Arlitia Jones: At her day job, chopping meat. Photo: Bill RothBy Dawnell Smith

Every time Dolly waits anxiously by the gate for her husband, another layer of truth unfolds--the lies and promises that get people through the day, the grudges and regrets that follow them to the grave.

"Sway Me, Moon" doesn't so much worship its characters as love them to death; the dense and poignant play about a broken son who tends his aging mother doesn't so much bask in the light of the moon as hover in its shadow.

Linda Benson and Dean Williams: Mom and son in "Sway Me, Moon"

By MIKE DUNHAM

We’ve heard some remarkable visiting cellists in Anchorage this season, remarkable as much for how their personalities meld with their talent and emerge in the music.

For Mark Kosower, on the other hand, the music’s personality is what stands out. He is, in all respects, a marvelous interpreter; accurate, alert, smoothly nuanced, capable of handling special effects with masterful precision. But his presentation of the score is translucent. No showmanship for its own sake here. More than once during Friday night’s opening concert in this weekend’s Winter Classics chamber music series I had the pleasant sensation that there was no human being making the magic happen, that the cello was somehow directly connected to the composer’s imagination.

BONNIE LANDIS: The roof of the Buckner Building in WhittierBy MIKE DUNHAM

I sometimes need to be dragged to art openings. Downtown’s parking problems are a huge headache and Friday night is the very worst time to be there.

But I was eager to see Bonnie Landis’ photos of the Buckner Building in Whittier. Eighteen winters ago, I wound up stranded in that town, waiting for the train and, caught in a sudden downpour, took shelter through the closest set of doors — back doors, it turned out, to the same building. For the next several hours I floated from floor to floor and from room to room, hardly believing what I saw.

Matthew Burtner: Alaska composer with his Metasaxophone.By Mike Dunham

We’ve written about way-out-on-the-edge composer Matthew Burtner before and even admired the music of his previously performed in Anchorage. But the press release for a Feb. 9 performance of an all-Burtner program by the UAF New Music Festival makes for some eye-popping reading.

“Broken Drum,” for brake drum and computer; “Fragments from Cold” for cello, snow and electroacoustics; “Mindcam” for metasax and snowboard video?

This probably isn’t an idle mixing of noises. Burtner is a First Prize winner in the Musica Nova International Elecroacoustic Music Competition. The metasaxophone is his own invention and the upcoming concert, in Davis Concert Hall at 8 p.m., is said to be the first time the thing will be played publicly in Alaska.

Juliana Osinchuk: Photo: Jim Lavrakas

By MIKE DUNHAM

About 50 people were on hand for an excellent performance of Mussorgsky’s “Pictures at an Exhibition” on Sunday night. Fact is, the little chapel-like space at the Steinway Piano Gallery of Alaska couldn’t have accommodated too many more patrons for pianist Juliana Osinchuk’s solo concert.

The Gallery, which old-timers may recall as the location of the former Synergy theater company, has become a regular venue for smaller programs — “soirees” — offered by the Anchorage Festival of Music organization. By “small” I mean chamber music, recitals, even jazz groups, not repertoire.

SITKA
A nonprofit dedicated to offering students in remote Alaska towns the opportunity to explore and strengthen their artistic skills was recognized nationally as one of 18 youth arts and humanities programs to receive the prestigious 2007 Coming Up Taller Award on Monday.
First Lady Laura Bush presented the award to Sitka Fine Arts Camp in a ceremony in the East Room of the White House.

Coming Up Taller is an initiative of the President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities. The awards recognize and support outstanding programs that celebrate the creativity of young people, and provide them with new learning opportunities and a chance to contribute to their communities. More than 350 nominations were received by the program in 2007.

Cellist Alisa Weilerstein: Performed the Dvorak concerto.By MAIA NOLAN

“Sunshine and Shadow” was the theme of the Anchorage Symphony Orchestra’s most recent offering, and both the title and the musical selections were suitable to this time of year when the days start to lengthen but the nights are still dark and chilly. Saturday night, under the direction of guest conductor Jung-Ho Pak, the orchestra presented three pieces selected for their respective lightness and/or darkness. While Saturday’s program did not represent the Symphony’s best work this season, an impassioned performance by guest soloist cellist Alisa Weilerstein offered more than adequate compensation for any shortcomings.

Is the level of arts education in Anchorage Schools adequate? How about in other Alaska schools? What more - or less - should public schools do? Add your thoughts here.

"Sikumi" - "On the Ice" - a short feature movie written and directed by Alaskan Andrew Okpeaha MacLean, has won the 2008 Jury Prize in Short Filmmaking at the Sundance Film Festival. The awards were announced on Saturday night at the Festival in Park City, Utah. MacLean’s film shared the top honor in the category with “My Olympic Summer” directed by Daniel Robin of San Francisco, Calif.

“Sikumi,” shot in Barrow with an Inupiaq cast, tells the tale of a hunter who goes out on the ice looking for seal and inadvertently witnesses a murder.

Highlights from the Awards Ceremony can be seen on the Sundance Channel beginning today as well as on the Festival website, www.sundance.org/festival.

Sundance will present the film for free public preview at it's Web site, throughout the day Saturday, Jan. 26. "Sikumi" was one of 10 short films to receive this treatment from Sundance.

Featuring a cast of actors from Barrow, the movie tells the story of a seal hunter who inadvertantly witnesses a murder. Find out more about the film at sikumifilm.net.

Bridgman Packer: Art Bridgman and Myrna Packer in "Under the Skin."

By Dawnell Smith

If you like saturating your senses, then scramble over to Alaska Dance Theatre for a jaw-dropping marvel of sound, film, movement and light. Don't second guess yourself. Just go, even if your idea of the perfect weekend means watching "Knocked Up" outtakes over a bag of chips.

What Art Bridgman and Myrna Packer accomplish through multi-media dance is dynamic, stunning, provocative and occasionally startling. Screens and lighting create shadows while video projections sustain a virtual counterpoint to the actual dancers, each piece teetering between moment and memory, body and illusion.

Read the Daily News review of "Into the Wild" published in Play on Oct. 19, 2007, below. Talk about prescient!

Add your thoughts about the movie, if you saw it, here.

It turns out most of that Oscar buzz for “Into the Wild” was just talk.

Throughout the fall, critics at publications such as The L.A. Times, USA Today and The Seattle Times all put the words “Oscar” and “Into the Wild” together, mainly for the performances of actors Emile Hirsch and Hal Holbrook, but also for cinematography, Eddie Vedder’s original soundtrack and even best picture.

But the Academy Award nominations were announced this morning, and the Alaska-set film was largely shut out.

And the winners are: Teacher Svetlana Velichko with (l-r) Nathaniel Knapp, Page Moon and Ian Huh. Photo: D. G. Anderson.Two Anchorage high school students, Page Moon and Nathaniel Knapp, won first place in their divisions at the Music Teachers of North American (MTNA) Northwest Regional Competition held January 12 and 13 in Billings, Montana.

Page Moon, 17, a junior at Service High School, won the Senior Piano division competition. Nathaniel Knapp, 15, a sophomore at East High School, teamed with Page Moon to with the Senior Piano Duet division competition. Both Moon and Knapp are students of Svetlana Velitchko.

Some UAA arts students want to tear down the wall between people who make art and people who view art, and their experiment won’t work without you.

“Paint By Number: An Interactive Community Collaborative” opens tomorrow in the UAA Student Union Gallery as a series of blank paint-by-number canvases. Anyone in the community who is interested can stop by, pick up a brush and fill in a numbered, white space.

“People who come into galleries who aren’t artists look at art with this reverence and this idea that they could never do that,” said Jason Parizo, also known as Jsun, an UAA art major and manager of the Student Union Gallery.

By Laura Carpenter

Once again, Whistling Swan introduced Anchorage to a folk group that defies genre and categories. Ollabelle, which gets its name from bluegrass musician Ola Belle Reed, defines itself as roots music and the old-time influences are apparent when the band brings in the mandolin and sings about agoin’ to heaven, but Ollabelle, young, loud and jazzy, also plugs into keyboards and an electric guitar, creating the energy of a rock band.

Singer-songwriter Martha Scanlan, of bluegrass group Reeltime Travelers, opened Saturday night with a set of her own. She started out solo, her high, sweet voice sounding like wind swirling through a peep hole. Slowly members of Ollabelle joined her onstage; guitarist and bassist Byron Isaacs first backed her up, then after a couple songs of love, countryside and “grass up to my thigh,” Fiona McBain (whose roots are from Australia) provided supporting vocals and guitar. Not long after that, percussionist Tony Leone and pianist Glenn Patscha rounded out the stage, raising the level from a lullaby to a thigh-slapping concert.

By Sarah Henning
Anchorage Daily News

Playwright/actress Kathryn Blume is Al Gore on crack. With red hair. And a uterus.

She’s fighting for a cause so close to her heart it’s nearly cutting off her circulation, and she appears to have enough ambition to crush aluminum cans with her mind. And take them to the recycling center, of course.

Unfortunately, her environmental-action play “The Boycott,” which opened Friday night at Cyrano’s Off Center Playhouse, alternates between entertainment and manifesto.

Gerry Beckley of America

One of classic rock's biggest hit-machines performs in Anchorage on Friday night. If you were there, tell us what you saw, what you heard and what you thought about it in the comment section below.

Allison Warden in Under 30

By MAIA NOLAN

Out North's "Under 30" opened Friday night, and while this year's theme is "Changes," one thing has stayed the same: The annual collection of performances is as quirky and original as "Under 30" fans have come to expect. This year's installment includes four pieces by local writers and performers; each, as the title suggests, is less than 30 minutes long.

The evening opens with "20th Century Man and Other Stories," written and performed by "Under 30" veteran B. Hutton. A series of "musings" on the nature of time, "20th Century Man" is extremely aural, with a rolling, poetic cadence. Hutton puts his sound technician through the wringer, makes his own vocal effects and draws on a pair of violinists to produce everything from horror movie music to traffic noise. There's visual spectacle, too; Hutton constructs a time machine onstage and makes good use of his own physical presence (including dance moves that would turn Ted Sadtler green with envy).

Alaska Chambers Singers

By Mike Dunham

On Friday night the Alaska Chamber Singers presented three of Bach's church cantatas, appropriately enough, in a church - the big, open venue of Our Lady of Guadalupe. Director David Hagen prefaced each with a sermon; well, mini-lectures on how Bach's music illuminated the various texts, a display of erudition that seemed to intrigue the sizable audience.

But what really drew the crowd was the choral singing, and the group did not disappoint. Though the male sections remain, um, undermanned (a recurring weakness in Alaska choirs) the female singers blended into an impressive facsimile of one big voice. The best music consistently came when the full chorus was featured, showcasing the precise and attentive sound that has become its trademark, as in the opening and closing of the final piece, "Der Himmel lacht! Die Erde jubilieret."

Moonalice: Photo: Leland Smith

By Leland Smith

Moonalice shows what happens when major musical talents merge. Sharing the creative helm of the band is guitar superstar G. E. Smith, who served as the musical director of Saturday Night Live for more than 10 years, and Roger McNamee, guitar/bass, who serves as the band’s principle theologian. Roger and wife Ann McNamee along with Barry Sless on pedal steel and guitar, Jimmy Sanchez, drums, and keyboardist Pete Sears were all formerly known as “The Flying Other