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Brian Slattery |
Mar 6, 2023 9:07 am
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Brian Slattery Photos
Cloudbelly.
Corey Laitman, a.k.a. Cloudbelly, smiled at the eager crowd about halfway through their set Sunday afternoon at Cafe Nine. “I’ve never done a matinee show,” they said, marveling at the experience of performing earlier in the day. “I don’t feel tired at all. I don’t have to rally.” Laughter rippled through the room.
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Brian Slattery |
Mar 3, 2023 8:32 am
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The pulsing hook of Ionne’s “The Last Time” reverberated through the speakers at Lilly’s Pad, the upstairs stage at Toad’s Place. Dancer Tadea Martin-Gonzalez struck a pose, then moved from it, her actions graceful and strong. As the beat churned to life, Ionne himself (a.k.a. Maurice Harris) sang the first few lines, clear, concise, mixing mournfulness and hope. “All we ever feared / Was killing time / Several hundred years / Amount to / Castles that we’ll never own / And songs I write / But cannot sing myself / Our dreams of spaceships / And their secret plans / To take us somewhere else.”
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Maya McFadden |
Mar 2, 2023 9:47 am
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Maya McFadden photo
At Celentano School's final Black History Month celebration of the year.
Eighth-grader Akiellea Gooden honored her Jamaican roots on stage in front of her Celentano School classmates by sharing a quotation from a Black political icon and historical Caribbean compatriot, Marcus Garvey: “A people without knowledge of their past history, origin and culture is like a tree without roots.”
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Brian Slattery |
Mar 2, 2023 9:25 am
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Haley Grunloh’s rendition of dragonflies shows off, first, her technical skill as an artist, as the insects are depicted with all the attention to their form a viewer could want. But she has also chosen to depict them mating, one of the most fascinating and also slightly awkward moments in a dragonfly’s life cycle, as it’s one of the few moments when they’re not capable of the aeronautics we usually associate with them. It’s a hint at Grunloh’s attraction to the unusual, and a doorway into her artwork — assembled as a show running at Never Ending Books on State Street.
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Donald Brown |
Mar 1, 2023 9:01 am
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Linda-Cristal Young Photo
Kayode Soyemi, Ashley Thomas, Jason Gray.
Blood-spattered limbs. Wigs and heels. A marriage in trouble. Angels and demons, birds and fish. All of these and more are part of the Yale Cabaret’s current season, as it has returned to in-person dining and theater under an inspired and historic artistic team pursuing the venerable old goal of delivering the shock of the new.
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Karen Ponzio |
Mar 1, 2023 8:49 am
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Tom Hearn Photos
The Cadavers.
Before punk was a word people tried to define, before it was a movement and state of mind, there were the live shows that brought music to many who were hungry for more than what they were getting from sharing albums with their friends. Among those many were the few who carried it out of basements and back rooms and into people’s memories.
Larry Loud, local punk legend, was a teenager in Bridgeport when he played a show with his band in 1978 that would later be heralded as the first original punk music show in Connecticut. That show will be celebrated this Saturday night, March 4, at Cafe Nine with Loud’s band The Cadavers, the New York-based Live Ones, and Bridgeport’s own Bad Attitude.
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Adam Matlock |
Feb 28, 2023 9:11 am
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Milos Babic Photos
Netta Hadari and Mark Rike, violins, Tina Lee Hadari, viola, Rebecca Patterson, cello (l. to r.).
In his introduction to “Brahms’ Alarm Clock,” by composer and pianist Istvan B’Racz, violinist Netta Hadari told the full house in the recital hall at Neighborhood Music School that at one point while working on the piece, he had asked the composer for “just a bit more of one section, to help complete it for me emotionally.” B’Racz obliged, and the full work, sometimes driven by a frenetic two-note motif with sudden jumps from string to string, was an impressive display. With quotes weaved in from Brahms’ Violin Concerto, and references to Hungarian folk music, the piece was a compelling study of the violin’s tone. And Hadari’s joy in playing it was clear.
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Brian Slattery |
Feb 27, 2023 9:13 am
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“O my dove, thou art in the cleft of the rock, in the secret crevices of the cliff.” The words from Song of Songs, poetic as they are, could be interpreted any number of ways. But in artist Margaret Shepherd’s hands, that interpretation tilts in a certain direction. The gracefulness of the letters themselves, the sensuousness of the details, the flower seemingly on the verge of opening a little wider, all suggest that, whatever other meanings the passage may have, one meaning is right on the surface, and not to be ignored.
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Brian Slattery |
Feb 24, 2023 9:13 am
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Stone.
Cult band Buttery Cake Ass are playing what might be their final show, and it might be their best. There aren’t many people in the audience, but what they’re hearing is blowing their minds. The saddest songs make them all cry. The songs filled with rage seem like they could set the hall on fire. The band members are engaged in the kind of musical alchemy that maybe only happens a few times in every musician’s life. Somewhere on the soundboard, a tape is rolling. What will it sound like when they take it home?
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Brian Slattery |
Feb 23, 2023 9:43 am
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Still from What Could Have Been: America's First HBCU.
On Wednesday night at the New Haven Museum, New Haveners had a chance to learn, together, about an uncomfortable truth: that, in 1831, New Haven’s white community leaders overwhelming rejected a serious proposal to found what would have been the first U.S. Black college, on the land where the interchange of I‑95 and I‑91 now exists.
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Allan Appel |
Feb 22, 2023 10:23 am
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Allan Appel photo
Library revelers Holly Nardini, Scott McClean, and Lisa Brandes.
Glittering bead necklaces, feather boas, whimsical hats sprouting purple tulips, and — finally! — masks that cover the eyes and the top of your face instead of the nose and mouth were spotted in profusion Tuesday night at the Mardi Gras love-fest for the New Haven Free Public Library.
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Brian Slattery |
Feb 22, 2023 8:42 am
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Linda Mickens
Sisters (detail).
Sisters is a sculpture that gets its effect in its details. Its creator, Linda Mickens, has the obvious skill to capture the girls as individuals, the contours of their faces, the wry, open expressions that are the gateway to seeing their personalities. Keeping the finest details a little vague has its own effect; it’s as though we’re seeing them in motion, just two girls walking down the street. What’s the nature of their kinship? Do they share a biological mother? Are they close friends? Or have they just met, but already feel a familial bond between them? The sculpture suggests the distinction is unimportant; what matters is that they’re sisters because they call each other that.
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Maya McFadden |
Feb 21, 2023 10:55 am
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Maya McFadden Photo
Sixth grader Mahki in Platt's art class.
A “House of Video Games” took shape line by line beneath sixth-grader Mahki’s pen — as Edgewood School students brought Detroit’s fabled Heidelberg Project into their New Haven classroom.
In the process, the students discovered how public art can transform blighted homes into objects bursting with color, life, and beauty, and they continued their monthlong celebration of contemporary Black artists and changemakers.
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Karen Ponzio |
Feb 21, 2023 8:41 am
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Album Club flyer for February
Nearly everyone is familiar with the set up of a book club: a group agrees on a book to read and then gathers a month later to discuss that book after reading it. Apply that same dynamic to a classic record and you have Album Club, one of many monthly programs at Volume Two, the State Street linchpin of both literary and lyrical offerings.
Since August 2022 the queer and feminist-centric group has been gathering once a month to discuss a classic album chosen by the participants. This Monday evening, the platter being served up was Amy Winehouse’s already-classic Back to Black.
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Brian Slattery |
Feb 20, 2023 1:53 pm
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Brian Slattery Photo
Manuel Camacho, Eliza Vargas, and Catherine Wicks in Ice The Beef and Elm Shakespeare's new anti-violence production of Hamlet.
Student leaders and Shakespeare theater-makers came together to create a new performance of Hamlet that was part social justice theater, part violence prevention program — and all heart.
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Brian Slattery |
Feb 17, 2023 9:04 am
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It’s America in the 1940s, and World War II is still raging. Carmen Jones has started a fight in the parachute factory she works in, and it falls to Corporal Joe to escort her to jail, miles from the military base where both of them work. Joe is engaged to be married, and just wants to get his duty over with. Jones has other plans. She’s flirting with him — hard — as soon as they’re on the road away from the base. Then Joe makes a poor navigation choice and drives the Jeep into a stream, forcing them to walk from there. Little does he know that he doesn’t stand a chance against Jones’s seductive skills. Little does Jones know that it will prove her own undoing, too.
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Brian Slattery |
Feb 16, 2023 8:25 am
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The Vultures had taken their places on stage, instruments in hand.
“Do you guys want to try something?” the sound person suggested, to make sure everything was working. None of the band members said anything.
“No?” the sound person said. “Okay!” She had read the band right, as the Vultures, with three words to say to the audience (“we’re the Vultures”) kicked into a set of fuzzed-out guitar, driving drums, and rumbling low end that immediately made the mood on Wednesday night, as the New Haven-based surf-punk heroes opened up for the skatepunk-dub duo Cardiel, originally from Venezuela and now on tour from Mexico City.
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Brian Slattery |
Feb 15, 2023 8:56 am
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From hip hop to dream pop with a few stops in between, New Haven’s musicians have been hitting the studio recently, and coming up with a strong start to 2023 for recorded music in the Elm City.
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Brian Slattery |
Feb 14, 2023 8:39 am
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Rita Hannafin
Sanctuary in the City.
The scene depicted in Rita Hannafin’s Sanctuary in the City could be of several places in the New Haven area, places that seem wilder than they should be given their proximity to people, whether it’s a stretch of the West River, or the Quinnipiac River before it reaches Fair Haven, or a part of the shoreline in West Haven.
