"Is carpet fun?" The answer, Yang Kim said, is that it can be. She was speaking at UICA, at an event hosted by CreativeMornings GR. Kim has worked at Herman Miller and Peopledesign, where she is creative director.

This August, Grand Rapids Ballet’s Summer Series sees the venerable organization performing in Petoskey, outside Grand Rapids’ Peter Martin Wege Theater, and at Frederik Meijer Gardens & Sculpture Park, in an effort to celebrate dance in an accessible, community-driven way.

It’s 2024 and arts organizations in West Michigan are thriving, with incredible, jam-packed seasons of art, conversations, fun and community involvement.

On the face of it, one might wonder how a French sex farce in which a greedy, deceptive bachelor shamelessly dupes three clueless, sexy women into simultaneously being his fiancées, roping in his seemingly naive old friend and his bemused housekeeper to keep the charade going could possibly play in this day and age. 

The word “Eupnea”, the title of CPR Dance company’s current season’s traveling concert, is literally defined as the breath at rest—our mode of breathing that does not require conscious thought.

There is something undeniably delightful about watching people have a wonderful time. At its heart that is the experience of seeing “School of Rock”, the infectious musical at Farmers Alley Theatre.

Second-wave feminism taught us that “the personal is political” and the power of that truth underscores “Detroit ’67”, the first of celebrated playwright Dominique Morisseau’s Detroit Project, a trilogy of provocative, classically-structured dramas that each bring to life a pivotal moment in the history of Detroit, which, in turn, inevitably tells a larger American story at the intersection of race, class, and gender. 

It starts with a tour. James Brandess, smiling under a baseball cap, serves as guide for you and the dozen or so people who’ve enrolled in his landscape class. The Oxbow Lagoon: gorgeous.

Screen-to-stage adaptations and jukebox musicals abound in contemporary theatre, and the new musical “Mystic Pizza”, is both. 

In the 2022 film Tár, Cate Blanchett plays a formidable and intimidating conductor. She suffers no fools. She demands of musicians that they sacrifice – even destroy – themselves.