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Brian Slattery |
Nov 25, 2024 8:27 am
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Sharmont "Influence" Little: "Humanity has never been given by a Greek god."
A symphony orchestra in a vast concert hall. Ballet dancers, barefoot. A spoken-word poet and a singer. A traditional African drummer.
These elements all came together in concert, as a collaboration among the New Haven Symphony Orchestra (NHSO), New Haven poet laureate Sharmont “Influence” Little, and members of the New Haven-area Tia Russell Dance Studio added up to a past-honoring, forward-thinking presentation of Beethoven’s ballet The Creatures of Prometheus that was both an embodiment and celebration of creativity.
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Brian Slattery |
Nov 22, 2024 7:58 am
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Allie Sandt and Teddy Holly.
From the stage at Never Ending Books on Thursday night, Trae Sheehan asked if there were “any introverts in the crowd.” He was met with complete silence. He beamed.
“See, I try that at every show, and audiences fail,” by cheering, he explained. The cheer, he said, was a sign that they couldn’t be introverts; the silence felt all too right. “This one goes out to you,” he said.
Sheehan was part of a three-act bill at Never Ending Books on State Street — including Sam Moth and Allie Sandt — that warmed a rainy night by fostering honesty, openness, and kindheartedness in song after song.
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Brian Slattery |
Nov 21, 2024 8:21 am
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Videodome.
On Wednesday night at Cafe Nine on the corner of State and Crown, two area bands, Nervous City and Videodome, welcomed a touring band, Parachute Club, to its first-ever gig in the state of Connecticut with big riffs, squalls of guitar noise, and an appreciative crowd of rock fans ready to stay up and have a good time.
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Jamil Ragland |
Nov 21, 2024 7:30 am
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A piece of pottery by Robin Simpson on display in the Etcetera exhibit
Etcetera Exhibit Manchester Town Hall Manchester Nov. 18, 2024
Art is not just what we can see and hear. It’s also what we can feel.
I was reminded of that by the Etcetera Exhibit located at the Manchester Town Hall. The Manchester Art Association has an ongoing exhibit at the town hall, where for three months they feature a different single medium. This quarter’s medium is “Other,” which includes artwork that doesn’t fit into the other traditional categories of pastel, oil & acrylic, watercolor, and photography. As such, there was some fascinating art on display that catered to the sense of touch (not that I touched them; this is an art exhibit after all).
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Brian Slattery |
Nov 20, 2024 8:09 am
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Raheem Nelson
The Alchemy of Art.
The small portrait of New Haven arts maven Ann Lehman welding in her studio is instantly recognizable to anyone who visited “The Alchemy of Art,” the show devoted to her work last year at Creative Arts Workshop. But New Haven-based artist Raheem Nelson’s graphic surrounds that portrait with a constellation of ideas that distills much of that complex exhibition and the various reports of it. In less than 10 seconds, we get a snapshot of who Lehman was, what her contributions to Creative Arts Workshop and the city were, and why we continue to celebrate her legacy. And our curiosity, perhaps, is whetted for more.
Payton, Ellis, and Anaya with muralists Jessie Unterhalter and Katey Truhn: “This is why we’re doing this.”
The challenge was steep. To scour the globe for a muralist to lend such pizzazz to a 240-foot blank warehouse wall that it would bring life to a faded stretch of town.
In the end, one factor sealed the deal: cartwheels.
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Brian Slattery |
Nov 19, 2024 8:17 am
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Bill Healy
Self Portrait, King Nothing, Princess Leia.
Bill Healy’s three collages cover three subjects, from the real to the imaginary, but are united by their distinctive personalities, half playful, half unsettling. In each face, there are a few delightfully recontextualized shapes. In Self-Portrait, the grimace is an Amazon smile turned upside down. One of King Nothing’s eyes is a bowl of soup. The middle of Princess Leia’s face is a tire. It’s the kind of lateral thinking that marks the most engaging collage art, and in another place, another space, the artist might be parlaying it into a social media following. But Healy — along with the rest of the artists in the show — isn’t on social media, and the work might not have made it to a gallery wall without a keen eye paying attention.
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Jamil Ragland |
Nov 19, 2024 8:00 am
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Dwayne Johnson and Chris Evans in Red One.
Red One Cinemark Buckland Hills 18 XD and IMAX Manchester
Red One is the first new Christmas movie of the year, starring Dwayne Johnson as the zealous head of Santa’s security detail and Chris Evans as an unscrupulous hacker he’s forced to team up with.
In a warmly lit room on Chapel Street, entrepreneur and business strategist Kathleen Griffith posed a question to her audience: “What’s your outrageous ask?”
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Jamil Ragland |
Nov 18, 2024 7:30 am
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Lioness dancers as part of The Lion King
The Lion King Bushnell Center for Performing Arts Hartford Nove. 14, 2024
The Lion King has returned to the Bushnell Center for performing arts for the first time in years. If you have the ability, go see it. It’s a triumph of staging and storytelling for all ages of the family.
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Karen Ponzio |
Nov 15, 2024 9:36 am
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A still from the film "Madame Sata."
Grit and glitter played equal parts in Thursday night’s Yale Film Archive presentation of Karim Ainouz’s Madame Sata, the 2002 film based on the true story of Brazilian legend Joao Francisco dos Santos, who fights his way through the streets and onto the stages of 20th-century Rio de Janiero to become a prominent trans performer who considers himself a “disciple” of Josephine Baker.
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Jamil Ragland |
Nov 15, 2024 7:00 am
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An image of a father carrying his children at the Devotion exhibit at the Widener Gallery.
Devotion: Photographs from the Collection of the Watkinson Library at Trinity College Widener Gallery Austin Arts Center Trinity College Hartford Nov. 11, 2024
Devotion is an exhibition of 25 images from the collection of the Watkinson Library, developed between 1925 and 1981 by 11 different photographers. The exhibition covers subjects from sexuality to children playing; the images of family caught my attention most.
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Brian Slattery |
Nov 14, 2024 9:33 am
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Robert Jacoby
Essence 13, Essence 15, Essence 9.
The three paintings are a celebration of abstraction, and abstraction of a particularly kinetic variety. The canvases convey the energy of a brush moving fast, decisions made at speed, less like deliberation and more like reaction, like a skier weaving through the woods. But the painter’s experience shows in the overall decisions made about the painting. The color choices set them off from one another, making each hue vibrate just a little more intensely. Most important is the decision of when to stop; even moving fast, the artist kept an eye on the whole, and in this case, let all that white space speak for itself.
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Brian Slattery |
Nov 13, 2024 10:58 am
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Abdullah Ibrahim.
Jazz legend Abdullah Ibrahim waited at the piano, listening intently, while his bandmates, Cleave Guyton on flute and Noah Jackson on bass, finished a quietly acrobatic rendering of a Duke Ellington classic that was also a nod to Ibrahim’s past. Guyton and Jackson finished, and left the stage. Then Ibrahim began, slowly, deliberately, with exquisite touch and gorgeous dynamic control, the product of decades of playing. He took his time working through his theme, and as the large audience at the Shubert Tuesday was struck silent, seemed to stop time itself.
Ibrahim’s performance — organized jointly between the Shubert and the Schwarzman Center — was part of a string of performances carrying the venerable College Street theater through the end of the year.
In front of large computer screens and a focused film crew, a woman in a white dress walked up to a Wooster Square brownstone pretending to be New York City.
She reached the top of the entrance. Before she could open the door and walk inside, she stopped, turned, and walked back down the stairs — ready to repeat those moves again and again, as part of a new horror movie being filmed in part in New Haven.
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Brian Slattery |
Nov 12, 2024 8:15 am
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The first floor of the Ely Center of Contemporary Art was full of bright colors and bold shapes, the sounds of insects and cartoons, even a few smells. Melanie Carr’s installation exemplified the first category, with its simple geometry, friendly colors, and a shape that conveyed its pillowy texture. Touch this, the piece all but screamed — a message spelled out with notes on the wall, inviting visitors to use their hands.
But this was an art exhibition at a gallery space, a place where, as children, we learn not to touch anything, ever. That’s why I hesitated for a comically long time, pushing against decades of learned behavior to navigate museums without bumping into anything, let alone reaching out to make contact with something. Finally, feeling a little like I did when I first jumped off a diving board as a kid, I put out my hand and touched the art. The material itself felt like I expected. The act of touching the art felt like hitting cool water on a hot day.
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Karen Ponzio |
Nov 11, 2024 8:53 am
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“How many people are here to hear the song ‘Jim Martin?’” asked Al “Pist” Ouimet, lead singer of local punk legends The Pist — who on Friday celebrated the release of their 7‑inch vinyl record that included a song about another local punk legend, Jim Martin. The crowd cheered loudly enough to confirm that yes, many of them were. It was one moment of many that solidified the strength of not only the local punk scene’s commitment to continuing to make music that matters, but to letting their friends and fans know that their connections to each other are just as strong.
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Brian Slattery |
Nov 8, 2024 8:57 am
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Ralph Buonocore.
It’s been years since Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell met, and in that time, the literary stars of both poets have risen. They have each moved from place to place in the United States and beyond, and chased and acquired romantic partners. They are living lives, on one level, that seem full of realized ambitions. And yet none of that stops Lowell from writing to Bishop, long into their correspondence, that “I seem to spend my life missing you.”
