DANCE: George Balanchine's A Midsummer Night's Dream, in a Francia Russell staging, opens tonight at the Pacific Northwest Ballet. Scenery and costumes are by the irrepressible Martin Pakledinaz, evoking a primeval Pacific Northwest. With Shakespeare's play as the basis, Balanchine turned to Felix Mendelssohn's music to dream on the childhood relationship to nature, and the nature of relationships. Here's the video preview. (Photo: Carrie Imler and Timothy Lynch; © Angela Sterling) 8 p.m. //......

At first, we weren't ready to like Artistic Director Nacho Duato's work Castrati--out of the gate it felt strained, and we worried that the topic (castrated Italian boys who became famous singers) would be too easily over-dramatized. Set to a series of works by Vivaldi, it opens with a group of men wearing low cut gowns, half dress-half cape numbers in all black; we later deduce these are the veteran castrati, their mission to bring......

When Seattlest was a young dancer, we dreamed of creating choreography worthy of this Spanish company. Not that we knew La Compañía Nacional de Danza back then, but the first time we saw them perform it was like watching the dancers from our imagination writ large on stage--we never succeeded as a choreographer, but Artistic Director Nacho Duato (that's right, you read correctly) has The Gift. Intense, vivid and poignant without ever being self-important or......

Even though he grew up in Seattle and has recently joined the UW jazz studies faculty, and even though he had an intriguing-looking gig at SAM during last fall's Earshot Jazz Festival, we still haven't managed to catch a performance by trumpeter Cuong Vu. But we'd sure like to catch him tonight at UW's Meany Hall and finally hear him in person. Equally at home with funk/rock rhythms and a more ethereal ECM-style vibe, Vu......

For Drought and Rain, Vol. 2, Vietnamese choreographer Ea Sola follows up her dance exploration of life during wartime with war's effects on the next generation. Sola was only twelve when she left Vietnam in 1974, so she has a foot in both worlds. There's more preview video, if you're into that kind of thing. There are thirteen dancers and, happily, six musicians (we get a little tired of canned music and dance). In the......

TONIGHT at Meany Hall, it's "Climate Change and the Future of Life on Earth," a two-hour multi-media presentation designed to freak your climatological shit out. It stars the world-famous paleoanthropologist, conservationist, and environmental activist: Dr. Richard Leakey. Shazam! (What? We never get to say "Shazam"!) Author of The Sixth Extinction, Dr. Leakey will talk "about our impact on the environment"...um, no, he's gonna open up a can of knowledgifying whup-ass is what. The Sixth Extinction......

If you missed Reggie Wilson's group at On the Boards a few weeks ago, you have the chance to not only make up for it, but to add three other stellar choreographers and one of Seattlest's favorite dance companies to the bill. Opening this evening at Meany Hall as a part of UW's World Series, the Dayton Contemporary Dance Company performs the Seattle premiere of colôr-ógrăphy, n. the dances of Jacob Lawrence. There have been......

You think you know someone. A fiery one-off German Romantic wunderkind. You've had beers with this guy. And then this Neefe dude pops up. As Byron Schenkman told the Town Hall audience: During his first trip to Vienna, young Ludwig van Beethoven wrote home to Johann Gottlob Neefe in Bonn, "Should I ever become a great man, you too will have a share in my success." Neefe was Beethoven's teacher, mentor, and advocate for......

UW World Series: Sydney Dance Company Friday, Saturday, 8pm, tickets $42 The music for this Australian dance group's "Grand" (which has no intermission) runs to 21 separate pieces, a fact that we reassured ourselves on by counting them out on our fingers while waiting for the show to start. We saw in the program notes that choreographer Graeme Murphy has dedicated "Grand" to his mother, a pianist who played for her baby Graeme and......

YOUNG BLACK CULTURE: Studies claim that African-American male culture has continued to decline despite generally strong national economic growth. Central District Forum for Arts & Ideas with moderator Carl Livingston Jr. and a group of respected panelists discuss their attempts to "defy convention and support the success and progress of African-American boys." 7pm // Langston Hughes Performing Arts Center // $5 for adults; Free for CD Forum Members/Students/Seniors DANCE: Australia's Sydney Dance Company brings Grand,......

Go see Parsons Dance at the Meany tonight or Saturday. You should go to watch one man perform one solo, and you will thank Seattlest for telling you to do so. In all our many years spanning from actually being a dancer to attending countless modern dance performances, we have never in our life seen anything such as Parson's 1982 work Caught. (That we had never seen it, much less heard of it until now,......

As we tucked into our seats at Meany Hall for last night's performance of the Shen Wei Dance Arts company, we noticed that the the floor was painted in a random array of fuzzy geometric shapes (initially we thought it was sand, the first of our Butoh flashbacks), and there were no wings installed. With the house lights still on, one by one the grey-and-black-clad dancers walked quietly out to the edge of the stage,......

MUSIC: Carrie Clark & The Lonesome Lovers. Memphis Radio Kings headline this show, but we're here for Carrie Clark all the way. Clark's been wooing Seattle crowds with her superb voice -- both playful and brooding for over ten years now. Backed by her band, The Lonesome Lovers, things seem to be coming together beautifully for Miss Clark; her new album, Seems So Civilized, produced by Darryl Neudorf (Neko Case, Kinnie Starr, The Sadies, The......

THEATER: You have only five more chances to catch WET’s latest offering, In Disdress Now: Redux. Marya Sea Kaminski’s one-woman show was originally developed as as part of On the Boards' Northwest New Works Festival in June 2006. Now the “story of a girl wrestling meaning out of love, porn, and the folds of an enormous red hoop dress” has been expanded into a full-fledged tour de force. 8pm // Washington Ensemble Theatre // 608......

A few weeks ago we noticed something new in the upper reaches of our Comcast Digital Cable guide. Channels 962-984 now play Seattle FM radio stations: KISW (971), KPLU (966), even KUBE (967). This is cool. Now, if we want to pig out on Cheetos and Diet Coke to radio instead of TV, we can. Problem is, we can only endure one local radio station. And that one--KEXP--isn't among the 23 channels offered. We......

Wednesday 25th >>> Cut Chemist and Lyrics Born at Neumo's. If Cut Chemist's contributions to Ozomatli are a highlight of your personal musical history, Seattlest will buy you a drink. We're just praying that Lyrics Born actually has some new material this time around, sheesh. 8pm; $18 adv/$20 door. Pigeon John opens and it's all ages, shorties. >>> Ziggy Marley at The Showbox. Bob's best-looking son does reggae just like daddy. 8pm; $30 adv/$32......

Her name is Tess Altiveros and, in the current UW production of Mozart's Le Nozze di Figaro (jointly staged by the Schools of Music and Drama), she plays the mezzo-soprano "pants role" of the love-struck pageboy, Cherubino. The operatic convention of an adult woman portraying an adolescent male makes musical sense; there's no better practitioner than the beloved Frederica Von Stade, who brings a golden voice and a winsome sprightliness to her art. Miss Altiveros......

Seattlest remembers well the day we were sitting at the Victrola back bar and Byron Schenkman, harpsichordist and co-founder of the Seattle Baroque Orchestra, turned to us and said, "I've been thinking about switching to piano." Well, you could have knocked us over with a skinny decaf latte. And if you think it's not big news, tell that to the Seattle Times, P-I, and Seattle Weekly. (We couldn't find the Stranger's most recent commentary --......