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Karen Ponzio |
May 8, 2024 8:04 am
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A still from The Truman Show.
What would it feel like to suspect that your whole life was a lie? Actor Jim Carrey famously plays out that scenario in a comedic-dramatic-dystopian-existential tour de force as Truman Burbank, the star of The Truman Show — both the film and the TV show within the film that follows his character’s life on a 24/7 live feed, unbeknownst to him until, well, it isn’t. The 1998 film, screened Tuesday evening, was the first in Best Video Film and Cultural Center’s May screening series, which this month will feature a retrospective of Carrey’s career.
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Brian Slattery |
May 7, 2024 11:05 am
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Dexter Singleton and Austin Dean Ashford.
It was just a read-through of a scene, without a costume or stage blocking, but the switches in writer and actor Austin Dean Ashford’s tone of voice were more than enough to convey switches in character: a wistful, optimistic young teacher, and an older, weathered but hopeful mentor. Later on in the reading, a harried school principal, and four students with whom that young teacher was going to have to prove himself. Director Dexter Singleton listened intently, and took notes.
The Bitsie Clark Fund for Artists, dedicated to enriching Greater New Haven by investing in its artists, has announced plans for its 2024 award process. The Bitsie Fund will award two $5,000 grants this year.
One will again be awarded to a Black artist; the other will be open to any artist. The Bitsie Fund Advisory Board explains: “We remain committed to being more intentional about ensuring that our grants are accessible to Black artists.”
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Brian Slattery |
May 6, 2024 9:35 am
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More music. More vendors. More sunshine.
Grand Avenue in front of Fair Haven School closed on Saturday to accommodate a bigger and more boisterous Fair Haven Day, as the neighborhood celebration — part of the International Festival of Arts and Ideas and a product of a broad, neighborhood-wide coalition — marked its second year post-pandemic shutdown and hearkened back to Fair Haven festivals of a generation ago.
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Karen Ponzio |
May 6, 2024 7:57 am
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The Decemberists' Colin Meloy ...
... and opening act Ratboys, at College St. Music Hall.
The Decemberists brought May to a magnificent start on Saturday night when they returned to College Street Music Hall for the fourth show of their 2024 A Peaceable Kingdom North American tour.
Fans filled the room from floor to balcony, up the stairs and to the edges of the stage barrier, to bask in the multicolored hues of the lights and lofty sounds of some of their favorites, mixed in with new material from the band’s aptly titled upcoming album As It Ever Was, So It Will Be Again.
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Donald Brown |
May 6, 2024 7:43 am
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T. Charles Erickson Photos
Zheng and Shih.
“Sometimes the memory is more sad than the forgetting.” Gee (David Shih) is an ailing man, plagued by forgetting, when he says this to a pregnant woman named Yuen (Joyce Meimei Zheng) in Lloyd Suh’s The Far Country, playing through May 18 at Yale Repertory Theatre, directed by Ralph B. Peña.
The scene is 1930s San Francisco, and Yuen is married to Moon Gyet (Hao Feng), who Gee brought from Hoisan, their native county in China, claiming him as his son for immigration — and exploitation — purposes. The textures of memory and forgetting suggest the vast scope of the hardships, fears, lies, and hopes for the future of Chinese immigrants to the U.S. from 1909 to 1930 in Suh’s ambitious, episodic play.
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Brian Slattery |
May 3, 2024 8:41 am
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Melida McKenzie-Alford
From Across the Waters.
From its subject to its materials to its execution, Melida McKenzie-Alford’s From Across the Waters partakes of the aesthetic and techniques of traditional African art, hearkening back to the origins of culture. But in the end it’s the overall shape of the piece (which isn’t and perhaps can’t be captured in a photograph) that draws the viewer’s attention. It starts high on the wall and cascades downward, a serene waterfall.
In the place where it’s currently hung at Known, on the fourth floor of the Palladium Building at 139 Orange St., it bids the viewer to stop for a moment and take a minute for contemplation. Which, as it turns out, is part of the point.
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Brian Slattery |
May 2, 2024 10:33 am
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Moshopefoluwa "MO" Olagunju
Blue (Affection).
The figure stares out from the canvas, her pose ambiguous. Does it connote strength or vulnerability? Or both? Something more? There’s a sense of intrusion, of the viewer having discovered her. But the painter insures that we, the viewers, come bearing an offering; those are our hands in the lower part of the canvas. But still more is afoot. The blue rope twining out from the figure are intestines, but she’s none the worse for losing them. All of the elements in Blue (Affection) are potent images, but their relationships to one another aren’t clear. Meaning shifts as we construct it.
The painting, by Moshopefoluwa “MO” Olanguju, is part of a larger series of artworks “designed to evoke varied narrative interpretations based on the arrangement of surrounding paintings,” MO writes. “Throughout the series, roses and guts emerge as recurring motifs, contributing to a thematic continuity within the narrative.”
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Karen Ponzio |
May 1, 2024 11:47 am
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Brian Meacham and student archivists.
Yale Film Archive turned one of its screening events over to students Tuesday night as members of the Spring 2024 Film and Media Studies 604 class shared their archivist projects — which included everything from a not-so-silent Dutch short that focused on the rain to a Looney Tunes cartoon that focused on a not-so-cool cat — with a room full of appreciative movie fans.
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Brian Slattery |
May 1, 2024 8:10 am
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Orpheus is smitten with Eurydice before they even speak. Hermes, Orpheus’s wingman, helps him work up his courage to ask her out. “Orpheus,” he warns, “don’t come on too strong.”
Orpheus extends his hand to Eurydice, offers flowers. “Come home with me,” he says, to audience laughter. “Who are you?” Eurydice responds. “The man who’s gonna marry you. I’m Orpheus,” he says.
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Donald Brown |
Apr 30, 2024 12:24 pm
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Stagger.
A photographer encountering the supernatural. Forty days of rain after the loss of a son. A six-decade love note to Hong Kong. According to playwright Danielle Stagger, the Carlotta Festival of New Plays 2024 — running May 2 to May 10 at the Iseman Theatre on Chapel Street — features three “funky plays” that are “not what you might imagine coming from Yale playwriting.”
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Brian Slattery |
Apr 30, 2024 8:28 am
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Eva Skewes Photo
Stacey Strange, Dani Bobbi Lee, Nicholas Strange.
Exploring the malaise of being caught in travel limbo. Examining the foibles of other people and yourself, and the way they can begin to grate. Satisfying the desire to keep learning and growing as circus performers. All these factors went into Layovers, the latest show from Air Temple Arts, which will appear for two shows on May 4 at the ACESECA Arts Hall. “Though really,” said Stacey Strange, Air Temple Arts’ founder and creative director, “it was the suitcases.”
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Karen Ponzio |
Apr 29, 2024 9:42 am
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"Addiction."
The arts and sciences, the movement and stillness, the rhythm of breath and step: on Saturday afternoon, all came together in the performance space at St. Paul and St. James Episcopal Church on Olive Street for Creative Circle, a delightful dance and music performance that saw two dance companies — the New Haven-based kamrDANCE and the New York-based SYREN Modern Dance — engage each other as well as the audience in their latest works in progress.
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Dereen Shirnekhi |
Apr 26, 2024 10:05 am
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Waxahatchee at Toad's Place.
“I’ve been yours for so long / We come right back to it.”
It was a refrain I’d heard maybe hundreds of times at that point, the croon of Katie Crutchfield’s voice and the banjo backing her committed to memory. But Thursday night, as I heard it live and sang along with a crowd filling up Waxahatchee’s sold-out show at Toad’s Place, the song felt new.
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Brian Slattery |
Apr 26, 2024 8:45 am
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Goodheart, Tassi, Morosco, Power (clockwise from top left).
Theater artist Terri Power discovered Shakespeare in high school, finding Lady Macbeth “extraordinarily powerful and sexual,” she said. Their teacher asked the class to memorize passages to perform in class. Power dressed in a long black turtleneck and sweater and skirt and delivered a monologue in which Lady Macbeth taunts her spouse: “I have given suck, and know / How tender ’tis to love the babe that milks me. / I would, while it was smiling in my face, / Have plucked my nipple from his boneless gums / And dashed the brains out, had I so sworn / As you have done to this.”
Her teacher sent Power to the principal’s office, where he then argued to the principal that she should be suspended for “revealing her breast.” The principal, looking at Power’s wardrobe, wondered exactly how Power would have done this. The teacher dialed it back: “She said things,” he said.
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Allan Appel |
Apr 25, 2024 8:54 am
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Allan Appel Photo
Michael Ortiz before diorama evoking Connecticut's Long Island shoreline.
“Absolutely magnificent,” eighth grader Michael Ortiz marveled at a representation of the Connecticut shoreline with its marshes, night herons snagging fish, and dozens of other labeled flora and fauna — all as part of one of the newly reopened state history dioramas at the freshly renovated Yale Peabody Museum.
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Brian Slattery |
Apr 25, 2024 8:52 am
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Sketch Tha Cataclysm at Three Sheets.
“Hello several people, rap professionals, and various cool people,” said Sketch Tha Cataclysm from the Three Sheets stage, as he and fellow New Haven hip hop stalwart Mo Niklz hosted a group of touring artists from Chicago for a night of high-energy indie hip hop.
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Brian Slattery |
Apr 22, 2024 1:11 pm
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At the New Haven Composers Spotlight at NXTHVN.
Composer and violinist Alyssa Chetrick was taking a solo as part of her vertiginous piece, sardonically titled “Equilibrium.” If some of the previous passages had offered a sense of calm, Chetrick was now going for chaos, spurring the ensemble around her to join her. Her phrasing pushed the musicians around her to dig deeper into the music she’d written, as if they were looking to break it. Would they?
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Brian Slattery |
Apr 22, 2024 11:13 am
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Amartya De
Sequoia.
The photograph is from northern California, and photographer Amartya De said it was his roommate’s favorite of his pictures at the time because “it shows the landscape.” It was a city, but not really a city; it was a place close to the redwoods. De was there from Calcutta, learning how to become an artist, and learning that the practice of making art and the practice of surviving weren’t all that different.
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Karen Ponzio |
Apr 22, 2024 11:00 am
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The Creature descends on Best Video.
The Giant Behemoth and a creature from beneath the sea stood side by side with Betty Boop, Jimmy Stewart, and a New Jersey couple celebrating their 25th wedding anniversary as Best Video Film and Cultural Center hosted a screening of 8‑millimeter films projected and presented by Quinnipiac University’s Women in Films president Julia Schnarr.
Sunday evening saw an intimate gathering of enthusiastic film professors, students, and fans at the Whitney Avenue movie lover’s mecca taking in seven short films, six from Schnarr’s own collection and one belonging to Best Video.
Sam Carlson broke a string as he tuned up his Guild D‑50 acoustic guitar to perform live on radio. But no worries — he had a backup Guild M‑20 with him as well.