Where I’m Going….
Milwaukee is a haven for a
rt made of pixels rather than paint these days. The lovely and technically innovative Act/React show at the Milwaukee Art Museum continues to draw crowds (see my review here). The Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design’s Media Projects show features three interesting artists selected by curator Jason S. Yi. And now, Marquette’s Haggerty Museum gets in the act with stop.look.listen, a show of video-based work from around the country. The work ranges from Mircea Cantor’s pure and provocative “Deeparture” to Slater Bradley’s examination of self-destructive celebrity in pop music, “The Doppelganger Trilogy.”
Speaking of self-destruction, everyone can go down with the ship at the Milwaukee Public Museum’s Titanic: The Artifact Exhibit. When you enter, you are given a boarding pass with a real passenger’s name on it. And when you leave, you get to find out if there was room for you on the lifeboats or not. There are no Canadian divas to be found here—just lots of information about the ship’s construction, as well as real pieces of it dug up by treasure hunters—including a piece of the hull. With 18 million visitors so far world-wide, this exhibit, a product of Premiere Exhibitions, Inc. (you can follow their stock on the NASDAQ: PRXI), claims to be the most popular museum show ever. I thought that Gunther von Hagens’ said the same thing about his Body Worlds show, which visited Milwaukee earlier this year, but who’s counting—besides Gunther and NASDAQ that is.
The Milwaukee Ballet opens a one-two punch of Tchaikovsky classics this weekend, staging Marius Petipa’s classic Sleeping Beauty before digging out the Christmas trees and candy canes for its annual Nutcracker in December. But don’t let visions of sugarplums make you miss this one. Balanchine called it “the best of the old ballets.” And New Yorker critic Andrew Porter called it “the grandest, fullest and finest achievement of Classical ballet.”
And for another classic, get in the Halloween spirit with another visit from the Alloy Orchestra, a Boston-based trio that has reinvented the art of accompanying silent movies. The film here is a restored version of Lon Chaney’s The Phantom of the Opera. The Alloy will be on stage with their arsenal of percussive junk, instruments and electronics, and play the score as the story unfolds. We haven’t heard whether the trio will play the Bach Toccata and Fugue on the Oriental’s own theater organ, but I’m sure it will be tempting.
Where I’ve Been….
See my review of Alverno Presents! performance by Eiko and Koma here.
Tonight I’m heading to the Milwaukee Chamber Theatre’s Rabbit Hole. Perhaps I’ll see you there.
And stay tuned for other updates as the Halloween weekend approaches.
