Albuquerque Journal from Albuquerque, New Mexico • Page 15

THE ARTS Features 2 Arts Calendar 3 Friday, April 20, 1990 Albuquerque Journal Page 1, Section possibilities TEAI ft i .1 I i1' i FlK Jwvt Eclectic Energy Fills UNM Musical Threepenny Opera' ip i 7 WrMy UK- jrik A By David Steinberg JOURNAL STAFF WRITER THE ANNALS of the English-speaking musical theater, well-remembered composer-lyricist collaborators are so famous they don't carry last names. filial WtFim 4i "Implosion," steel sculpture by Cynthia Barber Local arts exhibit A unique window on local visual arts will open Saturday with the unveiling of "The Art of Albuquerque," an exhibition of work by 74 contemporary artists at the Albuquerque Museum, 2000 Mountain Road NW. This show seeks to evoke the cultural pluralism of Albuquerque and the state of the visual arts. The result is a substantial exhibition including one work from each of the artists selected by curators Ellen Landis of the Albuquerque Museum and John Cacciatore, director of the Dartmouth Street Gallery. This offering of paintings, sculptures, prints, photographs and mixed-media pieces is designed to demonstrate the full range of artistic styles and approaches currently being pursued by a mix of big-name and relatively unknown Duke City artists.

It includes everything from images of the archetypal American West to the creations of post-modern sensibilities a smorgasbord of home-grown visual art. But look fast "The Art of Albuquerque" will be on view from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Saturday through Wednesday and, since the museum is closed Monday, that's a scant four days. Rodgers and Hammerstein II did "Oklahoma," "South Pacific," "The King and Lerner and Loewe penned "Camelot," "My Fair Lady" and "Paint Your Wagon." And British duo Gilbert and Sullivan did "The Mikado," "The Pirates of Penzance" and "H.M.S.

Pinafore." In the 1920s and '30s, Weill and Brecht were well-known Berlin-based collaborators of the musical stage, though today their names may not be burned into the literacy of Americans as the other three teams. (Weill's first name is Kurt and Brecht's is Bertolt). Of the several musicals Weill and Brecht worked on, their most widely performed and acclaimed is "The Threepenny Opera," a ringing satire about the decay of capitalism. The University of New Mexico's production of this musical, which runs this weekend and next at Rodey Theatre, is likely to reshape the meaning of the word "collaboration." That's because the UNM production is a multilayered teaming of academic departments, artists, computers, musicians, costumers and, of course, the actors. The production had its genesis with director Clayton Karkosh, a UNM theater arts professor.

After viewing the work of UNM artiststeachers Jim Jacob and Lydia Madrid, Karkosh talked to them about moving their images into the realm of theater as part of a set design. COURTESY JIM JACOB AND LYDIA MADRID The source of this image is the "Mack the Knife" song from "The Threepenny Opera." MORE: See ECLECTIC on PAGE C4 La Mesilla play "Gatherings" is a two-act play that confronts life's realities through a funeral, an unwanted pregnancy and a serious illness. The play, penned by Las Cruces' Pat Cole, will be staged by the Desert Playwrights Theatre beginning tonight at 8 p.m. at the Fountain Theater in La Mesilla. Tickets for tonight's opening are all other performances are $5.

The play continues weekends through April 28 at 8 p.m., with a matinee scheduled for 2 p.m. Sunday. Weaver Balances Tradition, Creativity By William Clark JOURNAL STAFF WRITER i 1 Unique ballet ''if weaver. "But that's just typical," she says with a modest shrug. "I grew up with these being very functional things, so I had to learn to do them." Sunrise also holds bachelor's and master's degrees in art education and multicultural education from the University of New Mexico.

She has taught at UNM, at the Armand Hammer United World College of the American West in Montezuma, and at New Mexico Highlands University in Las Vegas. Whether she is teaching on her own or as an artist-in-residence for the New Mexico Arts Division, her workshops on weaving and American Indian culture have taken her throughout the state, to the Navajo Reservation, around the United States and abroad to South Africa and New Zealand, where she traveled on a Fulbright scholarship in 1986. In 1988 her talents were honored with a Governor's Award for Outstanding New Mexico Woman. But it was in Navajo country at Whitewater, between Gallup and Zuni, where she was born and raised in a traditional Navajo family that Sunrise as a child learned to weave. "I was taught," she says, "that when I was weaving, I should be constantly reminded to pay respect to my legendary grandmother, the Spider Woman, who taught the first Navajo woman to weave.

The story goes that the woman was walking along one day and heard noises, sort of a tapping, NAVAJO WEAVER Pearl Sunrise sits at a traditional upright loom built of peeled poles lashed with rope, strung with handspun yarn. She spreads the tight warp cords wide with a flat wooden stick called a battan. She then deftly passes a few inches of bright red yarn between the warp and tamps it firmly in place, building the base of a geometric diamond pattern. Sunrise wears her hair, jet black and shining like the wing of a raven, in traditional Navajo fashion, and her voice is soft and musical as she describes the genesis of her art. For the moment Sunrise weaves in the Resource Room at the new Museum of Indian Arts and Culture in Santa Fe, where she is the curator, or at her home in Albuquerque, where she has lived for 18 years.

She now produces some contemporary fabric art on a horizontal, four-harness loom, but for more than two decades Sunrise has worked mostly in the old Navajo way, creating finely textured rugs and tapestries. Three of these are on view in "Native American Artists," the current exibition at the South Broadway Cultural Center. Sunrise is a woman of many talents a traditional jeweler, basketmaker and singer, with one album to her credit, as well as a ,.9 I- They've performed with groups as diverse as the Paris International Dance Festival and Miss Piggy and the Muppet Babies, but they can't deny that there's hair on the chests under those tights. These performers are practitioners of the rhinestone-and-goosefeathers aesthetic in the Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo, a one-of-a-kind, all-male dance troupe. The Ballets perform their parodies of classic ballet at 8:15 p.m.

Sunday at Pope joy Hall. Tickets range from $10 to $20 at Popejoy Hall box office or, with a $1.50 service charge, at Ticketmaster at Smith's outlets. Ballet has never been the same. For more information or for credit card charges call the Popejoy box office at 277-3121 or Ticketmaster at 884-0999. Featured vocalist A program of vocal chamber music will feature mezzo-soprano Jeanne Grealish accompanied by pianists and other singers including a mens' chorus, in Santa Fe and Albuquerque this weekend.

The admission-free Santa Fe concert is at 8 p.m. today in the Great Hall at St. John's College. The Albuquerque concert, a benefit for the UNM scholarship fund of the Sigma Alpha Iota music fraternity, begins at 3 p.m. in Keller Hall in the Fine Arts Center at the University of New Mexico.

Albuquerque tickets are $10 for general admission and $7 for students and seniors. Call 293-1850 for reservations. WILLIAM CLARK JOURNAL Pearl Sunrise: "From the shearing of the sheep to the rug, it's all a religious experience, with everything interacting." thumping, every so often. She looked down larger, and Spider Woman the weaver and there was just dirt and ground, but then invited her in. she saw a little hole and looked inside and "She said 'Come in, little one' that's saw somebody weaving." how we always address our children in A Navajo god appeared, told the woman to say prayers, the hole in the Earth grew MORE: See WEAVER on PAGE C8 Poet Recognizes No Limits In Appeals to Irrationality By John Knoll JOURNAL CORRESPONDENT ZAP! BANG! HISS! i i i "i Is it Batman? The Joker? No, it's as Wolfman Jack says "The Aristophanes of wa the UDDer Sonoran desert." America's "only alternative to the Atomic it's Taos exhibits The Millicent Rogers Museum in Taos is opening two new exhibits Saturday.

The work of Theodore B. Villa, Apache Hispanic watercolorist from Santa Barbara, will be shown along with selected paintings from the collection of the Taos Volunteer Fire Department. The department founded in 1935, began collecting local works in 1954. Jack Boyer, then president of the department, approached local artists requesting they contribute paintings for the bare walls of a new recreation room. Thus beginning what has become an important collection, with works from Oscar Berninghouse, Leon Gaspard, R.C.

Gorman, Emile Bisttram and Veloy Vigil to name a few. Also on exhibit at the museum are photographs of Jack Parsons of traditional New Mexico Folk Musicians. Villa and i no artists no poets who make fools of themselves at Halloween parties. Now, he's wearing plastic eyeballs, intoning Serious Art: "Only serious art lives on like some tight corset in an ice cube and that is our god our professor of head. Oh no, now he's wearing a long brown Pinocchio nose, talking about How To Make It In The '80s: "Go steal their wealth It's the grab-bag world.

Kiss the eternal stink of the boss as'he commands the rise and fall in every little town and power-play of convulsive swordplaying skyscrapers. Goodell is more fun than MTV. Jeff Bryan, painter-poet, describes a Goodell reading as "a shamanic jam session at a kundalini beach party. He is a skinny MORE: See POET on PAGE C7 Energy Commission," says master poet Robert Creeley, former UNM professor. It's Larry Goodell, performance poet, wearing one of his many disguises.

What's he up to? Look, he's wearing a rat's mask, poetizing in a multi-tonal voice about New Mexico's real estate developers: "We are the forward progressive set the ass-blind crowd we want you more like us no disgusting hippies no poor Chicanos no poor STEVE WEWERKA JOURNAL Larry Goodell reads outside his home in Placitas. "I try to extend the role of the poet." MORE: See POSSIBILITIES on PAGE C5.