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Eleanor Polak |
Jun 19, 2024 9:13 am
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Eleanor Polak photo
Brain Robinson: “Everyone should have the experience to be creative and test the waters."
When Brian Robinson entered the side room of Never Ending Books, he greeted everyone seated there as if they were old friends, and most of them probably were. Robinson’s weekly Tuesday night Open Mic Surgery event, a poetry open mic, is all about fostering community and poets building each other up, not just as poets, but as friends.
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Laura Glesby |
Jun 18, 2024 2:09 pm
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Laura Glesby photo
Waiting for a pie from Sally's on Wooster St. ...
... as, right around the corner, Mykala Grace grabs two iced teas for maximum hydration at DESK's drop-in center.
Two lines that never meet form around lunchtime on one Wooster Square block: one for Downtown Evening Soup Kitchen’s drop-in center, the other for the world-famous Sally’s pizzeria.
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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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Eleanor Polak |
Jun 17, 2024 1:26 pm
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Eamon Linehan (Free Artist Production)
Wadada Leo Smith: “I was born in Mississippi where the sunrise comes out of the ground."
Creative Musicians Improvisors Forum (CMIF) co-founder Wadada Leo Smith kept the audience at Firehouse 12 on Saturday enraptured as he detailed a life rooted in musical history, from Mississippi to California to Chicago to Europe to New Haven.
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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 14, 2024 9:23 am
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Brian Slattery photo
Brightening the dark at Never Ending Books.
Stan Nishimura announced his entrance with a fanfare from his trombone. Paul McGuire, on saxophone, answered with a wail. For a moment they made a game of matching notes and unmatching them. Then they moved into playing off one another, supporting one another, but breathing together, starting and ending their phrases together, turning the movement of air in and out of their lungs into their own rhythm section.
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Thomas Breen |
Jun 13, 2024 12:27 pm
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Chia-Yu Joy Lu bowed a pastoral landscape into being — a gently sloping grassy expanse with a big sky and low horizon — when, suddenly, her right hand let loose a run of clipped, staccato notes, horses’ hooves running wild across the Green.
Lu offered that transporting musical experience for several dozen onlookers Thursday morning during a press conference celebrating Friday’s start of the 29th annual International Festival of Arts & Ideas.
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Arthur Delot-Vilain |
Jun 13, 2024 11:27 am
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Arthur Delot-Vilain photo
Co-owner Paul Crosby: "The dirty chai is a crowd favorite."
After eight years of slinging coffee on the streets of New Haven, the Jitter Bus has brought their dirty chais and espressos to a newly opened brick-and-mortar store on the northern end of Wooster Square.
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Brian Slattery |
Jun 13, 2024 9:06 am
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Brian Slattery Photos
Rocking hard from Australia to Hamden.
“Is anyone in love in the audience?” G Flip asked the packed house at a sold-out show at Space Ballroom on Wednesday night. There were a few vigorous nods, and then someone said the obvious; they were in love with G Flip.
“Thank you for coming!” G Flip said.
“Thank you for being here!” the audience member responded.
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Thomas Breen |
Jun 12, 2024 2:00 pm
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Thomas Breen photo
Youth & Rec’s Gwen Williams and Ronnie Huggins, ready for summer.
More than 700 young New Haveners have above-minimum-wage jobs waiting for them this summer if they accept employment offers from the city’s youth and rec department — thanks to a recent bump in funding for the city’s Youth @ Work program.
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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.
Four years to the month after hundreds of people filled Wooster Square Park to cheer and jeer at the removal of the Christopher Columbus statue, neighbors and politicians and dignitaries returned — to applaud the installation of a new monument honoring the city’s Italian-American immigrant experience.
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Mark Oppenheimer |
Jun 10, 2024 9:54 am
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John Kritzman Photo
Bleachers.
Milling around the floor-level seating area at the Westville Music Bowl on Friday night, I had no particular idea what I was in for. I had come to review a show by Bleachers, the six-piece band conceived, fronted, conducted, and in every way emceed by Jack Antonoff, the producer and songwriter responsible for approximately 63.4 percent of the songs inflicted on me by Top 40 radio, including large chunks of the catalogues of Taylor Swift, Lana Del Rey, Lorde, Kendrick Lamar, and Carly Rae Jepsen. He is also an alumnus of the band Fun. (period intended), for whom he co-wrote the unbelievably catchy 2012 song “Some Nights.”
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Eleanor Polak |
Jun 10, 2024 9:41 am
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Eleanor Polak photos
Lynette Devore and Lisa Bellamy Fluker (below) at Riverfest.
The June sunlight sparkled off the smooth waters of the Quinnipiac River beside the Quinnipiac River Marina in Fair Haven, where people of all ages gathered to participate in the Quinnipiac Riverfest this Saturday.
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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.
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Allan Appel |
Jun 10, 2024 9:23 am
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Allan Appel Photo
Fiona Vernal (center) with Andy Horowitz and Jewish Historical Society's Michael Dimenstein at Sunday's oral history workshop.
Hillhouse High School Jewish student Sydney Bruskin on a dare from his pals consumed his first ham sandwich in the school’s cafeteria in the 1930s, and he not only was not struck down by God, he survived very nicely.
The statue of Christopher Columbus that for many years stood on a stone plinth in Wooster Square Park was a source of Italian-American pride, an affront to Native Americans and others, and a flashpoint for conflicts over fallen heroes of the past.
Today, hopefully, a new era of peaceful coexistence and mutual respect will begin with the official dedication of a new monument in Wooster Square.
Wally's Teo Hernandez, Lucas Hernandez, and Alex Blair perform at WNHH FM.
“Everything’s meant to be broken / Everything’s meant to pass …”
Alex Blair wrote those words back in junior high or high school; he’s not sure of the exact year, but he knows his heart was broken.
A decade or so later, he was singing those words with brothers Teo and Lucas Hernandez, sliding into pitch-perfect harmony they’ve honed since those school days.
After singing the chorus to the song, called “Hiding Behind The Moon,” Blair, on his Ovation guitar, and Teo, on his Martin, added a newfound twist: a chromatic descent influenced by Blair’s newfound interest in Bossa Nova music.
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Eleanor Polak |
Jun 7, 2024 9:15 am
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Eleanor Polak photos
Peter Bonadies and Gateway students Elisabeth Krogh and Ariana Silva, at work making art for ...
Eleanor Polak photo
... 101 College St. The mural will be where the wooden slats are.
On the third floor of Gateway Community College, eight students were hard at work with sandpaper, paint, and screwdrivers.
Their project: to build a pair of murals to hang on facades outside the 101 College St. bioscience building on the rise at MLK Boulevard, College Street, South Frontage Road, and Temple Street.
Artists Peter Bonadies and Vladamir Shpitalnik led the class to make art pieces that represented creativity, community, and giving back to the people of New Haven.
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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.
