“The Dallas DanceFest is very timely. Dance is surging forward…and it’s exciting because there are more emerging dance companies than ever before,” says Gayle Halperin, Vice President of Development for the Dance Council of North Texas (DCNT) and Chair of the Dallas DanceFest Committee (DDF). Returning after a 10-year hiatus,…
During a recent evening rush-hour, KERA was serving commuters one of its usual panels of NPR experts talking about the news, in this case the death of Michael Brown, the unarmed black teenager shot dead by a white Ferguson, Missouri, police officer. The talking heads all agreed: America needs to…
Dan Domenech wears jeans and a casual blue hooded sweater as he sips a root beer. Standing over 6 feet tall, it’s easier to imagine him dribbling a basketball than wearing fishnets and eyeliner. His dark brown eyes light up in sheepish amusement when he admits that he walks around…
Why did so few people see Sin City: A Dame to Kill For over the weekend? That and other topics are discussed in this week’s edition of the Voice Film Club podcast with the Village Voice’s Alan Scherstuhl and Stephanie Zacharek, joined as always by Amy Nicholson of the L.A…
In 1994, Priscilla, Queen of The Desertchronicled an outrageous road trip story about three drag queens that provided one of the first positive portrayals of gay and transgender people in major media, and took home the Oscar for achievement in costuming. Obviously. For those who don’t know much about the…
It was unbearably hot on Saturday. A friend of mine says people shouldn’t be allowed to complain about the weather in August. “It’s supposed to be hot in August,” he says. “If it’s this hot in December, then you can complain.” You know what I have to say about that?…
For centuries, white male narrators have dominated storytelling. We’re talking everyone from Homer’s Odysseus to Shakespeare’s Hamlet to America’s Rick Perry. Western cultural mythology is steeped in white male hegemony. And at the center of most of those stories is a tricky little devil known as ego. Whether characters are…
If you haven’t been inundated with the “ice bucket challenge,” then obviously you’re not on Facebook (congratulations) or perhaps dead. For the past few weeks, thousands of people, including some of your favorite celebrities, such as Benedict Cumberbatch and Patrick Stewart, have been pouring buckets of water and ice over…
Mixmaster presents “100 Creatives,” in which we feature cultural entrepreneurs of Dallas in random order. Know an artistic mind who deserves a little bit of blog love? Email lauren.smart@dallasobserver.com with the whos and whys. Dallas Comedy House performer and writer Noa Gavin started her comedy career by creating the popular…
In May, Brad McEntire and Audacity Theatre Lab brought eight artists and eight solo shows to town and stacked them all together inside the Margo Jones Theatre. For the first festival of its kind here, Dallas Solo Fest went well. So well, in fact, that McEntire has devised a quarterly…
The Nasher Sculpture Center gets a lot of things right. Jeremy Strick runs a tight artistic ship, with impressive exhibitions and thought-provoking programming. One of the most underrated programs is the 360 Speaker Series, which gives the microphone to world-renowned artists across a variety of disciplines. On Saturday at 2…
Kate Micucci and Riki Lindhome, the comedians who make up the musical comedy powerhouse of Garfunkel and Oates, are living the dream of every guitar-ukulele musical comedy duo. They have three top-selling raunchy comedy duets. They have their own TV show on IFC that Lindhome describes as a “millennial Laverne…
Mixmaster presents “100 Creatives,” in which we feature cultural entrepreneurs of Dallas in random order. Know an artistic mind who deserves a little bit of blog love? Email lauren.smart@dallasobserver.com with the whos and whys. The hyper-connected world we live in makes art and music from the far reaches of the…
The Circuit 12 Contemporary gallery is constantly in a state of flux. Of late, gallerists Gina and Dustin Orlando have taken interest in playing with environment in exhibitions. Not only have owners Gina and Dustin Orlando recently made some renovations to the space and added a fashion component, they’ve also…
Photo by Phil Bray – © 2014 – LionsgateWell, who was it? Find out in this week’s pod.On this week’s Voice Film Club podcast, Alan Scherstuhl and Stephanie Zacharek of The Village Voice and Amy Nicholson of L.A. Weekly sift through the smoldering pile of action movie that is the…
We’ve got quite a weekend up our sleeves for you. From theater to sideshows to film screenings and art exhibitions, we’ve shuffled up the cards and stacked the deck just for you. You might call it magic, we call it the Mixmaster…
Sin City, population unknown but dropping every minute, is a gorgeous place, but you wouldn’t want to live there. Even the shadows and broken glass are beautiful in this black-and-white world. Only the women — all gorgeous — give the streets a pop of color. That is, only the women…
If the clothes of Yves Saint Laurent were groundbreaking, the designer’s mystique was as subtle as the curve of an invisibly molded sleeve. Those who have picked up just a little Saint Laurent lore may know about his beginnings at the House of Dior in the late 1950s and his…
Should grown-ups be spending their time reading young-adult novels, at the risk of missing the supposed riches of fiction written for actual grown-ups? A recent essay in Slate groused about the legions of adults who long ago graduated from the 12th grade but still devour YA fiction at the expense…
According to inspirational sports movies, winning demands you train hard, play with heart, be a team and not care about winning. So it goes in the sturdy, crowd-pleasing When the Game Stands Tall, a profile in saintliness puffed up from a true story: the Northern California Catholic school whose football…
How did it get this way? That’s one question left un-addressed in too much of the coverage of the clashes between police and protesters in Ferguson, Missouri. How, in a generation, did a majority white suburb of St. Louis become majority black, mostly broke, and bereft of opportunity? And how…
Post-rock is a rather sterile term to be applied to the infectious music produced by bassist and composer Kristian Dunn and drummer Tim Fogarty. Collectively known as El Ten Eleven, the duo has been creating their unique brand of propulsive instrumental rock for a dozen years. Kind of like a…
