With a much anticipated spring break only a week away, I know I , like many of my peers, am ready to relax and let the stresses and worries of the winter semester be forgotten. What better way to find a moment of levity at the end of the week than attending Comco’s improv-comedy performance tomorrow, February 16th at 8:00 PM in Angell Hall’s Auditorium A. Tickets are $2 at the door. Plan to arrive 30-40 minutes early to avoid the rush and long lines and get yourself a prime seat.
PREVIEW: Mr. Burns, a Post-Electric Play
Do you love The Simpsons? The game telephone? Enjoy tales with an apocalyptic setting? Then Mr. Burns, a Post-Electric Play by Anne Washburn is just the thing to see this weekend as we prepare for the onslaught of midterms.
Though we all love our electronics, this dark comedy of a play being put on by the Department of Theatre and Drama takes place in a world without electricity. Absolutely none. I know. But in this world, theater and The Simpsons are the height of art. The audience is witness to the transformation of familiar tales as time progresses in the play, leaving the world of electricity further and further in the past.
Sound like a head-spinning time or a good study break? Come support your fellow students! Here are the details:
When: Feb. 16-19
Where: Lydia Mendelssohn Theatre
Tickets: Link Here OR (pssss- this is a Passport to the Arts event)
PREVIEW: Ping Chong-Stamps Speaker Series
Ping Chong is a contemporary theater director, choreographer, and visual artist who has amassed many awards and fellowships across his career. Many of his pieces focus on culture and cultural identity. In total, he has created over 90 different productions, with one of his most recent ones, Beyond Sacred: Voices of Muslim Identity, currently touring. Join Stamps for a special peek into Chong’s artistic process, perspective, and inspirations, and gain new insight into Beyond Sacred, which will be making it’s stop in Ann Arbor this weekend.
Ping Chong’s UMS performance Beyond Sacred, will be held in the Power Center on Saturday, February 18th at 8PM. This event will be included on the most recent passport to the arts, but the voucher must be redeemed in advance.
This talk will be held on Thursday, February 16th, at the Michigan Theater at 5:10 PM. Like all of the lectures in the Stamps Speaker Series, this one will be free and open to the public. Arrive there 10-15 minutes early for prime seating. Immediately following the talk there will be a Q&A section for those interested.
PREVIEW: Beyond Sacred: Voices of Muslim Identity Ping Chong + Company
Ping Chong + Company is a New York-based theater company that is putting on an interview-based theater production centering around Muslim-American identities in our post-9/11 world.
Below is a preview of the one-day event coming up this Saturday:
Where: Power Center
When: February 18th at 8 PM
Cost: FREE with a PASSPORT TO THE ARTS
The event page on the UMS web site states that
“Participants come from a range of cultural and ethnic backgrounds and include young men and women who reflect a range of Muslim identities…Beyond Sacred illuminates the daily lives of Muslim Americans in an effort to work toward greater communication and understanding between Muslim and non-Muslim communities.”
You can also register for a reminder about a livestream of the performance here
PREVIEW: Spectra: Voicing Our Experience A Night of Spoken Art & Music
ArtsX UMMA will be putting on Spectra: Voicing Our Experience A Night of Spoken Art & Music, featuring a wide array of participating student groups and individuals performing music, poetry, and song. Giving voice to the students’ stories, this event aims to display the diversity of experiences through art forms. Performances hosted at UMMA situated in the middle of the gallery spaces always prove to be beautiful; the sound echoes off the walls, amplifying and reverberating back at the audience to immerse the senses. If an event hosted in UMMA’s Apse surrounded by art and performance can’t tempt you enough, perhaps the hot cocoa bar will.
Thursday, February 16 / 7-10pm
University of Michigan Museum of Art
Free and open to the public
REVIEW: Toledo Museum of Art / Kehinde Wiley’s A New Republic
“I am standing on the shoulders of all those artists who came before me, but here there is a space for a new way of seeing black and brown bodies all over the world” – Kehinde Wiley
Upon arrival to the Toledo Museum of Arts and promptly demonstrating my navigational incapability, I was kindly directed to the temporary exhibit just around the corner featuring the works of Kehinde Wiley. Near empty – my favorite way to experience museums – the gallery continued beyond my expectations, featuring a large number of works. Wiley’s portraits often reached from floor to ceiling, a daunting presence over the viewer. The pieces are beyond striking; Wiley’s characteristic style features portraits placed onto bright, almost cartoon-esque floral and geometric backgrounds that begin to creep over the bodies of the subjects. Wiley’s portraits feature men and women of color, often strangers he has approached on the street. Looking to the works of Old Master paintings for inspiration, Wiley allows the models to choose for themselves who they are modeled after, giving them authority within their representation. Wiley’s work encourages a discussion about the roles of race, gender, and religion within art. It was a strange experience to exit the world of Wiley the Toledo Museum created, only to enter into the next gallery featuring the same white, aristocratic portraits this exhibition critiqued.
Bound by Kehinde Wiley
Outside of the Wiley exhibit, the Toledo Museum of Art features a strong collection of pieces. One exhibit that struck me, to the point of gawking, was a gallery called “the Cloisters”. Set up as a medieval monastery, the ceiling can transition from “day” to “night”. Standing beneath an artificial night sky in the middle of an artificial monastery, the soft sounds of recorded monk chants filtered into space, is how all art should be experienced. The gallery and museum space almost fades away, no longer art on display, you begin to witness objects within their original context. A gallery featuring works of art that were all of different mediums, regions, and time periods particularly caught my museum-loving heart, as I don’t commonly see this in museums; it looked at what techniques made them similar or different, giving the visitor an art-history vocabulary and allowing them to be able to pick out the trends themselves.
I loved the progressive feel of the Museum. It offered chairs not merely for resting oneself from museum-exhaustion, but for pondering art in only the most immersive and slightly pretentious of manners. Technology was used in a way that enhanced the experience without encroaching upon the art itself (I admittedly did stand in line behind a group of not-quite-teenage girls for the photo booth). The Wiley exhibit featured two documentary-style videos that could have taken an afternoon to view in themselves.
Be Afraid of the Enormity of the Possible by Alfredo Jaar
Kehinde Wiley’s exhibit will be on display at the Toledo Museum of art until May 14. Whether you’re an art connoisseur or an art novice, this exhibition gives the viewer more to ponder than merely the visual, a timely and dynamic array of art.
