Category: Features

Photo courtesy of National Water Dance
Dance Features Previews

The National Water Dance

Rita Algorri April 10, 2014 No Comments

A typical concert dance performance does not usually conjure up thoughts of social justice and governmental reform. At first glance, dance and politics might not seem to go together. That is not to say that the art form is entirely apolitical – different genres of art can certainly serve as a persuasive medium for declaring political statements. From a historical perspective, analysis of the arts can be used to study social change and political reform, and dance is no exception to this.

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Photo by John Donges
Features Previews Theater

John Donges Photographs THREE DAYS OF RAIN (Quince): A Double Assignment

John Donges April 6, 2014 No Comments

In shooting Richard Greenberg’s THREE DAYS OF RAIN, my first photographic challenge was to capture the unique structure of the play: the first act is set in 1995 and involves a brother/sister and their old friend – the son of their father’s architecture partner and oldest friend. In Act II, the three actors play the parents of their Act I characters. So it was a dual challenge to photograph basically two casts instead of one, and to try and paint a visual portrait of what is both similar and different between each character and his/her parent, and to portray the look of two very different decades.

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Incubator artist R. Eric Thomas.
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NOTES from the INCUBATOR (Simpatico): Entry Two: Getting So Frustrated

R. Eric Thomas March 26, 2014 No Comments

My mother tells a story about a time when I was young—3-years-old or 4—and I was trying desperately to get the swing I was seated on moving. My little legs kicked and kicked but I stayed motionless. After a minute or two, an adult came over and gave me a push and that’s all it took. I caught the momentum and I was swinging! As she tells it, I turned to the little boy on the swing next to mine and exclaimed in a giddy, high-pitched voice “I was getting so frustrated! Were you getting frustrated, too, Brooksie? I was getting so frustrated!”

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NOTES from the INCUBATOR (SIMPATICO): Entry One: The Collective Spirit

Meredith Sonnen March 18, 2014 1 Comment

Writing this play has been hard. It feels like squinting into the distance at an object that I think I should be identifiable but is just too blurry. Luckily, I have a cohort on this trek. If you met Lena (Barnard) and I, it would feel a lot like an episode of Gilmore Girls or the West Wing. We talk over each other and make obscure references and laugh at inside jokes that no one else gets. Being around Lena makes me feel entirely secure. I can be myself with her. I like to think the feeling is mutual. Who else will get all her Julie Andrews references?

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The fault, dear Brutus, is Super Racism: Makoto Hirano Criticizes Lantern’s Julius Caesar

Christopher Munden March 9, 2014 3 Comments

“Will it be in yellow face,” my friend asked when I told him about Lantern Theater Company’s decision to stage Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar in feudal Japan, when what the meant was “in kimonos with some Japanese screens and music” seemed somehow culturally tone deaf.

View More The fault, dear Brutus, is Super Racism: Makoto Hirano Criticizes Lantern’s Julius Caesar
Joe Guzmán and Forrest McClendon in THE TRAGEDY OF JULIUS CAESAR at the Lantern, with set design by Meghan Jones (Photo credit: Mark Garvin)
Features Previews Theater

On the Universality of Shakespeare: Roman History through a Shoji Screen in the Lantern’s THE TRAGEDY OF JULIUS CAESAR

Debra Miller February 13, 2014 1 Comment

Director Charles McMahon, founding artistic director of the Lantern Theater Company, asserts that all of Shakespeare’s plays, whenever or wherever they’re set, are in fact observations about contemporary England. By shifting the locales to places outside of his homeland.

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Dance Features Theater

You’re Probably Missing Out: A tour of Kensington’s performance spaces

Julius Ferraro January 21, 2014 No Comments

The performance spaces which have made Kensington their home (Walking Fish Theatre, Hella Fresh, Mascher Space, and fidgetspace) are remote, both financially and physically, from the city, yet still close enough to converse artistically with downtown venues and even to attract funding.

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Dance Features

BalletX’s Matthew Neenan downshifts for THERE I WAS

Lewis Whittington for The Dance Journal November 16, 2013 No Comments

Earlier this month BalletX dancers had their pointe shoes ready for a rehearsal for Matthew Neenan’s ballet There I Was. The piece showcases how inventive, within and out of specific pointe shoe classicism, Neenan can be. Even though it is weeks before the opening There I Was looks ready, Neenan only moved around to cue a specific music change, apologizing to the dancers for the pause.

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