Though the Miami New Drama-commissioned “Queen of Basel” will have its official world premiere at Studio Theatre in Washington D.C. next season, you don’t have to wait or travel to discover how playwright Hilary Bettis has reimagined August Strindberg’s controversial 1888 classic “Miss Julie.” With three powerful actors and a small audience sharing the stage space at Miami Beach’s Co..
Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, now 33, was named a MacArthur “genius” grant winner in 2016, the same year his play “Gloria” was chosen as a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for drama. Earlier, his provocative, stylistically diverse, subversive plays “Appropriate” and “An Octoroon” (the latter was produced by Coral Gables’ Area Stage last fall) each won best new American play Obie Awards. ..
"The Other Mozart" is a suitcase play – one of those shows where a single actress can pack the entire contents that creates the setting – costume, wig, and props, and go anywhere in the world. It is the way Samantha Hoefer will arrive in Miami to present Sylvia Milo's one-woman play about Maria Anna Mozart, the not nearly as famous older sibling of that 18th century rock star Wolfgang Ama..
Early on in the Argentinean film “El Último Traje” (The Last Suit), which makes its U.S. theatrical debut this week, a deceptively quaint and humorous scene takes place between the film’s protagonist, 88-year-old Abraham Bursztein and his young granddaughter. The little girl refuses to join in a family photo with Abraham surrounded by his many grandchildren. When he cajoles and insists, ..
Gone are the days when filmmakers needed huge budgets, and major movie studios backing them with big bucks to get their films seen, according to two producers who spent decades in Los Angeles, and have now moved their base to Miami Beach. "From a creative standpoint, there are amazing opportunities for filmmakers today," says producer Kevin Chinoy, who, along with producing partner Frances..
Mark St. Germain has achieved ongoing success with small-cast plays involving historical figures in fictional scenarios, and South Florida has been as welcoming to his work as the rest of the country. St. Germain’s “Camping With Henry and Tom,” about a 1920s camping trip involving Henry Ford, Thomas Edison and President Warren G. Harding, was produced in 1996 by New Theatre in Coral Gables..
Mexico City-based theater collective Teatro Ojo's works are constantly evolving. Nothing is ever really finished. That's because they take from every performance. Whatever the audience experiences, observes, feels, and offers feedback, which they highly encourage, all is used, considered, and included in the evolution of the same piece, or introduced into another new work. Two of the ..
“America’s Greatest and Least Known Playwright.”This is how the Cuban-American playwright Maria Irene Fornes is referred to several times throughout Michelle Memran’s documentary “The Rest I Make Up,” which makes its Florida debut this Saturday as part of Miami-Dade College’s Miami Film Festival. Fornes has been called the “Mother of Avant-Garde Theater.” Theater giants like Edward A..
“Once” has always been touched with magic. And as anyone who has seen the sublime new production of the show by Actors’ Playhouse in Coral Gables would tell you, the musical’s spellbinding pull is as powerful as ever. When Irish director-screenwriter John Carney first told the tale of a heartbroken Irish street musician and the spunky Czech pianist who reignites his passion, a 200..
Consider the idea of land in Palestine, and conflict may be the first thing to come to mind. But for Jumana Emil Abboud, the Palestinian landscape evokes other, older, associations – with mythological creatures like water spirits and ghouls. “These stories were told way before 1948,” says the Galilee-born artist, speaking by phone from her home in Jerusalem. She suggests looking back ..
In one duet, two dancers use their bodies as counterweights, springing forth from each other’s bodies with explosive power. In another, dancers form a sharp line before torsos undulate and fall one by one to the ground, a solitary figure left standing among the fallen. So goes Dance Now!’s latest work, “Bridges Not Walls,” a statement about the powerof art to make change, at a time when art and progress are under siege. It will be premiered at the Aventura Arts & Cultural Center this Friday.
For the 17-year-old dance company, now based in Little Haiti, the idea for the work was born from a cultural exchange project with a dance company in Mexico, long before current politics made wall-building part of the daily vernacular. The project was an exploration not of the physical divides, but what in us as people causes divisions. As Hannah Baumgarten, one of Dance Now!’s cofounders explains: “Ultimately what we decided is that identity is what we define ourselves with. And the question of who we are is what creates our personal boundaries and personal walls around us. If we change the question, can we bridge those walls? Can we find a commonality as humans? So this is our goal as a piece of choreography. This is our goal as choreographic collaborators on this project.”
It is a project not based solely on movement, as it also delves deeply into an understanding of human nature and human evolution. “We started talking about, what walls do we all build as humans to protect ourselves?” Baumgarten says. “We … try to understand looking at genetic studies and understanding that human beings have a natural instinct not to have their genes stomped out -- and how dominant genes do trump recessive genes. There’s an instinctive fear of the other that is primordial and is probably how the Neanderthals lost their place as the dominant species.
“We’re talking about ancient feelings that we’re able to now voice and translate and manifest, sometimes in an unpleasant human expression. But we try to sort of breach the subject … that being afraid of the other, being afraid of the different, we should not look at that as a bad thing. We should just look at it as something that we’re powerless over. What we have power to do is try to have empathy and understand our common humanity.”
Dance also allows Baumgarten to tell that story of common humanity in a way that is unique to the art form. “You can never escape the humanity of [dance], because it is the human body in motion. It’s impossible to have dance without having humans.”
Dance Now! Presents Contemporanea, including the world premiere of "Bridges not Walls" and an encore presentation of "Ritmo Jondo;"Friday, 8:30 p.m.; Aventura Arts & Cultural Center,3385 N.E. 188 St., Aventura; tickets: $35; 877-311-7469.