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Local brewing guru and Stone Brewing co-founder Greg Koch thinks the existing San Diego tourist-wooing programs should step it up in one key area: San Diego’s beer creativity culture.
VOSD’s profile of the bearded beer evangelist explores his unapologetic mission toward getting people to stop drinking “fizzy yellow beer.”
You’re reading the Culture Report, Voice of San Diego’s weekly collection of the region’s cultural news.
Happening Here
• “It’s easier than you think to sit through a three-hour play. You just have to find the right one,” says San Diego Magazine’s Kimberly Cunningham. Use her colorful choose-your-own-adventure map to find a play at a local theater that’s up your alley this fall. It’s part of the magazine’s annual look at what’s coming up at local playhouses, museums, concert halls and galleries in the coming months.
• ‘Tis the season for arts preview editions. CityBeat wraps up its picks for the fall, including experimental opera and a Jeff-Buckley-infused Romeo and Juliet.
Meanwhile, the U-T San Diego team highlights five visual art exhibits, five theater events, five classical music concerts, five dance events and 10 other concerts to put on your calendar.
• If you can’t plan for the whole season, you should at least look at October, which holds a 100-year birthday for Cabrillo National Monument, Dia de Los Muertos in Old Town and Fashion Week. (San Diego Magazine)
• Free mini-concerts by notable local musicians put on by the Athenaeum, a library in La Jolla, are entering their 44th year this season.
• New York percussionist Ian David Rosenbaum plays Tuesday night at Bread & Salt in Logan Heights, and thinks percussion can hook someone who’s otherwise uninterested in classical music. (U-T)
• Artist Dan Allen is commissioning large sculptural installations and performance art to fill his new downtown gallery space, called Canvas. An initial show is open now through Oct. 12.
• Amy Galpin is the fourth curator to leave the San Diego Museum of Art since executive director Roxana Velasquez took the museum’s helm in 2010. Galpin leaves to curate the Cornell Fine Arts Museum in Florida. (U-T)
• The New York Times appraises the 15-year legacy of Trolley Dances, choreographer Jean Isaacs’ collaboration with San Diego’s transit system:
For tourists, who often find California’s proud car culture unwelcoming and difficult to penetrate, the Trolley Dances offer a fresh take on three unique cities through the lens of dance, guiding audience members through each one’s hidden nooks and crannies, as well as popular landmarks. For residents, the event offers new insight into a hometown that so often blurs by.
• Zahna Moss, one of the dancers in this year’s Trolley Dances, is deaf. KPBS’s Angela Carone learns how she perceives rhythm when she can’t hear the music:
“I have to pay attention to everything, every detail,” Moss explains. “I have to watch how the dancers move in their space. I have to know where everyone is at all times on the floor.”
• Choral director David Chase has been leading the choir for La Jolla Symphony and Chorus for 40 years. His daughter, acclaimed flutist Claire Chase, will perform in a concert honoring her dad’s career in November. (U-T)
Local Roots
• Musician and activist Ramon “Chunky” Sanchez was formally awarded his national folk arts prize at a National Endowment for the Arts ceremony last week. He also performed a free concert in Washington, D.C. (U-T)
• The Che Cafe at UC San Diego, a “radical, volunteer-driven, underground art-and-performance space” is the inspiration for a much different kind of art, the technical, “highbrow” dance of the Patricia Rincon Dance Collective, in a new piece happening this weekend as part of the La Jolla Playhouse’s “WithOut Walls” festival. The audience, Rincon says, “is going to be taken on a little ride, a little adventure.” (CityBeat)
(Here’s more about that festival, from the U-T.)
• Syracuse photographer Carrie Mae Weems was one of the recipients of the MacArthur Foundation “genius” grants announced last week. Weems makes photographs focused on African-American culture and identity in the United States. She went to UC San Diego for her master of fine arts degree, which she earned in 1984. (Syracuse Post-Standard)
• Doug Simay was 36 when the Los Angeles Times called him one of the region’s “youngest and most ambitious art collectors” in 1987. Now, nearly three decades later, 57 pieces from his collection will be on display in a show at the Oceanside Art Museum through early January.
• The La Jolla Playhouse hosted the world premiere of the musical “The Who’s Tommy” in 1992. Now? It’s “as creaky as an old pinball machine,” opines CityBeat theater critic David Coddon. It’s onstage through this weekend in Vista.
• Acclaimed chef Patrick Ponsaty is making an impact at Escondido restaurant The Ranch at Bandy Canyon. “A taste of S.D.’s culinary future … in Escondido?” (Riviera)
• The latest episode of ArtPulse TV features the new brewery called Modern Times, and follows a lighting designer backstage at Cygnet Theatre in Old Town. (VOSD will host a mayoral debate at Modern Times in a few weeks.)
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