FIVE DANCERS IN INDIAN SARIS WITH FAN-LIKE INSERTS, jeweled headdresses, and elaborate, stylized makeup circle the stage of the new Cowles Center for Dance and The Performing Arts with a stately, syncopated step. It reminds me a little of the opening folk dance in Fiddler on the Roof, as the Jewish community of Anatevka sings “Tradition.” This is certainly a community of women, their hands and feet…

SLOWLY, BUT SURELY, ABOUT 15 PEOPLE FILED INTO THE MTN SPACE on the last Friday in August. They filled the folding chairs in the studio, set up around a laptop and small projector, having come to share their video mini-masterpieces based on MNKINO #24’s theme, “Urban Legends.” Before rolling out the entertainment, the night began with a quiet, but heartfelt rendition of “Happy Birthday,” led by co-founder…

THE NEW COWLES CENTER FOR DANCE & THE PERFORMING ARTS has been a long time coming. As a cheeky video segment during the grand opening last weekend demonstrated, the 1910 Shubert Theater underwent as many incarnations as a Hindu deity before its stylish transformation into a cross between a flagship theater and an education and community center for dance. In the past, the building has housed a local…

THE DARK SPACE. At first it’s a wound. A dark mouth, it caves in, it sucks. Things on its edge seem poised also to fall in. You leave quickly, look the other way when passing by. The people displaced by its demise pack up and move on to other places, charting their course by uncertain stars. One sees them weaving slowly in long trains, laden like crabs with all their tatty things, wrapped up in heaps of…

“It is something to be able to paint a particular picture, or to carve a statue, and so to make a few objects beautiful; but it is far more glorious to carve and paint the very atmosphere and medium through which we look…To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts.” IN OCTOBER, 2011 I WILL COMPLETE AN 18-MONTH COLLABORATIVE public art project — an ambitious, some might say crazy…

WHEN BAIN BOEHLKE WAS A YOUNG ACTOR, he was sure that he was going to have a chance to play Hamlet. He was blond, after all, and felt an affinity for the role; it was a part he felt he was meant to perform. He had a copy of the play with him when he was in Berlin, serving in the army from 1959-1961. He was in Germany when the Berlin wall went up. “The challenge of being an actor,” Boehlke says, “is that the…

EVEN THOUGH I’VE PRETTY CONSISTENTLY GOTTEN MY WORK, and fairly odd work it is, into the Minnesota State Fair over the last ten years, I was still a bit surprised to get the email inviting me to jury the photography “class” for this year’s Fine Arts exhibition. Readers of my reports on Art Basel Miami are well aware of my take-no-prisoners, paranoiac critical methods  — not the sort of acumen typically…

IT’S OVER. IF YOU WERE ONE OF THE MORE THAN 650,000 PEOPLE who experienced Savage Beauty at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York this summer, then you know the feeling of emerging, in a sort of delicious delirium, from the haunting, revelatory, exhilarating, fantastical show of fashion, performance art, and fetish objects by the late hero-artist Alexander McQueen. And if you weren’t, there are…

OUR NEW MINNESOTA POET LAUREATE, JOYCE SUTPHEN, was born and grew up on a working farm near St. Joseph in Stearns County. This rural background is something she shares with our first Laureate, Robert Bly. She is the eldest child in a large, talented, close-knit family. Sutphen’s latest book, First Words (Red Dragonfly Press, 2010) describes her family’s farm and her early years; it reads like a memoir in…