Tag archives: Arts & Lectures

It’s no surprise that UCSB Arts & Lectures has turned to the XIV Dalai Lama for the keynote event in its year-long 2021-2022 Creating Hope programming initiative. After all, not only has His Holiness, who is believed to be a manifestation of the Bodhisattva of Compassion, spent much of his life encouraging people to be […]

Shortly after moving to Santa Barbara more than four decades ago, Steven Gilbar found he spent a lot of his off hours from his day job as an attorney doing things that are all about authors and writers. An avid reader, Gilbar has also published more than 20 books over the course of his writing […]

The opening sequence of UCSB Dance Department’s COVID-coping triptych of dance films shows a series of eerily empty spaces all over the seaside campus. But it’s not meant to be a metaphor or pandering to the pandemic, said artistic director Delila Moseley, a longtime professor of dance at UCSB. Moseley has been able to actually […]

“Nay, why reproach each other, be unkind,For there’s no plane on which we two may meet?” The words might be a little too poetic and eloquent for modern times, but the sentiment is surely something that might have been spoken aloud on the floor of the U.S. Senate this week, say, perhaps by a centrist […]

UCSB Art & Lectures announced its new season of virtual events for the spring quarter – perhaps the last one necessitating such exclusively online programming before the pandemic releases its grip. The slate gets underway on April 10 with an old friend of A&L in Jane Goodall, the British primatologist, anthropologist, ethologist, and UN Messenger […]

Earlier in February, UCSB Arts & Lectures hosted the MacArthur Foundation “Genius Award” playwright-actress Anna Deavere Smith as part of its virtual Race to Justice series. The university’s Department of Theater and Dance closes out the month with a production of Fires in the Mirror: Crown Heights, Brooklyn, and Other Identities, Smith’s groundbreaking one-woman show […]

With their revolutionary perspective on the fundamentals of food preparation and flavor combinations, UCSB Arts & Lectures’ featured chefs Samin Nosrat and Yotam Ottolenghi represent a new paradigm of cooking ideals and styles. Moderated by Sherry Villanueva, Managing Partner at Acme Hospitality, “Chefs in Conversation” will feature the two James Beard Award-winning cooking book authors […]

UCSB’s second segment of its year-long Race to Justice series of virtual talks and Q&A sessions, which was created in part by the heightening of awareness of inequity raised by the Black Lives Matters protest after George Floyd’s murder-by-police last spring, got underway last week with a conversation with the compelling author Ta-Nehisi Coates. It’s […]

Sure, Christmas is almost a month in the rear-view mirror. Yes, Estella Scrooge, which takes place on a present-day December 24-25, is absolutely meant to be a Yuletide holiday story. But if you have yet to see this clever mashup of A Christmas Carol with several of Charles Dickens’ other books, now would be a […]

All of the UCSB Arts & Lectures House Calls and Race to Justice virtual events have been recorded specifically for the Santa Barbara community and every program concludes with a live Q&A session with one of the A&L staff or a member of the local area arts or education community. But perhaps none of the […]

Thanks to the extended lockdown laws on the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, UCSB Arts & Lectures has scrapped its planned live events season slated for February-May in favor of continuing the House Calls and Race to Justice series online. (The updated virtual calendar hadn’t yet been released by our print deadline.) Meanwhile, two of the bigger […]

Santa Barbara winemaker Doug Margerum has certainly got something to smile about during these gloomy times. Wine Enthusiast Magazine has recognized his Margerum M5 white Rhône blend, Margerum Esate Vineyard, Los Olivos district, as a top 100 wine of the year, ranking it at number 30. The publication’s global team of editors and tasters cumulatively […]

UCSB Arts & Lectures’ free outdoor fall film festival series of screenings at the West Wind Drive-In comes to a close with two Christmas classics, with a modern parable followed by a Jimmy Stewart tearjerker. In 2003’s Elf, Will Ferrell stars as an elf named Buddy who discovers that he’s actually a human whom Santa […]

Movie lovers might only know Cheryl Strayed from the film version of her bestselling memoir Wild, which starred Reese Witherspoon in the adaptation of the book that offered alternating harrowing and hilarious stories from Strayed’s solo 1,100-mile trek on the Pacific Crest Trail as well as the personal journey that led her there. But the […]

UCSB’s popular Arts & Lectures series has obviously been scrambling during the pandemic lockdown to present its normal program of international acts and artists. I took the opportunity at the weekend to watch 21-year-old cellist Sheku Kanneh-Mason and his pianist sister, Isata, play a virtual concert from their home in Nottingham, England, and couldn’t fail […]

One of the perks of the Santa Barbara Symphony’s decision to dive into digital rather than completely forgo its 2020-21 season is the opportunity to celebrate an important milestone for Beethoven, perhaps the most important composer in the classical music canon. The symphony is marking his 250th birthday with “Beethoven @ 250,” a chamber music […]

Dawn Porter’s much-heralded documentary, John Lewis: Good Trouble, which chronicles the life and career of the legendary civil rights activist turned longtime Democratic Representative from Georgia, came out shortly before Lewis passed away last summer. The film, which features both rare archival footage and exclusive interviews with Lewis, celebrates his 60-plus years of social activism […]

It’s doubtful we’ll hear Blu Cantrell’s “Hit ‘Em Up Style,” which Rhiannon Giddens covered so memorably a decade ago as part of a genre-busting, talent-bursting display by her then-band The Carolina Chocolate Drops, the Grammy Award-winning outfit that blended acoustic instruments with a decidedly modern approach. Indeed, Giddens, an operatically trained singer, songwriter, fiddler and […]

The election will be three days in the rear-view mirror when The Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra Septet with Wynton Marsalis performing “The Sounds of Democracy” streams for free as part of UCSB Arts & Lectures’ Thematic Learning Initiative, its community conversation arm in conjunction with events. Led by trumpeter-composer Wynton Marsalis and featuring seven […]

The venerable Granada was socially gridlocked when the popular Danish String Quartet returned to Santa Barbara with the Danish National Girls’ Choir, under conductor Phillip Faber, putting on an entertaining UCSB Arts & Lectures concert. The Fab Four – violinists Rune Tonsgaard Sorensen and Frederik Oland, violist Asbjørn Norgaard, and cellist Fredrik Schoyen Sjolin – […]