The slowing down was a screen; a record two years in the making speaks of obsession, if not nervousness and releasing it into the world with high expectations facing a band is daunting. What better modesty panel than turning it into a drone? That keening, stretched noise will forever be associated with the album as much as the contents itself, a pre-emptive remix to guard against what anyone else could say about the “actual” release.

This article is filed under Blog-Music, Music.

This music is something darker; it’s the country hidden beyond the well-traveled farms and ranches, yet ultimately resonating with the frenzied arrythmic lubdub of the American heartland.

This article is filed under Blog-Music, Music.

The mixtape format allows artists to experiment without needing to conform to anything a label wants, letting edgier and more exciting stuff get pushed to the fore — Kalenna has no need to control her swearing-as-punctuation habit if there’s no official single with obligatory radio edit, for instance and from the aggressive outset of “Go To Work,” that’s very much the core of Chamber of Diaries.

This article is filed under Blog-Music, Music.

Today, with The Book of Mormon taking irreverence to new heights and shows like American Idiot cranking up the power chords, any production of Superstar will have to rely on the score’s intrinsic qualities in order to compete for the attention of younger theatergoers. The good news is that the show’s construction holds up well.

This article is filed under Performing Arts, Religion, Theatre.

In a season peppered with contemporary world premieres and dramatic works, it is easy to forget that San Francisco Ballet is first and foremost a classically trained ballet company. With Program 6 and Raymonda Act III, the company re-stakes its claim as a classical company to be reckoned with.

This article is filed under Dance, Performing Arts.

There’s nothing worse than a complacent performance of a Beethoven symphony. Being such a staple of the orchestral repertoire, Beethoven is all too easily performed on auto-pilot. Some conductors, however, have made it their mission to find fresh approaches to the great composer, like David Zinman, the music director of the Tonhalle Orchestra of Zurich, who led the New York Philharmonic’s Modern Beethoven festival at Avery Fisher Hall this month.

This article is filed under Music, Performing Arts.

Frances Chung is as resilient as bundled cable. Davit Karapetyan partners her with genteel correctness. They are a brilliant match, swimming over and under each other like sea creatures, as the corps de ballet floods in, and indeed under Jack Mehler’s lighting, individual faces are lost to bodies that leap like flames; you can almost hear the hiss of the aquatic couple’s exit, as if extinguished by the conflagration.

This article is filed under Dance, Performing Arts.

Overall, Transit creates a recognizable place, but the dancers, while mostly a spirited lot, seem to lack the spitfire facility of their predecessors, and here I am thinking of Shannon D. Mitchell, Robert Moses, Brian Fisher, Kevin Ware, KT Nelson and Yukie Fujimoto, a vanished comet of former ODC stars.

This article is filed under Blog-Dance, Dance.

Today, because of her experience in such an extensive repertory, Berman is in demand as a regisseur, assisting choreographers in bringing their existing ballets to new audiences. This past month, she has been working with Walnut Creek’s Diablo Ballet, setting Christopher Wheeldon’s Mercurial Manoeuvres, which is part of the Inside the Dancer’s Studio program to be presented Friday and Saturday, March 2 and 3.

This article is filed under Blog-Dance, Dance.

Movement gives way to dancers sidling up to partners, though they do not dance with them, except in one chassé sequence, where the partners face one another and take a tentative, almost disinterested measure of the calculated steps.

This article is filed under Blog-Dance, Dance, Israel.

Her duet with Giles, in which both dancers use stilts to place themselves on the same locus, invites us to meet a pair of post-Nijinsky characters, two women who move like languid praying mantises, fluid, deliberate, yet delicate, as they explore a sensuality between women, untested by the choreographers of Nijinsky’s time.

This article is filed under Blog-Dance, Dance, Disability.

The world premiere of Mark Morris’s Beaux, set to Martinu’s Concerto for Harpsichord (1935), is a gentle work created for the company men. In contrast to the usual bravura leaps and beats normally used to showcase talented male dancers, Beaux explores different territory. In a Peter-Pan-and-the-Lost-Boys manner, Morris has the men create a visual picture of the hidden, light-hearted youth inside, and the sunny, patterned costumes and backdrop by designer Isaac Mizrahi underpin Morris’s intent. The dancers were equally matched, equally wonderful.

This article is filed under Dance, Performing Arts.

It’s Rattigan’s attempt to take the basic Hamlet situation and write a play which is both funnier (more jokes and stronger sense of the ludicrous in life) and more serious (more realistic and less willing to solve everything with corpses.) If you’ll allow him the chutzpah, it’s much more fun than it sounds.

This article is filed under Blog-Theater, Theatre.

The ability to enjoy DGV seems to me largely dependent on how irritating one finds Michael Nyman’s driving minimalist score. The piece (MGV: Musique à Grande Vitesse) was composed at the request of a European railroad company; and if Nyman’s music may at first express the ratcheting excitement of being propelled forward at high-speeds, it soon comes to convey instead the tedium of a long train ride.

This article is filed under Dance, Performing Arts.

Neighbourhood Watch never feels like an “issue” play, but the London riots, the increasingly draconian Law and Order rhetoric from the Conservative-led government, and a series of police shootings make it exceptionally timely.

This article is filed under Blog-Theater, Theatre.