Arts

The Zen of Zap

When Martha Mendenhall was thinking about the idea of Wunderkammer, a multifaceted arts carnival profiled in C-VILLE just last week, she picked longtime Zen Monkey Dance Troupe member Zap McConnell to take the reins as artistic director. McConnell has been involved in many different aspects of performance art, from theater and dance to studying clowning in Mexico. When I talked to her, Zen Monkey was in preparation for their seventh annual Summer Dance Intensive, which hosts students from all over the region, and I got to ask Zap about her influences.

spencer-lathrop | July 25, 2006

Arts

Movie Reviews

Monster HousePG, 91 minutesNow playing at Carmike Cinema 6 For some reason, live-action films now aspire to be cartoons, and cartoons aspire to be live-action films. And then there are those weird hybrids. Monster House, like last year’s The Polar Express, started with live actors, who were required to wear special suits embedded with thousands […]

kent-williams | July 24, 2006

Arts

Shorter Movie Reviews

The Ant Bully (PG) The summer of CGI toons continues. In this family fantasy, a young boy is magically reduced to micro-size after flooding an ant colony with his squirt gun. Our wee protagonist is then dragged into the ant colony and sentenced to hard labor for his trangressions. Eventually, of course, he learns a […]

kent-williams | July 24, 2006

Arts

Reviews

Sunday In the Park with GeorgeHeritage Repertory TheatreThrough July 29 stage In 1981, after his musical Merrily We Roll Along was abused by critics and shunned by the public, Stephen Sondheim announced that he was going to pour all of his creative energy into writing mystery novels. This was tantamount to Michael Jordan, a decade […]

C-VILLE Writers | July 24, 2006

Arts

Reviews

There are a few things that everyone can be sure of: 1) the earth is round; 2) if you fling a baseball (or a parking ticket, or a shitzsu) up in the air, it will come back down; 3) musicals are ripe for parody.

C-VILLE Writers | July 18, 2006

Arts

Movie Reviews

When Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl sailed into the harbor during the summer of 2003, it was as if none of us had ever seen a pirate movie before. We were delighted, dazzled.

kent-williams | July 18, 2006

Arts

Shorter Film Reviews

The Break-Up (PG-13, 106 minutes) Peyton Reed’s “anti-romantic comedy” about a mismatched couple (Vince Vaughn and Jennifer Aniston) is often funny, sometimes uncomfortably so. Vaughn plays a guy’s guy, the kind who’d like to put a pool table in the living room, and Aniston is a version of her sweet, spunky character from “Friends.” (Kent […]

kent-williams | July 18, 2006

Arts

Abbot’s “Mountain” climb

Bahlmann Abbot grew up in Fayetteville, in southern West Virginia. His grandmother was a picker and singer and his father played music as well. Abbot says, “It was in the storyteller tradition, sitting on the front porch and passing the guitar around.”

spencer-lathrop | July 17, 2006

Arts

Highlights from this weeks events

Try This Now is a rotating listing of classes, workshops and ongoing events to help you broaden your horizons-ake a hike, learn how to blow glass, or sign up your kid to act in a play. The schedule of topics goes as follows: First Tues-day of the month: Wellness; Second Tuesday: Kids; Third Tuesday: Arts and Fine Arts; Fourth Tuesday: Outdoors; Fifth Tuesday: Grab Bag. To get your event or organization listed, contact Susan Rosen at trythisnow@c-ville.com.

calendar-staff | July 17, 2006