Dance Company Bale Folklorico da Bahia Brings It On, Afro-Brazilian Style

Balé Folclórico da Bahia aims to give an authentic taste of Afro-Brazilian history and culture with every high kick and undulation that unfolds onstage. Using drumming and religious chanting as part of its soundtrack, the company’s repertoire explodes with high-energy folkloric movement, electric sambas and lightning-fast capoeira moves exchanged between…

Miami Improv in Coconut Grove Shuts Down, Seeks New Miami Location

Coconut Grove’s long-standing comedy club, Miami Improv, is no more. The spot is shuttered and all future shows are cancelled, a representative told Cultist. The spot, tucked away at 3390 Mary St., wasn’t doing well financially, according to the rep, so the owners decided to shut the doors. “We are…

Fear Up Harsh: A Brechtian Dramedy at the Arsht

The opening scene of Fear Up Harsh may be the closest a theater audience can get to the bowels of a war zone. It’s set in Muqdadiyah, a hellhole that American soldiers affectionately called “the nastiest town in Iraq” during Operation Iraqi Freedom. Marines and Army corporals are battling a…

The Manganiyar Seduction: A Sensual Take on Sufi Poetry

Inspired by sources as far flung as Amsterdam’s Red Light District and the women’s quarters of India’s Hawa Mahal (a royal palace in Jaipur), The Manganiyar Seduction promises to plunge concertgoers into the music and song of an ancient musical tradition and Sufi poetry. The Manganiyar are an all-male caste…

Fear Up Harsh: A War Drama That’s Not Really About War

The opening scene of Fear Up Harsh may be the closest a theater audience can get to the bowels of a war zone. It’s set in Muqdadiyah, a hellhole that American soldiers affectionately called “the nastiest town in Iraq” during Operation Iraqi Freedom. Marines and Army corporals are battling a…

Tiger Lillies: No Hamster Lovers

For the past quarter-century, when Martyn Jacques and his band, the Tiger Lillies, have passed through airports, onlookers have reacted with some variation of “I hope you don’t mind, but are you part of a religious cult?” “I usually manage to look away and leave it to the drummer, who…

Dance Sampler: A Preview of Miami’s Active Dance Life

The cultural arts have become a thriving industry in Miami. And the city owes much of its creative success to the local dance community that’s helped place the region on the map as an artistic hub. From classical, modern, African and flamenco, to mixed-ability and old-school hip hop, there’s an…

Fences: August Wilson Returns to Miami

By many accounts, Troy Maxson, the 53-year-old protagonist of August Wilson’s Fences, is a loser. He’s the bitter breadwinner of a small Pittsburgh family who lives in the thwarted pipe dreams of his past as a once-promising baseball player. And he operates with such blinding resentment — brought on, in…

Festival Supreme: The Five Best Moments

It’s been touted as the Coachella of comedy. LOLapalooza. WitStock. But this wasn’t just any music and comedy festival. This was Festival Supreme. The title of the Santa Monica, California, comedy and music festival was befitting of the event’s hosts, the once self-proclaimed but now widely accepted greatest band in…

Pilobolus Collaborates With Penn & Teller, Brian Eno in New Show

Many are those who refer to dance as “magic.” But the dance group Pilobolus takes the reference one step further. Pilobolus, the season opener of the Knight Masterworks/Ziff Dance Series at the Arsht Center for the Performing Arts, will quite literally blur dance and magic in homage to escape artist…

Win Free Tickets to Pilobolus This Saturday!

Pilobolus — the acrobatic international dance troupe — has been a huge crowd pleaser here in Miami. When they return to the Ziff Ballet Opera House at the Arsht Center for the Performing Arts this Friday and Saturday nights, they will bring with them five new performances, just in case…

Metamorphoses at the Arsht: Poolside Plunge Too Dry

Some of the pictures show beautiful, half-naked people wearing billowing white togas while lounging around Greek columns or descending stone steps. Other images depict the same crew positioned underwater, frolicking in an aquamarine paradise, like performers in a mermaid show without the fins. These promotional photos for the Adrienne Arsht…

Metamorphoses Isn’t the Serene Mythological Paradise You’d Expect

Some of the pictures show beautiful, half-naked people wearing billowing white togas while lounging around Greek columns or descending stone steps. Other images depict the same crew positioned underwater, frolicking in an aquamarine paradise, like performers in a mermaid show without the fins. These promotional photos for the Adrienne Arsht…

Ruthless! at Actor’s Playhouse Through November 3

Paley, the writer and lyricist of this 1992 off-Broadway comedy, could not have foreseen YouTube, Toddlers & Tiaras, or Here Comes Honey Boo Boo more than a decade later. Or maybe he could — that would explain the uncanny prescience of his durable showbiz satire about an 8-year-old diva who…

Arts Ballet Pays Tribute to Sensuous Work of Legendary Venezuelan

Vladimir Issaev’s dance company, the Arts Ballet Theater of Florida, is about to begin its 2013-2014 season, and “there will be surprises,” Issaev says. He is referring as much to the digital animation woven through his “Firebird,” as the presentation of “Pentimento,” a work by Vicente Nebrada, a legendary Venezuelan…