Guest blogger Walton Muyumba is a University of North Texas professor who teaches classes on blues, jazz and American literature. He is the author of The Shadow and the Act: Black Intellectual Practice, Jazz Improvisation and Philosophical Pragmatism.
Al Jarreau makes “adult contemporary” music. That’s not a problem, except that Jarreau’s set at the Winspear [...]

You’ve read her writing about dance on the Art&Seek blog (most recently here and here). And now you can hear her talk about her passion in the flesh. Danielle Georgiou will lead a gallery walk on Wednesday at 12:15 p.m. at the Dallas Museum of Art titled “Discovering the Other Through Movement and the Visual Arts.”

IN MEMORY OF: Wednesday night, Texas Woman’s University will put on a benefit for the Brian Leavell Endowed Scholarship. Brave Combo will play, as well as a slew of other respected Denton musicians. But who was Brian Leavell, and why is half of Denton gathering on Wednesday to celebrate his life? The Denton Record Chronicle [...]

From the Chronicle of Higher Ed: A compromise spending bill approved by Congressional negotiators on Tuesday sets the 2010 fiscal-year budgets for the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Endowment for the Arts at $167.5-million each, a $25-million total increase over the appropriations for the two endowments in 2009. The National Endowment for [...]

Live theater is such an ephemeral thing, it’s hard to assess the real merit of performances and productions from even a few years ago — if you never saw them, if they were never recorded. Although I met him twice, I never saw a show directed by Paul Baker, the founder of the Dallas Theater [...]

Paul Baker, who founded the Dallas Theater Center in 1959 and was the first principal of Booker T. Washington High School for the Performing and Visual Arts, died Sunday morning due to complications from pneumonia. He was 98.
The Baker Idea Institute’s Web site has a short biography that highlight’s Baker’s numerous achievements in the fields [...]

ONE LUCKY FLAT STANLEY: Parents around the country are now wishing they lived next door to photographer extraordinaire, Allison V. Smith. Allison’s neighbor, young master Gus, truly scored with his Flat Stanley project. Check out more photographs of Flat Stanley’s adventures on Allison’s fantastic blog. (For those who aren’t parents of young kids, Flat Stanley [...]

Guest blogger Josh Greenfield is a junior at Booker T. Washington High School for the Performing and Visual Arts. He plays Snug the Joiner in the Dallas Theater Center’s production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream opening next week.
Monday and Tuesday were birthdays, respectively, for Cameron Kirkpatrick (who plays Tom Snout) and Cedric Neal (Puck). We [...]

Oscar-nommed screenwriter-director-actor Guillermo Arriaga (21 Grams, The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, Babel, The Burning Plain) talked yesterday to University of North Texas students about what stage actors know that screen actors don’t. And Sally Nystuen Vahle, the UNT drama teacher and member of the Dallas Theater Center acting company, said, attaboy Arriaga, you tell ‘em.
Arriaga [...]

OK, SO NOW WHAT? All the enthusiasm over the Arts District’s open house on Sunday has died down to a simmer — final attendance guesstimate from the AT&T PAC folks is 45,000; earlier guesttimate was 25,000 at least. So now we can look forward to the acid tests of the two new halls: the Dallas [...]