Crozet-based contemporary dance company concorDance presents Tripping the Light Fantastic, a concert of playful choreography that celebrates mirth and merriment in movement. Pieces range from “Shamone,” a carousing number that conjures Bob Fosse, Michael Jackson, and Austin Powers to “Elevator Theory,” a duet that imagines love in a short ride between floors. Performances include live […]
Embrace the last of the lazy August days with the Summer Camp Series at the Packard Campus Theater in Culpeper. Ten movies, including two double features, will celebrate all things campy throughout the latter half of the month. From summer sleep-away comedies to sci-fi schmaltz, you can get your fill of over-the-top entertainment with silver […]
The year is 1958, and abstract expressionist painter Mark Rothko sits in a chair in his New York studio, smoking a cigarette and considering the audience. Or rather an invisible canvas that hangs between us. Aside from a coffee pot, a phonograph, and scotch, every surface is dedicated to artistic detritus. Rusty buckets, stained drop […]
Beverly Weston, aging poet and professor, sits among overstuffed bookshelves and reflects on the sum of his life: a marriage bound by whiskey and pills, a career lost in the shadows of tortured art. He quotes T.S. Eliot—“life is very long”—to his newly hired, live-in housekeeper, a young Cheyenne woman named Johnna, and admits it […]
Of the festival’s myriad non-fiction topics, one of the hottest will be Thomas Jefferson. This is Charlottesville, after all. Three separate programs focus on T.J., including Jefferson’s Legacies with Henry Wiencek and John Ragosta (Friday at 4pm at CitySpace). Wiencek’s Master of the Mountain: Thomas Jefferson and His Slaves received much attention for its highly-charged topic. “There was so much about Jefferson I didn’t understand,” Wiencek said. “There’s a saying among authors, ‘I write to find out.’”
Onstage, a fine-featured woman removes her skirt, collapses her bustle, and adjusts the corset nipping her waist. Her hands are pale and flighty as she sits on the doctor’s bench and pulls a medical drape up to her chin. Diagnosed with hysteria, a Victorian umbrella term for ailments including headaches, light sensitivity, and predisposition to […]
On January 1, one week before the Jefferson School City Center opened, I stood in front of the building’s main doors and rattled them in vain. I’d hoped to slip inside and sneak a preview of Common Ground Healing Arts, the affordable-rate holistic health studio nestled on the community center’s second floor. Instead I stared […]
“24/7 (2013) flips the paradigm,” Ray Nedzel said, noting that actors and writers typically audition and submit works to critical producers. “24/7 guarantees that new work will be produced, that actors will land their roles. The artists, in turn, commit completely, “and they do it with conviction, guts and expertise each time.”