If you Google the Indonesian term dhalang, Wikipedia will give you a simple definition: a puppeteer from the island of Java. But last night, the capacity crowd that watched a master dhalang perform at the Dallas Museum of Art discovered there is way more to it than that. Ki Purbo…
On a sun-bathed Saturday morning, as I arrived at Irving’s Hackberry Creek Country Club, happy golfers greeted each other as they met for early tee times. But it wasn’t until I spotted a pair of long coattails and a top hat saunter past the women’s aerobics class on the front…
Lucy Kirkman’s solo show at That That, a hard-to-find new art space in a Deep Ellum building that you’ve passed a million times (think of the Finley Shirts window on Main Street), is rooted in the Jorge Luis Borges short story “Library of Babel,” 10 dense and challenging pages of…
Elite classical musicians are often compared to pro athletes, at least by other classical musicians. We make the comparison because when we see a pitcher hurl a perfectly placed fastball into the strike zone at 97 mph, watch an Olympic gymnast flip backward through the air and land solidly on…
As we reported a while back, The Book of Mormon, the Broadway show with nine Tony Awards under its belt and written by South Park creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker, will finally be in Dallas this fall, as part of the 2013/2014 Lexus Broadway Series at the AT&T Performing…
“Things really took a turn after that rape” is something I said aloud on Friday while standing in the living room of a former crack house. We have to get there first, though. Siri reluctantly guides us to the ramshackle West Dallas residence, which sits on an overgrown plot behind…
When we see you on the street and think you put some thought into your style, we may take your picture and ask you things. See previous installations in the Street Style archive. The champagne was flowing on Saturday afternoon for the grand opening of the Dallas School of Burlesque…
I’m addicted to Oral Fixation, that clutch of storytellers who share their life confessions at the McKinney Avenue Contemporary. You must be too, since their shows sell out in advance — every, single, time. Tonight, we’ve whipped up a special evening with them and the Granada called “True Stories: Behind…
Friday evening, Luis Valdez, the founding artistic director of El Teatro Campesino, writer and director of Zoot Suit and La Bamba, and the father of Chicano Theater in the United States, was welcomed with a standing ovation at the Latino Cultural Center in Dallas. The packed house included several city…
With as frequently as artists get approached for charitable donations, it’s interesting to watch the energy shift of an Art Conspiracy event. There, volunteering gets competitive. We saw this again on Saturday night at “Mounted,” where Dallas’ best talents stepped forward to give time, build sets or donate original works…
As early as Thursday night, comic book fans and blockbuster aficionados will finally have the chance to see Man of Steel, the Zack Snyder-Christopher Nolan take on Superman, the all-American superhero. If you’ve been paying attention to the trailers surfacing periodically on Facebook, Twitter, and in theaters (people still go…
I’ve seen some good ones: Louis CK at the Majestic last year. Bill Cosby, who CK himself worships, at the Winspear. I saw Todd Barry in a tiny bar in Kansas City not that long ago, and spent an hour spit-taking my Boulevard Brew. Others, too. But this was damn…
*Like, when Netflix is all, “Here’s 30 new hours of Arrested Development, try being productive now!” You’d think it would be most people’s dream to skip the office, and pants, in favor of working from home. Apparently not so much. The internet, loneliness, creative stagnation and lack of tools are…
We wrote a while back about Nasher Xchange, the sculpture center’s public art initiative which brings 10 artists to Dallas neighborhoods for site-specific pieces. The unveiling happens on October 19 and we’ll soon know more specifics, like precise locations and design elements as news leaks during a ten-week series of…
Walking through the installation room of Wunder-Block, a new exhibition by Katharina Grosse, is an instant lesson in size perception. I feel like I’ve been zapped by a ray gun, transformed and shape-shifted into an ant harvesting dust on a busy MAC cosmetics counter. Mountains of pigments — charged-up royal…
Cristela Alonzo, an alumni of the Dallas comedy scene, recently finished taping her big Comedy Central Half Hour (re-branded from the more famous moniker Comedy Central Presents), which debuts Saturday morning at 12.30 a.m. Tapped by major entertainment website Vulture as one of the top 50 comedians with a chance…
On Tuesday, June 11, we’re having a night of storytelling on the Sundown at Granada’s gorgeous rooftop. We’ve partnered with them, Oral Fixation and some local musicians to make it happen, and we’ll be giving away prizes. All of the stories will be ripped from real life, so grab some…
The birds of a feather flocking together in the Arts District this weekend are members of the Theatre Communications Group, holding their annual conference here. About 1000 regional theater managers, artistic directors, dramaturgs and other arts professionals will be networking and attending seminars following the theme “Learn Do Teach.” (Sans…
For nearly two weeks now, Fort Worth’s Bass Hall has played host to some of the world’s most elite competitive pianists between the ages of 18 and 30. I haven’t seen any blood, but buckets of sweat and I’m sure more than a few tears have been shed during the…
Ask people about their favorite movies and the same titles come up regularly — Casablanca, Pulp Fiction, Annie Hall, Citizen Kane. But some movies have special meaning for people even if they don’t turn up on lists of established favorites. They’re the secret movies we keep in our pockets like…
Anyone trying to run a civilized country should know that throwing musicians in jail for making music is always a bad idea. That didn’t stop Vladimir Putin’s government from arresting three members of the punk collective Pussy Riot, after the group stormed the altar of the Cathedral of Christ the…
All the world’s a stage, Shakespeare wrote in As You Like It. It makes sense, then, to see some plays outside of conventional theaters once in a while. Like under tall trees in a parking lot next to an alley in Uptown. Or inside a converted Art Deco bath house…
