is a simple, common thing but it’s a very useful invention,” says Hayes. “It revolutionized the way people feed themselves. Tin Can Studio is like that tin can because art feeds people’s souls.”

Literature Performing Arts Theater

The Show Must Go On, Part 2: The Story We Tell Ourselves

I’ve signed up to do a storytelling show, though I’m not a natural storyteller. I pitched my story because being in a show sounds like fun. Because oral storytelling is a skill that I want to learn as a writer. Because I used to be a theater kid. And because as much as being in front of an audience terrifies me, I still love to perform. Then, predictably, stage fright sets in.

Theater

Death, Sex: Election Season

In an espoused effort to direct attention to the talents of playwrights, the nine ten-minute plays that comprise Balagan Theatre’s shorts festival, Death, Sex: Election Season, draw from one pool of eleven actors, each of whom portrays several roles in the evening. Similarly, in further textual emphasis, all shows are directed by either Shawn Belyea or Jake Groshong, reining the evening’s offerings into a shared sensibility.

Performing Arts

The Working Artist: Spotlight on The Cabiri—Phase 2

Even those who “support” the arts often treat the making of art like an optional activity in life, something to be reserved for the gifted. It isn’t. Art is not just about being crazy, weird, incoherent, and incomprehensible while expecting money for it. Being an artist requires massive amounts of self-imposed dirty work alternating with almost palpable tedium. This is for all those who do the dirty jobs.

Dance

Mark Haim’s X2: Remarks in passing

I quite liked the first half of Mark Haim’s X2 at On the Boards. It is an inventive use of space and time all linked by Louis Andriessen’s music De Tijd (Time), inspired as much by the Confessions of St. Augustine (which form its text) as by Morton Feldman. I’m much less keen on the second piece.