Chaos rules at Stiltshop, where day camp-style rehearsals prepare youngsters to participate next to older and more experienced dancers in Built on Stilts, the Island’s annual homegrown community dance festival. Call it Built on Stilts with a shorter attention span.
There’s a sleep-away camp feel to the Yard off Middle Road in Chilmark: office over here, summer-blooming party tent over there, and modest, grey-shingled, single-story cottages for visiting dancers, choreographers, singers and other artistes scattered throughout the woods.
A love story with mythological heroes, shipwrecked kings, queens, witches, a drunken sailor and a famous death scene plays this weekend at the Yard in the form of Dido and Aeneas, a 50-minute opera sung in English. There will be dancing, action sequences and a string quintet.
And of course there will be its famous aria, Dido’s lament, When I Am Laid in Earth, which has been performed by artists as far from opera as Klaus Nomi, Jeff Buckley and even (as a Trance mix) Armin van Buuren.
Defining Gravity With Dance at the Field Gallery
She-figured Dance presents Defining Gravity, a premiere modern dance performance and sunset reception for the benefit of the Somarela Fund on Tuesday, August 11, at 5:30 p.m.
Anyone who spent any time on the Vineyard before 1984, the year Lillian Hellman died (she was born in 1905), has a story to tell about the writer’s mean-spiritedness, from the number of nurses’ aides she fired in a single week, to her scowl at the Helio’s waitress who complimented Ms. Hellman on her mayonnaise, to the slightly ghastly sight of her shuffling down Main street, Vineyard Haven, leaning on the arm of a white-uniformed caregiver, a cigarette dangling from the famous writer’s grimacing lips.
If all the feminists in all the play-going world could vote to remove one production from the lists, it would probably be unanimous to expunge Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew. Oh, some regrets would ensue: We would rue the loss of such lines as, “I’ve come to wive it wealthily in Padua. If wealthily then happily in Padua.” And it’s a hilarious plot point that the reigning town fat cat, Baptista, insists on marrying off his over-the-top nasty daughter, Katharina, before her sweet kid sister, Bianca, can have her pick of swooning swains.