Tag archives: UCSB

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 […]

UCSB’s Music Department Winter Concert Series has not only gone virtual, it’s also veered toward video, with a big percentage of the ensembles choosing to incorporate visual material into their programs. Each entity took a different approach to marrying music and imagery, ranging from traditional filmed scenes of nature for choral music to wildly abstract […]

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 […]

More Mozart is headed our way this weekend as UCSB Opera Theatre and the Department of Music present an abridged two-act virtual video version of Don Giovanni on Friday, February 26. The production is helmed by Associate Professor Dr. Isabel Bayrakdarian, the star soprano who sang the love interest role of Zerlina in multiple productions […]

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 […]

You could say that Robin Gerber has had a backwards career. After working as a lawyer in Washington, D.C., and then serving as a well-paid Congressional lobbyist for trade unions for 15 years, Gerber, experiencing self-described burnout, junked it all for a life as a writer for newspapers and magazines.  Then her mentor suggested she […]

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 […]

Back in 2010, rising country music singer-songwriter Brandon Stansell was ostracized from his strict Southern Baptist family after coming out as gay. He spent the past decade healing from that pain, finding a new support system, and building a name for himself in country music by refusing to hide his truth. The 33-year-old’s 2020 EP […]

The Carsey-Wolf Center’s Pollock Theater’s pandemic-pivot programming, which barely paused for the holidays, has jumped right back into the virtual fray with the start of the new year. The “Subversives” series gets going over Zoom on Thursday, January 7, with a discussion of Lingua Franca, written and directed by and starring Isabel Sandoval. The 2019 […]

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 […]

When the pandemic forced interaction to head to the internet, UCSB’s Theater Department quickly picked up the virtual ball and ran with it. Not only classes did move online but the Launch Pad project quickly pivoted to mark its 15th anniversary milestone by having previous participants in the play reading series contribute short pieces to […]

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 […]

If you haven’t yet checked out The Queen’s Gambit, deservedly one of the top-ranked shows on Netflix and one of the best original series in the streaming service’s catalog, now would be a good time to get started on the seven-episode series about a chess prodigy turned accomplished if tortured young woman. That’s because Scott […]

I started at UC Santa Barbara in 1976, almost on a whim. I thought I would attend UC San Diego, but my high school girlfriend had her heart set on UC Santa Barbara, and though she was a junior, my romantic ass decided to head north and wait for her. When she finally arrived at […]

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 […]