Twenty-five years ago today the Berlin Wall fell, an event that was as sudden and surprising as it would be historically important.
A Santa Barbara mother and her son, Celeste Barber and Eric Friedman, have a chunk of the wall in their possession, a reminder of their days spent living in Communist-controlled East Berlin, and will soon be releasing a memoir of that life-changing time.
Twenty years ago in 1994, a 30-year-old Michael Andrews was a successful plumbing contractor with the itch to move on to a completely different place in his life, to follow his passions in the theater world and the music scene. And he managed to do both. His band Area 51 is still playing around town, and the company he helped create, Boxtales, celebrates two decades of bringing the world of myth and storytelling to audiences young and old. Boxtales will do so starting this Thursday with a three-day celebration of its best work.
They’ll return to the Lobero with “Prince Rama & the Monkey King,” “The Odyssey,” “Leyendas de Duende” and “B’rer Rabbit and Other Trickster Tales.” The shows have all the hallmarks that have made Boxtales a success: imaginative masks, great costumes, clever stage design, and original adaptations of classic myths that streamline the sometimes convoluted stories down to their entertaining essence.
David Holbrooke, the director of the “Mountainfilm in Telluride Festival,” appropriately enough lives high on a steep mountain in the town of the same name. When we talk on the phone he’s bouncing back and forth from this interview to the hordes of trick-or-treaters making their way to his door, and he’s convincing them that the climb is worth it. Much in the same way, his festival — a selection of which comes to UCSB on Wednesday — sets out to convince people to get outside and enjoy life.
“Get up and out!” he says. “I don’t mean that in a bad way. I want people to enjoy.”
A combination of modern technology, classic painting and contemporary art combined on Wednesday to create a brand new look.
The Public Defender’s Office at the Santa Barbara County Courthouse welcomed a tapestry version of “The Landing of Cabrillo,” the 1924 painting by Daniel Sayre Groesbeck (1879-1950) that hangs outside the second floor Mural Room in the same building.
The tapestry was designed and fashioned by artist John Nava of Ojai, who discovered and championed the technology that creates complicated tapestries from photo sources.
The tapestry was a joint venture between the Santa Barbara County Arts Commission and the County Art in Public Places Committee, and organized by the commission’s Rita Ferri.
The choice of the Groesbeck painting, Ms. Ferri said, made sense not just because of the history of the work, but because it was “The Landing of Cabrillo” that earned Groesbeck a much larger commission: the entire mural room itself.
It also solved a physical problem in the lobby: bare walls creating so much echo that the people who work behind the desk and its thick glass partition couldn’t hear people talk clearly.
Already there’s a big improvement in the area, with the heavy tapestry, roughly 8-by-11 feet, dampening the sound, Ms. Ferri said.
When she was first asked to look into finding a tapestry for the area, there were problems.
“Unfortunately, older tapestries did not usually survive in good condition but their request led to a creative solution,” Ms. Ferri said.
She called on Mr. Nava, who paints in a classical realist style but in 1999 started working in tapestries.
Through modern computer-based looms, Mr. Nava can send a scan of an artwork, reduce
the millions of color variations down to around 160, and have a sort of “tapestry printer” recreate the work.
The main home for this multi-million dollar machine is at Flanders Tapestries in Belgium. The business mass-produces tapestries and fabrics for large corporations, but they also took on Mr. Nava’s work.
One of his first tapestries now hangs at the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels in Los Angeles, and that was the commission that got him into this side work.
Mr. Nava laughs at the irony that his one piece of work hanging publicly is actually by another painter.
He took a large scan of the painting, “gigabytes and gigabytes size” he said, and not only decided on the palette to be used to recreate the colors, but also decided on the three-dimensionality of the piece. Some sections are raised while others are flat. Threads in the warp and weft combine to make different colors.
Mr. Nava then made tests
and had them shipped from Belgium to check. “You don’t really know the final colors until you see.”
On Wednesday, Mr. Nava was on hand to say a few words at the opening, but he believes the Groesbeck work speaks for itself. It now hangs at a level that invites careful study, unlike the original painting that is hung high above the floor and is dark due to age.
The idea of computer-based looms is an old one, actually. The Jacquard Loom, from the late 1700s, used a digital-like punchcard to program the machine to make patterns.
Mr. Nava said the choice of Groesbeck was a good one.
“He made these bravura, Cecil B. DeMille-like paintings with bold brush strokes, and that translated really well into the weaving.”
The tapestry is permanently on view in the Public Defender Lobby at the Courthouse, 1100 Anacapa St.
For more information on John Nava, check out: http://www.johnnavastudio.blogspot.com/
I feel like we always say this, but this is the hardest show we’ve ever done!” says the always chipper Samantha Eve, the executive director of Out of the Box Theatre Company. She’s talking about the 15-plus cast members of “Bare: A Rock Opera” that opens at Center Stage Theater this Thursday. Ms. Eve has worked with large casts before, like Stephen Sondheim’s “Assassins” and the hippie collective of “Hair.” But this musical, a story of two Catholic boarding school boys who fall in love and question their faith and identity — with some surprising consequences — is calling on local high schoolers for the job.
“We’re dealing with a lot of scheduling conflicts,” Eve says. “But we’re lucky because they’re bringing a lot of great energy to the show. They’re extraordinarily talented.”
Despite the amount of dance that passes through Santa Barbara, and the amount of schools and instructors in our town, there still is a dearth of opportunities for modern choreographers to have their works performed. Companies come and go, and find that locations and funding are a problem. According to Stephen Kelly, part of the collective called Hive, spearheaded by Maria Rendina Frantz of Motion Theatre Dance Company, the cost of rehearsal space in Santa Barbara is even higher now than New York City. The answer to that dilemma: form a collective, and focus on delivering a wide-ranging evening of dance, while turning a profit. They believe it can be done, and if the advance tickets to this Sunday’s show “Buzz” are any indication, they may be right. And dance fans will benefit.
“We’re hoping this will provide a model that is not just sustainable here, but elsewhere in the country,” Mr. Kelly says. He and his wife, choreographer Misa Kelly, have broadened the scope of their own organization ArtBark to encompass the East Coast and Eastern Europe, and Hive is another offshoot of their collective ideal.
Ten years ago, the documentary “What the Bleep Do We Know?” bundled together quantum physics and spirituality, brought in a slew of modern thinkers and went from an outsider documentary to a rousing success. Since then, the market for consciousness-raising films has expanded. So it makes sense that the Awakened World International Film Festival — a three-day combination film festival and conference — would honor the decade anniversary of this film. Executive director Barbara Fields also says our location also makes sense:
“We’ve done about 20 of these conferences in the same amount of years, all over the world,” she says. “But we picked Santa Barbara for this event because there’s an element here that somehow goes unappreciated, or is relegated to the ‘new age’, but this is a highly spiritual town.”
Do creators have to suffer for their art? Well, in the case of writer-director-actor Cathryn Michon, the indignities of a bad breakup and the levels to which she sunk to conform to ideals of beauty turned out to be a fertile ground for comedy. First a book and now a movie, “Muffin Top” is a “body image rom com” that takes a farcical look at a serious issue. The film gets its sneak preview this Monday, with a red carpet screening at Fiesta 5, with the select members of the cast and director in attendance.
“Muffin Top: A Love Story” is about Suzanne (Michon), whose husband dumps her for a younger, skinnier model. She’s helped by her best friend Elise, played by Ms. Michon’s real-life best friend, the Tony-winning (for “Hairspray”) Marissa Jaret Winokur. And the man Suzanne goes out of her way to woo is played by David Arquette. Other funny people in the cast include Maria Bamford, Dot-Marie Jones (“Glee”) and the recently passed and sorely missed Marcia Wallace.
It takes a set of cojones for a singer-songwriter to name his latest album “Balls,” especially when that singer is Griffin House, who is best known for love songs and introspection and not joking around.
“Certain people have ideas about what a musician is and isn’t supposed to do,” he says. “If you want people to take you seriously, you’re supposed to create this intrigue, almost not be yourself. And there’s no title that could explain my personality or sense of humor other than ‘Balls.’ ” (Actually, the name comes from his childhood, in a story too convoluted for this article.)
Inheriting a fortune and then being besieged by suitors who claim to love you was just as much of a problem back in the days of novelist Henry James as it is now, hence the ongoing popularity of “The Heiress,” a James adaptation for the stage that opens this coming Wednesday as the second play of SBCC Theatre Group’s 2014-15 season.
Based on “Washington Square,” Augustus and Ruth Goetz adapted Mr. James’ 1880 novel into a play in 1947 and then into a 1949 film version starring Olivia de Havilland and Montgomery Clift. It’s a play of ambiguous motives, abuse and bitter recriminations, just the kind of heady drama that actors and directors love to sink their teeth into. And this production boasts a strong crew.