Fall Dance Concert full of novel choreography, energy
Three female dancers, all in white, filtered out onto the bare stage of Ashamu Dance Studio.
Three female dancers, all in white, filtered out onto the bare stage of Ashamu Dance Studio.
A student artwork at the Rhode Island School of Design that included a Sarah Palin-themed pornographic video has inspired a public discussion on issues of creative freedom and artistic ethics. Yesterday, 75 RISD community members attended a forum to discuss last week’s unplugging of the video and its implications.
If not for the carpeted coziness of the exhibition space, visitors to the Sarah Doyle Women’s Center Gallery this month might get the sense that they have wandered into an auto repair shop from another planet. The gallery’s current show, “Congested Highway,” with works by Massachusetts-based artist Dana Filibert, features sculptures that evoke automobile parts while also assuming a strange, organic quality of their own.
Writer and journalist Ariel Sabar ’93 read from his new book “My Father’s Paradise” in the Brown Bookstore Thursday afternoon. The former Providence Journal reporter discussed the history of the Jewish presence in Iraq and his quest to reconnect with his father, a Jew born in Kurdistan.
Tom Stoppard’s 1993 play “Arcadia” is a comedy of manners set in England at the turn of the 19th century. It’s also a present-day drama about the surprising thrills and perils of historical research. It’s about Lord Byron, iterative algebra, mortality and the second law of thermodynamics.
Today: “Political Art and Its Paradoxes: A Symposium,” presented by the Cogut Center for the Humanities in conjunction with the exhibition “Views and Re-Views: Soviet Political Posters and Cartoons.” Featuring Profs. Svetlana Boym (Harvard), Devin Fore (Princeton and the American Academy in Berlin), and Christina Kiaer (Northwestern).
The latest installment in the Contemporary Writers Reading Series featured poetry that charms in two languages. Last night, in the McCormack Family Theater, poet Jan Wagner read a selection of his works in the original German. He shared the stage with Forrest Gander, professor of literary arts and interim director of the program, who read English versions of the same poems by a number of translators, including himself.
Though it is an acceptable trick for most classical vocalists to sacrifice word clarity for musical expression, it is not the case for the art songs of late 19th-century French composers like Claude Debussy and Gabriel Faure.
“Chihuly at RISD,” the first show in the Rhode Island School of Design Museum’s Special Exhibitions Gallery at the new Chace Center, makes loud visual statements but fails to say anything new. On Wednesday, glass artist Dale Chihuly, a 1968 RISD graduate, led some 50 museum officials and members of the press on a preview tour of the show, which officially opens Saturday.
The Rhode Island School of Design must “rise to the challenge” of the digital era “because we can,” said John Maeda, former professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, during his inaugural address Friday as the 16th president of RISD.