Tag: Vol. 22 No. 30

This enterprising group has put together a triple bill of early 20th-century operatic one-acts that unveils three disparate faces of love: the essential loneliness of the human soul, ardor cooled by deception and jealousy, and ironic bemusement. Yet all three derive their narrative drive from the discovery of a secret. In Bartok’s Bluebeard’s Castle (1911), […]

Our image of a dancer is of a young, lithe, healthy, beautiful animal–an image of perfect youth. When a dancer grows old, she cannot move like a young animal anymore, and she is often pushed behind the scenes into other roles. This tragedy echoes the everyday tragedy of many middle-aged women, who in their youth […]

Over half a century J.S. Bach churned out at least 1,200 compositions; the surviving works alone fill 60 volumes, published by the venerable Bach Society. According to my calculations, that’s enough material for the popular Bach Week in Evanston to last well into the next century. Every spring since 1974 this multiconcert event, hosted by […]

There’s a not-very-subtle distinction between treating a folk music tradition as a fragile heritage to be sheltered against corruption and treating it as a tough, grizzled system of roots that serves as a sturdy foundation for perpetually changing bursts of inexplicable greenery. Living traditions, oral or otherwise, change over the years like any living thing, […]

Pretty much everything about the Sock Monkeys is in their name: unabashed amusement, athleticism, grace, collaboration, a certain impishness, a little tribal je ne sais quoi, and even a sort of fuzzy warmth. This four-person collective twirls somewhere between postmodern dance and performance art, integrating movement, text, wonderfully absurd props, music, and notions both serious […]