Tucson Weekly: Arts Round-Up (December 31

The Best And Worst Of The Local Arts Scene In 1997.
By Margaret Regan
ONE OF THE best moments in the whole art year took place in its earliest weeks. Liz Lerman's Dance Exchange had come to town in January, and worked intensively with local groups to incorporate them into a professional performance at Centennial Hall. After weeks of rehearsals, old Mexican-American women from El Rio Neighborhood Center, Jewish mothers and children from the Hebrew Academy, gay activists and even Ken Foster, head of UApresents, joined Lerman's troupe onstage for "Still Crossing," a dance about immigration and nationhood.
Review It was a performance at once solemn and joyful. Its best moment, when the dancers raised their arms in unison in a quiet gesture of salutation toward the audience, lingers in memory almost a year later.
But the worst moment in the whole art year took place around the same time. The insulting La Malinche, badly written by Carlos Morton and badly acted, was mysteriously produced by Arizona Theatre Company. The author's disquieting inclination to pass off lyrical Aztec poetry as his own writing was so egregious that a top-level ATC staffer quit in protest.
That's the way the art pendulum swings. You never know whether you're in for the sublime or the ridiculous. ATC subsequently redeemed itself--several times over--with August Wilson's august Seven Guitars, Noel Coward's delicious Blithe Spirit, and most recently with the good-time music of Louis Jordan in Five Guys Named Moe.
UApresents' cutting-edge dance program faltered in March, at least to my ears, in the din of Elizabeth Streb/Ringside, a dance/trampoline circus that featured ear-splitting metallic cacophony, miked to the nth degree, instead of music. But, heck, what do I know? Shortly after her Tucson engagement Streb won the coveted MacArthur genius award, turning Foster into something of a kingmaker. Eikoh and Koma, another avant-garde troupe, also won a MacArthur award after their UApresents stint. Just think of the artists Foster will be able to book in the future by proffering a MacArthur as a bonus.
Among local dance troupes, the UA hoofers were the only American university group invited to perform at the International Theatreschool Festival in Amsterdam. Orts Theatre of Dance continued turning out strong work, most notably with Meister Eckhart, a medieval extravaganza on trapezes; and Urban Gaits, an ambitious collaboration about downtown by Orts' Anne Bunker and Chuck Koesters and a trio of local artists: poet Charles Alexander, painter Cynthia Miller and videographer Nancy Solomon. Urban Gaits did what, to my mind, contemporary art ought to do: try to make sense of contemporary life, or at least respond to it.
Ballet Arizona improved in this score this year, turning away from an overdependence on the 19th century to a fine concert of Balanchine works and the all-new Días de Muertos, also, coincidentally, about immigration. When it opened in November, this work by Michael Uthoff seemed partially formed, but at least Uthoff is trying to create dances about our own time and place. And the Phoenix-based company gets the prize for most-improved Nutcracker; its new choreography, costumes and sets were vastly superior to the old.
More often than not, a theatre critic in this town leads a lonely life, driving through deserted downtown streets to spend long evenings in sparsely filled theatres. Something mysterious happened this summer on the local small theatre scene, though, with company after company sprouting up in the moist air of the monsoon season. Millennium, Quicksilver, and Mercury all clamored for the limited audience that was already stretched threadbare over such other small companies as Upstairs and Damesrocket. There isn't necessarily room for everybody, though, and it remains to be seen which will stick it out.
Happy theatre memories of the year include Bloodhut's wicked and wrenching play on sex, Between the Sheets (I still can't forget one performer's monologue about her rape at 14); Invisible Theatre's heartwarming Spoonbread and Strawberry Wine (hearty helpings of southern food for all! Including the hungry critics!); and Borderlands' Waiting Room, a somewhat heavy-handed play about cancer that gave us Joy Lynn Pak's sublime send-up of a raucously demure Chinese noblewoman.
IN THE VISUAL arts, the much-praised Jim Waid opened the year with a beautiful show at the Tucson Museum of Art, his huge, thickly colored canvases giving life abundantly to the gaping museum interior. During the spring glass lollapalooza, during which dozens of Old Pueblo venues glittered nonstop with the stuff, TMA scored again. Its unforgettable glass show was one of those rare exhibitions where I rushed eagerly from work to work, and found almost everything fresh or lovely or shocking or intriguing.
Tucson painter Robert Colescott got fame if not fortune as the featured U.S. artist at the Venice Biennale in June. His work was praised in The New York Times and panned in the New Yorker; Old Pueblo residents will get a chance to judge it for themselves next year at the University of Arizona Museum of Art. Memorable works of art from 1997: Jan Olsson's urbane chocolate monoprints at the Temple Gallery; Daniel Martin Diaz' tortured painted saints at the same location; Joanne Kerrihard's lovely surreal landscapes at Dinnerware; Will Saunders' powerful, minimalist Pièta sketch, also at Dinnerware; Michael Longstaff's poetic painted artists' books at the TMA Arizona Biennial; Timothy Murphy's painted landscape at Davis Dominguez; Gail Marcus-Orlen's "Small Le Fleur" painting at Etherton. Sandra Semchuk raised the family snapshot to a universal level at the Center for Creative Photography, and Richard Torchia's mesmerizing camera obscura show there brought art lovers to the heart of the art experience by inviting them inside giant room-size "cameras."
Among the local literati, POG (Poetry Group) has emerged as a quirky presenter of readings with a twist: a play read by a poet, say, in an art gallery. The Extended University's Writing Works Center has branched beyond offering classes to also staging readings. And Tucson this year named its first official public laureate, in the person of William Pitt Root. Along with the well-established UA Poetry Center and its solid roster of readings, all this new activity helps solidify the Old Pueblo's reputation as a poetic epicenter.
THE YEAR NATURALLY had its bad arts news. William Holzman, the folk creator of whimsical biting alligator chairs, died in the summer in his 90s. October brought the sudden death of Daniel Nugent, 43, a new playwright whose work about the Chiapas rebellion, co-written with his wife Eva Tessler and Joan Holden, premiered a year ago at Borderlands. The UAMA put on a fine Rodin show, but then a school child learning about the French sculptor narrowly escaped injury when a workman drilling through the basement ceiling pierced the floor near where the kid was sitting.
The TMA broke ground for its grand expansion, but its excavations on the site of the old Presidio, the closest Tucson has to sacred ground, were too aggressive for some. Janos Wilder says he still has no firm plans for a new location for his restaurant, which must leave the historic Stevens House by the end of next August to make way for the museum's new Hispanic arts galleries. The ever-enterprising rulers of the Arizona International Campus of the UA actually advertised a fine arts major when they had neither the professors nor the studios such a major requires. And the National Endowment for the Arts was renewed, just for a year, only after a major congressional fight last summer. It soldiers on with a substantially reduced budget. To cite just one Tucson example, less NEA money means that the Center for Creative Photography is no longer receiving the NEA conservation grants that have been so vital to preserving its world-class collection.
But enough nattering negativism. In 1998, I wish the Tucson arts community robust inspiration, enthusiastic audiences and the fortitude to continue the lonely struggle.

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