On first view, Susie Brandt’s large wallhanging, “After Albers,” is simply a spirited study in earth tones — a pleasingly textured work with about the same visual appeal as, say, a bowl of mixed nuts. Once you learn what it’s made of, however, the piece becomes exhausting. Brandt constructed the entire tapestry from the pantyhose […]

The Guinness Book of World Records supplies many engaging facts about conjoined twins, such as the identity of the first doctor who successfully separated a pair (that would be Jac S. Geller, who executed the groundbreaking surgery at Cleveland’s Mount Sinai Hospital in 1952). But the only photo you’re likely to see is that famous, […]

A perilously animated skeleton elicits both alarm and affection from Kelly Davis’ Frida Kahlo in Looking for Frida, Viva la Vida. The dancer’s warring reactions to the skeleton’s wayward charm fuel a crucial scene in Asheville Contemporary Dance Theatre’s original modern ballet. “In Mexico, the skeleton is the image and symbol of death, and Mexicans […]

With a shared, stubborn shuffle and a familiar — if diffident — roar, monsters in various forms move en masse through the punk-tinted dreamworld of Half Japanese’s 1997 album Bone Head (suitably released on San Francisco label Alternative Tentacles). “Frankenstein made a monster/Frankenstein made a man/The good Dr. made a bad mistake/And now it’s gotten […]

If our world is still intact by the time this article appears, Y2K-philes who expected the worst may be left with black holes of gloom in their once-eagerly-racing hearts. No matter: Kent Davis Moberg, a WNC author now on tour to support his nationally distributed book, The Magic of Our Universe: Beyond the Facts (Camelot […]

Sincerity blooms from singer Ruthie Logsdon like condensation on a Pepsi can. With a truly refreshing candor, she recently revealed to Xpress the force that led her to explore what she and her D.C.-based band like to refer to as “rockin’ American roots music”: “My exposure to country pretty much came from watching TV.” That […]

Before interviewing Chicago-based dancer Anthony LoCacio, this reporter had assumed that tap dancing in heavy work boots would be a decidedly awkward endeavor. As utilized in Tapdogs, a comedic production about the steel-construction industry, it seemed a charming — but bafflingly impractical — touch of authenticity. Not so, explained LoCacio, with a laugh: “It’s great […]

“There’s really no reason in the world for someone not to make their own records,” Michelle Malone declares with feeling. The Atlanta-based performer has been making music professionally for more than 10 years; her first album, New Experience (independently released in 1988) was sprinkled with the star clout of REM’s Bill Berry. And her latest […]

How do you preserve the integrity of a superior tradition such as Russian ballet — yet still create a piece of theater that will resonate with modern audiences? “There’s no magical answer to that question,” says Akiva Talmi, co-producer — with fellow Juilliard graduate Mary Giannone — of the Moscow Ballet, a 120-year-old international organization […]

Asheville painter Rita Barnes has never formally studied botany, but many of the 72 small paintings in her latest exhibit, Leaving the Book of Lies, seem fashioned with a scientific curiosity. Each work honors a single fall leaf, set against a black-paper background that’s subtly altered from work to work. Some leaves are so precisely […]

“The calendars just don’t do it justice, do they?” The museumgoer who offered this observation and I were studying the same Georgia O’Keeffe painting, one of several now on view at the Asheville Art Museum as part of its latest exhibit, The Nature of Inspiration (the third and last installment of a collaboration with New […]

Despite its painful subject matter and eventual dramatic power, Melissa Hacker’s documentary about Holocaust survivors unfolds softly, like an age-worn book cover. But My Knees Were Jumping: Remembering the Kindertransports does not tell the story of concentration-camp victims. Rather, the film honors a different group of Holocaust survivors: the masses of Jewish children who were […]

His first hit, penned some 30-odd years ago, honored another soul man. But with any justice, Greensboro-based singer/guitarist Roy Roberts may well become the subject of his own tribute song some day. “In 1967, I released a record entitled ‘The Legend of Otis Redding’ — a song about his death,” the performer recalls (Roberts played […]

How far will a government go to be number one? In his new book, Undue Risk: Secret State Experiments on Humans (W.H. Freeman and Company, 1999), Jonathan D. Moreno — who directs the University of Virginia’s Center for Biomedical Ethics — penetrates classified documents and well-tended state secrets to uncover some of the most horrifying […]

Local performer Ron Neill is well aware that some folks object to the idea of having an open-mic competition. Local-talent nights should be about free expression, these idealists contend — about music for music’s sake, not for fortune and fame. “And that’s fine. … Maybe that’s what music is all about,” concedes the musician, who […]

As the earth’s seasons ignite and fade, so goes Asheville’s most fearless performance-art crew, the Sireal Sirqus (that’s Surreal Circus, for the phonetically challenged). “We work a lot with natural holidays — the equinoxes and the solstices,” says member Jim Genaro. The Sirqus’ first public event — held shortly after the group’s inception in October […]

Forget the restless wheel. Consider, instead, a certain other, infinitely more stable invention — one which truly defined the onset of rational culture, according to promoters of the Southern Highland Craft Guild’s Chair Show 3. “Invented to help ease the human condition of walking upright, some form of receptacle for the human hindquarters has been […]

They perform an opera about the Pittsburgh steel industry, an operatic remake of the classic “B” horror movie Night of the Living Dead, and — little surprise here — an opera created expressly to parody the classics. But Squonk Opera’s BigSmoergasbordWunderWerk — a nonsensical, multimedia gala as rigidly choreographed as it is lustfully plotless — […]