Columbia College Chicago students, faculty and staff receive a 20% discount on tickets! The Dance Center of Columbia College Chicago presents Vietnam's Together Higher Dance Troupe THIS WEEKEND ONLY! February 22, 23 & 24, 8pm
"...one of the more original and innovative piecesof modern performance art in Vietnam." - HERITAGE
The Dance Centerof Columbia College Chicago, 1306 S. Michigan Ave.
TOGETHER HIGHER DANCE TROUPE PERFORMS STORIES OF US, an evening-length work that uses Western-influenced modern dance to examine ideas of exclusion and segregation, inspired by personal stories of people living life outside of the mainstream in Vietnam. Artistic Director Le Vu Long's highly trained dancers, most of whom are deaf, create a powerful silencing force in this piece, moving from military-like marching formations to moments of free improvisation and emotion. This new company has been bucking the norms of dance in Southeast Asia and is turning heads in a place where contemporary dance is a relatively new phenomenon.
Other Events:
POST-PERFORMANCE DISCUSSION
Thursday, February 22
For tickets:
Please call the box office at 312-344-8300 to receive your 20% discount
For more info:
Please visit www.dancecenter.org
CRDT brings to light the stories and struggles of some forgotten topics while continuing to entertain its audiences with passionate energy. Today (Tuesday), Wednesday, and Thursday at Noon at Concert Hall, 1014 S. Michigan. Also Friday at 7:30 p.m.
Casteel’s play "Returns," is based on his own experiences as an Abu Ghraib interrogator for the US Army Reserves. The production is directed by David Gothard, Associate Director of the Abbey Theatre, Ireland's national theater. The performance will be followed by an informal Q & A with the Playwright and actors. TODAY, February 19, at 2 p.m. at the Hokin Annex, 623 S. Wabash
SHAFT: MOVIE PREVIEW AND PANEL DISCUSSION WITH RICHARD ROUNDTREE. Today, February 15, Movie Preview (1 p.m.); Panel Discussion (3 p.m.) in the Film Row Cinema, 1104 S. Wabash.
CONVERSATIONS IN THE ARTS – UP CLOSE WITH RICHARD ROUNDTREE -- Richard Roundtree has distinguished himself as a leading actor for over 30 years, appearing in over 70 films. Perhaps his most famous role was John Shaft, private detective, in the feature film, “Shaft”. Mr. Roundtree’s television credits include the landmark miniseries “Roots”, the acclaimed made for television film “Having Our Say” and the popular “Desperate Housewives”. He will next appear in the films “All the Days Before Tomorrow” and “Retreat”. Mr. Roundtree has been nominated for an NAACP Image Award, and has won the Peabody Award for his narration on the PBS documentary The Rise and Fall of Jim Crow. Tonight at 7:30 p.m. at the The Dance Center, 1303 S. Michigan.
Gus Van Sant's "Elephant"--One of our faculty loves the film, the other hates it. Where do you stand? Join in the fun! Screening of Elephant followed by a debate with Film & Video faculty members Dan Rybicky and Sandi Chaplin, referee'd by Ron Falzone. Tonight (February 13), from 6 to 8:30 p.m. at the Film Row Cinema, 1104 S. Wabash.
The first 45 minutes of Gus Van Sant's new film, "Elephant," is self-assured, formally adroit, and profoundly illuminating. Exploring the Littleton, Colo., school massacre of 1999, the film displays such a clear and sympathetic understanding of the banality and tiny terrors of ordinary high school life that the viewer is left wondering not why this tragedy ever happened, but why it hasn't happened more often. Van Sant is perhaps the gutsiest filmmaker working in American independent cinema today and consequently his filmography is jammed almost equally with disasters ("Even Cowgirls Get the Blues," "Psycho") and triumphs ("Drugstore Cowboy," "My Own Private Idaho," "To Die For"). The split between the good and the bad even continues among his more self-consciously commercial films ("Good Will Hunting" vs. "Finding Forrester"). This curious division is replicated within his latest film, whose literal-minded and unimaginative second half diminishes the sublimities of the first.
To cast the film, Van Sant interviewed a bunch of kids from various high schools in his hometown of Portland, Ore. It's unclear exactly what he was looking for, but the result of his talent search is a group of students that seem completely natural and genuine, yet who lack the awkwardness of most non-professional actors thrust suddenly before the camera. (Significantly, their first names in the film, for the most part, are the same as their names in real life). One of the girls is so geeky-looking that she couldn't possibly be anything but real, and she recalls the slovenly peasant girl from Rossellini's "Paisan" (1946). These kids are accompanied by smooth professionals -- like Timothy Bottoms -- who only enhance the feeling of authenticity. The opening scene, for example, gives us a drunken father (Bottoms) driving his son to school, and we're immediately and forcefully pulled into the film as he smashes into one car after another along the way.
Van Sant is also at the top of his filmmaking game in presenting these mostly forlorn lives, employing a kind of stylized realism that depends for a lot of its effectiveness on a relentlessly tracking camera that follows these kids everywhere, even into the bathroom. (Van Sant also sometimes reverse-rhymes the tracking shots by putting his camera, for example, at the other end of a huge gymnasium.) What's absolutely welcome here is that Van Sant has foregone the use of the hand-held camera, which a lesser director would have relied upon, in favor of the otherworldly smoothness of what seems to be a Steadicam.
Events are de-dramatized, and there's a casualness to everything that seems almost magical. Football practice is underlined, unusually and remarkably, by a classical music score. There are also tiny moments of slow motion that seem intended to increase the intensity of certain otherwise insignificant gestures. Most provocatively, the director employs a "Rashomon"-like chronological method in which a few structuring events are seen three different times, say, from the perspective of three different characters. In this, of course, he's following the practice of many recent films that seem obsessed by questions of time and their implications for cinematic form, but the film never feels derivative in the slightest way. And though all of this paraphernalia may sound like it weighs the film down, it does anything but.
Weirdly, the exact moment when the film begins to lose much of its aesthetic interest can be pinpointed. It comes when the three superficial girls he's been following, Brittany, Jordan, and Nicole, enter the ladies' room to purge, simultaneously, after lunch. The delicate balance between naturalism and stylization is lost, and with the latter momentarily taking over, our aesthetic investment in the film suddenly becomes threatened.
The film further deteriorates, ironically, when the action begins to pick up. As Van Sant becomes more aligned dramatically and narratively with the killers, our own interest becomes riveted in the unfolding events. But what we see, with few exceptions, seems to follow the by-now familiar pathway: Nazi websites, gun ordering on the Internet, violent video games, frustrated artistic creativity (one of the killers is fond of playing Beethoven) and so on. Maybe the problem is that Van Sant's desire to employ some narrative shorthand has a lot of these emblematic moments occurring within the same scene, and thus they seem forced and obvious. Happily, this final section is redeemed by some signature Van Sant moments (wish-fulfillments?) such as the killers kissing in the shower before they embark on their deadly task. Unfortunately, before tackling the greatest mystery of all -- just how could someone do this? -- Van Sant falters slightly and what could have been a masterpiece becomes just another pretty good movie.
URINETOWN: THE MUSICAL opens at Getz Theater this week, directed by artist-in-residence Stephen Shaw, with music and lyrics by Columbia alum Mark Hollmann. The Tony Award-winning musical tells the story of a government-enforced ban on the most private of acts following the depletion of the earth's water supply. Urinetown shamelessly parodies West Side Story, as well as the works of Bertolt Brecht, while questioning the possibility of achieving positive change in the world. Today (Thursday) at 2 p.m. at the Getz Theater, 72 E. 11th Street. Admission is$10-$14 (Columbia students free)