Month: April 2007

By commissioning five pieces of original music, each of which is to be accompanied by some form of electronic media, the Southern Theater is hitting upon a big trend in the contemporary composition business. As of late, composers of all stripes have sought collaborations with video and performance artists, thus adding an element of spectacle that blurs the lines between concert, play, and even film. On the docket for the first-ever Electric Eyes festival: Acoustic playing by New York composer and violinist Todd Reynolds is filtered through a multi-channel manipulative device. The reverberating sounds of the improvisational Minneapolis band Electropolis get video and aerialist accompaniment. VJ Never was, a well-known Electropolis collaborator, combines his handpicked video clips with live, electronically mixed music. And an emerging composer named J. Anthony Allen combines his own electronic sound installations with metronomic images. Southern Theater, 612-340-1725.

Alexander is a throwback to the halcyon days of hard-bop battle royals, when a man could walk into a club with a tenor saxophone and blow the house down. Just thirty-eight, Alexander knows how to stoke a barn-burning solo until the patrons are hollering even before the climaxes. But he also burnishes his supple, muscular tone with a tidy blend of intellect and curiosity that enables him to twist but not disfigure bop chestnuts and other jazz standards. And his apprenticeship with Memphis pianist Harold Mabern has provided him with a tangible grasp of the blues. By now his annual engagement at the AQ has become a calendar-date-circling event, made all the more so this time out by the possible inclusion of pianist David Hazeltine from Milwaukee. Artists’ Quarter, 408 St. Peter St., St. Paul; 651-292-1359.

This acclaimed comedy classic was made in 1962, given a brief American run in ’64, and then, for forty years, it vanished like a mob boss on the Witness Protection Program. Nino, the lead character, is a portly middle manager, happily passing time at a Fiat plant in Milan. He finally returns home to a little Sicilian village for the vacation he’s been promising his family for years—giving them the chance to finally meet his northern Italian wife and two daughters. But before he embarks on this trip, a local mob boss asks our poor hero to deliver a small package to one Don Vincenzo, the reigning capo of Nino’s hometown. Being a comedy, all hell must break loose. However, Mafioso isn’t just slapstick, but a poignant examination of the emergence of two Italys—the industrial north and the provincial south. Created a good seven years before the eponymous novel on which The Godfather was based, Mafioso is an obvious influence, yet it stands on its own as a sunny comedy. Lagoon Cinema, 612-825-6006.

This show features three intellectually hard-charging but often funny conceptual types from New York doing a wide variety of media (painting, sculpture, and video). This goofball name, Des Derrières, opens itself to all kinds of interpretations, from the opposite of the avant-garde (le derriere garde, the rear guard, those in fighting retreat) to pure scatology. All of this will matter, from the high-toned French history of the abject radical to the jokes and irreverence of fringy American art. It is also reminiscent of the old Monty Python joke: “And now for something completely different: A man with three buttocks.” It opens May 5 with a party everyone is invited to; if the opening is typical for this gallery, there’ll be music and ways for audience members to participate in the work. This is not the kind of gallery where you get something to go above the sofa, but you could figure out something to do behind it. Or maybe under it. Art of This Gallery, 3222 Bloomington Ave. S., Minneapolis; 612-721-4105.

Jil Evans’ paintings are beautiful. She’s also a thinker who’s deeply ingrained with paint. A founding member of the long-standing Art and Philosophy reading group, Evans strives for meaning in form and color. The Venetian painter Giovanni Battista Tiepolo is a major influence; she named her dog after him. In keeping with this intense relation to other artists’ work, The Dutch Opera is influenced by painters from the opposite end of Europe. On a visit to the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, Evans was transfixed by their Baroque Dutch still-life paintings: work by Willem van Aelst, Simon Verelst, and Jan Weenix. The paintings she made in response take the form of operatic theater; thus, they are absolutely huge. Form + Content is a new gallery, and a lot of excitement has accompanied its opening. It’s a co-op put together by a few of the best mid-career artists in the city, of whom Evans is one. These will be shows to watch. Form + Content Gallery, Whitney Square Building, 210 2nd St. N., Minneapolis; 612-436-1151.

Since the heyday of conceptualism in the ’70s, there have been artists doing interesting things with sound—not “music,” which is something very different, but sound as evidence of the natural or human world, combined in ways that intensify your consciousness of surroundings. This survey doesn’t cover everyone who has done this kind of work over the last few decades (Usry Alleyne, for instance, isn’t here) but it does represent sound artists ranging from Leif Brush (a pioneer, now in his sixties) to Abinadi Meza (in his twenties). There’ll be a lot of depth to this show, so you’ll need time; give yourself a couple of hours to hear the murmurs and cries of stars, light, and trees. Minnesota Museum of American Art, 651-266-1030.

This show gathers some of the city’s best younger artists, across a broad spectrum of styles and media. Sean Connaughty takes a thoughtful conceptual approach to the intersection of natural form and cultural tropes, using ink, photo, sculpture, words, and whatever else comes to hand. Clea Felien searches for the essence of portrait subjects in her small, left-handed drawings. Celeste Nelms constructs weird photographic metaphors whose open-ended resolutions act like telescopes that track the psyche’s trail across the sky of time. Ben Olson’s expressionistic self-portraits seem to look for the borders of the bearable. Melissa Stang hasn’t shown around here lately but was an important figure in the ’90s, with shows at the Soap Factory and elsewhere. It’ll be fascinating to see what she’s been up to. Gallery Co, 400 1st Ave. N., Minneapolis; 612-332-5252.

The Burning House Group was once the darling of the local theater scene, a collective of talented young performers forged in the crucibles of such dearly departed companies as Eye of the Storm and Margolis Brown. Today, the troupe is best remembered for its hit ’97 production Knock Knock, which was an uproarious farce with plenty of mistaken identities and slamming doors. Now, the company hopes to duplicate that success by returning to its physical-performance roots. What the Butler Saw is a ’60s-era sexual farce smartly written by Joe Orton, the playwright most famous for his black comedy Entertaining Mr. Sloane. This vicious send-up of sexual mores takes place in a psychiatrist’s office where the characters are caught, one by one, with their pants around their ankles. Minneapolis Theater Garage, 711 Franklin Ave. W., Minneapolis; 612-623-9396.

In 2004, the Guthrie Theater offered to send a favorite playwright, Julie Marie Myatt, to wherever in the world she wished to go, just so long as her travels inspired a new play. Myatt chose Cambodia. Once there, she immersed herself in the sex trade, interviewing child prostitutes and even volunteering for organizations trying to rehabilitate the girls. This wasn’t too far a stretch for Myatt, whose repertoire includes such provocative plays as Cowbird, The Joy of Having a Body, and The Sex Habits of American Women, all of which address complicated issues related to sexual identity. With this new piece, Myatt not only explores the challenging subject of the sex trade, but also looks at the motives of aid workers, mostly Westerners, who feel drawn to Cambodia. These do-gooders strive, perhaps in vain, to restore the country’s lost girlhoods. Guthrie Theater, 612-377-2224.

The red nose, that mark of chronic inebriates everywhere, was long ago appropriated by theater performers in Europe seeking a visible symbol of their humility. And believe it or not, the town drunk went on to serve as the muse of a million clowns (those working outside the parade and birthday-party circuits, anyway). In order to discover the clown within, each artist must submit to the rigorous, if not embarrassing, exercise of publicly identifying his or her physical imperfections—perhaps a big butt, twiggy legs, or a frizzy, unmanageable mop. By chance, a group of Minneapolitans has just been through this wringer. Performances of The Red Nose culminate a three-week workshop, led by the visiting Italian clown Giovanni Fusetti, who convinced a dozen or so local performers to embrace and amplify their problem spots. Bedlam Theatre, 1501 6th St. S., Minneapolis; 612-341-1038.