Arts & Culture

The Performing Arts Department in Arts & Sciences will present its fourth biennial Young Choreographers Showcase Friday, April 9, through Sunday, April 11, in the Annelise Mertz Dance Studio. The concert will feature more than a dozen dancers in nine original works created by student choreographers in the Dance Program. Tickets are available through the Edison Theatre Box Office at (314) 935-6543.  

Writer Tatyana Tolstaya, one of the foremost chroniclers of post-Gorbachev Russia, will present a pair of events at Washington University April 5 and 6. Tolstaya is the Visiting Fannie Hurst Professor of Creative Literature in The Writing Program in the Department of English in Arts & Sciences. 

The Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts honored seven outstanding architecture and art alumni at its third annual Awards for Distinction dinner March 18. The awards recognize graduates who have demonstrated creativity, innovation, leadership and vision through their contributions to the practices of art, architecture and design as well as to WUSTL and the Sam Fox School. 

Linda Tillery and the Cultural Heritage Choir will give a free concert covering American history through music at 8:15 p.m. Saturday, April 10, at the 560 Music Center.

The rise of film as a commercial medium in many ways parallels the rise of industrial production. For three days beginning Tuesday, March 23, the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum will explore three influential depictions of factory life with the Factory Film Festival. Held in conjunction with the exhibition Sharon Lockhart: Lunch Break, the festival will include screenings of Modern Times (March 23), Norma Rae (March 24) and 24 City (March 25).

Celebrated poet Frank Bidart, author of Desire and Watching the Spring Festival, will speak on the craft of poetry at 8 p.m. Tuesday, March 23. Bidart will then present a reading from his work at 8 p.m. Thursday, March 25. He is on campus as the Visiting Fannie Hurst Professor of Creative Literature in The Writing Program in the Department of English in Arts & Sciences.

Ralph Rucci is among the most accomplished American fashion designers working today. His women’s-wear label, Chado Ralph Rucci, is known for thoroughly modern garments defined by sculptural silhouettes, innovative materials and precise construction. At 6:30 p.m. Friday, March 26, Rucci will discuss his life and work for the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts’ Public Lecture Series. 

Celebrated memoirist, poet and playwright Nick Flynn, author most recently of The Ticking is the Bomb: A Memoir of Bewilderment (2010), will read from his work at 8 p.m. Wednesday, March 31, for The Writing Program Reading Series in the Department of English in Arts & Sciences. The talk is free and open to the public and takes place in Hurst Lounge, Room 201, Duncker Hall.

Chancellor Mark S. Wrighton congratulates Sabine Eckmann, PhD (left) at a March 2 ceremony in Steinberg Auditorium installing Eckmann as the first William T. Kemper Director of the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum in the Sam Fox School of Design and Visual Arts.

“There is no greater crime than abandoning your history.” So learns Undine, a hard-charging Manhattan social climber who is forced back to Brooklyn in Fabulation, Lynn Nottage’s Obie Award-winning satire of the African-American bourgeoisie. The Performing Arts Department  in Arts & Sciences will present the sharp-eyed comedy from Thursday through Sunday, March 25-28, in the A.E. Hotchner Studio Theatre.