Archive: Arts & Entertainment

Smart TalkSMART TALK
By Dr. Winton "Windy" Prolix

 

LIVE AND IN PERSON:  The staff of the Institute for the Linguistically Impaired gets raucous when they watch TV in the Fowler Lounge some evenings.  "As opposed to dead and in person?" yells Clara Dix.

"Why not?  Remember the Grateful Dead?" Garrell S. Utter replies. 

"Maybe it's opposed to live but not really here, like Alaska's Senator Gravel," offers Shirley Glibb.  The room falls silent while everyone tries to remember who that is.  "Well, I was just trying to help."

Gabby Johnson is Republican, so he changes the subject to prerecorded in front of a live studio audience. 

"Hey, look, Leno has a dead studio audience tonight," cracks Laconia Crisp.

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Touring troupe Stephen Petronio Company hits the Cornell Schwartz Center stage March 12-13.  Petronio calls his choreography "modern landscapes for the senses" and teams up with hip musicians and designers like Rufus Wainwright to collaborate on his works. Wainwright music is the inspiration for "Bud Suite," which features a male dance duet, and "Bloom," for which Wainwright wrote the score, drawing lyrics from the Latin Mass and the poetry of Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman.

Petronio's most recent work, "Bloom" celebrates the vitality and promise of youth and explores the bittersweet poignancy of transformation. The third piece to be performed at Cornell is "The Rite Part," an excerpt from Petronio's "Full Half Wrong," which is set to Igor Stravinsky's "The Rite of Spring."

Lansing High School actors have been polishing their Scottish brogues as they prepare for the March 5th opening of Lerner and Lowe's classic musical Brigadoon.  The play depicts a magical Scottish village that appears for only one day every hundred years.  To the villagers each century seems like one night.  Two lost American tourists, Tommy Albright and Jeff Douglas stumble upon the village on that one special day, taking a liking to villagers Fiona McLaren and Meg Brockie.

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Smart TalkSMART TALK
By  Clara Dix, N.P.

LITE:  Perhaps that quintessentially 70s song title should be spelled, "You Lite Up My Life."  The sappy song and the cutely misspelled title deserve each other, like black velvet paintings and lawn ornaments.

All uses of lite have officially been banned at the Institute for the Linguistically Impaired.  The Fowler Lounge will never stock the beer of that name.  The institute's dietician isn't allowed to order any foods with that word on the label.

When Rev. "Red" Johnson, pastor of The Complete and Total Faith Church of the Whole Entire World, here in Underbelly, Texas, put "Jesus the Lite of the World" on his sign board, institute members immediately transferred to Sister Polly Cotton's One Single Solitary Way Church of the Baptized Brethren and Sistren.

Our therapists urge their patients to join the boycott and help bring light back to the world.

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Inspired by a Cornell summer course in Rome developed by Concert Director Byron Suber, this year's dance concert at the Cornell Schwartz Center is a nod to the great films, architecture and culture that stem from this classical city. Titled "Spoglia," derived from the verb spogliare, which in Italian means "to strip," this original work focuses on how Romans stripped elements from antiquity and incorporated them into Renaissance architecture as well as looks at urban space as performance. Spoglia: Dance Concert 2008 will be performed March 6-9.

The Kitchen Theatre Company's KITCHEN COUNTER CULTURE series, featuring cutting-edge, outside-the-box work by guest artists from around the country, continues this month with a piece by Los Angeles performance artist Denise Uyehara. Uyehara will perform BIG HEAD for three performances only: February 29, March 1, and March 2. All performances will be followed by a talkback with the artist.

BIG HEAD revisits the treatment of Japanese Americans during World War II and considers current-day treatment of those perceived as "the enemy" now, including Muslim Americans, Arab Americans, and South Asian Americans. A work that has been in the making since early 2001, this poetic, interdisciplinary performance offers up letters from Rohwer Internment Camp in Arkansas, responds to recent hate crimes and imprisonments, and considers the coalition-building between these various communities during times of crisis. A non-linear montage of images, clay animation, movement, and text, Big Head evokes the mysteriously winding path of collective memory and how we interpret our past to provide hope for the future.

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Smart TalkSMART TALK
By Clara Dix, N.P.

LIKE:  Like, the young and the, like, brainless are, like, afflicted with, like, more than, like, eating disorders and A.D.D.  The Institute for the Linguistically Impaired wishes to, like, announce that we've, like, isolated and, like, named the problem.  We're, like, very proud.

It's, like, a disease called, like, cerebroporosis.  If you, like, look at that word and, like, think about it, you might, like, see that it means, like, having your brain full of, like, holes.  Of course, we're speaking, like, figuratively.

We're, like, trying to, like, isolate the cause.  Our, like, research team suspects it's, like, overexposure to, like, noise from, like, electronics, TV, and malls, which, like, damages their, like, learning ability and makes them sound, like, brain damaged.

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The Kitchen Theatre Company's KITCHEN COUNTER CULTURE series, featuring cutting-edge, outside-the-box work by guest artists from around the country, continues this month with a new play by New York City actress and teaching artist Vickie Tanner. Tanner will perform RUNNING INTO ME for three performances only: February 22, 23, and 24. All performances will be followed by a talkback with the artist.

Vickie Tanner knows firsthand the effect that poverty, drugs, and inadequate inner city schools can have on a teen. She grew up in South Central Los Angeles, in a home where, as she tells it, "no one saw to my breakfast, no one saw to it I was dressed in clean clothes, no one told me about my period... No one taught me how to survive." She did survive, though, and went on to earn a degree in theater from Cal State Long Beach and embark on a successful performing career that has included the national and European tours of the hit show STOMP and numerous film and television credits.