The senior living community known as The Towers at Tower Lane will be receiving $20 million to improve conditions and reach broader environmental goals, thanks to HUD’s Green and Resilient Retrofit Program (GRRP).
No one rushing by the commerce-crossroads of Church and Elm Streets could hear the Sean Paul beats coursing through the headphones of a woman commanding the corner as her stage. They could see her hips keeping the beat — and keeping a hula hoop suspended above the sidewalk.
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Karen Ponzio |
Jun 27, 2024 10:19 am
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Meredith Truax Photo
Samara Joy.
Samara Joy wowed the crowd at College Street Music Hall Wednesday night with her powerhouse vocal stylings as part of the International Festival of Arts and Ideas. A rising star in the jazz world who has already won three Grammys, including 2023’s Best New Artist, she offered 90 minutes of musical magic, calling to mind the classic jazz vocalists who came before her but wholly commanding the stage with her own range and flair for making the personal universal through songs and stories.
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Eleanor Polak |
Jun 27, 2024 9:23 am
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Eleanor Polak photo
CONTRA-TIEMPO's Ruby Morales: "We’re gonna practice ancestral technologies.”
Bennie Morris was not having a good day. Somebody had hacked his bank account, and he was on the way back from the bank to cancel any outgoing checks. Not to mention, it was 88 — and felt like 92 — degrees out, and he had to walk through the New Haven Green under the burning sun, wearing a full suit.
But then Morris passed the Arts and Ideas tent where CONTRA-TIEMPO, an activist dance theater, was holding a dance workshop in anticipation of its show, ¡AZUCAR!, this weekend. As he was about to walk right on by, somebody waved him over and invited him to join. Suddenly, Morris’s day changed drastically for the better.
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Brian Slattery |
Jun 26, 2024 11:08 am
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Brian Slattery Photos
Sherry Pocknett: "We've been here for 12,000 years and we're not going anywhere."
Catching and cleaning eels with relatives. Learning about the migratory patterns of birds and fish. Deciding that snapping turtle soup might be your favorite dish.
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Jabez Choi |
Jun 25, 2024 11:01 am
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Closing up, Tuesday morning: "We built power in our movement."
Paul Bass Photos
A tent encampment on the Green grew overnight — and then disbanded of its own accord Tuesday morning, with the group’s organizers heralding the outing as a success for drawing attention to the plight of homelessness.
Twelve tents popped up on the Green Monday evening — as part of a rescheduled overnight protest against past clearings of homeless encampments, and in support of the rights of the unhoused.
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Eleanor Polak |
Jun 24, 2024 9:21 am
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Contributed photo
The 7 Fingers in "Dual Reality."
The 7 Fingers, an acrobatic and theatrical company, was about to begin its performance of Arts & Ideas’ Duel Reality, a circus-like retelling of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, when a fight appeared to break out in the audience.
The ushers had split the crowd down the middle and given half the attendees a red wristband while the other half received blue. The problem: two audience members noticed that a third “audience member” was seated in the wrong section, wearing a blue wristband in the red half. They asked him to move. He resisted. Just as the audience started to get nervous that a real physical altercation was occurring, all would-be combatants ran up onto the stage. The show had already begun.
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Brian Slattery |
Jun 24, 2024 9:05 am
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Brian Slattery Photos
Agnete Wisti Lassen and Mohamad Hafez: "I cannot think of a more fulfilling engagement."
Mohamad Hafez
Eternal Cities.
“I don’t like to speak,” artist Mohamad Hafez said to a packed audience at the Peabody Museum on Friday night. Since he became a public artist, he said, “I wanted my art to speak on my behalf,” and “I love it when institutions take the artwork, and they talk.”
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Brian Slattery |
Jun 21, 2024 8:17 am
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Haitian-American band Jo. L. & Friends started their Thursday evening set on the Green with a barrage of drums, tight and pounding beats. An hour and a half later, the Ukrainian band DakhaBrakha announced its presence on the stage by ripping out rhythms on multiple drums.
Both musical gestures had the same effect. They were calls to gather. They set the tone for each band’s set. And they were a promise, that each band would stir the feet and heart, even as the sources of their musical traditions were over 5,000 miles apart.
Emerson tenants Kolokotronis, Blau, Perez, and Hinds: Unionized, and ready to fight lease-non-renewal notices.
The new landlord of a leak-damaged downtown apartment complex has told the building’s unionized renters that their leases won’t be renewed — leaving some scrambling to figure out where they’ll live next as soon as this summer.
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Eleanor Polak |
Jun 18, 2024 9:17 am
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What would you do to keep your reality intact? This was the question posed by composer, conductor, and jazz pianist Kevin Harris to a crowd of hundreds gathered in the Beinecke Library on Monday. By the light of illuminated bookshelves, New Haveners gathered to share in a musical and educational experience, inspired by the work of writer and activist James Baldwin and part of the International Festival of Arts & Ideas.
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Laura Glesby |
Jun 17, 2024 10:56 am
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Laura Glesby Photo
DESK director Werlin (center): Guided by "accessibility."
In order to operate a soon-to-be-renovated four-story hub of meals, healthcare, and gathering for unhoused clients, Downtown Evening Soup Kitchen (DESK) is going to need an elevator.
And in order to dig an elevator shaft, the organization first needs to shore up the foundation of the parking garage next door.
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Karen Ponzio |
Jun 17, 2024 9:20 am
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Reena Esmail.
A tapping of a tabla, a voice lifting up Hindi poetry, a striking of a cymbal, a chorale joined in harmony: all came together to evoke the image of water and the multitude of ways it affects our lives in Reena Esmail’s Malhaar: A Requiem for Water, performed at Albert Arnold Sprague Memorial Hall early Saturday evening as part of the International Festival of Arts and Ideas.
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Brian Slattery |
Jun 17, 2024 9:17 am
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A pairing of two bands steeped in traditional music — Cécilia and the Ebony Hillbillies — showed the ways in which having deep roots in a particular musical style can lead to grounded explorations elsewhere, while also getting audiences out of their chairs and onto their dancing feet, during a Sunday afternoon concert on the Green as part of the opening weekend of Arts & Ideas.
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Eleanor Polak |
Jun 17, 2024 9:11 am
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Shin Kurokawa Photos
Compagnia de’ Colombari's King Lear.
Compagnia de’ Colombari’s production of King Lear at University Theatre — whose first performance was part of Friday night’s big kickoff for the International Festival of Arts and Ideas — doesn’t start, so much as the audience blinks and then it’s happening.
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Brian Slattery |
Jun 12, 2024 9:12 am
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The pieces at first look just like abstract collages, but soon, fragments of meaning emerge. The shape of lips. A pattern of shadows. Finally, letters and words, but not enough of them to know exactly what they say, and certainly not enough to know where they’re from. The meaning and the source have been cut away, and they’re now out of reach. The viewer has to look to the accompanying labels to learn anything. It turns out the piece on the left is taken from Why We Can’t Wait, by Martin Luther King, Jr., and the one on the right is from The Bluest Eye, by Toni Morrison. King’s book was banned in South Africa during apartheid. The Bluest Eye had been banned from schools and libraries in the past few years in over 20 states — including Connecticut.
An Edgewood-based landlord has purchased a church-affiliated apartment building downtown for $2.7 million — leaving the property’s tenants to wonder whether the new owner will be any better than the last at promptly repairing leak-damaged rental units.
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Karen Ponzio |
Jun 10, 2024 9:34 am
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Robert Eddy Photo
Composer Gwyneth Walker.
Sunday afternoon saw a wealth of appreciative music fans fill Woolsey Hall for the New Haven Chorale’s season finale that was also part of the International Festival of Arts and Ideas. Its program filled heads and hearts with a resplendent array of selections that focused on fond memories, gratitude for those memories as well as the present moment, and an offering of comfort and peace for those of us in the here and now, even as we grapple with grief and pain.
Lattes on tap are coming to Church Street — as a new coffee shop plans to fill a long-empty groundfloor commercial space that was vacated by Starbucks four years ago.
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Brian Slattery |
Jun 6, 2024 9:15 am
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Curtis Brown Photography
The photo is of Adil Mansoor when he was a child, in Pakistan. The scene was a family celebration, and a relative, on a lark, dressed the boy in a fine women’s gown. The adult Mansoor regards the picture from a few feet — and a few decades — away.
He notes the irony that this photograph perhaps best represents the fullness of who he is, as a queer South Asian man, proud of who he is and where he’s from. The irony lies in the fact that he has perhaps never been able to fully be who he is since that moment. Especially for his mother.
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Dereen Shirnekhi |
May 30, 2024 3:15 pm
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Dereen Shirnekhi photos
Jamal Robinson (center) joined by wife Jess Robinson and team (left) and economic development official Carlos Eyzaguirre, Mayor Justin Elicker, cultural affairs chief Adriane Jefferson, and Beachworld Senior VP Dan DeStefano (right).
Outdoor salsa nights, craft beers, and live music are coming to a long-empty lot in downtown New Haven, thanks to the efforts of a local innovator who is hoping to showcase Black and Brown brewers.
