October 18, 1996




The Tibetan Song and Dance Ensemble from The Snow Fields of China.

Lied Hosts Rare Jewels From Tibet

Lentz Center Also to Feature Performance, Exhibit

Folk songs and dances from half a world away will be at the prairie's doorstep when the colorful Tibetan Song and Dance Ensemble brings spectacular festive dress and even "yak" humor to movement and song at 8 p.m. Nov. 1 in the Lied Center for Performing Arts.

Traditional songs and musical reverences relate stories of the culture and Buddhist religion through authentic dance and theater that will be performed by the Tibetan Institute of Performing Arts ensemble.

The company of 32 includes five monastery monks with origins in the ancient city of Lhasa, Tibet. Costumed in striking bejeweled headdresses, masks and magnificent hues of blue, purple and orange, the troupe performs three major styles of traditional Tibetan music, dance and theater. Known as traditional palace style, folk and temple style, all will be represented in the program at the Lied Center.

The presentation will include traditional palace music and the renowned and mysterious multi-phonic ritual chanting of the monks. The show will include the surreal, other-worldly sounds of behemoth Tibetan horns. Other native instruments include small minstrel-sized guitars and drums for the fast-paced dancing in a show characterized as "audience interactive."

Established in exile in 1959, the Tibetan Institute of Performing Arts has attempted to preserve authentic dances, songs and operas from Tibet after takeover by the Chinese.

Another aspect of Tibetan culture will be displayed at the Lentz Center, where "The Sacred Arts of Tibet" will be displayed Oct. 29 to March 2, 1997.

Fifty Tibetan art objects from the Lentz Center's permanent collection will be highlighted on an altar-like shrine constructed for the exhibit. The display will include bronze statues of religious figures, musical instruments and cloth paintings.

Located at 329 Morrill Hall, the Lentz Center also will host the opening ceremonies for the creation of a sand mandala by three monks from the Sera Je Monastery in India. A mandala is a two-dimensional creation in sand or paint representing the sacred realm of a deity - in this case Hayagriva.

"The Mandala of Hayagriva: Sand Painting and Attendant Ceremonies Monks from the Sera Je Monastery" has been scheduled from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., Nov. 2. The presentation will provide the public with the opportunity to watch the monks perform chants and rituals associated with the mandala's creation. The sand painting will continue Sunday from 1:30 to 4 p.m. and Tuesday through Saturday, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. with closing ceremonies at 2 p.m. Nov. 9.

The Lentz Center efforts are sponsored in part by the College of Fine and Performing Arts, the College of Arts and Sciences, the Asian Arts and Culture Guild and Jewel Heart Nebraska.

Tickets for the Lied Center performance of the Tibetan Song and Dance Ensemble are $28, $24 and $20. Half-price tickets are available for youth under 18 and UNL, Doane College and Wesleyan University students with valid identification. The Lied Center box office is open for walk-in sales weekdays from 11 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. and 90 minutes before the performance. Phone orders may be placed by calling 472-4747 or 1-800-432-323 1.

Target "Treatseats" discount coupons are available at participating Target stores.

Deborah Reinhardt, a UNL assistant professor of music education, will give an educational pre-performance talk in the Lied Center's Steinhart Room 55 minutes and 35 minutes before the performance is scheduled to begin.

Oberlin Dance Company to Take the Lied Stage Nov. 7

The Oberlin Dance Company/San Francisco returns to the Lied stage Nov.7 with several new works exploring themes ranging from competitive love to the westward expansion.

The 8 p.m. Nov. 7 performance will include Scissors Paper Stone; Western Women 1: Ghosts of an Old Ceremony; Force of Circumstance and Laundry Cycle: The Long and the Shorts.

Featuring a selection of blues and rock music by Jimi Hendrix and John Lee Hooker among others, Scissors Paper Stone is a dance involving a competitive love triangle that moves to the rhythm of the blues.

Ghosts of an Old Ceremony explores the settling of the west at the turn of the century from the women's perspective. Inspired by reading through hundreds of journals written by women who made the trek westward, the resulting piece is highly theatrical with lush costumes and spellbinding images.

Set to an original score by Paul Drescher, Force of Circumstance is a sextet of three men and three women that pits aggressive physical movements against the tyranny of form.

A whimsical and mirth-filled dance that enlivens with wry humor what Marilyn Tucker of the San Francisco Chronicle calls "the cliches of a laundry list," Laundry Cycle: The Long and the Shorts is performed to a commissioned suite by the a cappella vocal group The Bobs that tosses the metaphor of laundry into a huge tumbler of world events and private drama.

In addition to their public performance, the Oberlin Dance Company will perform student matinees on Nov. 5 and 6. The company will also work with students in the University Foundations Program and with students in four Lincoln middle schools. The LPS work will be on a work-in-progress titled "Imagination on Line" and will use student input for a dance/internet project. ODC's two-week residency in Lincoln has been arranged by Arts Are Basic and the Wagon Train Project.

Tickets are $20, $16, and $12 and are half price for students and senior citizens (62 and over). The performance is sponsored by Arts Are Basic, an aesthetic education program of UNL's College of Fine and Performing Arts.

Nochlin to Discuss Cezanne Portraits

Linda Nochlin, the Lila Acheson Wallace Professor of Modern Art at New York University, will discuss "Cezanne's Portraits" at 7 p.m. Oct. 21 in the auditorium of the Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery as part of the continuing Norman and Jane Geske Lectureship in the History of the Arts.

A reception will follow in the Sheldon Great Hall.

Nochlin received her BA from Vassar College, her MA from Columbia University and her Ph.D. from the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University. Her publications include Women, Art & Power, Courbet Reconsidered and Art and Architecture in the Service of Politics.

Faulkner to Present 'Cult and Culture' Oct. 22

Quentin Faulkner will present "Cult and Culture at the Millenium" at 7 p.m. Oct. 22 in 119 Westbrook Music Building.

T. S. Eliot wrote that "no culture has appeared or developed except together with a religion." If Eliot's assertion that religion and culture are linked, Faulkner asks, "On what 'religion' is modern secular culture based? Or is modern culture a phenomenon without historical parallel, an exception to all previous manifestations of culture?"

With the use of slides, video and sound, Faulkner asks the question "What is culture?" He explores the historical relationship between art and religion, a relationship that inspired great art through the ages. If today's pop music concerts arouse the same level of passionate, un-self-conscious involvement, are they art? How do we define art, culture and religion? What drives the current movement referred to as religion fundamentalism? How is this related to the issue of art and culture? What is multi-culturalism? Is it merely a smoke screen for the inevitable process of assimilation?

Faulkner takes on these questions and many others, and in a very entertaining though substantive presentation provides some very interesting insights into modern life.

The Arts & Issues speakers series was established by the College of Fine and Performing Arts in 1994 as a forum to address important issues in the arts. Faulker is a faculty member in the UNL School of Music.

Warhol Lives

Jared Harris portrays artist/celebrity Andy Warhol in I Shot Andy Warhol, now playing at the Mary Riepma Ross Film Theater.

Opening Oct. 24, Warhol is an entertainingly kicky, unexpectedly sharp, and thoughtfully docudramatized saga of Warhol's would-be assassin, Valerie Solanas, who wrote the SCUM (Society for Cutting Up Men) Manifesto and on June, 3, 1968, pumped three bullets into Warhol.

Also showing is a short feature, Your Name In Cellulite by Gail Noonan, a six-hilariously-animated-minute rocket travelogue of the female body as it tries to conform (or deform) itself to the images idealized by modern culture.

Both features are showing Oct. 24 through Oct. 27 and again Oct. 31 through Nov. 2.
Check Scarlet calendar for times. For film information call 472-5353.



UNL Opera Features Kurt Weill Composition

The UNL Fall Opera production will features Kurt Weill's one-act, Opera Down in the Valley, as part of a double-bill to be presented at 8 p.m. on Oct. 22, 23, 25 and at 3 p.m. Oct. 27. Performances previously scheduled for Oct. 24 and 26 have been cancelled. The second production of the evening will be Gian Carlo Menotti's The Medium.

Weill was an innovator in using American folk song for dramatic purposes. Actual American folk songs constitute the very fabric of the score, most notably the title song which pervades the entire texture. According to Weill, Opera Down in the Valley was "mainly conceived for production by non-professional groups. It can be performed wherever a chorus, a few singers, and a few actors are available."

Opera Down in the Valley, with a libretto by Arnold Sundgaard, premiered at Indiana University in 1948. Weill (1900-1950) is considered a master of the 20th century music theatre. He is renowned for his operatic collaborations with Bertolt Brecht (The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny and The Three Penny Opera) as well as his Broadway success (The Lady in the Dark and Knickerbocker Holiday).

The Medium, which dates back to 1946, had a Broadway run of more than 200 performances. Menotti's inspiration for the story came from a real life experience in which he attended a seance given by friends seeking to contact their dead daughter in the great beyond. The operatic tale centers around a medium who dupes people out of money by pretending to talk to the dead, until one night when events do not go as planned. The woman suddenly finds herself, in the words of Menotti, "caught between two worlds, a world of reality which she cannot wholly comprehend, and a supernatural world in which she cannot believe."

Directed by William Shomos and designed by Daniel Gaylord, the operas will be fully produced, with piano accompaniment by Michael Cotton and David Cole. Both audience and actors will be on the stage of Kimball Hall to enhance the intimacy of the setting. Seating will be very limited.

Tickets are $8 for adults and $4 for students and are available at the Lied Center Box Office or by calling 472-4747.

Award Winning Film Editor to Speak Oct. 21

The UNL Theatre and Dance department will present Academy Award-winning film editor Mike Hill in a lecture and discussion at 5:30 p.m. Oct. 21 in Studio 301, on the third floor of the Temple Building.

Hill lives in Omaha when he is not in Hollywood working with the Ron Howard production team. Ron Howard-directed films edited by Hill include the soon-to-be released Ransom with Mel Gibson; Apollo 13 (1995) for which he received the Academy Award; The Paper (1994); Far And Away (1992); Backdraft (1991); Parenthood (1989); Willow (1988); Gung Ho (1986); Cocoon (1985); Splash (1984); and Night Shift (1982).

Hill has also edited the following films: What's Love Got To Do With It? (1993); Problem Child (1990); Pet Semetary (1989); and Armed and Dangerous (1986).

'A Shayna Maidel' to Open at Studio Theatre

University Theatre and Dance will present A Shayna Maidel , directed by Karen Libman, at 8 p.m. Nov. 1-2 and 5-9 in the Studio Theatre. A preview will be performed at 8 p.m. Oct. 31. Tickets for the preview are $5.

The story revolves around two sisters, separated for 20 years, who are reunited in America after World War II. The younger sister, Rose, has been in New York with her father, Mordechai, since she was four. The older sister, Lusia, is a survivor of the Holocaust. The three reunite and begin to ponder a list of lost Polish relatives and confront the overpowering emotions caused by the immense tragedy of the Holocaust.

Moving among her characters and shifting back and forth in time, the playwright, Barbara Lebow, draws a comprehensive portrait of a family devastated by war, a portrait that remains specific even as it becomes emblematic. A Shayna Maidel ("A Pretty Girl" in Yiddish), becomes a tribute to the sustaining power of family and to man's indomitability.

Tickets are $6 for students, $9 for faculty/staff/senior citizens and $10 for all others. Call 472-2073 for ticket reservations.

Berlin Philharmonic on 'Great Performances'

The incomparable Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, led by artistic director Claudio Abbado, raises the curtain on the 24th season of Great Performances in an all-Brahms program on "Carnegie Hall Opening Night 1996," airing at 8 p.m. Oct. 21 on the Nebraska ETV Network.

The two-hour concert honors the centenary of Brahm's death, which will be observed in 1997. Pianist Peter Serkin opens the evening with Brahm's Piano Concerto No. 2 in B-flat Major, Op. 83, written in 1878. Brahms himself was the soloist in the world premiere performance of this work in Budapest in 1881.

The work contains some of Brahm's loveliest melodies, as does the Symphony No. 2 in D Major, Op. 73, which concludes the program. The "Second Symphony" was first heard in Vienna in 1877 and had its American premiere in New York in 1878. The performance 118 years ago took place at Steinway Hall, where it was presented by the Philharmonic Society of New York.

Maestro Abbado's appointment as artistic director of the 114-year-old Berlin Philharmonic is the culmination of an impressive list of important musical achievements for the Italian conductor. He was last featured on Great Performances in "Abbado in Berlin: The First Year." That 1992 program examined his delicate succession to the position of artistic director of the Berlin Philharmonic after the death in 1989 of the lionized Herbert von Karajan who had led the orchestra since 1955. The Berlin Philharmonic was founded in 1882.

The Great Performances series airs on Nebraska ETV, a service of Nebraska Educational Telecommunications (NET). The complete program schedule for Nebraska ETV is available on NET's World Wide Web site, http://net.unl.edu.

Artist Anfuso Returns for Reading Oct. 23

Poet, musician and artist Linda Anfuso returns to UNL this fall as part of the College of Fine and Performing Arts' Artists Diversity Residency Program. She will conduct a reading and discussion of her poems at 4 p.m. Oct. 23 in the UNL Culture Center.

Anfuso owns a successful jewelry manufacturing company and is also a successful writer. Her collections of poems include Stolen Daughter and Red Coat and Other Poems. Anfuso has just finished her latest book on the canals of England, which she toured over three months earlier this year. This new book will be published this fall.

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For questions regarding these Scarlet pages, contact:
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(402) 472-8518, Fax: (402) 472-7825