By Irvine City News staff

Dance is an essential element in the creative repertoire offered at the Irvine Barclay Theatre each season, with Orange County’s own Festival Ballet Theatre (FBT) a significant source of the theaters artistic talent.

The professional dancers of FBT led by Artistic Director Salwa Rizkalla will return to Irvine this month along with two world-class guest artists to present Don Quixote. Set to the classic score by composer Ludwig Minkus, the ballet is centered on the well-known story of the eccentric knight Don Quixote and his loyal friend Sancho Panza on Quixote’s quest to find his impossible dream woman, Dulcinea. Marcelo Gomes and Hee Seo will dance in the leads as the young Spanish couple in the ballet that brings Cervantes’ iconic novel to life. 

​Set to the classic score by composer Ludwig Minkus, the ballet is centered on the well-known story of the eccentric knight Don Quixote and his loyal friend Sancho Panza on Quixote’s quest to find his impossible dream woman, Dulcinea. The professional dancers of FBT led by Artistic Director Salwa Rizkalla will return to Irvine this month along with two world-class guest artists to present “Don Quixote.” Marcelo Gomes and Hee Seo will dance in the leads as the young Spanish couple in the ballet that brings Cervantes’ iconic novel to life.
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FBT’s colorful production of the romantic comedy features Gomes and Seo, along with company dancers and a boisterous cast of characters, for two performances only: Saturday, March 25 at 7 p.m. and a matinee the following day, Sunday, March 26 at 2 p.m.

Gomes and Seo are both principal dancers with American Ballet Theatre (ABT), the country’s premiere ballet company often seen in Orange County thanks to frequent performances at Segerstrom Center for the Arts. Gomes is particularly well regarded, having dances in “Kings of the Dance,” “Tour de Force” and the world premiere of ABT’s “Sleeping Beauty” here in Orange County. Hee Seo also was a principal in the “Sleeping Beauty” premiere, dancing her debut as Aurora at Segerstrom Center.

In addition to her performance at Irvine Barclay in “Don Quixote,” Seo will also appear at Segerstrom Center’s world premiere of ABT’s “Whipped Cream” this month (March 15-19), in a production that includes Misty Copeland and Gillian Murphy.

Dance fans should not miss the opportunity to see these stars of international dance up close at Irvine Barclay Theater. The Festival Ballet company dancers will also perform excerpts from “Don Quixote” in a free community performance on the Newport Beach Library Civic Green on March 25, 12-1 p.m.
 
Irvinebarclay.org
 
Tickets: $42 - $55

By Irvine City News staff

“Coriolanus” is not one of Shakespeare’s plays from which quotes or soliloquies easily come to mind. We’d venture to say few have read it, fewer still have seen it performed on stage. Now’s our chance, as UC Irvine’s Claire Trevor School of the Arts Department of Drama presents Shakespeare’s tragedy based on the life of Roman leader Caius Marcius Coriolanus. The play, which runs from Feb. 4-12, dramatizes the rise and fall of a military leader lionized for his valor and heroism, qualities that are manipulated by those around him to advance their own agendas.

Xenophobia is the theme of the 2016-17 UCI Drama season, with productions that explore a variety of aspects of how “the other” is treated in society. This production of “Coriolanus” by director Paul Cook, a third-year MFA candidate at UCI, isn’t set in the age of Rome. It takes place in a dystopian landscape of indeterminate era and location to emphasize the timeless issues at stake, and some of the warrior roles written for men are played by women, according to comments in a UCI release.

No doubt the play has seen increased interest after recent events…and elections. Google “Coriolanus” and “Trump” together; the search results will review a variety of views on the relevance of the play to contemporary culture, including the odd revelation that Trump strategist Stephen Bannon once wrote a rap version set in Rodney King riot era of L.A.

To appreciate the subtext of Shakespeare’s “Coriolanus,” we’ll look a bit further back than the 1990s. William Hazlett’s “Characters of Shakespeare’s Plays” was published in 1817, and in it the esteemed critic and author of his day wrote that “The whole dramatic moral of ‘Coriolanus’ is that those who have little shall have less, and that those who have much shall take all that others have left.”

Dystopian, indeed.

Hazlett, who also wrote much on the American and French revolutions (he was for them), continues on Shakespeare’s accomplishments in the play:

“The arguments for and against aristocracy or democracy, on the privileges of the few and the claims of the many, on liberty and slavery, power and the abuse of it, peace and war, are very ably handled, with the spirit of a poet and the acuteness of a philosopher.”

His analysis of the play’s themes is enlightening… and a tad disturbing:

“The insolence of power is stronger than the plea of necessity. The tame submission to usurped authority or even the natural resistance to it has nothing to excite or flatter the imagination: it is the assumption of a right to insult or oppress others that carries an imposing air of superiority with it.

“We had rather be the oppressor than the oppressed. The love of power in ourselves and the admiration of it in others are both natural to man: the one makes him a tyrant, the other a slave. Wrong—dressed out in pride, pomp, and circumstance—has more attraction than abstract right.

“This is the logic of the imagination and the passions; which seek to aggrandize what excites admiration and to heap contempt on misery, to raise power into tyranny, and to make tyranny absolute; to thrust down that which is low still lower, and to make wretches desperate: to exalt magistrates into kings, kings into gods; to degrade subjects to the rank of slaves, and slaves to the condition of brutes.”
Well, alrighty then.

Hazlett’s opinions on the play make one eager to view UCI’s version to see if its themes are as relevant to our era as “Coriolanus” clearly was to Hazlett in his revolutionary age.
 
General Admission $15 / Seniors $14 / UCI Students & Children under 17 $11
 
Arts.uci.edu/tickets

By Irvine City News Staff

Many who grew up in California remember studying the missions in fourth grade. The project includes making a model of one of the 21 missions out of sugar cubes or Popsicle sticks, though today’s students often choose Legos, we’re told. Or even 3D printers.

Visiting missions is part of field trips and family road trips, with OC’s own Mission San Juan Capistrano being one of the most visited, and most beautiful. There’s even the California Missions Museum in Sonoma (californiamissionsmuseum.com) that includes scale models of each one.

The Irvine Museum’s current exhibition “Along Camino Real” looks at historic art depicting, or at least inspired by, the missions and the vistas seen from the road connecting them. The missions themselves had fallen into disrepair by 1850, when California became a state. The artists’ attention to them began in the 1890s, spurring efforts to restore and maintain them that continue today.
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The California missions were established by Spain starting in 1697 in Baja, with the first one in today’s California founded in San Diego in 1769. They stretched from there to Sonoma along some 600 miles known as El Camino Real. There’s still a short stretch of road with the name in Irvine, near the 5 by the Marketplace. The road evolved into U.S. Route 101, and then the 5 in our area, and the 101 still approximates the route taken by the friars and conquistadores. Sharp-eyed travelers can still spot the commemorative bells that marked the route beginning in 1906.

The exhibit at the museum, which is now part of UCI but is still located in the Irvine Business Complex, includes work by California painters working from 1850 to 1950. They include the well-known Laguna Beach painter William Wendt and Elmer Watchel, whose paintings of the San Juan Capistrano mission from the 1880s include the ruins of the Great Stone Church that fell in the earthquake of 1812.

A similar exhibition in 1995 was held at outdoors at Mission San Juan Capistrano. Called “Romance of the Bells: the California Missions in Art,” the catalogue that resulted from the exhibit provides an excellent review of the era in California art and the highly romanticized view of the missions.

Students of California history know that the population of native California Indians declined by 90 percent following the arrival of the Spanish. Many succumbed while living under the control of Spanish missions. Between 1846 and 1873, the first 27 years that California was a U.S. territory and then state, the Indian population in California went from 150,000 to 30,000, an 80 percent decline. The state’s leading historian, Kevin Starr (who passed away recently) put it simply: “60 percent of the deaths were attributable to disease, the rest to murder.”

Clearly, it hasn’t been the mission of The Irvine Museum to explore the harsher elements of the state’s history, as shown through art or otherwise. Nor should it have been. But we’ll be interested to see if its new affiliation with UCI will allow for teaching moments about some of the Golden State’s less-glorious and romantic stories.
 
irvinemuseum.org