Reflections on Cape Charles and the Eastern Shore
A Intro to Nature Journaling class will be conducted by Virginia Eastern Shore Land Trust at Hacks Neck.
The event is November 16th from 9 a.m. to 11 a.m.
Enjoy a nature walk, learn about and try nature journaling or hone your skills in a supportive environment. No experience is necessary. All ages and skill levels welcome. The event is free.
Children must be accompanied by an adult. Find out more on the Virginia Eastern Shore Land Trust website: https://veslt.org/calendar
Just like turkey and sweet potato pie, the Artisans Guild Holiday Tour is a tradition on the Eastern Shore of Virginia. This year’s Tour is the largest in its 17-year history. With almost 50 of the Shore’s finest artists located at 17 stops from Cape Charles to Onancock, this self-driving tour promises to be extraordinary. Don’t miss this two-day event to be held on Thanksgiving weekend, Friday and Saturday, November 29 & 30 from 10:00 am to 5:00 pm.
Come and do your holiday shopping – no Black Friday Malls on this Tour! It’s a treat for folks who want a fun shopping experience, need something to do with out-of-town relatives, or just think the Shore is a fabulous place to visit. The Guild promises to take you down country roads into home studios, historic venues, an alpaca farm, and a family-owned vineyard and winery. As you travel the Shore, the place these artists call home, you’ll experience the beauty that inspires their work.
The Tour is a slice of the best the Shore has to offer. Organized by the Artisans Guild-Eastern Shore of VA, it showcases member artists and their work. Juried artisans such as Buck Doughty who cuts and welds metal into flowers, ospreys and even depictions of skylines. Buck will be showing his work at Windsor House Gallery south of Cape Charles. Windsor House is the home gallery and studio of Kurt and Sally Lewin, crafters of 18th century Windsor chairs and furniture. Timeless, comfy and beautifully crafted.
Meander along and off the beaten path to Chatham Vineyards in Machipongo. A sampling of the Shore’s beautiful landscape and tastes of their award winning wines are yours to enjoy.
The Tour will take you to wonderful towns like Belle Haven, Wachapreague and Pungoteague where you’ll visit home studios with painters, glass blowers, sculptors, and even an alpaca farm. In Belle Haven at ESO (Eastern Shore’s Own), enjoy a visit with the llamas that Barbara Baker raises, then go inside to see the beautiful wares she’s designed from their fleece. Also featured at ESO are carvers, painters, fiber artists and sea glass jewelry.
Follow the tour to Janis King’s home studio on the outskirts of Onancock, where she sculpts and paints. She’s combined her talents to make one-of-a-kind Santas just for this tour.
The Tour’s final location is Onancock – 19 artists in 4 venues in town. You’ll visit Ker Place, home of the Historical Society of the Eastern Shore, where you can take a tour of the mansion, then visit with artists such as Richard Toft and David Farlow. Richard paints in the traditional style with egg tempura, much like Andrew Wyeth. David carves decoy birds as did the “old timers.” Ask him about where he learned his craft – history, talent and a bit of folk lore come together to make his birds.
Onancock’s additional stops include Vesna Zidovec’s Studio with beautiful painted pottery; Useful Pots, functional and decorative pottery; and the Historic Onancock School. The school will house ten artists – everything from hand spun wool at Ten Good Sheep, to carvings by Master Carver Billy Crockett, and to art quilts by Donna Stufft and Sarah Jillard. Paintings, sea glass jewelry (by Gertraud Fendler of course), hand carved wooden items and crocheted wearables will all be featured at the Onancock School.
A copy of the brochure is available at local businesses, on the Guild website www.ESVAArtisansGuild.org or by request at info@ESVAArtisansGuild.org.
Saturday September 7th is the date for ESO Arts Center’s largest annual fundraiser. With music by David Pruitt, Van Lewin, The Sonic Ukes, featuring Jahfree Jones, and Court Street Company.
Local beers from Cape Charles Brewing and wine from Chatham Vineyards. Local Clams BBQ and more will be available to purchase throughout the day.
Demonstrations and exhibits by local artists, plus kids activities and games there is fun for everyone. Bring a lawn chair and come celebrate The Arts on the Eastern Shore!
SAT, Sep 7, 20192-8pm General Admission: $15Kids FreeOn The ESO Grounds: 15293 King Street, Belle Haven VA.
Free Parking
https://www.facebook.com/events/1926520824117991/?active_tab=about
http://www.esoartscenter.org/event/eso-fest/
GEAR and the Historic Palace Theatre PresentMusical Theatre Summer Camp – Stars on Stage!
2 week camp, Monday-Friday 10:00am – 4:00pm
Performances: Friday, July 19 at
$300 for two weeks
Ages 7-16
Campers will experience the theatrical process from start to finish as they work together to produce a musical theater performance of Pirates Past Noon, a magical adventure to an exotic island with pirates, where they discover the power of friendship and the simple pleasures in everyday life.
Campers’ journeys will include instruction from experienced staff to learn acting, singing, dancing, and character development. Whether your child is going on stage for the first time or is a seasoned veteran, they will enjoy this camp which culminates in two performances on stage at the Historic Palace Theatre.
Performance prices are $8 Adults, $5 Students.
Register at Lemon Tree Gallery.
Multiple child discounts are available (2 children 10% off, 3+ children 15% off)
TRDance Ensemble and VBT Ensemble, the pre-professional modern and ballet dance companies affiliated with Todd Rosenlieb Dance and Virginia Ballet Theater, are excited to present their Spring Concert premiering new modern and ballet works by local Hampton Roads choreographers.
Choreographers include current and former TR Dance company members. The Ensembles include high school, college and post-graduate dancers who are interested in developing their performance and choreographic skills in the modern or ballet dance idiom.
Friday April 26 at 8 PM
Saturday April 27 at 8 PM
Admission $10
Benjack Studio Theatre, 325 Granby St., Norfolk, VA 23510
TRDance presents its annual Spring Concert.
TRDance Spring Studio Concert Series, May 3, 4, 5, 2019 at the Benjack Studio Theatre.
8 PM (Fri/Sat) and 2 PM (Sun)
This concert will feature historical repertoire in Modern dance as well as new works choreographed by Artistic Director Todd Rosenlieb and former Company member Janelle Spruill.
Please visit www.TRDance.org for more information. Ticketing www.CoVaTix.com
According to Hollywood Reporter, Hello Kitty will be making her Hollywood film debut.
Sanrio, the Japanese company behind the iconic feline, has granted film rights to the Warner Bros. label New Line Cinema and Flynn Picture Company to develop the character’s first English-language feature film.
The partnership marks the only time Sanrio has granted film rights to Hello Kitty and its other popular characters — including Gudetama, My Melody and Little Twin Stars, among others — to a major film studio.
It is currently unclear if the project is being developed as an animated or live-action feature, but the search for writers has already begun. Beau Flynn will produce and Wendy Jacobson will executive produce for Flynn Picture.
The big question: will Hello Kitty, who does not have a mouth, actually speak?
Hello Kitty has previously appeared in comic books, TV series, video games and several Japanese-language animated movies, as well as on more than 50,000 different branded products (if you can name it, you can find a Hello Kitty version of it).
EXMORE – Applications are now being accepted for the 2nd Annual Artisans Festival to be held September 21, 2019, from 10 a.m.- 3p.m. in the Exmore Town Park located at 3380 Main Street in downtown Exmore. The Festival is open to artisans across all categories as well as visual artists working in all media, whether professional, hobbyist or beginner, and is intended as a venue to exhibit and sell.
“We were impressed that in the first year our event drew a large crowd, and with only a few months lead time,” said Taylor Dukes, who helped spearhead the formation of the 2018 event. “The idea for an Artisans Festival has been embraced by artists and makers, and the community. It’s a unique opportunity for artisans to display their work in the intimate, fun and family-friendly setting of the Exmore Town Park.”
Artists, artisans, farmers, watermen, bakers, or any maker of hand-crafted goods from across the ESVA and the region are invited to participate. If you make it, bake it, grow it, sew it, shape it, carve it, can it or otherwise bring a product into being by hand, come showcase and sell your work in the Exmore Town Park.
The goal of the festival is not only to provide the local community access to original art and hand-crafted products, but also to welcome art lovers from the region to spend more time on the Eastern Shore of Virginia. The Artisans Festival is part of two days of “art” activities that begin on Friday evening, September 20, with Exmore’s 3rd Annual Free Shakespeare in the Park, presented in partnership with Boston’s Brown Box Theatre Troupe. This year’s production is Shakespeare’s “Measure for Measure”, a politically charged play with comic overtones. The performance is free and open to everyone.
The Artisans Festival is a “Rain or Shine” event, and the Town provides a choice of indoor or outdoor space. Spaces are 10’ x 10’ with 5’ clearance between booths. Indoor spaces with electricity are $45. Outdoor spaces with no electricity are $25, Exhibitors are asked to provide their own tables, chairs, and tents. Free hi-speed broadband is available throughout the Park, from 7 am – 7 pm.
Onsite food vendor and a children’s art activity area will round out Saturday’s Artisan Festival. Entry information is available on the Town of Exmore’s Facebook Page https://www.facebook.com/events/302412080627831/ or by calling 757-651-8260.
Historic Palace Theatre presents I Played the Palace Finals on Saturday February 9th at 7:00 p.m.
Tickets: $10 adults $5 students.
I Played the Palace is a talent show that allows you to perform on the Palace Theatre Stage. Enjoy a variety of acts from local aspiring stars. Dance, music, comedy, poetry and theatre–any category is possible.
Virginia Ballet Theatre presents its WINTER CONCERT 2019
Come experience the magic of dance with Virginia Ballet Theater, Hampton Roads premiere professional Ballet Company, in its annual WINTER CONCERT at The University Theatre at Old Dominion University; Friday & Saturday, February 22 & 23, 2019 at 8:00 p.m. and Sunday, February 24, 2019 at 2:00 p.m.
The program will open with two virtuoso dances from the classical repertoire: the pas de duex from Le Corsaire featuring our own Deana Bortnick with Guest Artist Omar Nieves, former principal for Ballets de San Juan. Also in the program Amber Romano and Timothy Knoll will perform the Black Swan pas de duex from the 3rd act of Swan Lake.
Adding to the experience, Virginia Ballet Theater will present Twilight choreographed by Guest Choreographer David Keener, former Director for the Virginia School of the Arts and the Alabama School of Fine Arts. Twilight, set to Rachmaninov’s Symphonic Dances, is a neoclassical piece that epitomize the American influences to the world of classical ballet.
Later in the program enjoy Fragile Strength, a new work by Artistic Director Ricardo Melendez, to the sound of Sonata for Cello by contemporary composer Gyorgy Ligeti. Inspired by the artwork of Danielle Tegeder’s “Lightness as it Behaves in Turbulence”, presently in exhibition at the Chrysler Museum of Art’s “Chaos and Awe” exhibit, the piece is an experiment on classical ballet lines as impacted by contemporary influences and aesthetics; an allegorical image of fragility as it confronts obstacles.
Come and experience the passion and beauty of Virginia Ballet Theater and indulge your senses in an evening of past and contemporary classics of dance. More information is available at TRDance.org.
Tickets Adults $27.00
Senior Citizens & Military $22.00
Students $15.00
Available in advance at CoVaTix.com, or at the door.
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Todd Rosenlieb Dance is a center for Dance promoting the highest level of professional performance, education, and community outreach. Through innovation, creativity, and inclusion, we explore Modern Dance and Contemporary Ballet that enriches the culture and community of the mid-Atlantic region.
“The list is the origin of culture”–Umberto Eco.
Psychologists say that obsessive compulsive list makers are trying to create an illusion of control in otherwise chaotic lives.
And, there’s nothing wrong with that. In the words of the American abstract artist, Charles Green Shaw: “Real happiness consists in not what we actually accomplish, but what we think we accomplish.”
In 1983, Susan Sontag edited an anthology of French critic Rolande Barthes’s work and penned the introduction to it. She included Barthes’s own list of likes and dislikes, originally titled J’aime, je n’aime pas (I like, I don’t like):
I like: salad, cinnamon, cheese, pimento, marzipan, the smell of new-cut hay (why doesn’t someone with a “nose” make such a perfume), roses, peonies, lavender, champagne, loosely held political convictions, Glenn Gould, too-cold beer, flat pillows, toast, Havana cigars, Handel, slow walks, pears, white peaches, cherries, colors, watches, all kinds of writing pens, desserts, unrefined salt, realistic novels, the piano, coffee, Pollock, Twombly, all romantic music, Sartre, Brecht, Verne, Fourier, Eisenstein, trains, Médoc wine, having change, Bouvard and Pécuchet, walking in sandals on the lanes of southwest France, the bend of the Adour seen from Doctor L.’s house, the Marx Brothers, the mountains at seven in the morning leaving Salamanca, etc.
I don’t like: white Pomeranians, women in slacks, geraniums, strawberries, the harpsichord, Miró, tautologies, animated cartoons, Arthur Rubinstein, villas, the afternoon, Satie, Bartók, Vivaldi, telephoning, children’s choruses, Chopin’s concertos, Burgundian branles and Renaissance dances, the organ, Marc-Antoine Charpentier, his trumpets and kettledrums, the politico-sexual, scenes, initiatives, fidelity, spontaneity, evenings with people I don’t know, etc.
The recently released volume of Susan Sontag’s diaries, As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh: Journals and Notebooks, 1964-1980 (public library), was among the best psychology and philosophy books of 2012 and has already given us Sontag’s wisdom on writing, boredom, censorship, and aphorisms, her radical vision for remixing education, and her illustrated insights on love and art. All through her list making.
Beliefs
This is the very first entry in Sontag’s earliest published journal, dated November 23, 1947
I believe:
(a) That there is no personal god or life after death
(b) That the most desirable thing in the world is freedom to be true to oneself, i.e., Honesty
(c) That the only difference between human beings is intelligence
(d) That the only criterion of an action is its ultimate effect on making the individual happy or unhappy
(e) That it is wrong to deprive any man of life
[Entries “f” and “g” are missing.]
(h) I believe, further more, that an ideal state (besides “g”) should be a strong centralized one with government control of pulic utilities, banks, mines + transportation and subsidy of the arts, a comfortable minimum wage, support of disabled and age. State care of pregnant women with no distinction such as legitimate + illegitimate children.
To Read
from Sontag’s journals, December 19, 1948 (NB: she’s 15)
There are so many books and plays and stories I have to read—Here are just a few:
The Counterfeiters—Gide
The Immoralist—”
Lafcadio’s Adventures—”
Corydon—Gide
Tar—Sherwood Anderson
The Island Within—Ludwig Lewisohn
Sanctuary—William Faulkner
Esther Waters—George Moore
Diary of a Writer—Dostoyevsky
Against the Grain—Husmans
The Disciple—Paul Bourget
Sanin—Mikhail Artsybashev
Johnny Got His Gun—Dalton Trumbo
The Forsyte Saga—Galsworthy
The Egoist—George Meredith
Diana of the Crossways—”
The Ordeal of Richard Feverel—”
poems of Dante, Ariosto, Tasso, Tibullus, Heine, Pushkin, Rimbaud, Verlaine, Apollinaire
plays of Synge, O’Neill, Calderón, Shaw, Hellman . . .
[This list goes on for another five pages, and more than a hundred titles are mentioned.]
On Interpretation
from Sontag’s journals, December 31, 1956
1. Nothing is uninterpreted.
2. To interpret is to determine, restrict; or to exfoliate, read meaning into.
3. Interpretation is the medium by which we justify context.
4. To interpret a word is different from defining it; it means to specify a range of contexts (not equivalents)
Rules + duties for being 24
from Sontag’s journals, January 15, 1957 (the day before her 24th birthday)
1. Have better posture.
2. Write Mother 3 times a week.
3. Eat less.
4. Write two hours a day minimally
5. Never complain publicly about Brandeis or money.
6. Teach David to read.
Later, undated but “most likely late February or early March 1957”:
DON’T
1. Criticize publicly anyone at Harvard—
2. Allude to your age (boastfully, mock-respectfully, or otherwise)
3. Talk about money
4. Talk about Brandeis
DO
1. Shower every other night
2. Write Mother every other day
Self-assessments
from Sontag’s journals, 1957
What do I believe?
In the private life
In holding up culture
In music, Shakespeare, old buildings
What do I enjoy?
Music
Being in love
Children
Sleeping
Meat
My faults
Never on time
Lying, talking too much
Laziness
No volition for refusal