Archive: Arts & Entertainment

"How to Walk, Run, Jump, Fall Together" is an energetic and entertaining evening of all-original dance.  The concert features the work of two faculty and five student choreographers, including three seniors.

"This is a celebration of our senior students and also an opportunity to create dances that can be playful, serious, and above all, an experience in having fun together," said Concert Director Jumay Chu. "The concert reflects a wide array of the work being done in the department, experimenting with conventions and bringing issues and ideas that are non-traditional to the forefront.  It's interesting to see how the dancers' disparate backgrounds inform their individual choreography."

The 2008-09 Cornell Dance Series kicks off with a one-evening-only performance of Trajal Harrell: Quartet for the End of Time. A cutting edge choreographer and dancer, Harrell probes the antagonism between sincerity and irony in this contemporary dance work set to Olivier Messiaen's "Quartet for the End of Time." This famous music was first composed and performed by prisoners in a Nazi war camp. This touring company will perform October 2.

Smart TalkSMART TALK
by Dr. Will S. Sert

 

MITIGATE AGAINST:  Codgers (not old codgers) remember Archie Bunker, the TV comedy character who looked dumb and close minded at the time but has become a model for today's cable news personnel.  Unfortunately, he lives on in many of my patients at the Institute for the Linguistically Impaired, who often pretend to work as public servants.  Let's just say they fill political offices.

These toilers for our taxes often propose action that will mitigate against some undesirable tendency.  Mitigate against is worthy of Archie Bunker because it's wrong on two counts before we even debate the rightness of the action. 

First (not firstly), mitigate against is redundant.  Mitigate already means to make less severe.  Against is no more necessary than mental before telepathy.

Second, mitigate is usually the wrong word, anyway, so it becomes a malapropism in the greatest Archie Bunker/Dan Quayle/George W. Bush tradition.  Mitigate against isn't as funny as consorting for immortal purposes, but it'll have to do in these scary times.

The expression my patients probably intend is militate against.  That means to counteract, or operate against.

Many of them can't understand the distinction, and I train them to stick to plain words they understand, much as soldiers aren't allowed to handle weapons they haven't qualified for.

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Aurora, New York – The Wells College Music Department proudly presents “Music for a Royal Occasion,” performed by the Wells Concert Choir. The concert will be held in the Sommer Center at 4:00 pm on Sunday, May 11. Admission is free and the public is cordially invited to attend.

This regal program features the Coronation Mass in C Major, K.317, composed by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart for full chorus, soloists and orchestra. In addition to the joint performance of the Mozart mass, the College’s women’s and men’s ensembles will sing works from their respective repertoires. The concert will be conducted by Wells Professor of Music Crawford R. Thoburn.

Ithaca-based funk-rock band Revision will release their new album “Amplification” on Friday April 25 at Castaways in Ithaca.

In 2007, REVISION played over 120 shows across the country, fueling their touring with a vegetable oil powered van. With the music industry in state of turmoil, independent bands have to think differently to survive. Whether driving long hours to get to the gig, or dumpster diving for fuel, these Ithaca College graduates epitomize the hard working band. Their music grooves, it rocks, and never fails to make a room move.

Springtime in Ithaca is here, and with the changing of seasons returns the sunshine, the flowers, and, most importantly, the music! On Sunday, May 4th, Ithaca Community Orchestra will perform “Music From the Stage,” this year’s Spring Concert. Spanning many different styles from the last two centuries, this year’s program explores the rich history of the pairing of music and drama.

Smart TalkSMART TALK
by Dr. Winton "Windy" Prolix

TOUR:  At the Institute for the Linguistically Impaired, tour has two related meanings for common usage.  It can mean a pleasure trip, perhaps a tour of the attractions around Underbelly, Texas, where we can show you Summit Peak and Vista View overlooking Glendale  and the Rio River.

Now that's a tour, the kind of experience that tourists endure franchise food for.

We also recognize the tour that's a guided presentation of, say, an olive pitting facility, or of a converted shipping container the realtor is trying to sell.

In both cases, the tour is a voluntary travel-through, often for the pleasure of learning but at least with an expectation of getting home unharmed.

On a military tour, however, the odds of returning unharmed are greatly reduced, and said tour is often involuntary.  The more reality based might call it a hitch, or an assignment; the disgruntled, a sentence.  But it's not a tour, and the Institute for the Linguistically Impaired deplores this misuse of the word.

Since they have too much invested in always being right, military officers don't often appear for treatment at the institute, so we helplessly watch the involuntary sense of tour grow through the decades, much as surge instead of escalation probably will.

Tour in place of assignment, or even term, is as cynical as enhanced interrogation rather than torture.

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The Kitchen Theatre stage fills with music and dance for the world premiere of SCOOT, SIZZLE & SLIDE, opening April 26 and playing Saturdays at 1pm & 3pm, Sundays at 1pm, through May 11. Choreographer Rachel Lampert and composer Sally Lamb have created an enthralling new dance play that takes you on a journey through strange lands with a large cast of dancers and a live music ensemble.
 
Two travelers looking for a place to stay the night find themselves in a magical land where a bumbling servant guards a sleeping princess, where tango dancers are summoned out of thin air, where people are awarded for their funny walks, and where a wandering group of whispering creatures climb over everything, including each other, and make a good night’s sleep difficult to get.  All of this is told without words by a company of dancers and musicians.

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Smart TalkSMART TALK
by Dr. Viva Palaver

AFRICAN-AMERICANS:  Last week, I touched upon the use of minorities as a euphemism that masks white people's racial prejudice in the name of political correctness.

At the Institute for the Linguistically Impaired, I often hear white patients, especially, refer to people of color by continent.  African-American, for instance.  As staff psychologist, I'm fascinated by the self-righteous and evasive replies I get when I ask why not use a less-clumsy term, such as black.  After all, that's what they mean.

Naming groups by continent, if done consistently, soon gets vague and downright useless.  A white American born in Africa becomes an African-American, for instance.  Born in Siberia? Asian-American.  Israel?  Iraq?  Asian-American again.  And from Brazil?  South American-American? 

Whatever happened to American?  More to the point, what did these people think American meant?

My patients soon realize that the labels, even when by country, usually betray a preoccupation with exclusivity.  Then they can begin thinking, and avoiding using what really are racial labels and embarrassing themselves. 

They also soon notice that they may have an appalling lack of geographical knowledge and may not know even what continent most countries are on.  So instead of parading their ignorance, they use fewer labels.

And that's a good thing.

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