Arts & Culture

St. Louis native Gus Giordano, who died in 2008, is widely considered the father of jazz dance — at once founder, teacher, popularizer and finest exemplar. At 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday, April 10 and 11, the company he founded, Giordano Dance Chicago, returns to its roots with two shows in Washington University’s Edison Theatre.

The Los Angeles Piano Quartet, widely considered one of the premier  ensembles in the United States, will perform new work by Washington University composer Christopher Stark, along with pieces by Samuel Barber and Antonin Dvořák, at 8 p.m. Saturday, March 28, in the E. Desmond Lee Concert Hall.

Can theater movement-training techniques help real-life computer scientists improve human/robot interactions? Beginning March 26, director Annamaria Pileggi will put that theory to the test with “Sky Sky Sky,” a world premiere drama featuring three human actors and one PR2 robot. Performances take place in the A.E. Hotchner Studio Theatre, located in Mallinckrodt Center, 6465 Forsyth Blvd.

The ziggurat drum. The nail violin. The gong array with artillery shells. The chariot of choir. If Mad Max and Dr. Seuss started a band, it might look something like Scrap Arts Music, which comes to Edison March 20 and 21. The Vancouver-based percussion ensemble builds wild, one-of-a-kind instruments from gleaming industrial salvage.

The Center for the Humanities and the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts have announced the first recipients of Faculty Collaborative Grants. Presented under the auspices of The Divided City, a new urban humanities initiative, the awards are funded in part by a four-year grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Since the mid-1990s, thousands of Bosnian refugees have settled in South St. Louis. Today, “Little Bosnia’ includes more than 60,000 people — the largest Bosnian community outside Bosnia. On Tuesday, March 3, the Department of Music and musicians from the St. Louis Symphony will explore their stories with a free concert titled “Bosnian Journeys: Generations.”

Higher education reduces recidivism rates by as much as half. Yet today, only a small fraction of U.S. prisoners have access to such programs. In the fall of 2014, University College launched the Washington University Prison Education Project, a three-year pilot program supported by a grant from the Bard Prison Initiative.

Stanley Nelson’s documentary “The Black Panthers: Vanguard of a Revolution,” will be shown at 7 p.m. Thursday, Feb. 26 in Steinberg Auditorium on the campus of Washington University in St. Louis. The screening is co-sponsored by Cinema St. Louis and by the Program in African and African-American Studies in Arts & Sciences; the Center for Diversity and Inclusion; and the Washington University Film & Media Archive of Washington University Libraries.

The Washington University Symphony Orchestra, with student soloist Silas Hsu, will present early, reputation-making works by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Jean Sibelius and Edvard Grieg at 7:30 p.m. Monday, Feb. 23, in the E. Desmond Lee Concert Hall at the 560 Music Center.

The killing is not in doubt: A black man is dead; a white man pulled the trigger. The only real question is why. James Baldwin wrote “Blues for Mr. Charlie”  in 1964. But today, the echoes of Ferguson are impossible to ignore. The production of the Performing Arts Department in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis runs Feb. 20 through March 1 in Edison Theatre.