There’s still time for you to reserve your spot for the annual Miami-Dade County State of the Arts address given by the Chairman of the Miami-Dade County Cultural Affairs Council, Adolfo Henriques. Our county has what I’m willing to wager is the strongest support for the arts of any in the country, largely because of […]

I don’t know what’s happened to Miami theater this season. Maybe our local directors feel that to compete with the steamy drama unfolding in our beaches, nightclubs, and half-empty luxury condos, they need to be as explicit as the stage will allow. Or maybe, given all that steamy, real-life drama, they feel that the only […]

After a quiet holiday weekend, the dance season is back with a vengeance. The Miami Dance Festival begins with Ori, a full evening featuring the repertory of Brazz Dance Theatre. The highlight should be choreographer Augosto Soldade’s new work Kayala, based on the Afro-Brazilian tale of the goddess of the sea bringing night to the […]

There was no escaping the clave on North Beach on Saturday night: that uh-uh-uh, uh-uh beat that drives Afro-Cuban music. Somewhere around 9pm it seemed like the whole north end of the island might rise right off it’s dredged up perch and dance into the sea. At the Byron Carlyle, timba band Tiempo Libre was […]

Performance is fleeting. That’s the thrill and the rub. A painting can hang around on a wall for months or centuries, but once a performance ends it exists only in memory. With each new performance, the work is created anew. That’s why it’s so important that local performing artists have many opportunities to share their […]

This week the Global Caribbean exhibit at the Little Haiti Cultural Center comes down and heads for a second showing at the Musee International des Artes Modestes in the South of France. Let’s hope that the exhibition, curated by artist Edouard Duval Carrie, is only the beginning of a powerful artistic life for the center. […]

There was a time when the world stopped for me during Winter Music Conference. Every year I interviewed dozens of DJs, sat in on official panels, slogged around the Ultra Festival, stayed up all night and all the next day and all the next night (you get the idea), sustained by little more than the […]

Here’s another sign of the weight the arts pull in Miami-Dade: the Human Services Coalition is pretending to be an art gallery for a night. Sure, artists are always banding together to support worthy causes from musicians playing benefits for farmers and earthquake survivors to visual artists and art collectors donating work for auction, with […]

The great Haitian revolutionary hero Mackandal ignited a popular uprising in the 1740s, only to be brutally killed as an example to his fellow travelers. It would be nearly four decades before the Haitian Revolution would gain momentum again. There’s a tiny taste of the same drama in the making of the opera that bears […]