tedmills

This man can move: Savion Glover at Lobero

November 18, 2003August 21, 2014 tedmills Leave a comment

Tap-dancing wonder Savion Glover brings out his dancing art from somewhere deep within his thin frame. Like a Rasta shaman, he conjures multilayered syncopation, pushing and pulling the beat, compressing and exploding over and over into showers of rapid-fire foot movements. At nearly 90 minutes of dancing with only a short break, Mr. Glover thrilled the Lobero audience on Sunday night in a personal, packed show.

He has been amazing theatergoers since he was 12, and his tour brings a four-piece jazz ensemble along with a young protégé called Cartier for a deep examination of tap-dancing. Whereas traditional tap-dancers coast along on top of the music, with gaps left by the band for the dancer to fill, Mr. Glover is the fifth instrument.

Sacred Revolutions: St. Petersburg Choir Brings Rachmaninoff’s Vespers to America

November 14, 2003August 27, 2014 tedmills Leave a comment

It’s taken conductor Vladislav Chernushenko 25 years to get to the United States to tour. Originally, the group he heads-the St. Petersburg State Academic Capella Choir-was scheduled to make their first American tour back in 1978. “The contract was signed,” he says, “And then it didn’t happen for political reasons.”

The history of the St. Petersburg choir can be charted out along centuries of political reasons, events, and decisions, yet their music has kept its close ties to the spiritual. One of the world’s oldest choirs, the group formed in Moscow in 1479 for the express purpose of accompanying Tsar Ivan III wherever he went, celebrating mass or entertaining. Ivan the Terrible and Peter the Great both sang in choir at certain points. In 1703, the choir sang at the inauguration of St. Petersburg a major event in the choir’s history, and there they remained. In 1837, the great Russian composer Mikhail Glinka became Kapellmeister, and wrote many operatic works expressly for the choir. During the Communist Revolution the choir’s sacred music fell out of favor, but the group continued, under the name the Popular Academic Chorus, and performed works by Shostakovich, Kabalevsky, and Prokofiev. As rules became lax, the sacred crept back in, until the coming of perestroika unleashed the history of sacred Russian composers and work back into the repertoire.

Sandoval’s Slight Return: Second Symphony concert features a reconfigured menu

November 11, 2003August 27, 2014 tedmills Leave a comment

Trumpeter Arturo Sandoval was supposed to make a welcome return to the Santa Barbara Symphony Saturday night, opening with a pleasant Haydn concerto and closing with a Glière concerto. Somewhere along the way, those plans got the mice-and-men treatment, and the Glière was dropped. Haydn became the finale, and a very brief Glière piece was added to the opening, allowing the beaming Sandoval to show his face and remind the audience that he was around and would be returning for the second half.

So in fact the first half of the evening became centered around Sibelius and his First Symphony in E Minor, Opus 39.

Surrealism Lives: 70 pairs of shoes filled with butter

November 10, 2003November 10, 2003 tedmills Leave a comment

This later turned out to be the remains of some art project, but still, how cool is it to come across this on a hike?

Mystery surrounds 70 pairs of shoes filled with butter in woods
By The Associated Press
(10/10/03 – STOCKHOLM, Sweden) A couple hiking in the mountains of far northern Sweden found 70 pairs of shoes, all filled with butter. Officials have no idea who put the shoes there, or why.
A provincial spokesman says the buttered footwear ranges from sneakers to boots. There are even butter-filled high heels and tap shoes. Each contains about a pound of butter.
The province spokesman says they’d like to catch the person who did it and make them clean it up. He says it’s going to create quite a mess when the butter starts to spoil.
Officials say they’ll wait for snow, so they can get a snowmobile into the area.

Dance preview: Do not drop: K. KVARNSTRÖM AND COMPANY BRING ‘FRAGILE’ GOODS TO UCSB

November 7, 2003September 9, 2014 tedmills Leave a comment

“The inspiration for this piece came from not really knowing what I wanted to do.”

Choreographer Kenneth Kvarnström is talking on the phone from his San Francisco hotel room about “Fragile,” the hour-long work from 2001 that his dance company is bringing to UCSB Campbell Hall on Wednesday.

“Fragile is how I felt,” he says. Since 1987, the Finnish-born but Stockholm-based Kvarnström has made it his company’s mission to produce one long work per year, and then tour the world with it.

One Road, Four Choices: William Soleau Brings Multifaceted Seasons to State Street Ballet

November 7, 2003August 27, 2014 tedmills Leave a comment

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I-
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
–Robert Frost, from “The Road Not Taken”

Choreographer William Soleau has been thinking about destiny and choice a lot this year as he puts the final touches to his four-act work “Seasons,” a world premiere for the opening of State Street Ballet’s tenth season.

“What if I had chosen another college?” Soleau asks, “What if I hadn’t met that one teacher? What if I had not fallen in love with that one girl?

“These ‘what if?’ questions are something everyone can relate to,” he says.

Bile is beautiful: COMEDIAN LEWIS BLACK BRINGS HIS ANGRY COMEDY TO THE ARLINGTON

November 7, 2003August 25, 2014 tedmills Leave a comment

Lewis Black has been working himself into a humorous lather for over a decade now, either in his wildly popular standup act or as part of the “news” crew at Comedy Central’s “The Daily Show With Jon Stewart,” where he lets his anger rip every week in his segment “Back in Black.”

Whether talking politics or lambasting the idiocy of the general public, Black is right on target and very, very funny. He’s been with the show since the beginning, and has watched his profile rise in the comedy world. Now he joins his cablemate Dave Attel, the hard-drinkin’, hard smokin’ host of “Insomniac,” in a double-pronged assault on the Santa Barbara psyche at Thursday night’s show at the Arlington Theatre. Black was interviewed as he was waiting for a flight to Lebanon, N.H., for a gig. This cell phone conversation took place in the midst of crying children and a persistent tannoy speaker.

Home of the Brave: “Wit” Pits Poetry Against Cancer

October 28, 2003August 25, 2014 tedmills Leave a comment

Mention people and cancer and the adjective “brave” pops up immediately. And in “Wit,” the Pulitzer Prize-winning first play from Margaret Edson, much bravery-of the theatrical kind-is on display. The playwright has decided to focus on a woman dying of cancer, spending the play in a medical center, allowing few supporting characters other than doctors, nurses, and interns. The actor (Allison Coutts-Jordan) portraying the woman Vivian Bearing, a professor in English specializing in John Donne, must achieve a delicate balance between dignity and debasement, between harshness and sentimentality. And because this terminal illness attacks such a stern taskmaster without, as we soon learn, a husband, children, friends, or loving students, the temptation for Edson to use the illness as a sort of punishment-repent, Ebenezer Scrooge!-must be resisted.

This performance, to run until Nov. 8 at SBCC’s Garvin Theater, pulls all the above off perfectly. Director Rick Mokler certainly took a chance with the play, with its many grim scenes likely to repel a number of people. Mr. Mokler also has invested in a play that relegates much of its time to a hospital bed set back in the stage. Fortunately, Ms. Coutts-Jordan handles everything with confidence-she is called on to carry the play and does so because there is no room in the character’s world for anybody else. She relishes the part and the audience is with her all the way.

Steve Jobs: Black Power Conspiracy?

October 28, 2003October 28, 2003 tedmills Leave a comment

Spike Lee, man, you were robbed again!
I have yet to hear anyone state the obvious: The whole design of Mac’s new OS X package is a blatant copy of Lee’s 1992 “Malcolm X” poster.
People: “X”?
“Panther”?
“Black…Panther”?

Is Steve Jobs making a Black Power comparison here? Look at yet another example.

You think those venetian blinds are a coincidence???

Fire on the Mountain

October 27, 2003October 27, 2003 tedmills Leave a comment

Today was such a particular day, a particular mood. We got up to find, nicely enough, that the clocks had gone back an hour, so that extra lay-in wasn’t as long as we thought. Stepped outside onto the patio and was enveloped by the heat and something else: the smell of smoke. Those two, combined with the golden hazy sunshine took me back in a Proustian moment to Japan 1995. I realised only today that a majority of my time in Japan was under a cloud of perpetual smoke.
Then I felt a bit strange, because while I was off in madeline-biscuit land, I was actually inhaling the remains of somebody’s Rancho Cucamonga/Lake Piru house.
Tonight I took part in a press conference for Michael Moore’s visit to Santa Barbara. The man filled the Arlington to the bursting point. He came late to the pre-show green room conf, but was a gracious guest, though the answers he gave to the questions mostly turned up in his lecture, line for line, joke for joke. The only thing he didn’t use was a little sneak preview of his upcoming 2004 film, “Fahrenheit 911”: I asked him about black box voting, and though he did later tell the audience about Diebold–eliciting a huge gasp from them (I guess this story is not mainstream enough yet)–he told the press that in the upcoming film, he visits the house of Diebold’s CEO.
I’m possibly going to write this up as a news feature for the Voice. We’ll see.
Finally, the air is cool and crisp tonight and is making a refreshing atmosphere for late night typing. I’m in the zone, baby! I’m ready to zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz