The Walker’s just-announced 2012-13 Performing Arts Season is “like the Neiman Marcus Christmas Book,” writes Pamela Espeland. “You turn the pages, you see a lot of things you want and a few eyebrow-raisers.”

Dubbing it “theatre hacking,” Olivier Choinière’s recent project is raising ire in Montreal: He gave MP3 files to audience members at a Moliere play at the Théâtre du Nouveau Monde, treating them to his wry running commentary on the remounting of classic works.

Eiko and Koma’s trademark meditative pace will be part of the Caravan Project at Maryland’s Clarice Smith Center, but the work’s conclusion sets it apart: performed in a trailer, the duo will hop in a car and drive away, “looking toward summer,” as Eiko says.

In the Arab Spring, “art, music and performance fueled revolution by giving the disenfranchised—the outsiders, the rebels, the refugees, the critics—a second draft to rewrite their country’s cultural memory,” Safa Samiezade’-Yazd writes.

Among the first class of Doris Duke Artists, who’ll receive multi-year cash grants of $225,000, are Walker friends Anne Bogart, Bill Frisell, Vijay Iyer, Marc Bamuthi Joseph, Young Jean Lee, Eiko Otake, Ralph Lemon, Meredith Monk, Sarah Michelson, and others.

Bucking band-culture expectations, the Lisps have added a nontraditional project to their recording and touring schedule: making a musical. The band prioritizes spectacle over, say, shoegazing, but their work FUTURITY is still “a musical made by people who don’t make musicals.” The group’s Sammy Tunis and César Alvarez weigh in on why they chose this form and how it kept their band together.