Monday, April 27, 2015

Bay Area Dance Week - Celebrate!

The Art, Music and Recreation Center is pleased to host two events for Bay Area Dance Week.



On Tuesday, April 28th at 5:45 in the Latino Hispanic Meeting Room, we welcome Toba Singer and José Manuel Carreño.  José Manuel Carreño, Artistic Director of Ballet San Jose and former Principal Dancer with American Ballet Theatre, will join Toba Singer, author of Fernando Alonso, the Father of Cuban Ballet, to present the legacy of the internationally-famous Cuban ballet master, Fernando Alonso, architect of the training system that has produced first-rank ballet dancers who today grace the stages of the Royal Ballet of London, American Ballet Theatre, San Francisco Ballet, as well as the Cuban National Ballet.

A slide presentation will present highlights from the 2013 Encuentro Internacional de Academias de Ballet (International Ballet Academies Encounter), a yearly Havana event where ballet students from throughout Cuba and their teachers interface with students and teachers from other countries to compare and demonstrate best practices in the teaching of ballet.  José Manuel Carreño will be accompanied by dancers from Ballet San Jose to demonstrate how he incorporates the training system into his work-out routines.




On Wednesday, April 29th we host the San Francisco Dance Film Festival to present "Dances for Camera", which will be screened in the Koret auditorium at 5:30pm.   San Francisco Dance Film Festival will present highlights from its 2014 festival, including award-winning screendance shorts and La Passion Noureev, a documentary by Fabrice Herrault compiled from rare footage and interviews with iconic ballet dancer Rudolf Nureyev in his prime.


 




The 25 Art, Music and Recreation Center Books with the Most Holds in April 2015



The most requested books in the Art, Music and Recreation Center (the Dewey Decimal 700's) include a few bestsellers.  Celebrity bios are always popular -- memoirs of actors and actresses, alternative rock musicians make up most of this list.

One unexpected title near the top of list is Minecraft, a two year old title, about the creator and creation of a very popular online game.

Knitting books always do well and two recent titles, Magpies, Homebodies, and Nomads and Twigg Stitch, are among our most requested.

Art Before Breakfast, a book for artists on the run, is about how to meaningfully squeeze personal creativity into a harried life.

Tiny House Living is natural title for the Main Library's neighborhood where more and more "micro-dwellings" are being built.

Sonic Boom looks at how music and sound affect us (and can be used to manipulate us).

Balancing Acts is a written and visual documentary of three San Francisco Ballet ballerinas who balance their demanding art with motherhood.

Most of these titles are also available in an ebook format.  All in all, there are many excellent choices here for the San Francisco reader.  Happy reading.


1. Girl in a Band by Kim Gordon (Dey St., an imprint of William Morrow Publishers, 2015)

2. The Boys in the Boat: Nine Americans and their Epic Quest for Gold at the 1936 Olympics by Daniel James Brown (Viking, 2013).

3. A Fine Romance by Candice Bergen (Simon & Schuster, 2015).

4. Yes Please by Amy Poehler (Dey St, 2014?).

5. Born with Teeth: A Memoir by Kate Mulgrew (Little, Brown and Co., 2015).

6. Clothes, Clothes, Clothes: Music, Music, Music: Boys, Boys, Boys: A Memoir by Viv Albertine (Thomas Dunne Books, 2014).

7. Minecraft: The Unlikely Tale of Markus Notch Persson and the Game that Changed Everything by Daniel Goldberg & Linus Larsson, translation by Jennifer Hawkins (Seven Stories Press, 2013).

8. I Was a Child by Bruce Eric Kaplan (Blue Rider Press, 2015).

9. The Rainman's Third Cure: An Irregular Education by Peter Coyote (Counterpoint, 2015)

10. There was a Little Girl: The Real Story of My Mother and Me by Brooke Shields (Dutton, 2014).
 
11. Edgewise: A Picture of Cookie Mueller by Chloé Griffin (b_books Verlag, 2014).

12. Magpies, Homebodies, and Nomads: A Modern Knitter's Guide to Discovering and Exploring Style by Cirilia Rose (Stewart, Tabori & Chang, 2014).

13. Twigg Stitch: A New Twist on Reversible Knitting by Vicki Twigg (Interweave, 2014).

14. Art Before Breakfast: A Zillion Ways to be More Creative, No Matter How Busy You Are by Danny Gregory (Chronicle Books, 2015).

15. The Battle of Versailles: The Night American Fashion Stumbled into the Spotlight and Made History by Robin Givhan (Flatiron Books, 2015).

16. The Sonic Boom: How Sound Transforms the Way We Think, Feel, and Buy by Joel Beckerman   with Tyler Gray (Mifflin Harcourt, 2014).

17. Tiny House Living: Ideas for Building and Living Well in Less than 400 Square Feet by Ryan Mitchell (Betterway Home, 2014).

18. The B-Side: The Death of Tin Pan Alley and the Rebirth of the Great American Song by Ben Yagoda (Riverhead Books, 2015).

19. So That Happened by Jon Cryer (New American Library, 2015).

20. Breakfast at Sotheby's: An A-Z of the Art World by Philip Hook (The Overlook Press, 2014).

21. Balancing Acts: Three Prima Ballerinas Becoming Mothers by Lucy Gray (Princeton Architectural Press, 2015).

22. Shibori: The Inventive Art of Japanese Shaped Resist Dyeing: Tradition, Techniques, Innovation by Yoshiko Iwamoto Wada, Mary Kellogg Rice, and Jane Barton (Kodansha USA, 2011).

23. Schubert's Winter Journey: Anatomy of an Obsession by Ian Bostridge (Alfred A. Knopf, 2015).

24. Out came the Sun: Overcoming the Legacy of Mental Illness, Addiction, and Suicide in My Family by Mariel Hemingway (Regan Arts, 2015).

25. The Grand Budapest Hotel, screenplay by Wes Anderson (Opus Books, 2014).

Sunday, April 5, 2015

Cypress String Quartet - Tuesday April 7, 2015


On Tuesday, April 7, 2015 at 12:00 PM, the Cypress String Quartet will present an hour-long preview of their 16th annual Call & Response concert.  This concert, consisting of works by Beethoven, Bartók, and a world premiere by Philippe Hersant, will be performed at the Marines' Memorial Theatre on April 10, 2015 at 8 PM.

In commissioning this year's work, the Quartet chose the theme of "night."  They grouped Hersant's new String Quartet No.4 “Der gestirnte Himmel,” with Beethoven's Quartet, op. 59, no. 2 and Bartók's 4th String Quartet.  The Cypress String Quartet states that in their Call & Response programs, their aim is to "contextualizes the new work, pairing it with the older masterpieces which inspired it, and demonstrating the composers’ work as a process of ongoing inspiration through the ages."

Tuesday's program will be presented in the Koret Auditorium located on the Lower Level of the Main Library.  All programs at the Library are free and open to the public.