NATURE AND GARDENING
Get Your Hands Dirty and Your Air Clean
Quick, go plant a tree this morning! Celebrate Arbor Day and bring new life to Powderhorn Park. The Home Depot and the National Arbor Day Foundation are heading up a 1,000 trees in 10 cities campaign to increase awareness of the importance of trees in our cities and to create healthier communities in urban areas. As part of this campaign, they’ll be hosting a tree-planting event today at 10 a.m. at Powderhorn.
Friday at 10 a.m., Powderhorn Park, 3400 15th Ave. S., Minneapolis.
MUSIC AND NEW MEDIA
As we get more and more visually-centric with this current gush of new media, artists are being pushed to find creative forms of collaboration. It’s not enough anymore to just have audio; it must be accompanied with visuals — video, performance, anything to keep the eyes engaged. Minneapolis is a great place to be this weekend when it comes to blurring lines and bringing together media forms in innovative ways.
What Came First — the Song or the Image?
It doesn’t get much more innovative than this. Bob Wiseman is a Canadian singer/songwriter and filmmmaker. Remember the Canadian roots rock band Blue Rodeo? No? That’s OK. I might have been one of three people in this country to buy their album. In all fairness, they were quite good — and they’re still around — but Wiseman hasn’t played with them since 1992. Since then, he has been busy making folk and rock jazz music about explicitly political themes. But the kicker came in 2000 when Wiseman began making super 8 films and videos to accompany his music. This is a seriously multimedia event, folks. Don’t miss it. Wiseman has performed with a number of well-known acts, including The Wallflowers, Wilco, and Edie Brickell. He is currently touring with Jason Trachtenburg of the Trachtenburg Family Slideshow Players and Magali Meagher of The Phonemes — both unique, innovative, and beautiful in their own way.
Another multimedia act, the Slideshow Players are best described as an indie-vaudeville-conceptual-art-rock-slideshow band. The father-mother-daughter combo set vintage slide collections to music, turning anonymous lives into pop-rock musical exposés. While it’s just dad in Minneapolis with Wiseman and Meagher, the show promises to be quite interesting.
Saturday at 9 p.m., 400 Bar, 400 Cedar Avenue S., Minneapolis; 612-332-2903; $8.
Remember, this show is about more than just listening. But if you want to get a strictly listening sample, click the links below.
Listen to Bob Wiseman.
Listen to the Slideshow Players
Listen to the Phonemes.
Electric Eyes: New Music and Media Festival by Christy DeSmith
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 a
The reverberating sounds of the improvisational Minneapolis band Electropolis get video and aerialist accompaniment. VJ Neverwas, 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.
Friday and Saturday at 8 p.m., Sunday at 7 p.m., Southern Theater, 1420 Washington Ave. S., Minneapolis; 612-340-1725; $15/show ($27 for 2, $35 for all).
THEATER & PERFORMANCE
Theatre Unbound and The 365 National Festival
Several years ago, Pulitzer Prize winning playwright Suzan-Lori Parks got an idea to write a play a day for a year. The resulting play cycle, 365 Days/365 Plays, is a daily meditation on an artistic life. Some plays are very short, less than a page. Others last forever. This weekend, Minneapolis is participating in The 365 International Film Festival, a grassroots premiere of the play cycle with over 700 theaters from around the country. Enjoy a progressive-dinner-style romp through the Parks’s wild world of art. Each room holds something completely new and wonderful, and a new play starts every 10 minutes. See one or two, or stay for them all.
Saturday at 7 p.m., The College of St. Catherine, Coeur de Catherine Classrooms, 2004 Randolph Avenue, St. Paul; 612-721-1186; free. (Free parking in O’Shaughnessy event parking lot)
Also opening tonight is The Red Nose at Bedlam Theater.
ART
Witness the Birth of Art
What better way to celebrate Mothers’ Day than in The Labor Room? No, silly, not a labor and delivery room; just a labor room, an artistic labor room. Twenty visual artists will come together in a common studio to transform inspiration into art in a variety of media. Think you have the muse in you? The weekend-long event is open to the public in an effort to expose and share the creative process. Stop on by to watch and learn, inspire or be inspired. Witness the creation from start to finish –oil and acrylic painting, drawing, sculpture, ceramic barrel firing, screen- printing, and photography. Plus, join the Artist Reception on Friday from 7 – 9 p.m.
Friday and Saturday from 4-9 p.m., Sunday from 1-6 p.m., Center for Independent Artists, 4137 Bloomington Ave. S., Minneapolis; 612-724-8392.
More art? Check out The Dutch Opera, painting by Jil Evans, at Form + Content Gallery.
BOOKS & AUTHORS
The Woman Cometh
Looking for a great Mothers’ Day gift for mom? Take her to see Dr. Maya Angelou this Saturday or Sunday. Whatever this woman has to say will be well worth it. Clearly a poet at the core of her being, Angelou has earned success as a playwright, a best-selling author, a professor, a historian, a civil-rights activist, an actress, a producer, and a director. This woman is without a doubt one of the great voices of contemporary literature. Go partake of her essence.
Saturday at 3 p.m., The O’Shaughnessy, College of St. Catherine Campus, 2004 Randolph Avenue, St. Paul; 651-690-6700; $36.
For more things to do this weekend check out our Events Listing. And don’t forget the Jewish Film Festival wraps up this weekend, and The 2007 Twin Cities Tibetan Film Festival kicks off at the Riverview Theater.
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