Movement is life. Motion is everything. To the lovers of dance theater, reality is a grand-scale performance, and Miami takes center stage this week. The Florida Dance Festival returns for its 26th season with a roster of international performers, newly commissioned works, and a series of workshops and classes that…
NOW 24/7 For the homeless, shelter is found in cardboard boxes and abandoned buildings. Meals are scraped from late-night rummaging through restaurant Dumpsters. The summer heat feels twice as hot and the hunger pangs are the only constant company. According to the Miami-Dade Homeless Trust, there are more than 4000…
NOW 24/7 Sue the city. Yes, that’s exactly what you should do if you already were a preadolescent or a teenager when the City of Miami Beach began work on the North Shore Park & Youth Center 10 long years ago. Bureaucrats and their harebrained scheme, er, “vision,” prevented you…
SUN 6/20 Dads and dogs are typically two peas in a pod. They’re both known to urinate wherever they please, sniff the occasional butt, and frequently end up in the doghouse. So why not honor the strong ties that bind them this Father’s Day at the Loews Miami Beach Hotel…
FRI 6/18 Asked how long it took to build a theater for Miami Dade College’s drama program, Prometeo, actress/artistic director Teresa Maria Rojas unabashedly replies, “Thirty-three years!” On the telephone, Rojas’s eloquent and effusive Spanish is suddenly cut short by the dry pronouncement in English that Prometeo’s permanent home was…
All hail irrationality! And Wayne Gretzky too (hold on a minute — we’ll get to that). Irrationality is the only explanation of why the Atlantis Playhouse’s Gary Waldman decided against all logic to present The Life, a stark, gritty musical about pimps and prostitutes that’s a 180-degree change from the…
There are eighteen songs in Songs for a New World, some more imaginative than others but all striking in their deceptive simplicity. The common themes in this revue of composer Jason Robert Brown’s work are life and happiness, or lack thereof. They run the gamut from unabashed optimism to shocking…
In glass blowing, the gaffer shapes a molten mass of glass by blowing air into it through a tube. Around the first millennium B.C., Syrians invented the craft, which quickly became a rich export to all parts of the Roman Empire. These early vessels had a decorative purpose (shaped as…
Summer Shorts: City Theatre’s annual festival of short plays, a highlight of the South Florida stage scene, is back with mini comedies and dramas in all styles and sizes. Twenty playlets from one to twenty minutes long are presented in two separate programs, which can be taken in on separate…
Cakewalk: Aesthetic experience and erogenous pleasure have always been close relatives, to be sure. But rather than any genuine countercultural agenda, artists in 2004 are armed with a stylist’s finely tuned eye for the retro, a fascination with the abject and unlovable, a salacious eye for soft porn, and an…
Ah, the peculiar genius that is Guy Maddin. Who else but the morose Canadian director, born and raised in one of the coldest cities in the world, would marry silent film, 1930s movie musicals, Prohibition, family melodrama, critique of capitalist zeal, and monster-movie gore in a surreal montage about sorrow…
Getting stranded at snowbound O’Hare for the night is one thing. You call home, maybe knock down a couple of martinis, then grab a blanket. A century ago, being quarantined at Ellis Island for eight months because you were, say, a part-time anarchist from Campobasso with a big mustache and…
You might think that with the technological advances in moviemaking since 1956, this new version of Around the World in 80 Days would at least look better than its predecessor did. You could not be faulted for believing you’d be wowed by the Rube Goldberg gadgets of inventor Phileas Fogg,…
Thursday 6/17 You’ve seen the more than 140 dazzling images of hulking machinery and technological wonders that make up the exhibition “Margaret Bourke-White: The Photography of Design, 1927-1936.” Now you’re left wondering how in the world anyone puts a major display like that together. How to decide what goes in…
Has it already been a year since Summer Shorts was last in town? This festival of short plays (twenty minutes max) has become a nationally recognized event in its nine-year history and something of a must-see/must-be-seen-there social event for South Florida cognoscenti. Shorts has its own cheerily subversive personality; this…
Three separate actions drive the narrative of Jim Tommaney’s Desert Storm, an ambitious but uneven drama that combines fact and fiction. The stories involve soldiers on the war front, their concerned parents, and President George H.W. Bush’s deliberations over sending troops into Iraq after its invasion of Kuwait in August…
Contemporary art has rummaged through fashion, Hollywood, and pornography in an attempt to attach itself to the allure present in those modes. Aesthetic experience and erogenous pleasure have always been close relatives, to be sure. In two current group exhibitions, this is evident. The postures of subversion are everywhere. Rather…
The Gulf of Westchester: Deborah Zoe Laufer’s biting satire about the war in Iraq hurtles along with such passion and intensity it’s breathtaking. Laufer doesn’t get the gold at the finish line — she cartwheels out of control well before that — but her reckless bravado makes for the kind…
i am the resurrection: Works by Daniel Arsham, Ian Cooper, Jay Heikes, and Rachel Howe circle cautiously around Goth culture and the spate of recent school shootings by teenagers. The works suggest the saturation of violence permeating contemporary life, and explore the twin afflictions of victimization and vengeance plaguing youth…
It’s a sign that a nation may be losing its collective mind when it grants a nutty hack like Quentin Tarantino an exalted title like Officer of Arts and Letters, but there’s France for you. Whether Gallic pop culture is rousingly progressive or embarrassingly adolescent is anyone’s call, but few…
Beware the exclamation point. When found at the end of a title, it almost inevitably signals a level of self-hype rarely justified by the content of whatever it hopes to name. In the case of the movie Saved! — an amusing, if facile comedy about a good Christian girl gone…
So let’s get this straight: You’re a much-loved comedian who just did a low-budget, multi-award-winning film with an acclaimed up-and-coming director. In recent years, thanks in part to your work with the younger, edgier filmmaking set, you’re starting to be taken seriously as an actor. You even managed to score…
