"Spring Awakening," which opened Sunday at the Brooks Atkinson Theatre, mixes hearing and deaf performers with elegant ease, adding new depth to a show about the dangers of failing to communicate. Deaf actors communicate to the hearing audience by relying on colleagues elsewhere onstage to provide their spoken dialogue and singing voice, like alter egos. "Spring Awakening" focuses most prominently on three youngsters — Melchoir, the defiant but popular and handsome rebel (played by Austin McKenzie); Wendla, the shy young woman determined to learn about sex (acted by Sandra Mae Frank, voiced by Katie Boeck); and Moritz, done in by the repressive society around him (played by Daniel N. Durant, voiced by Alex Boniello). The language is coarse and plot points include premarital sex, abortion, homosexuality, autoerotism, sadomasochism and incest. Many of the songs — including "Mamma Who Bore Me" and "The Bitch of Living" — haven’t lost their vitality and there is simple elegance when cast members hold each other tight to become a tree or leap around with tiny flashlights attached to their fingers to perform "The Mirror-Blue Night" (perhaps inspired by the lyric "flip on a switch")
Source: www.chron.com

Miami already enjoys a vibrant street art scene, but now a new arts district is emerging. The industrial city of Hialeah is becoming an affordable
Source: www.kcur.org

Leonidas Diamantopoulos put brush to a large canvas spread out on the floor of his Athens studio, etching out images of a pool of water and a man standing beside it. Slowly, the story started to come together.
He’s not painting pictures, he said. He’s writing stories.
Every so often, Diamantopoulos stood up and ascended a small spiral staircase. On a second-story balcony, he can look down at the image — better perspective for how it will look on the ceiling of a Dallas church.
“Someday after I finish the whole project, I’m sure this church will be a landmark site for Texas,” he said.

Source: www.dallasnews.com

With their heavy tanks of compressed air, hoses, gauges, wetsuits, fins and masks, divers seem more like astronauts than ballerinas. Yet in what is being billed as a world first, 14 dancers are donning scuba gear for an underwater performance, complete with specially composed music, to an audience submerged to a depth of about 5 meters (16 feet) in Cape Sounion, southeast of Athens, beneath the ancient temple of Poseidon — the god of the sea in classical mythology. When the water is clear, 40 seats are available for the audience on the seabed, and 40 more could get a panoramic view as they snorkel while landlubbers can watch nearby on a giant screen for what was planned to be a three-day run. […] there were the logistics: diving gear, transport, financing, the vagaries of the weather and political upheaval in Greece, complete with banking restrictions and early elections. […] she said, the deep is something I won’t part with. Because now I carry it within me.
Source: www.seattlepi.com