Charlottesville’s Lua branded its own musical fusion. “We play Mexilachian, a blend of original and traditional music from Mexico, the Appalachias of Virginia and the Atlantic Basin,” says singer and guitarist Estela Knott. The duo performs at the Festival of Cultures on Saturday. Photo: Publicity photo
The Charlottesville Festival of Cultures may be the simplest way to learn about the world. With more than 30 countries represented by local citizens and organizations, the event offers a glimpse into the art, food, music and languages in our diverse community.
Saturday 5/14. Free, 10am. Lee Park, Market Street and Second Street NE. festivalofcultures.org.
Acting out: No theater? No audience? No problem. Live Arts turns crisis into creativity with 30in30. Every evening in May, members of the theater’s vast volunteer staff will participate in livestreams of plays from the organization’s last three decades for a retrospective that interim artistic
Can’t hold it back anymore: Is there a young Stephen Sondheim or Bruce Springsteen at home who’s aching to flex some creative muscle? Or maybe your child is still singing Frozen’s “Let It Go” on repeat. Kid Pan Alley can nurture that love of music through its online songwriting workshops, which
Beach bound: When uber-popular mystery writer Tana French calls your debut novel “a subtle but relentlessly unsettling book,” you know you’ve got what it takes to thrill readers. Tara Laskowski appears in the Virginia Festival of the Book’s streaming series Shelf Life to discuss One Night Gone,
Making it interesting: Is your shopping addiction really being served by refreshing that grocery order and impulse buying on Amazon? Sure, Etsy can take you down some twisted, cash-grabbing rabbit holes, but the most fulfilling isolation void-filling purchases may be at Craft Cville’s Virtual
Working the web: Documentary filmmaker Ricardo Preve is a former Crozet resident who’s stayed connected to the local community through his work. Now based in Genoa, Italy, Preve has screened several movies at the Virginia Film Festival, including his most recent, Coming Home, about the first
MC Yallah X Debmaster Kubali (Hakuna Kulala) The most frenetic moment of Kubali comes right at the top, like an intimidating bouncer. Once you get past the brief jabbery pattern of vocables, percussion, synthesizers, and unidentified sonic objects, Kubali just swaggers and bumps. Uganda’s MC
Best short-timers: The Indie Short Film Series includes highly regarded festival selections as well as local productions such as The Devil’s Harmony, Best International Short Film award winner at Sundance. A disquieting tale of a bullied teenage girl enacting revenge on her enemies and abusers,
Circling back: Dan Deacon has been working his synth-pop magic for nearly two decades. From the self-released CD-Rs of his student days to the hyperactive live shows made legendary through audience participation, Deacon is an established trailblazer in electronic music. At a 2010
Most musicians will tell you that Craigslist isn’t the best place to find bandmates. Sure, it’s worked for some groups (The Killers), but in a small town like Charlottesville, the odds of finding a copacetic match on the internet are especially slim. You’re more likely to meet like-minded
![Amber Zion (top), seen here in Deaf West Theatre’s production of My Sister in This House, is in town to push the boundaries of opera during a VHO workshop. She has performed music since she was a child, but this will be her first opera performance. Opera singers “have so much more emotions in their voice,” she says, and “[as deaf actors], I think we will be able to bring that out through our beautiful ASL.” courtesy of VHO.](https://www.c-ville.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/Amber-Zion-My-Sister-in-the-House-320x170.jpg)
Amber Zion started analyzing acting techniques when she was 5 years old. The only deaf child in her family, she grew up watching movies without captions, and she made up her own stories based on what she saw in the actors’ expressions and gestures. When she watched MTV, she’d ask her mother to
Since childhood, Nathan Colberg has nurtured the same, secret dream. It’s one shared by many born-and-bred Charlottesville musicians, but few ever see it realized. On February 28, Colberg, along with fellow local acts Grant Frazier and Spudnik, will take the stage at The Jefferson Theater.
Punk from here: When her family relocated from Los Angeles to Washington, D.C., in the early ’80s, Cynthia Connolly brought her camera and her passion for punk rock to the nation’s fledgling scene. Her documentation resulted in Banned in DC: Photos and Anecdotes from the DC Punk Underground
The greatest horrors of the movie world are creatures pulled straight from our nightmares, abominations that mutate from our most irrational fears. It is cathartic and emotionally healthy to confront the monsters that scare us, in order to realize that they have no power over us. The monsters
New York Times bestselling author Ann Patchett has published 12 books across three genres, won a long list of awards and fellowships—including the Orange Prize, the PEN/Faulkner Award and a Guggenheim—appeared on “The Colbert Report” and Oprah’s Super Soul Sunday, opened a thriving bookstore in
It’s haiku season. Sling your wildest words out there. You could last longest. Wednesday 2/19. Free, 8pm. Twisted Branch Tea Bazaar, 414 E. Main St., Downtown Mall. 293-9947.
Adventurous Strumming: Ross Martin knows guitar, and his deep knowledge of the instrument has led him on explorations of jazz, bluegrass, country, folk, experimental, and classical music. Over the course of his many tours and projects, he’s perfected both the entrancing acoustic duet and the
Breakdown lane: The Drive-By Truckers are unapologetically political on The Unraveling, their first album in three and a half years. “I’ve always said that all of our records are political but I’ve also said that politics is personal. With that in mind, this album is especially personal,” says
Growing up on the Torres Strait Islands of Australia, Brian Robinson drew on walls, windows, the kitchen table, the back fence. “Pretty much everywhere,” he told C-VILLE last month. “That creativity continued to grow and flourish” over decades of art-making, says the artist, who is now in his
Despite obstacles: Morgan McCoy, author and actor recently seen in the Oscar-nominated film Harriet, comes to town with a one-woman show, Evolution of a Black Girl: From the Slave House to the White House. Depicting the struggles and triumphs of fictional and real African American women across
Field Recordings: Music, poetry, and the English countryside merge for British Riches, Charlottesville Symphony’s curation of works by A.E. Houseman, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Thomas Middleton, William Wordsworth, Wilfred Owen, John Keats, and William