Arts And Entertainment

FRIDAY, JULY 13 -more-

Promising “more song-and-dance than a Bush Administration press conference,” the San Francisco Mime Troupe will be Making a Killing this weekend, for free, at Cedar Rose Park, a block from Cedar and Chestnut Streets. -more-

It has been 35 years since the Berkeley Museum brought New York’s Museum of Modern Art exhibition, “Sculpture of Matisse,” to the Bay Area. The current show as SFMOMA permits us to re-examine the great painter’s three-dimensional work. The museum’s press release speaks of his “sculptural masterpieces.” -more-

This Friday Trinity Lyric Opera opens its second season with Aaron Copland’s The Tender Land at its new home in the Castro Valley Center for the Arts. -more-

It’s a perverse world that lets the name of Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami remain obscure to the vast Western film-going public. He is considered by many to among the three or four greatest artists in cinema today, the creative force behind some of the most thoughtful and compelling films of the past 25 years. -more-

TUESDAY, JULY 10 -more-

ARIEL STRING QUARTET AT GIORGI GALLERY -more-

On a platform, three women sit, facing the audience. They don’t budge from their chairs until practically the end of the show, yet there’s a choreography, in Lisa D’Amour’s Anna Bella Eema, as directed by Rebecca Novick for Crowded Fire Theater Company at the Ashby Stage, and the three actors (Cassie Beck, Danielle Levin and Julie Kurtz) provide a rhythmic soundscape as well, with voice, simple musical instruments (a finger piano) and various ordinary objects as noisemakers. -more-

In today’s fully wired world of digital video and handheld viewing devices, it may be difficult to fathom a time when the moving picture was itself a revolutionary technology. In the first few decades of the 20th century, as the new medium was developed and perfected, it brought with it a radical cultural shift, bringing images from all over the world to neighborhood theaters. -more-