Performance Preview
Desert Dancing
VSA’s regional series returns with Whitman, war and psychology
Meshi Chavez moved to Portland, Ore., at the age of 18. Sixteen years later, he’s returning with We Two Boys to Wild Dancing West, VSA North Fourth Art Center’s contemporary dance festival. Now in its seventh year, Wild Dancing West is “the sibling of Global DanceFest,” says Kearny, referring to VSA’s international spectacle that began in 2001. After celebrating dance from around the world, creators decided “it was important to also focus on contemporary dance happening in our region,” she says.
Book Review
Show Me the Way to Go Home
Toni Morrison’s tale of siblings searching for solace has character but lacks resolution
Like pretty much everything else she's written, Morrison's most recent novel is a work of historical fiction deeply ingrained in social injustices. Home’s story revolves around brother and sister Frank and Ycidra (aka "Cee") Money, who grew up in the destitute shantytown of Lotus, Ga. It was a place where, as Frank says in one of the book's many internal monologues, "There was no goal other than breathing, nothing to win and, save for somebody else's quiet death, nothing to survive or worth surviving for."
Courtesy of Richard Levy Gallery
Culture Shock
Last Saturday Arts Crawl
John Chervinsky's Frames of Reference is an exquisite contemplation on the interplay between scientific principles and their worldly manifestations. In one of the series' subsets, Studio Physics, the Harvard applied physics professor went to great lengths for his final photographic prints. Chervinsky set up studio still lifes, then photographed portions of them. He mailed those photos to a painting factory in China and incorporated the reproductions of his photos by anonymous artists back into the still lifes. Elements of decay (a bowl of rotten bananas half covered by a painted “before” version of the ripe fruit) exhibit the enigma of impermanence in a visually straightforward way.
