Tagged: Arts

The National Endowment for the Arts has awarded Louisville’s Council on Developmental Disabilities a Challenge America Fast-Track grant to help fund a group art exhibit, The Striped Show, in the spring.  The $10,000 grants, which receive an expedited application review, are intended to increase access to the arts for underserved communities. 

Many of the arts season’s holiday shows are tried-and-true classics, but one Louisville theater company prefers a less reverent approach. Pandora Productions' plays and musicals typically examine some facet of LGBT life, and holiday programming is no exception. But when artistic director Michael Drury went looking for gay-themed Christmas fare to produce, he came away disappointed.

Christmas shows might be the 800-pound gorillas stomping on the December arts scene, but this year Congregation Adath Jeshurun is getting in on the action with "Chanukah Chappens," a multi-genre Chanukah show at The Bard's Town. The evening's two performances (7 p.m. and 8:30 p.m.) will feature storytelling, music, comedy, poetry and, of course, the lighting of the first candle on the menorah. 

“The Nutcracker,” a fantasy-fueled story of a young girl who dreams her toy prince to life and follows him through magical lands, debuted as a ballet in St. Petersburg in the late 19th century with choreography by the ballet master Petipa and music by Tchaikovsky. But it didn’t become an American holiday tradition until after World War II, when George Balanchine staged his version for the New York City Ballet and the ballet caught fire as a Christmastime production.