DANCE
Choreography festival returns to McCallum Theatre (Uken Report)
This one-of-a-kind festival, scheduled for Nov. 10 and Sunday Nov. 11, promotes dance as an art form by creating a venue for emerging and established choreographers and developing new dance audiences.
IDEAS & ISSUES
Should artists be fundraisers? (Barry’s Blog)
A popular blogger suggests that arts organizations should integrate artists into fundraising initiatives because “Artists and their work are ostensibly at the core of why people donate to the arts” and “It’s no longer enough to simply hire a development person and expect that person to do it all alone.”
Burning Man: Transforming the big empty (aeon)
How an impossibly flat expanse of absofreakinglutely nothing inspires creativity and transformation at Burning Man.
HISTORY & HERITAGE
50 shades of gay (Palm Springs Life)
The nation’s first LGBT publication, The Advocate, celebrates its Golden Jubilee with a fascinating new documentary film set to open Cinema Diverse in Palm Springs.
The sex lives of dates (Palm Springs Life)
How a love-struck Midwesterner made sweet blondes and brunettes a Coachella Valley icon — and a loyalist of this writer.
LITERARY
Drag queen story hour returns to Palm Springs library (Uken Report)
Back by popular demand, the Palm Springs Public Library has announced that Drag Queen Story Hour featuring local diva Bella da Ball resumes this month.
MUSIC
Jazz in the Pines goes on hiatus after unifying Idyllwild (The Desert Sun)
The Idyllwild community celebrated the 25th anniversary of Jazz in the Pines, and its survival after the Cranston Fire. Leaders of the Idyllwild Arts Academy, which produces the event as a fundraiser for scholarships, say the festival will go on hiatus in 2019.
Desert dreamers: the crooners (Palm Springs Life)
Writer Kent Black celebrates some of the legendary singers — Dean Martin, Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley, Dinah Shore, Trini Lopez, Liberace, and Peggy Lee — who put down roots and gave Palm Springs its enduring celebrity cachet.
THEATER
Theatrical staged-reading group announces season (Uken Report)
Script2Stage2Screen, an innovative performing arts organization for the development of original stage productions, has announced its plays for the upcoming season.
VISUAL ART
Can art revitalize downtown Indio? (The Desert Sun)
To help revitalize its downtown, the city of Indio selected and granted five artists to create an installation that reflects on the concept of house and home. The exhibition runs Oct. 29 through April 29, 2019.
Exhibition explores desert’s role in ‘Greater West’ super region (Palm Springs Life)
What do the Trans-Alaska Pipeline, Trinity Test Site, Joshua Tree, Mexican volcanoes, and the forests of Chile have in common? Unsettled, an expansive, season-long exhibition of modern and contemporary art at Palm Springs Art Museum, suggests these places all belong to “the Greater West,” a super region encompassing the western expanses of the American continents and unified by tectonics and history.
Birds of Sunnylands focus of new photography exhibition (The Desert Sun)
Walter Annenberg — business leader, diplomat, philanthropist — was also a birder. Flight Plan: The Birds of Sunnylands exhibits 52 photos of some of the more than 130 species of birds that migrate here every year, all photographed at the estate over the past two years by wildlife photographer and ornithologist Tim Laman.
Featuring High Desert artists, ‘Desert Icons’ opens at YV Arts (CV Weekly)
Challenged by YV Arts curator Michael McCall to present images that reflect the High Desert and the experience of living and working here, a selection of artists from the area proved they were up to the task in the exhibition Desert Icons (through Oct. 21).
Mural inspires Latino queer youth (KMIR)
Ryan Llamas, a community health educator, worked with 30 young people, between 14 and 21 years old, to paint the mural during a summer camp organized by Desert AIDS Project and Safe Schools Desert Cities.
Photo: A brightly colored stripe behind the eye distinguishes the Great Roadrunner, which appears in Flight Plan: The Birds of Sunnylands, a new photography exhibition at Sunnylands Center & Gardens in Rancho Mirage.
