Street Sounds (Photo: gamma sf)
The human voice is the first and most powerful instrument of music and emotion. Drawing on that idea, the a cappella quintet Street Sounds celebrates, inspires, protests and memorializes music from the African American experience.
Street Sounds performs at 8 p.m. April 8 at the Lied Center for Performing Arts. Street Sounds is presented as part of the New Voices series supported by the Lied Center.
Founded in 1989 by Louise Robinson, a founder of the all-woman a cappella quintet Sweet Honey in the Rock, Street Sounds is based in Oakland, Calif. Dynamic, uplifting and continuously energetic, Street Sounds draws on a repertoire of African chants, Delta blues, American jazz, civil and human rights anthems, R&B, doo-wop and more to explore the role and influence of African and African American music.
The five members of Street Sounds stretch the capacity of the human voice to mimic instruments such as a string bass. Tight harmonies and a stage presence that encourages audiences to sing along (almost like congregational hymn singing) enhance the concert setting.
Street Sounds has performed with the Manhattan Transfer, Wynton Marsalis, Robert Cray, Chick Corea, Ladysmith Black Mambassa and Pete Seeger. The group's performances combine elements of entertainment with deep-rooted spirituality that sends a message of peace and social justice.
Pre-performance talks, part of the Lied Center's ongoing education programming, begin in the Lied's Steinhart Room 55 minutes and 30 minutes prior to curtain.
Tickets for the performance are $22, $18 and $14. University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Nebraska Wesleyan University and Doane College students and youth 18 and younger with proper identification can purchase tickets for half-price. Target "Treatseats" discount coupons are available at participating Target stores.
Call the Lied Box Office at 4724747 or toll free, 1 (800) 432-3231 for
ticket availability. Box Office hours are 11 a.m. to 5:30 p.m.
weekdays.
| THE BACKYARD FARMER BUNCH, clockwise from top: John Watkins, plant pathologist, Reggi Carlson, moderator, Don Steinegger, horticulturist, Roch Gaussoin, turf specialist and Fred Baxendale, entomologist. Backyard Farmer premieres for the 1998 season on April 7 at 7 p.m. (Photo: IANR) |  |
The hour-long program premieres April 7 and airs each Tuesday through Sept. 1 at 7 p.m. CST/CDT and 6 p.m. MST/MDT on the statewide Nebraska Educational Television Network.
In its 45th season, "Backyard Farmer" is the nation's longest-running locally-produced gardening show, said Brad Mills, media specialist for the University of Nebraska's Communications and Information Technology unit. He is the program's producer for the Institute of Agriculture and Natural Resources.
Jim Locklear, director of the Nebraska Statewide Arboretum, will host a five-part series on Nebraska's historic landscapes. As part of that series, "Backyard Farmer" will travel to the Joslyn Art Museum, the State Capitol, the Nebraska National Forest in Halsey and the Jules Sandoz home in Sheridan County. While at these locations, Locklear will discuss and show the significance of each individual landscape. Other historic areas of the state may be added as the series continues.
"We are really excited about this season. The series on Nebraska's historic landscapes is going to fit well within the 'Backyard Farmer' format," Mills said.
Other "Backyard Farmer" topics this season will include year-round greenhouses, home ponds, selecting trees for a specific locale, rose care, water conservation, children's gardening, low maintenance gardening and herb gardening. Many of the topics will deal with tree planting, pruning and repair, timely subjects given the tree damage experienced in the October snow storm, Mills said.
After 28 years on the show, Dave Wysong, plant pathologist, has retired. He was the longest-running cast member on "Backyard Farmer." Filling his spot will be John Watkins, NU plant pathologist. Other panelists, all NU Cooperative Extension specialists, are: Roch Gaussoin, turf specialist, in his seventh year; Fred Baxendale, entomologist, in his 13th year; and Don Steinegger, horticulturist, in his 22nd year. Reggi Carlson moderates the program for Nebraska Educational Television.
As in previous years, "Backyard Farmer" will highlight at least one Nebraska county weekly. Counties featured this year, by date, are:
"Backyard Farmer" is a cooperative effort of NU's IANR and the Nebraska Educational Telecommunications Commission.
Fans can visit the "Backyard Farmer" Internet web site at: http://net.unl.edu/~byfarmer/ or http://byf.unl.edu/
Earl May Seed and Nursery is partially underwriting "Backyard Farmer." Money raised by Nebraskans for Public Television also supports the program, said Lisa Good, underwriting specialist for Nebraskans for Public Television.
Beginning on April 9, the Mary Riepma Ross Film Theater is hosting free-to-the public screenings of films by students from accredited colleges and universities who have entered the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences' 25th Annual Student Academy Awards. The Academy is the organization famous for the annual Oscar awards.
The purpose of the Student Academy Awards competition is to support and encourage filmmakers with no previous professional experience who are enrolled in accredited colleges and universities located throughout the United States. For purposes of this competition, the United States has been divided into three regions. Nebraska is in Region Two.
Screenings of this year's entries are scheduled at 7 p.m. on April 9 and 10; at 1 and 7 p.m. on April 11; and at 2:15 and 7 p.m. on April 12.
To celebrate the 25th Anniversary, Region 2 is hosting a reception at 7 p.m. April 4 at Club 1427 (1427 O St.). There will be a screening of a compilation film of last year's winners, as well as free food and a cash bar. The reception is open to the public.
The films compete in four categories: Animation, Documentary, Dramatic, and Alternative. The winning films will be sent on to the Academy, located in Beverly Hills, Calif., to compete against entries sent from other regions throughout the United States. The final judging for the national winners is done exclusively by members of the Academy, the same body of voters who decide the winners of the annual Oscar awards.
Winners of the national competition will be flown to Los Angeles to participate in an intensive week of industry-related activities, such as visiting film locations, meeting with industry professionals, and attending state-of-the-art filmmaking demonstrations.
Poet Thomas Lux will give a reading of his work at 7:30 p.m. April 10 in 228 Andrews Hall. A professor of English at Sarah Lawrence College, Lux is the author of eight books of poetry, most recently New and Selected Poems, 1975-1995, published last year by Houghton-Mifflin. His work has appeared in forty anthologies and over a hundred journals, including The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly and The Paris Review.
Lux has also taught at the University of Iowa, the University of Michigan, Columbia University, Boston University and Emerson College, as well as at writers' conferences from New England to Colorado. Lux has received three fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, plus a Guggenheim Fellowship and many other prizes during the course of his distinguished 25-year career as a poet.
The reading is sponsored by the Creative Writing Program and the Faculty Convocations Committee of the Academic Senate
The Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery and Sculpture Garden presents The Human Factor: Figuration in Contemporary American Art to July 5.
The human form has a long history as a measure of our intent - each age has invested the body as an artistic object with beliefs and values of their own time. Until the Abstract Expressionist movement, the human figure had been a dominant subject/form in Western art.
Since the turn of the century, in the development of modern art, the human image has been transformed, distorted and almost disappeared as a subject in much of the most important artistic expression of the period. However, in the last quarter of the 20th century, we have witnessed a return to the human figure by many contemporary artists in the visual arts as a valid subject and an important vehicle for self-discovery and self definition against the velocity of change in our world.
The selected diverse paintings, sculptures, prints and drawings drawn from the Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery's collection and included in The Human Factor: Figuration in Contemporary American Art provide a mini survey of many various aesthetics, issues and ideas contained within the figurative idiom of the United States over the past several decades. Stylistically these 63 works trace the recurring human imagery in contemporary art.
Not only does this exhibition illustrate the comprehensive nature of the Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery collection holdings, but more importantly, it reflects the change in focus of the human figure as subject in contemporary art from a modernist tradition, which primarily relied upon the sensory and physical properties of form, to a shift in sensibility where the human figure functions as a narrative and physiological vehicle reflecting the human condition within a social and political context. Each artist uses the human figure as a common vehicle through which they express personal and aesthetic issues alluding to the human condition of our time.
The Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery and Sculpture Garden presents Sheldon Solo: Carol Haerer, The White Paintings, an exhibition featuring Carol Haerer's white paintings of the mid-to-late 1960s.
Haerer will present a public gallery talk at 5 p.m. April 7 in the exhibition space. A public reception for the artist, sponsored by the Nebraska Art Association, will follow the gallery talk in the Great Hall of the Sheldon Gallery.
A midwestern native who attended Doane College and UNL, Haerer studied in Paris on a Fulbright Fellowship in 1958, and after earning an M.F.A. from the University of California-Berkeley, she moved to New York. It was in New York where she began to paint intensely subtle white paintings which received considerable critical attention in the late 1960s, in part because they seemed to offer a way out of what was perceived by many in the art world to be the straightjacket of Minimalism. Haerer's white paintings were included in the important Whitney Annuals at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, in 1969 and in 1971. But the critical attention they received in the 1960s has rarely been noted by art historians, who have tended to evaluate painting or sculpture from this period by the theoretical standards of Minimalism. But as "minimal" as Haerer's paintings appear at first blush, they are images, even atmospheres, but not "objects." This exhibition offers an opportunity for our audience actually "to experience" these paintings as they were intended to be viewed, as an aesthetic environment.
In addition to the nine white paintings in the exhibition, two examples of Haerer's more recent work are included to suggest the continuity between her classic white paintings of the late 1960s and her recent paintings on plexiglas, a continuity based on Haerer's interest in the effects of light.
An illustrated exhibition brochure will be published which features an essay on Haerer's work by Charles Eldredge, Hall Distinguished Professor of American Art at the University of Kansas and former director of the National Museum of American Art in Washington, D.C.
The Saxophone Day Concert will be at 4 p.m. April 4 in the Westbrook Music Building. Featuring Robert Fought, the UNL Saxophone Quartets and the UNL Saxophone Ensemble. The concert is free.
The Scarlet & Cream Singers will perform at 8 p.m. April 4 and 3 p.m. April 5 in Kimball Hall. Tickets are $12 adults, $10 Nebraska Alumni Members and $6 seniors and students. UNL's singing ambassadors are under the direction of Julie Enersen.
The Percussion Ensemble will perform at 7 p.m. April 8 in Kimball Hall. Under the direction of John DeStefano, works by Gauger, Pat Metheny, Chick Corea and more will be performed. The concert is free.
Based on Truman Capote's highly acclaimed first novel, Other Voices, Other Rooms, which opened at the Mary Riepma Ross Film Theater on April 2, follows a young boy's odyssey of self-discovery as he seeks to solve the puzzle surrounding his father's disappearance.
Joel Sansom, a young boy of 13, is summoned to a sprawling and decaying plantation house in the deep South to meet the father he has not seen for nine years. One his arrival, he meets Amy, the mistress of the house, and Randolph, her debauched and eccentric cousin. His father is nowhere in sight.
Other Voices, Other Rooms is a story about acceptance, a child's accepting a man, accepting Randolph's life, add his father's homosexuality. Other voices are voices in the past, but also inner voices: the voice Joel is discovering in himself.
Also showing is a short feature, Cheap Flight by Kevin Duffy, a rude awakening after a night of hard partying finds our friends discussing the merits of men, bagels, and a cheap flight to LA.
Other Voices, Other Rooms and Cheap Flight are showing on April 3 at 7 and 9 p.m. each evening. Admission is $6; $5 for students; and $4 for senior citizens, children and members of the Friends of the Mary Riepma Ross Film Theater.
Story: Language as Image is on display at the Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery and Sculpture Garden until June 7.
The exhibition includes 22 artists whose diverse textual expressions span a 30-year period, from Robert Rauschenberg's silkscreen print, Features from Currents through Jenny Holzer's mechanical LED sign that electronically flashes her "truisms." Selected three-dimensional manifestations of the artists' use of text in art range from the famous stacked, sculpted word Love by Pop artist Robert Indiana to the delicate paper Poem Dress (The Soul Selects Her Own Society) by Leslie Dill.
A major development in American visual art is the frequent use of language/text in conjunction with visual images. The forms in which words and language fragments appear are varied, but united by the fact that the words serve to increase the image's potential for meaning. Whether the words underline and reinforce the image, essentially become the image, or contradict the image to achieve an ambiguity, the combination of the visual image with the visual sign system we know as language creates an idea that must be viewed with not only the aesthetic/visual eye but with the intellect/mind. Only when the artwork is experienced with both the eye and the mind will it be fully comprehended.
George W. Neubert, Sheldon Gallery director and curator of this exhibition, will discuss Story: Language as Image during the second in a series of "Wednesday Walks" from 12:15 to 1 p.m. April 8 in the gallery. "Wednesday Walks" is an ongoing educational program provided by the Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery and Sculpture Garden held every second Wednesday from October through May. Cookies and gourmet coffee provided by The Mill will be available following the walks.
Theatrix presents the Nebraska Masquers' One-Act Festival at 8 p.m. April 9-11 and 2 p.m. April 11 in the Studio Theatre, 3rd floor, Temple Building.
The Masquers' One-Act Festival is an annual event sponsored by Theatrix, Nebraska Masquers' and the department of Theatre Arts and Dance and is produced by Daryn Warner. The festival is an opportunity for new playwrights to demonstrate their talent, as well as provide important opportunities for new directors and actors at the university. The festival is producing four-one acts that range from farce to satire to drama. The shows included are "Hot Rods" by Rebecca Key, directed by Steve Barth; "Five Playwrights," by Gregory Peters, directed by Ken Paulman; "When the Butler Tries to Do It" by Jason Ehlers, directed by Mark Dickenson and "Las Vegas Lifestyles" by Michelle Brown, directed by Jacob Crabb.
Tickets are $3 at the door.
Did you know that university researchers rip clothes to shreds in the name of science? Have you heard about the NU professor who created one of the largest man-made forests in the world? Do you know what a male goldfinch does to pick up chicks? If you'd seen a recent episode of "Life Nebraska Style" you could say "yes" to all these questions.
"Life Nebraska Style" is a weekly, half-hour television magazine that spotlights interesting people and activities at the University of Nebraska. It's jointly produced by UNL Public Relations and IANR's Communications and Information Technology's Electronic Media unit.
This week on "Life Nebraska Style":
"Life Nebraska Style" airs at various times throughout the state. Here's where you can find it in your area:
One of India's best-known musicians will present an evening of Indian classical music to celebrate the 50th anniversary of India's independence April 18 at the University of Nebraska.
Pandit Shivkumar Sharma will perform at 7 p.m. on the santoor at Westbrook Music Hall, 11th and Q streets, accompanied by his son, Rahul Sharma, also on the santoor, and Shafaat Ahmed Khan on the tabla.
The santoor is a 100-string instrument that resembles a dulcimer and is unusual in having so many strings, all of which are played. Two wooden strikers are used to play the resonating metal strings, which are stretched over wooden bridges. Four strings are passed over each bridge and those strings are tuned to the same raga (note). A tabla is a pair of small, different-sized hand drums.
Before Pandit Sharma started playing the santoor, the instrument was made only in Kashmir, the northernmost state of India, and there was only one family of santoor maker. When he took up the instrument, Pandit Sharma modified it and changed its tuning system. He is now renowned as a composer and is one of the most accomplished exponents of Indian classical music.
Pandit Sharma also performed in Lincoln in 1996. His 1998 appearance is sponsored by RAAG, the India Music and Culture Interest Group student organization at the university. National sponsors are the Center for the Performing Arts of India at the University of Pittsburgh and the Indian Council for Cultural Relations.
Tickets are $10 for the general public and $5 for students. They are available at the door or may be ordered through Ticket Master at the Nebraska Union, 14th and R streets, through Bidisha Nag, RAAG treasurer, at (402) 420-6360, or by e-mail at raag@unlinfo.unl.edu.
-Tom Simons, Public Relations
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