Provocative Events Coming to Town in May & June
May 16 — Pairings: An evening of wine and dance. If you have long fantasized about seeing edgy avant-garde dance performed at a stuffy country club, you’ll want to be at Woodstock Club for “Pairings,” a fundraiser for Motus Dance Theatre. Think Baryshnikov meets “Caddyshack.” Six courses of wine and hors d’oeuvres selected to complement six original dance performances. (For a more conventional dance experience, head to the Indiana Repertory Theatre for Dance Kaleidoscope’s “Fathers & Sons,” which includes the world premiere of “I Never Danced for My Father,” choreographed by DK Artistic Director David Hochoy.) A Culture Club recommendation … check it out.
May 16 & 17 — (The Earth Mass). Paul Winter’s “Missa Gaia” (The Earth Mass) is based on “Canticle for Brother Sun,” by St. Francis Assisi (the original Christian tree-hugger). A lovely and joyful piece of jazzy contemporary worship music laced with gospel harmonies and global beats, “Missa Gaia” will be performed by Encore Vocal Arts, St. Luke’s Chancel and Children’s Choirs, and an ensemble of instrumentalists. Plus guest soloists: a wolf, a whale, and a loon! Well, probably recordings of the wildlife … Indianapolis is still waiting for a church with the green grapes to include a live wolf in its performance of “Missa Gaia.” A Culture Club recommendation … check it out
May 17 — Campecine 2008: From Invisible to Invincible. No one makes movies like the Indianapolis-based Latino Youth Collective, which puts digital cameras and sophisticated editing software in the hands of kids so that they can show how they view their lives. See some examples of their work at the Indianapolis Museum of Art when this enormously creative group of high school and college students puts on Campecine 2008 (Campecine = campesino + cine). The varriomentaries (their word for documentaries) deal with gangs, the voicelessness of undocumented immigrant kids, and teen pregnancy. If you are lucky, they will show their wildly imaginative “Loz Invenzivlez,” all but guaranteed to make your head burst in flames. A Culture Club recommendation … check it out
May 18 — Producer James Morehead will show excerpts from his film “A Ripple of Hope.” “A Ripple of Hope” explores the events that occurred in Indiana on April 4, 1968—the day that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., was assassinated. Sen. Robert F. Kennedy happened to be in Indianapolis for a campaign appearance that day, but when news broke that Dr. King had been shot in Memphis, Kennedy’s remarks to the primarily African-American crowd had to take on a dramatically different tone—and went down in history as one of the great political speeches of the twentieth century. check it out
May 21 — Living with a Resurgent Russia. How can the US handle a Russia that doesn’t want to do what we tell it to do … and has the clout to stand up to intimidation? check it out
May 21 — James Schoff tells us: What to do with North Korea?There could be no headache awaiting the next president that’s bigger than North Korea, with its nukes and crisis-ridden economy. That’s why James Schoff has to worry that “the six party talks” doesn’t sound like much of a party at all. check it out
May 28 — John Clark on “Great Decisions indeed: Why Indianapolis needs its own foreign policy”Consider the eight topics of the Great Decisions series: unending war in Iraq, the EU, grudging diplomatic discussions with our enemies, policy for an overstretched military, Latin America’s Leftists, undemocratic Russia and Putinism, trade with China, private philanthropy and foreign aid. All apparently disconnected from one another, all far away … but they all intimately touch Central Indiana, and we have a chance to contribute to solutions. check it out
June 22 — Discuss the New Climate of Publishing with Indy writers. E-publishing to giant presses, query letters to multiple book deals – pre-published writers will sit equally with well-known published authors and talk about the pitfalls they have felt and the mountains they have overcome to seek and succeed at publication. check it out
