“I really needed to pull in some professionals and go for broke and see what happens, just push the envelope, because people weren’t taking me seriously,” says Karen Stewart, professor and director of dance at Miami-Dade Community College’s North Campus, and founder of the nine-year-old Black Door Dance Ensemble. “We…
As heir to the ideological battles of the late Nineteenth Century, the avant-gardists hoped to make art sovereign by ridding it of the evils of capitalist consumerism. Once outside those laws, art truly would liberate mankind, just as Schiller had exhorted in his letters, On the Aesthetic Education of Man…
Is it possible to take in 26 full-length movies in ten days? Most likely not. Although the heart and mind may want to, the eye could have a problem. And that’s not even including the two retrospectives and thirteen shorts unreeling at the FIU Miami Film Festival. (See “Kulchur” and…
“Good morning, everyone. Welcome to Miami-Dade Transit’s seventh annual Black History Tours,” begins veteran bus driver Craig Rolle. For now Rolle is sticking to the prepared script, a 21-page tome fashioned by Dorothy Jenkins Fields of the Black Archives History and Research Foundation. In honor of Black History Month, the…
“Ever since I’ve been old enough to reason,” says singer Tania Libertad, speaking by phone from her home in Mexico, “I’ve seen that the world has its rough spots.” Anointed an Artist for Peace by UNESCO in 1996, the celebrated vocalist chalks up her commitment to combatting poverty, AIDS, and…
First the good news: GableStage’s new production of Killer Joe features smart staging and engaging performances, backed up by a terrific design team. South Florida theatergoers should consider themselves lucky to have this company in their midst. Now the not so good news: Despite the merits of this particular production,…
Director Chen Kaige is best known in the United States for Farewell, My Concubine, the most successful Chinese production ever released here. As many pointed out at the time, this Oscar-nominated 1993 epic of modern Chinese history may have been wholly Chinese in both content and viewpoint, but it was…
La crème de la coiffure! A mock documentary about, of all things, a Scottish hairdresser who travels to America to compete in an international hairstyling tournament, The Big Tease is a mildly amusing romp that benefits enormously from an ingratiating performance by Scottish actor Craig Ferguson, who also co-wrote the…
Jane Campion’s 1992 film The Piano was an intoxicating work of art, a film of such beauty and power that it literally took my breath away. Nothing the New Zealand-born writer-director has done before or since even comes close to matching it in form, content, or sensibility. And her latest…
Lift ev’ry voice and sing/Till Earth and Heaven ring/Ring with the harmonies of liberty. Stirring words fit for a poem, eventually adapted as lyrics to the song many view as the black national anthem. This weekend Florida Memorial College celebrates the 100th birthday of the tune with the musical revue…
Ask any American whose birthdays are celebrated as part of the catchall holiday known as Presidents’ Day, and watch them give you the wrong answer. Oldsters know that once upon a time, commanders in chief were important enough to have their birthdays recognized separately. Not anymore. Now people care more…
Ask Rafael Lima, award-winning author, what the secret to his success has been, and he just might respond with a joke. So there’s this priest holding services at church, when a flood crashes through. Someone in a station wagon drives up to offer help. Thank you, says the priest, but…
Everyone knows the cliché about men and navigation. They don’t mix. Men don’t accept directions — ever. They could be driving off the end of the Earth and they would still keep going, insisting all along they know where they are. Take Christopher Columbus, for instance; seems as if he…
She took out her notebook. But he spoke so fast she couldn’t keep up. He paced the stuffy room as he dictated, drifting toward the stove. He lit one trembly cigarette after another, flicking them half-smoked into the ashtray. In October 1866 Anna Snitkina graduated from stenography school and agreed…
Sharon Stone doesn’t appear onscreen until halfway through this tale of three lives unraveling, but when she does, she makes quite an impression as Rosie, the third player in a horse-racing scam. Adapted from a play by Sam Shepard, Simpatico jumps back and forth in time between present day and…
“Sorry I’m late,” whines the dominatrix in Communicating Doors. “I think there was a gun battle in the Strand.” She sports a tattoo, nosebleed heels, and a leopard-print coat, underneath which is a layer of patent leather lingerie, complete with zippers dangling from pointy nipples. Poopay, as she calls herself…
Two weekends ago art lovers in Miami who made it to the Espirito Santo Bank building on Brickell Avenue for Departing Perspectives were offered a unique experience: a predemolition event curated by Fredric Snitzer. (The bank soon will be torn down.) For four days 44 local artists participated in an…
The obsession begins when you’re a little kid strolling along the beach. Suddenly you stop dead in your tracks. Peeking out of the sand is a stunning shell, former home to a slimy mollusk, now a piece of calcified art, unique as a fingerprint, tinted in a rainbow of pastel…
The evening of March 14, 1885, was an auspicious one in the annals of musical theater. Less than four years had passed since the opening of London’s Savoy Theatre, built specifically for the productions of librettist William Schwenk Gilbert and composer Arthur Seymour Sullivan. The partners’ first six works had…
It’s easy to see how Play It to the Bone, writer-director Ron Shelton’s latest comedy-drama, got started. Shelton obviously wanted to do for boxing what he’d already done with baseball in Bull Durham, golf in Tin Cup, and pick-up basketball in White Men Can’t Jump. But somewhere along the way…
Alain Resnais is not only one of the most respected film directors from the French New Wave, but, in this writer’s opinion, he is the most important one. His film Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959) showed us a different way to look at movies, and a completely revolutionary way to adapt…
