Category: Article

If you think of the University of Minnesota’s Nash Gallery as a teaching space, then this ambitious exhibit is designed to show students—and the rest of us—the range of forms that political art can assume. An intriguing mix of locally-based and national artists are represented: There are paintings from Shana Kaplow and selections from photographer Paul Shambroom’s Security series, while Martha Rosler, who made collages in the ’70s that conflated the Vietnam war and American women’s domestic lives, updates that idea with our current war and consumer trends. Also on view are Maus selections from Art Spiegelman; Sue Coe’s savage prints and drawings; a profoundly disturbing “re-creation” of The War Remnants Museum in Ho Chi Minh City by Portland-based Harrell Fletcher; and works from more than a dozen others. Regis Center for Art, 405 21st Ave. S., Minneapolis; 612-624-6518;
www.nash.umn.edu

Hardcover Theater’s versions of “penny dreadfuls,” or Victorian-era soap operas, have been so popular in years past that this time around it’s offering five installments, each time imagining a more fantastical mash-up. Making an appearance are historical figures such as Queen Victoria, Scotland Yard founder Sir Robert Peel, and the grave robbers William Burke and William Hare, who became boogeymen for generations of British schoolchildren. Characters borrowed from Victorian pulp include Varney The Vampire, who doesn’t necessarily like being a bloodsucker; and The Beatle, a Middle Eastern sorceress with powers of mind control and self-transformation. Even if you’ve missed earlier installments, each show starts with a recap, so don’t worry about missing anything. 810 W. Lake St., Minneapolis; 612-825-8949;
www.bryantlakebowl.com

Stuart Pimsler was inspired by literature when constructing this feverish meditation on love; he read everything from Plato’s Symposium to contemporary fare like Nicole Krauss’ The History of Love and Jonathan Safran Foer’s novel Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. He then cast a nine-year-old dancer to act as the show’s sage narrator, much like in Krauss’ and Foer’s stories; threading together a history of feelings, this character thus carries the tone of the piece, which ranges from bawdy to introspective. To pluck things up, Twin Cities composer Michelle Kinney has composed live, original music for cello, acoustic guitar, and accordion, while filmmaker Paul Augustin lends the video accompaniment—mostly images of wooded areas that Pimsler called “very Midsummer Night’s Dream-like.” 612-377-2224; www.guthrietheater.org

In the biblical story of Susannah and the Elders, a beautiful young woman gets falsely accused of being a hussy. Thinking this an apt metaphor for all the finger-pointing and paranoia he saw during the McCarthy era, American composer Carlisle Floyd transposed the fable to 1950s Tennessee. Just like in the Bible, the fetching Susannah is spied bathing nude in a pond (as it was done in B.C. Israel, so with mid-twentieth-century Appalachia), and indicted for doing so by the so-called devout members of her community. But unlike the Bible’s version of the story, this one boasts gorgeous arrangements of operatic singing layered over a finger-picked, Appalachian-inspired score. 1614 Harmon Pl., Minneapolis; 651-209-6689; www.latteda.org

Edna Stevens Talton was but a wee Liberian seven-year-old when her family transplanted itself to the States in 1981. Once here, she quickly picked up on echoes of traditional African dance in the new African-American styles she was discovering. A couple of decades later, long after she’d forged a successful career as an MTV backup dancer, Talton would strike upon this parallel by leading her company, Universal Dance Destiny Studios, in a review of African and African-American dances that became the hit of last year’s Minneapolis/St. Paul Fringe Festival. Thirty-five performers sustain an hour of constant motion, with breakdancing, krumping, and traditional West African dance set to spoken word, hip-hop, and African drumming. One of four top-selling Fringe productions being reprised at the Guthrie. 612-377-2224; www.guthrietheater.org

Michael Lesy’s Wisconsin Death Trip has been a strangely enduring cult phenomenon. First published in 1973, Lesy’s indescribable marriage of photographs and text, alternately chilling and hilarious, chronicled a late-nineteenth-century epidemic of madness and mayhem in Black River Falls, Wisconsin. A photographic historian, Lesy has kept busy since then, producing a batch of books that, even if they don’t quite capture Death Trip’s weird magic, share its obsession with photographs and history. The title of his latest, Murder City: The Bloody History of Chicago in the Twenties, pretty much says it all. Rain Taxi sponsors this talk and signing, a kickoff for Lesy’s Murder City tour. 165 13th Ave. N.E., Minneapolis; 612-824-5500; www.guthrietheater.org

As Minnesota Public Radio’s alterna-juggernaut, The Current has delivered a reliable slate of programming and special events, but it’s really stumbled on an inspired idea with the Fakebook series. The basic idea is to pair an author—usually somebody copasetic with the station’s mission—with a band, and put the two on stage with host and Current DJ Mary Lucia. Previous installments featured Neal Pollack and Amy Sedaris, and this latest bill is easily the most promising yet. Minnesota native Chuck Klosterman is a senior writer at Spin and the author of Fargo Rock City and Killing Yourself to Live, among other titles, and a true pop culture superhero in certain circles; he can be poignant, very, very funny, and maddeningly self-indulgent in the span of a few pages—no small feat. Joining him is the local rock comet Tapes ’n’ Tapes. 651-290-1221; fitzgeraldtheater.publicradio.org
http://fitzgeraldtheater.publicradio.org/

Other Electricities, Ander Monson’s 2005 debut collection, introduced one of the freshest and most interesting new voices in years. The interrelated stories, set in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula in the bleakest midwinter, represent a sort of inventory of loss, complete with obituaries, obsessive weather minutiae, electrical charts, and an elegiac style that drifts again and again into stretches of purely poetic language. Neck Deep and Other Predicaments, winner of Graywolf’s 2006 nonfiction prize, finds Monson ruminating on such topics as disc golf, car washes, and the history of mining in Northern Michigan. Robert Polito, who selected the book for the prize, says of the author, “For Monson the essay is something like a schematics for our fiercest longings and most ecstatic inventions.”

Mix the rich color cinematography of Douglas Sirk with the gushing violence of Sam Peckinpah, fold in the kind of Thai melodrama that has all but vanished from the international movie landscape, and you’ve got Tears of the Black Tiger, a film that moves with the force of a hurricane blasting apart a great marzipan city. Tears tells of the impossible romance between the young peasant-cum-legendary-bandit, Dum (a.k.a. The Black Tiger), and the wealthy daughter of a provincial governor, who is engaged to be married to the local chief of police. Wisit Sasanatieng’s picture is both homage and send-up, but harks back to a genre that is so little seen that it comes off as strikingly original. Watch for armies of scowling bandits in black, thugs who resemble Joseph Stalin, some oddball Thai jazz, headless snakes falling from trees, and a ricocheting bullet so incredible they have to stop the film and show it twice.

Jan Svankmajer could be the weirdest filmmaker in the world, an artist whose troubled subconscious seems to dictate his every move. His latest, Lunacy, is loosely based on two Edgar Allan Poe short stories and “inspired” by the Marquis de Sade. It’s the story of a poor fellow who, upon returning from his mother’s funeral, is taken to an asylum where the inmates have the run of the place and the staff members are locked up. As per usual in a Svankmajer film, there’s bizarre sex, gratuitous nudity, violence (including what appears to be an inmate with his eyes gouged out), and stop-motion animation that involves meat—in this case, dancing tongues. Lunacy would certainly have a greater effect on one’s fragile psyche if seen in a theater—but even at home, you’ll find that Svankmajer’s unwillingness to stay on the sane side of life is the stuff of nightmares.