Arts & Culture

Sandra Brennan, longtime assistant to the dean of the Sam Fox School Design & Visual Arts, died at her home in Webster Groves Monday, Oct. 29, following a long illness. She was 73. 

Groundbreakers Bill T. Jones and Arnie Zane had a 17-year partnership, interrupted only by Zane’s death in 1988, that was arguably the most productive in contemporary dance. On Nov. 16-17, the company they formed will return to St. Louis with Body Against Body, a retrospective of groundbreaking duets.

It’s not every day you get to play with the greats. On Oct. 20, famed trumpeter Wynton Marsalis and the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra — arguably the nation’s finest jazz big band — joined the St. Louis Symphony for a performance of Marsalis’ Swing Symphony. The day before, Marsalis and Co. visited WUSTL’s 560 Music Center to conduct a clinic with students from the East St. Louis High School Jazz Band.

The world is getting smaller, but cities are getting bigger. That growth represents a key challenge and a key opportunity for 21st century sustainability. In November, the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts will present URBANISM(S): Sustainable Cities for One Planet, an international symposium exploring the future of global urban design. The two-day event will feature a range of talks on the ecology, infrastructure and social life of cities, as well as keynote address by Pritzker Prize-winning architect Thom Mayne.

Patrick Kennedy is a garrulous alcoholic, drenched in whisky and Shakespeare. His daughters — insecure Judith, acerbic Rose and idealistic Maud — are variations on the theme of spinsterhood. In other words, a typical broken Irish family. Ah, but wait. All is not exactly as it seems, here in County Sligo. In The Night Season, British playwright Rebecca Lenkiewicz flirts with the tropes of Irish drama, inhabiting and upending in equal measure.

Conductor Steven Jarvi, praised as an “eloquent and decisive” conductor by The Wall Street Journal, will make his public debut with the WUSTL Symphony Orchestra Oct. 27. The Parent and Family Weekend concert, which takes place in the 560 Music Center’s E. Desmond Lee Concert Hall, will feature music by Ludwig van Beethoven, Adam Schoenberg and Edward Elgar.

James Siena is a New York-based artist whose complex, rule-based linear abstractions, or “visual algorithms,” result in intensely concentrated, vibrantly colored, freehand geometric patterns. This fall, Siena served as the Arthur L. and Sheila Prensky Visiting Artist at Island Press, the nationally known print shop in WUSTL’s Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts.

Elizabeth Roxas, a former principal dancer with Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre — whom The New York Times once described as the “cool, still, lyrical center of the Ailey storm” — leads a master class with dance students in the Performing Arts Department in Arts & Sciences earlier this month.

In The Anchorage, his debut collection, poet Mark Wunderlich creates a central metaphor of the body as anchor for the soul, in poems located in New York’s summer streets, in the barren snowfields of Wisconsin, and along stretches of Cape Cod’s open shoreline. On Thursday, Oct. 25, Wunderlich will read from his work for The Writing Program in Arts & Sciences.

Cyrano is smart, courageous and noble, a brilliant poet and skilled swordsman. He is utterly besotted with the beautiful Roxanne. But oh, that nose! On Friday, the Aquila Theatre Company — today’s leading producer of touring classical theater — will return to Edison with Cyrano de Bergerac, Edmond Rostand’s funny, poignant and often heart-wrenching tale of unrequited love. On Saturday, Aquila will retake the stage with Taming of the Shrew, Shakespeare’s timeless battle of the sexes.