Arts & Events

Opens May 29 at the Landmark Shattuck

After sitting through Claudia Llosa's snow-crossed saga of family alienation in a land of perpetual chill, poverty, and buried emotions, I found myself thinking a better title for the film might have been Adrift.

While the cinematography is gorgeous and the acting is forthright and deeply felt (with compelling performances by Jennifer Connelly, Cillian Murphy, and the young Zen McGrath), the story is sometimes as hard to follow as footprints in a snow bank on windy day.

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For years, Mary Sano--an exquisite dancer and choreographer--has been teaching and performing Isadora Duncan's style of dance in Mary's studio on 5th Street in San Francisco, not far from where Isadora was born on May 27th, 138 years ago. -more-

There's been a great profusion of international theater and related music events springing up all over the Bay Area the past few weeks, some of it by touring groups, some by residential companies--and the biggest producer for them, the San Francisco International Arts Festival, which presents moire than 70 ensembles and individual performers over three weeks, has shows continuing through this weekend and next, until Sunday, June 7th, at Fort Mason, including performers from Berkeley as well as from all over the world. -more-

Coming just four months after the American Bach Soloists performed a concert version of Handel’s short opera Acis and Galatea at venues throughout the Bay Area in late January, Chora Nova, a choral group founded in 2006 by Paul Flight, offered a concert version of Acis and Galatea in a single performance, Saturday evening May 23 at Berkeley’s First Congregational Church. Handel’s Acis and Galatea, a brief two-act opera, (or, as it was originally called, a masque), is a charming example of George Friedrich Handel’s musical artistry. First performed in 1718 at Cannons, the country mansion of James Bridges, Earl of Carnarvon, Acis and Galatea is set to a libretto fashioned by eminent poets such as John Gay, Alexander Pope and John Hughes, who took the basic plot from a story in Book XIII of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. -more-