Arts & Events

Following the example of Oakland, Emeryville, El Cerrito and Palo Alto, Berkeley is preparing to require new development projects designate 1% of their construction budget on public art or pay into the city's public art fund. Public Art funds can be used for sculpture, monument, mural, painting, electronic and media art, video, earth art, installation, performance and social practice art and other artwork. Funds are overseen by the Civic Arts Commission. -more-

On Saturday, April 18, I attended a performance of Rossini’s very first opera, La Cambiale di Matrimonio, which was offered in Berkeley’s First Congregational Church by Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra in partnership with the San Francisco Opera Center. Miraculously, all the verve, wit, madcap energy, and sparkling musicality that would be the trademark of Gioachino Rossini’s mature operatic output are already abundantly present in this opera-composing debut by the precocious 18 year-old Rossini. La Cambiale di Matrimonio is a one-act, 70-minute piece in the tradition of the Neapolitan farsa. Music Director Nicholas McGegan led the orchestra and singers in a brisk reading of this engaging farce, which enjoyed an uproarious staging by director Ted Huffman. -more-

Bill Plympton is not your average animator. Most feature animations these days either involve two-dimensional comic art or faux 3D effects. Plympton is old-school. For his first full-length animation, The Tune (1992), Plympton (like the Walt Disney animators before him) manually inked and colored 30,000 individual sheets of celluloid ("cels") that were then painstakingly photographed one after another to produce the illusion of motion.

But Plympton goes even further then Disney did. He doesn't just animate two-dimensional cartoon figures decked out in primary colors. Plympton animates actual drawings—each frame a sophisticated, nuanced portrait in which the characters are rendered in great detail, including intricately crosshatched shadings of face and form. -more-