It’s a big weekend for ballet lovers along our coast – and music lovers, too. Ballet Vero Beach stages its second program of the season, Composers and Choreographers, with a focus on music – what, in dance, is the underseen force of all that happens on stage. The program Friday night, Saturday afternoon and Saturday night includes an original score performed live to a dance that was choreographed by the dancers as the composer created the music. Another is set to a commissioned piano recording of a composition by Vero Beach resident Paul Gay. And a third dance is set to a Vivaldi masterpiece that has been obsessing artistic director Adam Schnell for 15 years and has finally found form in one of his ballets.
The performances take place at the Vero Beach High School Performing Arts Center. Tickets are available on the ballet’s website or at the door.
In West Palm Beach, Miami City Ballet stages its second program this weekend with a company premier of “Calcium Light Night,” Peter Martins’ first ballet set to music by Charles Ives. Also on the program, “Serenade,” George Balanchine’s first ballet created after he arrived in America – in 1934. It is set to Tchaikovsky’s “Serenade in C Major.” Then there’s Sir Kenneth McMullan’s duet in the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical “Carousel.” And Jerome Robbins’ “Glass Pieces,” another company premiere, set to the music of Philip Glass. When the piece was premiered by the New York City Ballet in 1983, it featured Lourdes Lopez, now Miami City’s artistic director. The performances run through a Sunday matinee at the Kravis Center; the ballet offers discounted tickets at the box office an hour before each performance.
The Vero Beach Museum of Art has two new exhibits up these days. The latest is of the works of sculptor Larry Kagan that alone seem like works of abstract metal. Under strong light directed under a specific angle as directed by the artist, the works become in their illumination shrouded in mystery by their shadows. Also on display, the large photographs assembled in photo-montage of Jeffrey Becton in The View Out His Window (And In His Mind’s Eye).
The museum just announced its third Asbury Short Film concert coming up Saturday, Feb. 11. Hosted by Doug LeClaire, director of the series, the two-hour concert melds important international films of years past with new films winning festival awards. This year, the films include “Rust,” a short directed by Halifax, Nova Scotia, director Ben Proudfoot about an artist who makes sculptures out of rusted scrap metal. The film took Best Short Film at the Sherburne International Film Expo in September. And “Drawcard,” directed by Antonio Orean Barlin of Australia, about an office worker whose practical joke goes awry; it just won the People’s Choice award at the Los Angeles Comedy Shorts Festival. The event has sold out in prior years; tickets are $20.
The museum’s film enthusiasts are also snapping up seats to its film studies series. The next two series are already sold out, so here’s a heads-up to take action and sign up for “French Connections: Fiction and the French Cinema.” Film studies director Warren Obluck precedes each film in the series with a short talk, followed by a question and answer period. The films are screened on Tuesday afternoons and evenings from March 21 to April 18.
The Vero Beach Theatre Guild is offering up an unusual event: a one-weekend, one-man musical from South Africa here thanks to the strings-pulling of theater veteran Mark Wygonik.
“Sugar and Cream,” playing Feb. 3-5 as a fundraiser for the theater’s new addition, stars Johannesburg resident Harry Sideropoulos. It’s the story of a Greek gourmand and serial dieter in search of the perfect baklava. Someone please take this man to Tea and Chi’s Maria Sparsis, who bakes the baklava for her shop.
Speaking of Sparsis, the gallery that is home to her more permanent creations – her clay works — Flametree Gallery, is hosting Vero’s favorite poet Sean Sexton next Thursday night, Jan. 26, for a poetry reading. Sexton’s pottery art is the current show at Flametree. Sexton, the grandson of Vero’s legendary Waldo Sexton, is a rancher, an esteemed artist and a poet who has published a collection of his poems, “Blood Writings,” with Anhinga Press, Florida’s best-known literary imprint.
On the subject of poetry, the 13th annual Palm Beach Poetry Festival has been going on all week in Delray Beach. The finale reading Saturday night includes Dorianne Laux, winner of a Pushcart prize, two NEA fellowships and a Guggenheim; David Baker, poetry editor of the Kenyon Review currently teaching at Denison University; and Ginger Murchison, editor-in-chief of the Cortland Review. The reading and book signing begins at 7 p.m.
That’s followed at 9:30 by a spoken-word event with two of the trio known as the Mayhem poets.
If you can squeeze a couple of seats out of Riverside Theatre this weekend, it’s the last chance to see “Chicago,” the record-smashing musical with which Riverside has done a smashing job. Then, starting Tuesday, Michael Hollinger’s absurdist comedy “An Empty Plate at the Café du Grand Boeuf” plays in the theater’s black box theater. It’s about the lone patron of a French restaurant who decides to starve himself to death, a blow to the servers and chef, who ladle out une grande bouffe of adjectives and empty platters. The show runs through Feb. 5.
