Arts & Events

Opens May 8 at the Elmwood

Note: Director Jon Pirozzi will be appearing at the 7:15PM screening on Saturday, May 9.

If, like most Americans, you remember Cambodia mostly as a sad land of civil war and mass-genocide, John Pirozzi's award-winning documentary, Don't Think I've Forgotten, will forever change that assessment. Pirozzi has resurrected some surprising history—but it wasn't easy. The task of finding evidence of "life before Pol Pot" was complicated by the Khmer Rouge's campaign to destroy every vestige of the popular culture that flourished before the advent of the Maoist-inspired "revolution."

In addition to killing an estimated 2 million Cambodians (starting with the artists and the intellectuals), Pol Pot did such a good job of eradicating the country's pop music remains that few people in the West would suspect that Cambodia once produced a rock-and-roll generation that included scores of popular singers who recorded scores of cassettes and vinyl albums.

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Susan Lamb Cook, cello, and Gayle Blankenberg, piano--the Cook-Blankenberg Duo--will play four pieces in a program at 8 p. m. Tuesday May 12 at the Berkeley City Club: Beethoven's 1796 Sonata in G minor for Piano and Cello, Opus 5 no. 2; Manuel de Falla's Suite Populaire Espanole, seven folkloric "miniatures" originally for voice and piano; Ross Bauer's Five Pieces for Cello and Piano (2013; Bauer teaches composition at UC Davis) and Rachmaninoff's four movement Sonata in G minor, Opus 19. -more-

Berkeley's Inferno Theatre, which has staged their own productions locally and collaborated with Actors Ensemble for the summer shows in John Hinkle Park in the hills, will stage their second annual Diasporas Festival this weekend, May 8-10, starting tonight (Friday) at 8, continuing afternoons and evenings through Sunday in the historic South Berkeley Community Church, featuring a broad selection of little companies and independent performers working in all manner of physical and gestural theater in the Bay Area. Last year's inaugural festival proved one of the most interesting, diverting weekends in Bay Area theater. -more-

Over the weekend of May 1-3, Opera Parallèle offered four performances at San Francisco’s Z Space of Tarik O’Regan’s Heart of Darkness, which premiered in 2011 at the Royal Opera, Covent Garden. Based on the novella by Joseph Conrad, this opera, like its source, explores the inner darkness at the heart of western man, especially when he is confronted, as in Central Africa, with another realm of darkness, namely, the teeming life of the jungle and its natives. Around this set of issues, composer Tarik O’Regan weaves a florid orchestral score, dominated by piano, celesta, harpsichord, organ, harp, and both an acoustic guitar and an electric bass guitar. -more-