Blog

At the end of last week I took a rather last minute trip to London for a long weekend to pop in on Propeller’s “Richard III” rehearsals for a couple of hours. I was really excited by what I saw. Ann Arbor audiences, you’re certainly in for a treat!

We’re running a one-day promotion through Groupon today…this is the first time we’ve worked with Groupon, so check it out if you’re interested!

Can you imagine how it would feel to watch a football game on the stage of Hill Auditorium? Or how about listening to a string quartet in the Michigan Stadium? Just plain wrong, right? These questions are comical, but not unlike the questions UMS has to ask when deciding on where to present our artists.

Stew is honest.
Stew is smart.
Stew is powerful.
Stew is magical.

One night, long, long ago (about 10 days heretofore, to be exact), UMS and “experimental film happening,” HOTT LAVA, took over the former UMMA Off/Site space on the corner of S. University…

In this roundup: No progress made with DSO talks, so musicians travel with self-produced concert series. Orchestras now join the HD-broadcast performing arts trend in an effort to entice new audiences. Fela! musical (which appears on UMS 10/11 NT Live series) faces $5M lawsuit.

Here’s a special behind-the-scenes video of the Mariachi Vargas de Tecalitlan artist residency. Yesterday, Alberto Alfaro (violinist in Mariachi Vargas) accompanied two youth Mariachi singers, Sebastien de la Cruz and Karenn Lazo (both were winners in the 2009 Mariachi Vargas Extravaganza Competition) on the Craig Fahle radio show on WDET 101.9 FM Detroit.

By the numbers…one of the busiest weeks all season!

This past August, UMS Interim Director of Education Claire Rice made an interesting proposition: research and design a tour of the most important ONCE Festival-related sites in Ann Arbor. Of course, many of the original venues that housed ONCE performances or served as hangouts for the city’s artistic and political revolutionaries have been replaced or, even worse, erased. Thus the project became an exercise in excavation and imagination, as I set off to recreate, revisit, and remember some of the local sites that helped shape—and were shaped by—the artistic and political upheaval so prevalent at that time.