Following a long tradition, Ballet San Antonio will once again present everyone’s favorite holiday ballet, The Nutcracker, at the Tobin Center for the Performing Arts, starting the day after Thanksgiving. It will be a modified Nutcracker with fewer dancers on stage to avoid crowding and close contact, but co-choreographer Easton Smith says there will be plenty of magic as great …
By JASMINA WELLINGHOFF, Editor Though so many live stage productions have been cancelled this year, that’s not going to be the case with Ballet San Antonio’s Nutcracker. It will be different, more high-tech, and a little tweaked all-round but it promises to be just as enchanting as always, with great dancing and computer-generated special effects. This is a “Nutcracker” for …
Grand displays of Christmas lights are always popular at this time of the year but the Lights Alive! Drive-thru Light Show upgrades the entire concept by producing a spectacle of dancing lights like you have probably not seen before. Produced by Living Light Shows, this spectacle consists of a mile-drive through a holiday landscape animated by computer-generated light designs synchronized …
By JASMINA WELLINGHOFF, Editor Though some people seem to think that Disney invented the Snow White story, the tale of the innocent, beautiful young princess was, in fact, included in the Brothers Grimm 1812 collection of fairytales, and versions of it exist in many European countries. One thing they all have in common is the jealousy of the vain stepmother, …
By JASMINA WELLINGHOFF, Editor When software engineer Matt Johnson decorated his house for Christmas in 2015, it wasn’t just your run-of-the-mill display of shine and twinkle. It was a fancy, computer-controlled, musically synchronized light show that ended up on TV. “ABC saw our YouTube video of the house and approached us to ask if we wanted to be on their …
Lots of great shows coming to the Tobin! Multiple-platinum country music star Tracy Byrd takes the stage for a single night tomorrow, Nov 13, to be followed the next day by the Pink Floyd Laser Spectacular that’s become a regular pre-holiday psychedelic experience that fuses the music of Pink Floyd with vivid video and light effects. Most people seem to …
By KATHY MOLGA, Contributor Despite all the movie choices that are available online these days, there’s nothing like going out to see a movie on the Big Screen. When COVID-19 first shut down businesses in San Antonio, I thought my cinema-going days were over. But not quite. After being dark for a few months, some theaters started reopening in August, …
By JASMINA WELLINGHOFF, Editor — Pianist Viktor Valkov and composer Luke Dahn are both members of the University of Utah music department but it was not music that brought the two men together. It was chess. Both are avid chess players, “so we just played chess,” explained Valkov, in a phone interview Tuesday. But one day, two years ago, Dahn …
By JULIE CATALANO, Contributor — They say nature abhors a vacuum. But sometimes nature fills a vacuum, as is the case at the popular, and award-winning San Antonio Botanical Garden, commemorating its 40th anniversary this year. The Garden has something new to celebrate—turning into a hot spot for performing arts in the midst of a pandemic, when the great (and …
Blue Star Contemporary is opening four new exhibits Friday, that, it hopes, will invite “reflection and dialogue,” according to the press release. The largest, Please Form a Straight Line, is installed in the main gallery and features the work of eight artists: Jamal Cyrus, Maggie Evans, Benjamin S. Jones, Yuge Zhou, Frances Lightbound, Mark Menjivar, Jingiing Lin and Jorge Villareal. …
