Arts & Events

The title of Mary Dore's spirited fem-doc throws a nice jab at a bit of chauvinistic jiu-jitsu that still haunts the English-speaking world. Truth to tell, an angry woman is anything but beautiful. In fact, the sight of an angry woman can be terrifying. Any man who has ever hoped to defuse righteous female anger with this tone-deaf compliment deserves every facial bruise that may come his way.

Director/Producer Dore's film comes to the big screen after scoring rave reviews in the festival circuit (including the Audience Award at the Boston Independent Film Fest). The film arrives at a critical time in America, when many of the rights won by women's struggles since the 1960s are either being threatened or reversed by neocon governors and the insurgent extremists in the Halls of Congress.

She's Beautiful focuses on the birth and development of the women's movement between 1966 and 1971 and tells its stories through a feast of interviews with more than 30 members of the long (and still continuing) campaign. Among those interviewed: Fran Beal, Heather Booth, Rita Mae Brown, Susan Brownmiller, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, Muriel Fox, Jo Freeman, Kate Millet, Eleanor Holmes Norton, Trina Robbins and three Berkeley luminaries, Alta, Susan Griffin and Ruth Rosen. -more-

Two plays by Catherine Treischmann, a younger American playwright whose work's been staged Off-Broadway, around the US and in London and received commissions from Manhattan Theatre Club, South Coast Rep and the Denver Theatre Center, will have their Bay Area premieres by two separate theater companies in Oakland and San Francisco this month. -more-

Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra musical director Nicholas McGegan will conduct the Orchestra, the Philharmonia Chorale (led by Bruce LaMott) and soloists soprano Sherezade Panthaki, countertenor Clifton Massey, tenor Brian Thorsett and baritone Jeffrey Fields in the program The Cousins Bach, with choral works by Johann Sebastian's cousins Johann Ludwig Bach: Trauermusik (Mourning Music), in three parts (funeral music with setting from the Book of Psalms, brisk cadences--an inspiration for J. S. Bach's St. Matthew Passion), Johann Christoph Bach: cantata: "Herr, wende dich und sei mir gnädig"--and a G. P. Telemann sinfonia from Schwanengesang. -more-

Phillip Greenlief, excellent Oakland saxophonist and woodwinds player, maybe best-known locally for his 20 years and counting with The Lost Trio, who has collaborated with many fine improvisors, will be reunited onstage at 9 p.m. Thursday, February 12 at Berkeley Arts Festival with the brilliant Provençale double bassist Joëlle Léandre, who has played with a great range of international musicians and performing artists, from Pierre Boulez and John Cage to Steve Lacy and Marilyn Crispell, Anthony Braxton and Derek Bailey, some of whom have written music for her. The duo put out a CD on the Relative Pitch label in 2009, That Obscure Desire of Object. Opening at 8 will be trumpeter Mazen Kerbaj from Beirut. -more-