Somebody over at the AT&T Performing Arts Center knows what’s up. Which is selfishly to say that lately I’ve been buying what they’re selling, picking up what they’re putting down, digging what… you get the point. Like the announcement today of the new summer speaker series, #thinkspeak, which includes contemporary…
Joshua Peugh’s name is becoming familiar to those in the dance scene both here in Dallas and the wider world. With the amount of recognition he has received over the last year, it’s safe to say that Peugh and his dance company, Dark Circles Contemporary Dance, are having a pretty…
It’s hardly fair that weekdays outnumber weekends. If only life could be a string of weekends! But “the man” has planned otherwise for you, which is why you need to make the most of the Saturdays you get. We’re here to help you spend your weekend doing awesome. From world-excusive…
BY INKOO KANG (Heavy spoilers for the pilot; very light spoilers for the second and third episodes.) There’s more than one way to start a revolution. You can get high off your own sense of righteousness and authenticity, as celebrity chef and Fresh Off the Boat memoirist Eddie Huang recently…
Even if you’ve never seen or heard of a movie called She Killed in Ecstasy, isn’t it lovely to know such a thing exists? That 1971 eroto-thriller was a creation of prolific Spanish-born writer-director Jess Franco, who had a lasting career making florid B movies with sordid plots and voluptuous…
Where we come from defines us more than we realize: That’s the idea implicit in Andrey Zvyagintsev’s somber, sturdily elegant drama Leviathan, in which a mechanic who has lived on the same parcel of land all his life — as his father and grandfather did before him — resists being…
It’s hard to imagine that George Lucas has cared, much, about the fan-revolt he’s faced since ’97 or so, the year he thumbed CGI Colorforms all over the original Star Wars movies. But there’s one criticism that seems to have stung him: that Lucas, a good Marin County liberal, populated…
“You ready for another miserable video game?” I heard one critic crack to another as I settled in for Jupiter Ascending. “Maybe in March we’ll see this year’s first good movie,” his pal said back, as if Girlhood, Hard to Be a God, Amira & Sam, Timbuktu, Joy of Man’s…
Richardson’s Alamo Drafthouse is racking up another hit by becoming the home of the regional premiere of Creative Domain, a documentary exploring American choreographer Paul Taylor’s creative process as he produced Three Dubious Memories—which had its world premiere at the Eisemann Center in 2010. This film is important because it…
As the relevance of vinyl records continues to grow, so do the number of documentaries about records and record collecting culture. The most recent example is Records Collecting Dust: a documentary film about the music and records that changed our lives. Written and directed by San Diego musician and filmmaker…
In late 2012, comedian Katt Williams announced his retirement from stand-up comedy after an incident that landed him in a Seattle jail. Just three days later, however, he announced his retirement was over and he was back again. And that’s lucky for us because the comedian, rapper, actor, and everything…
Dallas has a long way to go to achieving the kind of improv comedy scene that Chicago has become thanks in part to visionaries like The Second City and comedy buddha Del Close. We may reach that plateau one day in the distant future presumably sometime after the Goat Flu…
Much has been made of the fact that author Mitchell S. Jackson, a black man, grew up in what has to be one of the whitest cities in this country—Portland, Oregon. And Jackson himself has admitted that it’s not the most likely place for the story he told in his…
Sometimes you’ll find art in surprising locations. This weekend, for example, when you’re out shoe shopping you might find yourself at an art exhibition opening. Painter Lauren Hensens is from Denton, that lovely little college town north of Dallas, where she developed into quite the artist. After exhibiting at various…
This stands to be a memorable weekends in performance art in Dallas: not only can you see the provocative Carlos Martiel likely bleed out in Expo Park’s CentralTrak, there’s also an honest-to-goodness performance art festival just down the street at Beefhaus, 833 Exposition Avenue. In the Room We Discovered An-Other…
There’s committing to your art…and then there’s committing to your art. Artists give up pieces of themselves all the time to make a statement, but few go to the extremes that controversial performance artist Carlos Martiel does—the man certainly goes all in for his work. Consider the time he allowed…
It’s generally agreed upon that art, if it truly speaks to you, is priceless. And owning a piece that inspires you on the daily—that still resonates years after its purchase—is worth a pretty good sum. But the reality is that it’s an expensive endeavor to buy art, and a luxury…
Everybody loves a tale of a hopefully-lucky suitor courting a rich widow, right? The Texas Ballet Theater is teaming up with the Fort Worth Symphony Orchestra to bring you The Merry Widow, which is adapted from the operetta of the same name. It’s basically just like “Millionaire Matchmaker,” with the…
There are many reasons to see The Book of Mormon, the Broadway musical by Trey Parker, Matt Stone and Robert Lopez. It won nine Tony Awards; Parker and Stone, the geniuses behind South Park, proved they know show tunes with the brilliant big-screen South Park: Bigger, Longer, Uncut; also, critics…
It’s been said by many a drama critic that the plays of Russian writer Anton Chekhov are more about what’s being said between the lines than the dialogue itself—that they revolve around subtext. And if that’s the case, then it’s not sacrilegious that the Dallas Actor’s Guild has brought modern…
Your eyeballs are working hard. As you read this they are processing and interpreting symbols to send to your brain. But how often do you consider your own observational power? It’s something that artists of all varieties dwell upon and then render into their work. For the next exhibition, Ro2…
Have you ever wondered what color your aura might be? This mystical description of the way a person’s energy affects the room they inhabit might seem silly, but we use color to categorize things all the time. Red light means stop. Green, go. White for the wedding dress; pink for…
