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Brian Slattery |
May 3, 2024 8:41 am
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From its subject to its materials to its execution, Melida McKenzie-Alford’s From Across the Waters partakes of the aesthetic and techniques of traditional African art, hearkening back to the origins of culture. But in the end it’s the overall shape of the piece (which isn’t and perhaps can’t be captured in a photograph) that draws the viewer’s attention. It starts high on the wall and cascades downward, a serene waterfall.
In the place where it’s currently hung at Known, on the fourth floor of the Palladium Building at 139 Orange St., it bids the viewer to stop for a moment and take a minute for contemplation. Which, as it turns out, is part of the point.
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Brian Slattery |
May 2, 2024 10:33 am
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The figure stares out from the canvas, her pose ambiguous. Does it connote strength or vulnerability? Or both? Something more? There’s a sense of intrusion, of the viewer having discovered her. But the painter insures that we, the viewers, come bearing an offering; those are our hands in the lower part of the canvas. But still more is afoot. The blue rope twining out from the figure are intestines, but she’s none the worse for losing them. All of the elements in Blue (Affection) are potent images, but their relationships to one another aren’t clear. Meaning shifts as we construct it.
The painting, by Moshopefoluwa “MO” Olanguju, is part of a larger series of artworks “designed to evoke varied narrative interpretations based on the arrangement of surrounding paintings,” MO writes. “Throughout the series, roses and guts emerge as recurring motifs, contributing to a thematic continuity within the narrative.”
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Karen Ponzio |
May 1, 2024 11:47 am
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Yale Film Archive turned one of its screening events over to students Tuesday night as members of the Spring 2024 Film and Media Studies 604 class shared their archivist projects — which included everything from a not-so-silent Dutch short that focused on the rain to a Looney Tunes cartoon that focused on a not-so-cool cat — with a room full of appreciative movie fans.
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Brian Slattery |
May 1, 2024 8:10 am
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Orpheus is smitten with Eurydice before they even speak. Hermes, Orpheus’s wingman, helps him work up his courage to ask her out. “Orpheus,” he warns, “don’t come on too strong.”
Orpheus extends his hand to Eurydice, offers flowers. “Come home with me,” he says, to audience laughter. “Who are you?” Eurydice responds. “The man who’s gonna marry you. I’m Orpheus,” he says.
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Donald Brown |
Apr 30, 2024 12:24 pm
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A photographer encountering the supernatural. Forty days of rain after the loss of a son. A six-decade love note to Hong Kong. According to playwright Danielle Stagger, the Carlotta Festival of New Plays 2024 — running May 2 to May 10 at the Iseman Theatre on Chapel Street — features three “funky plays” that are “not what you might imagine coming from Yale playwriting.”
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Brian Slattery |
Apr 30, 2024 8:28 am
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Exploring the malaise of being caught in travel limbo. Examining the foibles of other people and yourself, and the way they can begin to grate. Satisfying the desire to keep learning and growing as circus performers. All these factors went into Layovers, the latest show from Air Temple Arts, which will appear for two shows on May 4 at the ACESECA Arts Hall. “Though really,” said Stacey Strange, Air Temple Arts’ founder and creative director, “it was the suitcases.”
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Karen Ponzio |
Apr 29, 2024 9:42 am
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The arts and sciences, the movement and stillness, the rhythm of breath and step: on Saturday afternoon, all came together in the performance space at St. Paul and St. James Episcopal Church on Olive Street for Creative Circle, a delightful dance and music performance that saw two dance companies — the New Haven-based kamrDANCE and the New York-based SYREN Modern Dance — engage each other as well as the audience in their latest works in progress.
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Dereen Shirnekhi |
Apr 26, 2024 10:05 am
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“I’ve been yours for so long / We come right back to it.”
It was a refrain I’d heard maybe hundreds of times at that point, the croon of Katie Crutchfield’s voice and the banjo backing her committed to memory. But Thursday night, as I heard it live and sang along with a crowd filling up Waxahatchee’s sold-out show at Toad’s Place, the song felt new.
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Brian Slattery |
Apr 26, 2024 8:45 am
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Theater artist Terri Power discovered Shakespeare in high school, finding Lady Macbeth “extraordinarily powerful and sexual,” she said. Their teacher asked the class to memorize passages to perform in class. Power dressed in a long black turtleneck and sweater and skirt and delivered a monologue in which Lady Macbeth taunts her spouse: “I have given suck, and know / How tender ’tis to love the babe that milks me. / I would, while it was smiling in my face, / Have plucked my nipple from his boneless gums / And dashed the brains out, had I so sworn / As you have done to this.”
Her teacher sent Power to the principal’s office, where he then argued to the principal that she should be suspended for “revealing her breast.” The principal, looking at Power’s wardrobe, wondered exactly how Power would have done this. The teacher dialed it back: “She said things,” he said.
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Allan Appel |
Apr 25, 2024 8:54 am
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“Absolutely magnificent,” eighth grader Michael Ortiz marveled at a representation of the Connecticut shoreline with its marshes, night herons snagging fish, and dozens of other labeled flora and fauna — all as part of one of the newly reopened state history dioramas at the freshly renovated Yale Peabody Museum.
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Brian Slattery |
Apr 25, 2024 8:52 am
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“Hello several people, rap professionals, and various cool people,” said Sketch Tha Cataclysm from the Three Sheets stage, as he and fellow New Haven hip hop stalwart Mo Niklz hosted a group of touring artists from Chicago for a night of high-energy indie hip hop.
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Brian Slattery |
Apr 22, 2024 1:11 pm
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Composer and violinist Alyssa Chetrick was taking a solo as part of her vertiginous piece, sardonically titled “Equilibrium.” If some of the previous passages had offered a sense of calm, Chetrick was now going for chaos, spurring the ensemble around her to join her. Her phrasing pushed the musicians around her to dig deeper into the music she’d written, as if they were looking to break it. Would they?
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Brian Slattery |
Apr 22, 2024 11:13 am
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The photograph is from northern California, and photographer Amartya De said it was his roommate’s favorite of his pictures at the time because “it shows the landscape.” It was a city, but not really a city; it was a place close to the redwoods. De was there from Calcutta, learning how to become an artist, and learning that the practice of making art and the practice of surviving weren’t all that different.
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Karen Ponzio |
Apr 22, 2024 11:00 am
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The Giant Behemoth and a creature from beneath the sea stood side by side with Betty Boop, Jimmy Stewart, and a New Jersey couple celebrating their 25th wedding anniversary as Best Video Film and Cultural Center hosted a screening of 8‑millimeter films projected and presented by Quinnipiac University’s Women in Films president Julia Schnarr.
Sunday evening saw an intimate gathering of enthusiastic film professors, students, and fans at the Whitney Avenue movie lover’s mecca taking in seven short films, six from Schnarr’s own collection and one belonging to Best Video.
Sam Carlson broke a string as he tuned up his Guild D‑50 acoustic guitar to perform live on radio. But no worries — he had a backup Guild M‑20 with him as well.
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Brian Slattery |
Apr 12, 2024 9:33 am
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It’s the shape of an ancient Middle Eastern cityscape, verandahs and towers, arched doorways and windows like peeping eyes. But it’s not anywhere near the Middle East; it’s on a rock hilltop in Waterbury, and it’s part of Holy Land USA — to some, a roadside attraction, to others, a place of serious pilgrimage, and for Joy Bush, the subject of an almost 40-year-long series of photographs.
Some of those photos are up now at City Gallery in a show called “Ruins of a Holy Land,” running through April 28, with a reception on April 13.
In the backroom lounge of Mediterranea Cafe, among centuries-old hookah pipes and patterned cushions, a fairy rising from the Underworld sang about darkness — and love, too.
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Brian Slattery |
Apr 11, 2024 9:51 am
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In front of a packed house that was ready to have fun, two touring acts at Space Ballroom — the New York City-based Ghost Funk Orchestra and the Woodstock, N.Y.-based Marco Benevento — brought humor, relaxation, and armfuls of danceable beats to the Hamden club on Wednesday night.
“The astounding story of an astounding military plot to take over the United States! The time is 1970 or 1980 or, possibly, tomorrow!”
Thus reads the tagline to the political thriller Seven Days in May, the first entry in April’s Tuesday night film screening series at Best Video. Last night an engrossed crowd took in the John Frankenheimer-directed and Rod Sterling-penned 1964 classic, based on the novel written by Fletcher Knebel and Charles W. Barley II and published in 1962.
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Asher Joseph |
Apr 10, 2024 9:19 am
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Music lovers young and old found their seats with the help of the early evening sun, the only source of light in the dark gymnasium of the Q House.
The space would not remain dark for long, however, as the Dixwell Community Management Team’s (DCMT) “Jazz & Contemporary Music Concert” lit up the space with singing, saxophones, and selections from various poets.