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Theater
The Diva Behind the Diva
She was known simply as "La Divina", the paragon of grace and glamour. Wherever she took the stage- at La Scala, La Bastille and La Monnaie- she ripped the hearts right out of her audiences. Her mezzo-soprano had the power to shatter crystal and bedazzle millions. Her name was Maria Callas. More
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Theater
Strangers in a Strange Land
You've got to hand it to Dave Eggers. The internationally acclaimed memoirist, novelist, and publisher has managed to transcend criticisms of being self-indulgent and solipsistic. A simple rule of thumb is that you never write a memoir before having accomplished something stellar in the public eye- Eggers broke this rule with his first book, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, an insoluble, artful memoir about his family's tragedies. Eggers' prose is relaxed, colloquial, but full of penetrating clarity that can be both humorous and crushing... More
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Galleries
A Matter of Perspective
It is rare when we discover a location where the connection between our bodies, our vision and our experiences can exist together in a thick sea of images, but Bay Area artists Deniz Demirer and Alex Killough have given us the opportunity to do just that in their installation, Video Symphony: Sequence to Simultaneity: Body Motion, Tech Motion showing at Ego Park Gallery in Oakland. More
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Museums
Life of Israel
Adi Ness's striking photographs at the Legion of Honor create an otherworldly portrait of life in Israel. Ness turns the banality of daily life into the monumental. He lights and saturates his giant and elaborately-staged tableaux to reference nearly every iconic image type: classical paintings, films, fashion stills, even photojournalism and war photography. More
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Galleries
The Persistence of Celebrity
All appreciators of modern art owe a debt to Salvador Dali. Granted, he was one of those artists whose reputations inevitably precede their legacies; he's just as known for his feverish landscapes and evanescing clocks as he is for his braggadocio and impossible mustache. Dali hob-knobbed with the likes of Luis Bunuel and Federico Garcia Lorca; and he achieved international rock star status among the paparazzi, fashionistas, and poo-bahs of the avant garde. Dali was never admired for his subtlety, and his compulsive penchant for self-multiplication in both his life and his art happily invite lampooning... More
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Theater
Gay Camp Weds Gothic Romance
Swimming in references to Poe, Joyce, Shakespeare, and the Brontė Sisters, The Mystery of Irma Vep, which is now enjoying the stage at the Berkeley Repertory Theatre, is a 'penny dreadful': a lampoon of the 19th century melodrama. Irma Vep is the vaudevillian tour-de-force that launched writer / director / performer Charles Ludlam and his Ridiculous Theatrical Company into camp renown back in 1984. It's an unabashed, madcap pastiche of The Mummy's Curse, Abbot and Costello Meet the Wolfman, and David O. Selznick's Rebecca, which is wryly knocked about... More
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Theater
Fluid Yet Incomplete a Second Time Around
Cherylene Lee's adaptation of Sophocles's 442 BC tragedy, Antigone, riffs off the imperishable motif of the totalitarian state, replete with tyranny, greed, and changeless sermonizing. Despite its imposing status as a play that's been worked and re-worked constantly (by the likes of Jean Anouilh and Bertolt Brecht, to name a couple), Lee's Antigone is an uncommon take on the Greek classic. It's an intriguing yet choppy work that attempts to bridge the lacunae between past and present and East and West. More
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Museums
Rise and Fall of a Global Icon
The latest exhibit at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts is a methodical multimedia retrospective that probes the legacy of Fela Anikulapo-Kuti, the controversial Nigerian Afrobeat musician and activist who died of AIDS-related complications in 1997 at the age of 58. Conceived by Brooklyn-based curator Trevor Schoonmaker, the exhibit showcases the work of 30 contemporary artists who distill Fela's enigmatic persona and revolutionary proclivities... More
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Theater
Get moving!
Put on your collective dancing shoes and join the revelers! Containing everything from performances by the San Francisco Ballet to panels on the significance of urban movement styles, the Bay Area's celebration of National Dance Week is rife with pickings for dance enthusiasts and wallflowers alike. The events on the line-up for National Dance Week present a unique opportunity for proponents of dance to participate in and observe ballet, hip-hop, flamenco, butoh, capoeira, belly dance, kathak, modern and experimental movement, and much more... More
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Museums
Creating a Geometry of Experience
Romare Bearden found his calling in collage-making in the 1960s at the age of 51, a venture that led to his indoctrination in the modern canon and boded a half-century of imitations and tributes. His collages present an exercise in attention and intellectual fortitude, placing spectators in a position where they are forced to reconstruct the artist's meandering fragments and convolutions into a coherent whole. More
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