Tagged: Arts

Actors Theatre of Louisvilles' apprentices open their final production of the season tonight. The New Voices Young Playwrights Festival is a bill of ten-minute plays written by eight area high school students. 

The plays were selected from more than 500 ten-minute plays submitted by middle and high school students from Kentucky and Southern Indiana this year. Each play in the festival receives a full production, with a director, designers, a dramaturg, a cast of apprentice actors and a seat in the rehearsal hall for the playwright. 

The first season of our audio diary series “The Big Break,” comes to a close this week. Since last fall, understudies and apprentices take us behind the curtain at the Kentucky Opera, Actors Theatre of Louisville and the Louisville Ballet. 

We'll launch the next season of The Big Break with a new class of up-and-coming artists in the early fall. 

For their final diaries, actor Samantha Beach and dancer Claire Horrocks reflect on their time in Louisville and shaer what lies ahead now that the season is over. 

The Kentucky Foundation for Women has awarded $100,000 in grants to Kentucky artists. The grants are awarded to feminist artists and organizations to develop their artistic skills, explore new techniques or create new works. 

Small grants ranging from $1,000 to $7,500 will support projects ranging from a Lexington music series focused on African American female composers to a nonfiction book and website about life as an active-duty military wife. Of the 36 artist enrichment grants awarded this month, 12 totaling $34,000 will fund Louisville-based artists and their projects. 

Louisville native Mitchell L.H. Douglas returns home tonight to read from his new collection of poems, “\blak\ \al-fə bet\,” which won the 2011 Lexi Rudnitsky Editor's Choice Award from Persea Books. Douglas reads from his new work tonight at the InKY Reading Series, 7-9 p.m. at The Bard's Town on Bardtown Road.

Douglas' first collection, "Cooling Board: a Long-Playing Poem," a finalist for the 2010 NAACP Image Awards, explored the life and death of soul singer Donny Hathaway, but “\blak\ \al-fə bet\” is a more personal collection of poems about Douglas' Southern family after the death of its matriarch.