Dear Friends, In just a few short months since its opening, the Walker Art Center’s incredible William and Nadine McGuire Theater has assumed an essential role as a new home for performance innovation locally and nationally. In the face of declining funds for art and artists nationally, particularly risk-taking art, this is an explosively hopeful thing. Our first full season in the expanded facility…

As art world VIPs and Twin Cities visitors alike filled the William and Nadine McGuire Theater on the Walker’s opening weekend, the whimsy and “dark intrigue” of the space (as the Los Angeles Times would later say) enchanted audiences, and the response from performers was uniformly enthusiastic (Bill Frisell told me it didn’t feel like a new theater but one that had been “broken in” long ago). But it…

Peggy Shaw’s “supremely transgressive art explodes every box which might be used in some vain attempt to contain her: language, societal norms, sex, fashion, romance, art,” writes Craig Lucas in BOMB magazine. This legendary actor/producer/playwright—winner of three OBIEs and three Awards for Emerging Forms from the New York Foundation for the Arts—recently took time to answer some of life’s most—and…

Dyke Night. The name alone has proven so radical that it’s taken the local press years to even print it in its events calendars. Since 1991, queers of all gender stripes have been treated to extravaganzas of song and dance; masterful martial arts and baton twirling; fabulous feats of stand-up comedy; parades of dykes and their dogs; agitprop magic acts; transgressive tale-telling via film, poetry, and…

Jazz probably hasn’t seen a more compelling or contentious figure than Ornette Coleman. Expanding the boundaries of “free jazz” with radical inventiveness, a polyglot infusion of musical traditions and techniques, and an impossible-to-define musical philosophy called “harmolodics,” he has sparked furious opposition during his half century of performing and composing. An angry musician once punched him…

Throughout a career spanning two decades and some 150 recordings, Grammy-winning guitarist/composer Bill Frisell has shared a long history with the Walker. Commissioned in 1999 to create his ambitious Blues Dream (Nonesuch), he has performed here numerous times and is a highlight of the Members’ Preview Party on April 16. Frisell recently took time from his busy schedule to answer some life’s most…

In one sense, a theater is to a performing arts curator what a white gallery is to his counterpart in the visual arts—an empty volume created to be animated by today’s most innovative minds and bodies. But in discussing the new William and Nadine McGuire Theater in the Walker expansion, design consultant Josh Dachs offers a different analogy. “These spaces are for telling stories, and the idea of…