Arts & Culture

“The first thing we’re going to do is teach you how to throw a punch,” says senior Melissa Freilich. No, it’s not Boxing 101. Earlier this fall, the Edison Ovations Series welcomed approximately 500 eighth-graders from across St. Louis for a special matinee performance by nationally acclaimed Aquila Theatre.

Collaborative artists Nicholas Kahn & Richard Selesnick have won international acclaim for large-scale photo installations that mix dry wit and subtle narratives with trippy, futuristic surrealism: Rene Magritte meets NASA and Pink Floyd. On Monday, Jan. 28, Kahn and Selesnick—who met as WUSTL photography majors—will discuss their work for the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts spring Public Lecture Series.

You try doing homework in the dark. For school-aged children across the developing world, access to electrical lighting remains precarious. Enter the Little Sun, a solar-powered lamp designed by Danish artist Olafur Eliasson. Now Little Sun is at the center of two projects involving WUSTL students and faculty, which stretch from the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum to the villages of Madagascar.

Washington University’s Department of Music in Arts & Sciences will present its annual sing-along of George Frideric Handel’s oratorio Messiah at 3 p.m. Sunday, Dec. 9, in Graham Chapel. Nicole Aldrich, director of choral activities, directs the program.

Tili Boon Cuillé, associate professor of French and co-convener of the 18th Century Interdisciplinary Salon, discusses the musical tableaux, the relationship between science and the humanities, and structuring the art of conversation.

Ah, December. Days grow shorter, checkout lines longer, and final exams inexorably closer. But on Dec. 2, audiences are invited to pause for an afternoon of “Joy and Wonder.” Presented by the Washington University Concert Choir and the Washington University Chamber Choir, the concert will feature a range of music relating to the holiday season.

They’ve shaken Shakespeare, humiliated Hollywood and affronted all the great books. Now the Reduced Shakespeare Company—those emperors of editing, those sultans of summary, those bad boys of abbreviation—is back and ready to tackle its most fearsome opponent yet: Santa Claus.

Mary Lou’s Mass is like a prayer on stage: a spirited homily rooted in the southern church, an uplifting sermon on life’s trials and ecstasies. On Nov. 30-Dec. 2, students from the Performing Arts Department in Arts & Sciences will perform excerpts from this groundbreaking collaboration between choreographer Alvin Ailey and jazz pianist Mary Lou Williams as part of Rootedness, Mobility and Migration, the 2012 Washington University Dance Theatre concert.

In the early 20th century, Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso invented Cubism and shook the foundations of Western art. But in the 1930s, as the rise of fascism brought new urgency to questions of aesthetics and politics, Braque’s fractured still lifes and bourgeois interiors remained emphatically inward-looking. Yet Braque’s painting was not as separate from outside events as Braque might have it, argues Georges Braque and the Cubist Still Life, 1928-1945, the first major U.S. museum exhibition dedicated to the artist in 16 years. ​

Angelina toils away for her two preening stepsisters. But when Prince Ramiro visits the household, disguised as a mere valet, it is love at first sight. In La Cenerentola, Gioachino Rossini offers a brisk, witty and emphatically non-supernatural variation on the traditional Cinderella story. On Nov. 15-16, the Washington University Opera Workshop will present excerpts from La Cenerentola and four other works in the 560 Music Center.