Category Archives: Dance and the other arts

Michelle Mathesius: Making Waves, Again

Dance and the other arts, ,

When I saw the New York Times article headline about a protest led by a “dance teacher at LaGuardia Performing Arts High School” I knew Michelle Mathesius was leading the charge. And deftly going to the media to buttress her case.  LaGuardia’s mission is to encourage talented students in the performing arts, but — lately — the very talented ones have been rejected for admission in favor of those with so-so talent and higher academic standards.

This is not the way to create Broadway stars.

If you don’t know Michelle as a dancer, you have heard of her ex husband, Bill, a former judge and Republican prosecutor known for being outspoken.

I wrote about her for the Trenton Times during the glory days of the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, when it had money, when she was dancing and choreographing and teaching and organizing and doing all with a flair. She led the movement to celebrate New Jersey’s early dance star, Ruth St. Denis, and she helped create the vo-tech schools of performing arts. La Guardia Performing Arts High School snatched her away and though I went to one of its impressive recitals, we lost touch.

Surely the legions of LaGuardia graduates will come out of the woodwork, out of the rehearsal studios, off the Broadway stages — to join Mathesius in her protest. Dance on, Michelle!

 

 

Janet Gardner: Uncovering History

Around Town, Dance and the other arts, Faith and Social Justice, ,

If you want to know where to find the best south Asian food around here, ask Rocky Hill resident Janet Gardner. She’s spent years in Vietnam and Cambodia making award winning documentaries. Her film “Lost Child — Sayon’s Journey” will be screened on WHYY tonight at 11 p.m. To celebrate the Cambodian New Year, it will be screened at the Buddhist Temple in Philadelphia on Saturday, Aprl 26, at 4 p.m.  Admission free.

Nicole Mulvaney wrote about it today for the Times of Trenton.

Established in 1990, Gardner’s company focuses on films about hidden history. Her films include Dancing Through Death, about a Cambodian classical dancer under the Pol Pot regime,  Mechanic to Millionaire, about the Cooper Union founder Peter Cooper, Precious Cargo, about the babylift from South Vietnam, Siberian Dream, about a Buddhist woman and former fashion model who grew up in the Buryat/Mongolian culture — and several more.

I met Janet when she alerted me to a great place to get Pho.  I have our TV programmed for this important show.

Small Treasures

Around Town, Dance and the other arts, , ,

barbara at MACQG

You may know of my passion for collectible buttons, and that I give talks about them for the New Jersey State Button Society about the beauty and history of buttons and how to start a collection of your own.

enamel fop

If you have your mother’s button jar, or if you are a quilter, or a sewer, and have more than a passing interest in the “world’s smallest antique,” you have three opportunities in the next month to learn more and perhaps pick up a few treasures.

 Saturday, April 26, at 1 p.m. at Kuser Farm Mansion, 390 Newkirk Avenue, Hamilton NJ 08610.  Carol Meszaros and I present a free talk and workshop, “World’s Smallest Antique: Each Button Has a Story.” This talk will feature buttons that could have been worn by Teresa Kuser.  RSVP to Kim Daly (Kdaly14@aol.com) or to me.

Thursday, May 8, 7 to 9 p.m. at Lawrence Library, we present “Small Treasures.’ Refreshments will be served, registration encouraged at 609-989-6920 or email lawprogs@mcl.org. The NJSBS has a display in the library through May.

button workshopThis photo taken at Hickory Corner Library shows how, after the talk, you get to choose and mount buttons, and take home a card of “small treasures.”

Saturday, May 10, 9 to 4 p.m., in Titusville, is the New Jersey State Button Society Spring Show. Here is where you get to ogle all kinds of buttons. Dealers set up tables and you can look for buttons for your sweater, or buttons about cats, or buttons to make into pins or use for crafts.

Do let me know if you expect to come to any of these button opportunities  or want to be on the list (or off the list!) for the future.

 

Charles Ewen of
EastCarolinaUniversity
 Will offer a lecture entitled:
 X Marks the Spot: The Archaeology of Piracy
 Monday March 31, 2014
106 McCormick Hall, 5 pm.  (Princeton Art Museum)
Doris Z. Stone New World Archaeology Lecturer for the AIA
Reception to follow
Pirates have long captured the popular imagination.  However, it has been only recently that scholars (mainly historians) have tried to separate fact from fiction and taken a pragmatic view of piracy.  Archaeology has been remarkably silent on this topic.  However, the discovery of the wreck of Blackbeard’s ship the Queen Anne’s Revenge, has raised the question with archaeologists as to “what is a pirate and how would you recognize a pirate site”?  The answers are not as apparent as one would expect, especially from an archaeological perspective.

City Gardens: Jon Stewart bartended there

Around Town, Dance and the other arts, , , ,

AmyWuelfing - Copy

Bet you didn’t know where Jon Stewart got his start. Amy Wuelfing, co-author of a new book on City Gardens, reveals that he started his stand-up career by bartending at that music club. Wuelfing, an ebullient redhead who is a VP at Caliper Corporation, brings her book No Slam Dancing, No Stage Diving, No Spikes, to  the Daily Show tonight (if you are podcasting, that’s March, April 25).

How did I know? My friend, Kate Newell, interviewed Wuelfing for U.S. 1 Newspaper for a fun article entitled No Slam Dancing and Definitely No Selfies.  Newell explains that City Gardens “was originally a late 1970s jazz club that opened in a old car dealer building on Calhoun Street and used the quasi-exotic moniker King Tut’s City Garden.” 

Maybe you were a regular on Thursdays at legendary 90 cent dance nights.  If so, you met Stewart, quoted in the book:  “I went there by myself — that’s what a loser I was. It was one of the few places you could dance by yourself. You could wear a brooch and no one would say anything. It was the ‘80s. We all dressed like Molly Ringwald and didn’t know why. Even the guys.”

Big name acts got their start here. Big name acts who could come only on Thursdays were turned down here — because they would interfere with 90 cent dance night!

Newell asks — “How did this all happen in a bunker-like building, in an economically obliterated city with nothing but flyers and word-of-mouth promotion?” And answers.

It’s an amazing and entertaining story. Here ‘s a link to the book, and here’s one to the article on princetoninfo.com.

PS: Moms whose daughters are stage-struck or music-struck, there’s a lesson for you here. Your daughters can actually earn money AND follow their passion.

 

 

 

African Soiree Auction: “Ballerinas”

This painting by Rhinold Lamar Ponder is one of the items to be auctioned at the auction for the African Soiree, held at the Princeton Theological Seminary Mackay Center on Saturday, March 1, 5 to 8 p.m. It will benefit the United Front Against Riverblindness (www.riverblindness.org). For tickets,  UFAR@princetonumc.org or call 609-688-9979.

Michele Tuck-Ponder, a member of the mission team from Princeton United Methodist church, will call the live auction of items. In the auction are also a framed needlepoint picture yby Susan Lidstone, specially designed copper bracelet from Randi Forman of Nassau Street-based Forest Jewelers, a needlepoint picture, a quilt that Tuck-Ponder made from African fabric. Aruna Arya, owner of the Palmer Square-based fashion store Zastra , will donate one of her designs. Elsie McKee will contribute items made by a Congo-based charity, Woman, Cradle of Abundance. A professor at Princeton Theological Seminary and a member of Witherspoon Street Presbyterian Church, McKee is in charge of local arrangements and the African market.  

More than one-third of the 60 million people in the Democratic Republic of Congo are at risk for getting riverblindness. Caused by a parasite and transmitted by the black flies that live near the river, the disease takes two lives – the life of the adult who goes blind, and of the sighted child who must leave school to be the caretaker. The medicine is provided free by Merck & Co., but the distribution is a challenge. Using a community-directed approach that involves villagers who are appointed by their village chief, UFAR is able to treat more than two million persons each year. Annual treatment for each person in required for ten years to eliminate the disease.

UFAR is an African-inspired, Lawrenceville-based nonprofit charitable organization that aims, in partnership with other organizations, to eradicate onchocerciasis, a major public health problem in the Kasongo region of the DRC (riverblindness.org).

Each Moment New: Jane Buttars

Around Town, Dance and Dancers, Dance and the other arts, ,

tympanumMost musicians bring life to a page of musical notes and try to make it sound fresh and in the moment. Pianist Jane Buttars and cellist David Darling improvise their music — moment by moment. In their first album together, Tympanum, the listener gets to sit in on their exciting moments of creation. Each piece is a journey, imagined and created step by exciting step. Do not expect to listen to their improvisations while you are doing something else. Their focus is so intense that it snatches you and demands your full attention.

Each of the 14 selections takes a different mood journey. Sometimes persistent but unexpected rhythms bubble up to the surface and fairly bid the listener to get out of a chair and MOVE for heaven’s sake. Or gentle swaying lifts your spirits, like a high swing, and then subsides into still calm.

They are not limited to major, minor or modal; they can play for two minutes in the key of silence.

How to compare it? Maybe to say, think of combining the energy of jazz improv plus the adventuresomeness of Poulenc, plus the whimsy of e.e. cummings, But keep in mind that this is a duo of classical musicians.

Grammy Award-winner David Darling formerly played with the Paul Winter Consort and co-founded Music for People, which aims to encourage trained musicians to find joy in improvisation and ordinary people to find music in themselves. (This is my translation of MfPs mission statement.)

JB on CD better Buttars is a classically trained performer and teacher,  a Fulbright Scholar, and a dance and Dalcroze student, with a Doctor of Musical Arts in piano and harpsichord performance.  (Full disclosure: she is my workout partner at the Rabara Pilates studio.) Based in Princeton, she directs Music From the Inside, a program of group improvisation classes and workshops for all levels, beginners to professionals, and she leads Music for People sessions.

I can envision several important uses for Tympanum, beyond listening for delight. These improvisations fairly beg to be danced to — by those who do “contact improv” or those who choreograph. They could work wonderfully as part of a worship service, to introduce or follow a psalm or meditation that fits the particular mood. Creative dance teachers and nursery school teachers– here is a gold mine.  Listen at CDBaby.

Mostly, though, I just want to sit in my rocking chair, look out the window and be taken on one journey of imagination after another, each moment new.

An article in this week’s U.S. 1 Newspaper, by Dan Aubrey, alerts us to a reception at the Princeton Public Library today (Saturday, January 18) from 3 to 6 p.m. it is for “Concentric Circles of Influence: the Queenston Press, The Woman Portfolio,” an exhibition that was inspired by the United Nation designations of 1975 as International Women’s Year.

Aubrey’s cover story, Defending the Arts Amid a Culture of Fear, has a much different tone. It tells about his ‘bridge closing moment,” on March 25, 2011, and if that sounds familiar, yes, it is about his battle with the Christie administration. Writes Aubrey.

While the current revelations about the Christie administration waging retribution on Fort Lee may be an eye opener for some, it is something I have lived through.

His 4,000 word account is an eye opener. Read it in hard copy or read it here.

McPhee Shines His Flashligiht: Stephen Ornes quotes the redoubtable John Mcphee in a December 6 blog post about how science writers can fashion their opening sentence. About how in a 2010 interview in the Paris Review McPhee says the right lead shines a flashlight into a dark well etc. etc.

McPhee has been using that metaphor for long time. I quoted him on it at least 20 years ago. It’s still about the best one around.

From Bejing, to Princeton — to Alcatraz. The zodiac animals of Chinese artist and political dissident Ai Weiwei enliven the plaza at the Woodrow Wilson School. Soon visitors to Alcatraz will see his art. As in today’s New York Times.

That’s the good arts news from Princeton today. The bad news is that the funds of the Triangle Club have been embezzled to the tune of more than $100,000. Robin Lord will be the attorney for the defense and this is one case I hope she doesn’t win.

Or is it good news that an arts organization could make that much money and it wasn’t missed?