Arts & Events

James Keller was longtime resident playwright at the Magic Theatre some years back, his plays and adaptations familiar to Bay Area audiences, and they've been performed in London and New York as well. For the past twenty-some years, he's also been a popular teacher at Berkeley Adult School and other East Bay venues, well-known for teaching literature, film and other cultural subjects with great vigor. Keller's still writing (both plays and poetry) and directing his own scripts for the occasional show by his troupe, Poor Players ( poorplayers.org ). His dialogue and characters engage the audience, dancing in the spectators' minds' eye.  

On October 4, Keller will give two rare solo performances in San Francisco, of his "tour" of Proust's great seven volume novel 'In Search of Lost Time' (aka 'Remembrance of Things Past'), marshaling his diverse and considerable talents--Australian-born, he was trained in theater in London, where he also received two British Arts Council Writing Grants. Accompanied only by music and 180 slides, Keller endeavours to bring the complex tale, woven of forgetting and remembering, alive in all its humor and tragedy of passing time. Author and New Yorker theater critic John Lahr has dubbed the performance "a tour de force." 

A Q & A session with Keller will follow each show.  

Sunday, October 4, two shows, 2 & 8 pm, Southside Theatre, Bldg. D, Fort Mason, San Francisco. https://wwwbrownpapertickets.com/event/2239503 

--Yakshagana is an old South Indian theatrical form, similar to Kathakali, employing elaborate costumes and make-up, music (two singers and two drummers playing a stick drum and a horizontal two-headed drum, dance and stylized movement to depict stories from the great mythic Hindu epics with tremendous energy and humor. I've written about it in the Planet before, when we've been fortunate enough to have a troupe here to perform this eminent style. 

A few days ago, there was a lecture/demo of Yakshagana at Morrison Hall on the UC campus. M. Prabakhar Joshy, both performer and scholar of Yakshagana, spoke about the form, its different styles and their history before an audience that included Dr. Martha Ashton, who Joshy hailed as "probably the first woman to perform Yakshagana onstage in full costume--and certainly the holder of the first PhD awarded on Yakshagana," as well as Katharine Kunhiraman of Kalanjali, Dances of India, the Berkeley educational project through which she and her late husband, second-generation Kathakali actor K. P. Kunhiraman, have taught and performed South Indian dance and theater for for over 35 years. 

At the end of the lecture, Joshy introduced three Yakshagana actors in costume who'd just arrived from Karnatika, South India. They gave a vigorous and charming demonstration of scenes and tableaux from their repertoire. 

Now, it's been announced that those actors will be performing with their colleagues--Shashidhara Somayali, Ashoka Upadya, Sreepada Hegade, Ganesh Shetty, Prashanth Padubidri, Aparna Ds, Lavanya Joshi-- in a--free!--performance, presented by Yaksha Kala Ranga USA this Saturday night, 8:30 till 10:30 in Sunnyvale at Sanatan Dharma Kendra, 193 Commercial Street, between the Central Expressway and Kifer Road. The story they'll present, ChandrahasaCharitre, is synopsized and discussed on WikiPedia:  

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chandrahasa