Originally posted 1.26.2012 at www.Forbes.com

‘The only thing I could have done to make them accept me was to water everything down — and I wasn’t prepared to do that.’

By Lindsay J. Westley

When architect Zaha Hadid walks into the Philadelphia Museum of Art, conversation stops. Dressed all in black,she strides purposefully across the vast exhibition hall, her presence nearly dwarfing even the mural-sized Marc Chagall stretching from floor to ceiling behind her.

Hadid’s larger-than-life persona is a frequent topic of conversation in the architecture world, and in concert with the gravity-defying, curvilinear buildings she creates, has earned her a reputation as the diva of architecture. It’s a term applied by admirers and critics alike, to which she responds bluntly “You wouldn’t call me a diva if I were a guy.”

Originally appeared in the print version of Seven Days on Dec. 14, 2011 and posted here: http://www.7dvt.com/2011digitizing-treasury-objects-fleming-museum

Janie Cohen walks through the stacks on the top floor of the University of Vermont’s Fleming Museum of Art, running a finger along the shelves and pointing out favorites. Ancient Native American pottery shares a shelf with pre-Columbian artifacts, which perch next to small-scale European sculpture. Cohen, the museum’s executive director, stops to point out a tattered-looking collection of maps created by Napoleon and his troops, then continues down to the end where the paintings hang. A nearby table displays smoking apparatuses, under consideration for a winter exhibition; a row of hunting spears hangs above a drawer full of Native American beadwork.

This area of the museum — where the Fleming keeps its treasures — is generally off limits to visitors. It’s one of three on-site storage vaults, and it’s crammed with objects dating from 3500 BC to the present day. Cohen knows them all. Visitors, even regular ones, probably haven’t seen a quarter of the collection.

All museums struggle to represent the full range of their holdings, and the Fleming is no exception. Cohen estimates that only 5 percent of its 24,000 items are on view at any time; the other 95 percent sit on shelves upstairs, neatly labeled but as good as invisible.

By Lindsay J. Warner

“Above all, theater must not be realistic,” the narrator intones during the prologue of the BalletX/Wilma Theatre collaboration Proliferation of the Imagination.

Consider yourself duly warned.

What unfolds is a joyful, absurd, funny and utterly ludicrous take on Guillaume Apollinaire’s Les Mamelles de Tirésias (The Breasts of Tirésius), whose plot, as described in the prologue, is as “simple as a periscope.”

Be warned in that respect, too. A dramatic non sequitur in execution, Proliferation of the Imagination follows no set rules of cause and effect. It revels in the execution, but, true to Surrealist edicts, exists to further the goals of the movement, rather than to present a holistic production (remember that Apollinaire first coined the term “Surrealism” in the preface of Les Mamelles de Tirésias). 

By Lindsay J. Warner

From John Grisham’s A Time to Kill to Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities, racially charged courtroom dramas have captivated American audiences with tense in-court debates. Like Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird though, the climax of David Mamet’s Race takes place outside the courtroom, as two lawyers — one black and one white — and their young African- American assistant debate a case in their offices, becoming prosecutors and jury both in their discourse.

Race, driven by the frequently tense relationship between Jack (Jordan Lage) and Henry (Ray Anthony Thomas), speaks in clipped, lawyerly tones that waylay the viewer into believing it is a play about right and wrong, guilty or not guilty. As their young assistant Susan (Nicole Harris) begins to enter the conversation, however, it’s clear that Mamet has little interest in the verdict of the court case, and cares only to expose the inherent feeling of guilt and shame that emerge when talking about race.

    Summer orchestra programs seem generally be selected using one criterion: Will the program survive the beer and blanket test? As in, will the music stand up to the distractions of the summer season at the Mann, where themed picnics and fireworks tend to leave a longer-lasting impression than the music itself?

    Under the direction of Grant Llewellyn on Tuesday night, the Philadelphia Orchestra opened a two-week run of the expected popular favorites and crowd-pleasers, while also plugging the lesser-known work of Erich Wolfgang Korngold, a shining star in a program that luxuriated in easy-listening favorites.

    Easing into the program with Strauss' “On the Beautiful Blue Danube,” Llewellyn cruised at a relaxed pace that pleasantly contrasted the oom-pah-pahing that too often characterizes this piece. The languid tempo, though the perfect accompaniment for picnics and summer crowds, took its toll close to the end, however, as the final few bars came to their rather abrupt crescendo, taking the low strings seemingly by surprise at the work's close.