Arts & Culture

Legendary guitarist Ralph Towner is one of the finest improvisers in modern jazz and one of the few to specialize in acoustic guitar. At 8 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 27, Towner will present an evening of both standards and original music for Washington University’s Jazz at Holmes Series. In addition, on Oct. 26, Towner will take part in “The Music of Ralph Towner and The ECM Movement,” a symposium exploring both Towner’s work and the music of other artists associated with ECM Records.

Ward Stare is a rising star in the world of classical music, serving as both resident conductor of the St. Louis Symphony and as music director for the St. Louis Symphony Youth Orchestra. This fall, Stare adds to his portfolio as conductor of the Washington University Symphony Orchestra. On Oct. 23, Stare will make his regular-season debut with the WUSTL symphony in a performance featuring music of Ralph Vaughn Williams, Franz Liszt and Jean Sibelius.

Nationally acclaimed poet Lucie Brock-Broido will present a talk on the craft of poetry at 6 p.m. Tuesday, Oct. 11, for the Writing Program Reading Series. Brock-Broido is the author of three books of poetry: Trouble in Mind (2004), The Master Letters (1995) and A Hunger (1988). Her work often explores obsessions and anxieties — of influence, ritual, mortality and modernity — using shifting syntax and diction to create vivid, and sometimes disorienting, portraits of mind.

Ten cutting-edge Sukkahs by architects and designers from around the nation will be installed Oct. 18-22 on the campus of Washington University in St. Louis. The projects are winners of Sukkah City STL, an ambitious contemporary design competition that challenged participants to reimagine the traditional Jewish Sukkah — a small, temporary structure erected each fall during the weeklong festival of Sukkot — through the lens of contemporary art and architecture.

With its poodle skirts, bouffant hairdos and withering irony, John Waters’ Hairspray (1988) feels almost timeless. It could be set at any point after which the 1950s had ceased to be cool. It is actually set in 1962, the year James Meredith became the first African-American admitted to the University of Mississippi. That historical grounding is at the center of a new staging of Hairspray: The Musical, the 2002 Broadway extravaganza based on Waters’ film, by the Performing Arts Department in Arts & Sciences.

The Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts has announced the recipients of its 2011 Faculty Creative Activity Research Grants. Four art and architecture faculty members will each receive between $1,000 and $8,000 to support a variety of projects. These range from research about the Elizabethan “Lost Colony” of North Carolina and a monograph on Dutch architect Aldo van Eyck to a mobile art studio traveling the Gulf Coast and new methods of architectural fabrication in Jakarta, Indonesia.

A chance encounter with James McLeod by Jazz at Holmes series organizers beneath the Brookings Hall archway in 1998 would lead to the continuation of the popular series, which has become a local instituion in its 13th season. On Oct. 6, Jazz at Holmes will honor McLeod, who died Sept. 6, with a concert by legendary St. Louis saxophonist Freddie Washington.

Tomás Saraceno creates spectacular, gravity-defying installations and visionary sculptural models inspired by clouds, bubbles, spider webs and other natural structures. On Oct. 5, Saraceno — who was born in Argentina and now lives and works in Germany — will discuss his work as part of the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts’ fall Public Lecture Series. The talk, which begins at 6:30 p.m. in Steinberg Hall, is held in conjunction with the exhibition Tomás Saraceno: Cloud-Specific, on view through Jan. 9 at the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum.

In this centennial year of Williams’ birth, and the 75th anniversary of his matriculation at WUSTL, Tennessee Williams’ literary legacy will be the subject of an Assembly Series lecture by Henry I. Schvey, PhD, professor of drama and comparative literature in Arts & Sciences. Schvey’s presentation, “Tennessee Williams at 100: From Washington University to the Wider World” will be held at 7 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 6 in Steinberg Hall Auditorium.

It is the stuff of campus legend. In 1937, Tennessee Williams took fourth in a playwriting competition at Washington University in St. Louis. So upset was the young writer that he soon left town and later, in The Glass Menagerie, exacted sly artistic revenge upon his alma mater. But on Oct. 7 and 8, Williams will return to Washington University, in the form of two one-man shows by veteran actor and playwright Jeremy Lawrence.