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JACKSON: New York City Ballet Visits Dancers’ Workshop

Watch the New York City Ballet…

images provided by Dancers’ Workshop

This summer Dancers’ Workshop welcomes the incredible artists of New York City Ballet MOVES back to Jackson for a fourth year in a row!  For five days in August, the company will fill DW’s spaces at the Center for the Arts in Jackson with the grace and elegance of ballet executed at its highest level, an experience that’s certainly worth taking a weekend trip to Jackson this summer.

While in Jackson, NYCB company members will continue the activities that have become a tradition of their yearly visits by teaching eight master classes for dancers age 11 and up, holding two free open rehearsals, and performing three shows in the Center Theater.  In addition to all of these programs, this year DW and NYCB add a new educational focus to the residency by offering a lecture-demonstration performance and a lecture/discussion of historical film footage with Jean-Pierre Frolich, NYCB Artistic Administrator and expert on the work of Jerome Robbins (who was one of NYCB’s Founding Choreographers, and whose dances are still performed by the company.)

Made up of corps, soloist, and principal level dancers, New York City Ballet MOVES is an elite group of dancers drawn from the NYCB main company who tour to small and mid-size theaters across the U.S. and the world.  Four years ago, Dancers’ Workshop was the first presenter ever to host an NYCB MOVES tour, and the success of that first trip to Jackson has continued ever since.  Every year DW presents NYCB MOVES, dance students in Jackson and the region get to learn from premiere ballet masters, adult artists and dancers in Jackson get inspiration from the classical work they see, and Jackson audiences get the chance to watch one of the world’s greatest ballet companies in a beautiful, intimate setting.  In return, the NYCB dancers, musicians, and staff members who visit Jackson every year say that it is the absolute highlight of their touring season.

For anyone still looking for where to take a short summer vacation, Jackson Hole the first week of August should be high on their list!  Jackson is served by direct flights from Denver and Salt Lake, and the drives from Montana, Colorado, Idaho, and Utah include many scenic byways.  Beautiful weather with blue skies and 80 degree temperatures is typical for Jackson in August, and the area offers something for everyone- both low and high impact outdoor sports, lovely scenery and small town, excellent accommodations (the Four Seasons, and Aman Resorts have properties in Jackson, in addition to locally owned operations Hotel Terra, the Rusty Parrot Lodge, the Historic Wort Hotel, and Town Square Inns), wonderful dining, and an abundance of cultural and artistic events.  A long weekend in Jackson could include a day in Grand Teton National Park or Yellowstone, almost any outdoor sport you could imagine, attending concerts by New York City Ballet and the Grand Teton Music Festival orchestra, a day wandering the historic downtown with its iconic town square and elk antler arches, perusing galleries with local and internationally known artists’ work, and taking advantage of Jackson’s well known outstanding hospitality services.

For more information about Dancers’ Workshop and this summer’s presentation of New York City Ballet MOVES, visit www.dwjh.org or call 307-733-6398.

For more information about visiting Jackson and hotel and activity reservations, contact Jackson Hole Central Reservations at www.jacksonholewy.com, or (888) 838-6606.

CASPER:  Corridor Gallery Welcomes Artist Rebecca Weed

“Granted:  Original Artwork by Rebecca Weed”

Born and raised in Cody, Wyoming and attending Montana State University in Billings to earn her BA, Rebecca has taken inspiration from the region throughout her life to develop her incredible style. Working in oil paint and drawing, Rebecca’s beautiful works harness an incredible energy captivating the viewer by masterful use of color and composition based on figure or landscape inspiration. Often drawings are crafted on multiple sheets of layered tracing paper offering intense detail and depth. Rebecca is currently working with artists in training at Northwest Community College in Powell, Wyoming but will be making the trip to Casper on the weekend of August 2nd, 3rd and 4th for her upcoming show. The Corridor Gallery is happy to announce “Granted: Original Artwork by Rebecca Weed” as their latest showcasing of Wyoming artists. You are invited to join Rebecca, the Corridor staff and enthusiasts on Friday, August 2nd at 7pm for the opening reception. “Granted” will be showing ONLY through Sunday, August 4th. Rebecca’s works will be available for sale at obtainable prices. Please contact the Corridor Gallery with any questions.

Granted:  Rebecca G. Weed Artist Statement

When I work, I am thinking about permanence and impermanence, I am thinking about time and the way we measure it, and I am thinking about what is beautiful.

The beauty is in what we do measure, what we can’t measure and what we forget to measure. I was raised in a landscape that has been described as bleak, harsh, empty, even ugly.

From the time I was small I took it for granted that everyone could see the horizon. A definitive line where the land overlapped the sky was always in view. When I travel to locations that are filled with trees, buildings, or people that obscure our sense of space and direction I feel claustrophobic.

In this place I grew up an occurrence became a story:  a plane overhead, the only thing to briefly break the emptiness and silence. Sitting on the ground next to a pile of sagebrush I felt everything:  longing, loneliness, excitement, adventure, the smug security that I was in a place that only one person could occupy at any given time. And there was the story. A girl, dirt, and an airplane. And this story goes on and on and on.

Within this landscape, within America, within an ever accelerating world, there is a lack of heroism. There is a lack of signposts that mark our individual time. There is a lack of the archetype, the myth, the importance of presence. These are human constructs and they may be evolving into other manifestations. They may be no longer useful. They may be right in front of me. Wherever or whatever they are I feel the necessity to mark my time; to celebrate a bit, or mourn, to fall in love.

Event Details

Event:  “Granted: Original Artwork by Rebecca Weed” Opening Reception: Friday, August 2nd at 7pm

Admission Cost: Free Show

Showing Through: Aug 2nd 7pm-midnight, Aug 3rd 10am-5pm, Aug 4th noon-4pm

Accommodations: Cash bar

Information: For more information, please contact Rebecca Weed via email at weed.rebecca@gmail.com or The Corridor Gallery at (307) 333-7035, Reed at (307) 259-8001 or visit www.thecorridorgallery.com

Merchant of Venice performed in Rock Springs — image by www.sweetwaternow.com 

CASPER: Wyoming Shakespeare Festival Company Presents Merchant of Venice

The Wyoming Shakespeare Festival Company of Lander has presented the Merchant of Venice throughout Wyoming — and the Casper show is coming July 27! Visit Artcore of Casper’s website for information on events, schedule and ticket information. The Wyoming Shakespeare Festival Company has been performing the classics of Shakespeare throughout the Cowboy State since 1999.

WY Shakespeare Festival Company — Director’s Notes

Welcome to Wyoming Shakespeare Festival Company’s fourteenth season.

We are happy to present The Merchant of Venice, performed by the Touring Company and Twelfth Night, performed by the Academy. Although Shakespeare wrote the former play four to six years earlier than the latter; both plays remain popular and enduring comedies; both stories have a theme centered on a ring. In both plays the heroine cross dresses and in both {plays}, William Shakespeare brings up Pythagoras’ theory of the transmigration of souls*. The choice to produce each play was inspired by the wonderful actors’ enthusiasm to give them life.

Love in Shakespeare’s plays is rarely a simple matter, however it almost always is presented as an example of humanity’s noblest impulses; the best of what we can become. The Merchant of Venice and Twelfth Night,  as most of the great comedies, conclude with blissful unions.

Although the two plays’ classification as comedies are no exemption, The Merchant of Venice love matches bring grief in their wake, just as the pursuit of justice – ostensibly a righteous mission – also proves an act of inhuman cruelty. Likewise, the threat of revenge by the wounded Malvolio at the close of Twelfth Night, embitters the atmosphere of the joyful couples.

For those of us who live Shakespeare’s works, setting this year’s plays in modern time is a natural choice. Wyoming’s communities surrounded by dried up oceans; more space than development, seemed apt for the world of Illyria in Twelfth Night. Although The Merchant of Venice is placed in Venice, Italy, the bottom-line-obssessed world of today resonates more deeply than most in suggesting how the calculations of profit and loss are integral to even the most intimate human relationships.

Our aim is to open the door wide for you to enter Shakespeare’s profound understanding of human complexity rendered with such care that we can register sharply how both cruelty and compassion, ignorance and intelligence, mercy and injustice reside, not just in any human heart, but also in every human heart.      — DS, Director —

*Transmigration of Souls

Transmigration of Souls or Methempsicose is a philosophical doctrine, whose birth is registered in India and is believed to have migrated to Egypt, from where Pythagoras[1] adopted the conceptual system and later brought it to life in Greece.

In his mythical dissertation about the transmigrations of the wandering souls, Pythagoras tells the story of a myriad of wandering souls, each migrating from body to body along a path of recurrence amid the becoming of the All. Yet, for the Pythagoreans, this story does not describe the passive revolution of a circle, but a pathway for an active exploration of the All and return to the Divine, or, in other words, the various Manifestations of All That Is. This endeavor is strenuous as it occurs amidst a suspension within the double bind of nativity and fatality, again and again to be born and to die, and to be reborn as still another being. The thread of the narrative, of reminiscence, is always severed with each demise amid the labyrinth of mortal existence. Yet, as the narrative that composes the lives of a soul is a rope of many threads, the persistent re-articulation of the narrative instigates a mnemopoiesis of remembrance that transcends the individual mortal life amid the broader travels of the soul.

It is said that his disciples taught that through Methempsicose, it was possible for a soul, after having a brief or long period in the kingdom of souls, to return to inhabit another physical human body or even an animal body, and to proceed with its period of learning and purification until it is time again to return cleansed and ascended to the Original Source of all life.    

LANDER: 5th Annual Riverfest by Lander Art Center, July 27

The 5th annual Riverfest Art & Music in the Park, hosted by the Lander Art Center, will be held Saturday, July 27 from 9:30 AM -5:30 PM at the Lander City Park. Artist booths will be open from 9:30-5:30; Jackson Hole Dancers’ Workshop Summer Creative Arts Performance will be held at 11 AM; from 12:30-8 PM, enjoy music: Buffalo Bill Band (12:30-3); Drag the River (3-6); Chanman Roots Band (6-8).

Food & beverage vendors will also be on hand:  Lander Bar, Old Town, Middle Fork, Bar 10, WeePeKorn, Tony’s Pizza, Merry Poppins Popcorn Factory

Visit Lander Art Center online for more information!