DURING THE DOG DAYS OF SUMMER, my thoughts often turn to rock and water — specifically, to a violent geology of Precambrian magma, transformed into the craggy granite topography that surrounds the world’s largest freshwater lake. That’s right: Lake Superior. The dark woods and darker waves, grey boulders and speckled-rock beaches beckon with their coolness, and my yearning for immersion becomes as…

WHEN FIVE WRITERS IN MINNEAPOLIS founded the Playwrights’ Center in 1971, no one expected it to become one of the pre-eminent playwrighting centers in the country. Regardless, over the past four decades — and particularly under the leadership of former producing artistic director Polly Carl — that is exactly what happened. Now, the place where award-winning playwrights such as Lee Blessing, August Wilson…

WHEN I GOT HOME FROM THE NEW GUILLERMO KUITCA SHOW at the Walker, I sat down at my desk, took out a piece of paper, and sketched the floor plan of our home. I had seen it before: the stairs, the small closets, the tiny room where I work. That room is an office now, but many years ago it was built as a kitchen in an upstairs apartment. As I thought back to a painting I’d noticed in Kuitca’s show, though…

WHAT MAKES A PERFORMANCE COMPELLING? What makes a dancer riveting — makes the dance come alive for the viewer, rise up as a lived moment, translated into the viewer’s own dreams and history? It doesn’t take too much watching to figure out the answer to this question. The most exciting dancers are those who seem to be alive on stage — who appear to be, that instant, growing, changing, learning, feeling…

“IT BEGINS WITH AN ‘A’.” Claire Witt traces the thin, mosaic tiles forming a loopy capital A with her finger, and then she moves slowly around the base of a large mosaic planter, reading aloud, “‘A long, long time ago.’ This one is about the past.” It is the first of a trio of mosaic pieces along a walking path in Harmony Park, Long Prairie. She shades her eyes and squints at the serpentine mosaic bench fifty…

MILK SOURS AND MAKES YOU SICK. Honey crystallizes and shatters your sweet tooth when you least expect it. Our idealistic dreams were eventually (and quite effectively) dashed, too, but before that happened we got by for nearly a week on nothing more than music, marijuana and some basic survival skills we’d seen demonstrated on cable TV. Even if we never speak to each other again, we’ll always have our…

LAST FALL I WROTE ABOUT A FIRST VIEW of Hijack (local duo Kristin Van Loon and Arwen Wilder) and Heron’s (Scott Heron, of New Orleans) Smithsoniansmith, with a promise to revisit the show this year. Last weekend, Hijack and Heron remounted Smithsoniansmithat the Open Eye Figure Theatre, and I went. First, I should start by making the case for revisiting, in general — rereading, re-seeing, returning. After all…

You might find yourself here unexpectedly, with neither direction nor intent. Say you are just passing through, no fixed address, and the less you say about where you’re from the more at ease others seem to be. Say your wife found the letter you had intended for the eyes of another, or that other received the words intended for no one. Now you lie in the in-between, locked out of that other part of…

THE LILACS ARE IN FULL BLOOM, AS IF ON CUE.  Duluth’s Deborah Gordon Cooper is reading tonight from her new book of poems, Under the Influence of Lilacs, and people are streaming into the Congregational Church on Superior Street for the event.  Local folk hero, Sara Thomsen will also sing during the program, and to add to the pleasures of the evening, upon entering the the church, attendees are greeted…