YOUR IPHONE EMBEDS geodata into every picture you upload to Flickr. Facebook posts your address without your permission. Your E-ZPass knows where you’ve been driving.

Scary, but is this art? A show at Arlington Arts Center asks, why not?

“Public/Private,” featuring work by Matthew Sutton, Richard Saxton, Lisa Blas, Satomi Shirai, Mandy Burrow and Stephanie Robbins, raises the question of privacy in a public world, where everyone stars in “The Me Show” and almost everything can be found online. Christian Moeller’s MOJO addressed the issue in 2007 by putting a spotlight on a street corner and recording footage of the beam following the movements of passersby. Most of the subjects seem to enjoy their fleeting fame. The light — an actual theater spotlight — makes each person a star, if only for an instant.

If your Facebook mini-feed’s more important to you than CNN’s news feed, watch “Everyone That We Know News.” Endearingly earnest Chris Barr and VÃ(c)ronique Cote dress as newscasters and present updates from their friends and family, while Facebook-style status updates scroll across a “news ticker.”

Not even pen and paper is safe: Anissa Mack posted pieces of her sister’s diary on a public bulletin board. The aptly titled “My Sister’s Diary” promises to reveal a private life, but Mack redacted most of the words, making the diary read more like a top-secret FBI document than a journal of personal feelings. Viewers can respond to the diary or post their own flyers, almost like a proto-blog.

Perhaps you didn’t know that a picture of the front of your house is on the Internet. Google’s Street View probably captured a detailed image from their camera on wheels, which has photographed most major U.S. cities. In “Street With a View,” Ben Kinsley and Robin Hewlett learned when the camera car would be visiting cramped Sampsonia Way in Pittsburgh, so the artists staged a parade, a marathon and a sword fight along the car’s route. It wasn’t entirely a prank (Google was in on it) but their whimsical results can now be seen from any computer.

The artists weren’t interested in the privacy concerns raised by Google’s photographs. “[They] tend to have pretty rosy outlooks on these things,” says Jeffry Cudlin, who curated the show. Rather, the project’s stated purpose was to get viewers to “start exploring [nearby streets] and then not be able to know” what was staged, Kinsley told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

But the piece serves as a reminder that even if Big Brother isn’t watching, anyone could be.
You can’t beat Google, after all. You can’t hide from the GPS satellites forever. So why not have a little fun? “We’re going to throw a parade,” Cudlin jokes. “Put flowers in the barrels of their guns, basically.”

Read it at Expressnightout.com

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IT’S OFTEN TAKEN for granted here that the faucet will work, that the bathtub will fill, and that the fridge at 7-Eleven will always contain bottles of Dasani. But filmmaker Irena Salina wants us to take a closer look at water.

Her documentary “Flow: For Love of Water,” opening at E Street cinema on Friday, examines the multifaceted water crisis, from scarcity to pollution to dams to private water companies that have restricted water access to only those who can afford it.

The movie is at times disorganized, but that hardly detracts from its chilling message — that the days of “water, water everywhere” will soon be over.

» EXPRESS: I always turn off the tap while I’m brushing my teeth. Will that help? Is it enough?
» SALINA: It’s awareness. We take water for granted. We have a whole generation of people who turn the shower on to get it warm, go do dishes, and then the phone rings. … [Water]‘s not just something coming from a tap. It’s a source of life.

Read the rest at ExpressNightout.com

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Ricky Subritzky (the Kiwi) and Fiona MacDonald (the Aussie) have collaborated before on political pieces, and Subritzky doesn’t think it’s strange at all for the artists to take note of America’s political phenomena: “People seem a bit surprised — with New Zealand being on the other side of the world — that we’re interested. But the whole world’s interested.” He said the installation is inspired by what he and MacDonald see as the huge changes sweeping America’s political landscape; despite pundits’ rumblings about party schisms and military disasters, “Lobby” is a hopeful work.

“Lobby” is part of “Derivative Composition,” an international juried exhibit sponsored by VSA Arts for artists with disabilities; Subritzky is hearing impaired. In the exhibition catalog, he writes that his deafness makes him more attuned to the interpretation of symbols. For Subritzky and MacDonald, the liberty tree is a powerful symbol, though few Americans are familiar with it.

“I think this installation underlines what’s good about democracy, when it’s working. It’s been fascinating to watch the primaries and see people mobilize. … When I got here last week, the cabdriver immediately started in on a political conversation.”

Read it at Readexpress.com

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Easy: Get your jaded behind over to the Freer + Sackler Galleries for the 6th Cherry Blossom Anime Marathon. The lineup this year features two kids’ films, a romance/drama and an action flick. Roland Kelts, author of Japanamerica, will introduce the films, which should help you get a handle on what these films are — and what they’re not.

“A lot of people who are unfamiliar with the Japanese art forms of anime and manga have, understandably, stereotypes about them,” says Kelts. Such as? “The image of large-eyed, mini-skirted little girls with sometimes ‘enhanced’ body parts, fighting in outer space with massive mechanized robots.” Not, perhaps, the most widely appealing image –so, luckily, there’s nary a mini-skirt in sight in these movies.

First: “Jungle Emperor Leo,” a tale of a lion cub who becomes king long before Simba was a mote in his mother’s eye. (The original TV show and manga, or comic, were created in the 1950s by legend Osamu Tezuka — this flick is a 1997 remake featuring the eponymous cub as a grown-up.) Leo’s fight to preserve his jungle home from destructive humans will thrill kids and charm parents.

Another animal movie is up next, called “Atagoal: Cat’s Magical Forest,” the CGI tale of a selfish, always-hungry cat who first endangers, and then saves, the town of Atagoal.

Romance lovers may want to catch “5 Centimeters Per Second,” a drama/coming-of-age tale set in present-day Japan. Be warned: This is not your standard “boy-meets-girl, boy-wins-girl” love story, and all but the most die-hard lovers of melodrama may find themselves frustrated by the main character’s angst. (Actual line: “One day I realized my heart was withering, and in it was nothing but pain.”)

Read the rest at Readexpress.com

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Long known as a place that fosters emerging talent, the Source Theatre set up shop on 14th Street NW in 1977. Although the area today is a thriving arts corridor, Source’s debut was less than a decade after devastating riots ravaged the surrounding Shaw neighborhood, spawning an influx of crime, drugs and prostitution.

From its earliest days, Source did theater with a capital T: gay Holocaust dramas, Strindberg, Shakespeare. Plays put together on a shoestring budget, performed in a theater with a curtain and a set of mismatched folding chairs — and not much else. It had some commercial successes, but also a few flops. Yet the money didn’t matter … until it did.

After a string of financial problems, the Source Theatre Company produced its last season in 2002, and later rented its only asset — its building at 1835 14th St. NW, next to Bar Pilar and the Black Cat, which it bought in 1987 — to theater groups in need of a spot to rehearse and perform. In 2006, the company was poised to sell the building to Bedrock Management — owner of Bedrock Billiards and Buffalo Billiards, among others — which planned to turn it into a pool hall.

That’s when the Cultural Development Corp. came in, armed with money it had gathered to save the theater. After the purchase was completed, Cultural Development began renovating the building, replacing the roof and upgrading the sound and light systems — an effort slated to finish in the summer.

Karyn Miller, Cultural Development’s manager of communications, said the group intends to maintain Source’s “spirit of supporting emerging artists” by renting space to arts groups, similar to the way Flashpoint, which it also owns, works.

This new organized culture is a far cry from the scrappy Source of the 1980s.

On one hand, during that time Source fostered its fair share of talents who’ve moved on to more prominent pursuits, including Marcia Gay Harden, Charles Busch, Nancy Robinette and Rick Foucheux. But back in its earlier days, the improvisation at Source didn’t just take place on stage.

There was the time the lights went off in the middle of a play. There was the hole somebody cut in the upstairs rehearsal room floor to run an extension cord from the marquee lights to an outlet on the ground level. (Cultural Development is filling the hole and having lights wired properly.)

There were the Theater Alley plays, performed in the actual back alley behind the theater. The audience sat in makeshift bleachers and kids watched from the nearby rooftops.

Then there were the financial troubles. Like the time Pepco shut off the electricity when the troupe fell behind on its bills. Or when water pipes burst, causing $600 in damage. Then came fire, theft and the threat of eviction.

In 2004, Joe Banno, the troupe’s artistic director, announced that Source was closing from March to midsummer. Instead of kicking out the renters, which included the Actors’ Theatre of Washington and the In Series group, he asked them to forward their rent money to Pepco to keep the lights on in their offices.

By 2006, the Source company owed more than $600,000 to the Internal Revenue Service, utility companies and others. The company ceased operations, and Bedrock Management offered $2.8 million for the building. But at the last minute and after much protest, Cultural Development bought the building for the price of Source’s debt.

Source’s troubles didn’t end there, though. Cultural Development paid Source’s creditors, but also assumed a hefty mortgage owed to the city. Since then, the organization has negotiated a debt-forgiveness plan by providing services to the community — “things like free tickets to the community, allowing community groups to use the spaces, et cetera,” according to Miller.

The building was expected to reopen after renovations in mid-2007, but funding problems meant the work didn’t start until last month.

“We were going after some government grants that had a lot of hoops,” Anne Corbett, Cultural Development’s executive director, said. “And we jumped, and we jumped, and jumped and eventually we failed.”

Since then, the theater’s fortunes have improved. This week, air ducts are being hammered into place and walls are going up to create collaborative office spaces. And the pinnacle of the Source’s resurrection could be the revived Source Festival — once called the Washington Theatre Festival — which showcases new work by actors, directors and playwrights. So far, Cultural Development says it’s received a staggering 900 submissions for the three-week event, which is scheduled to kick off in the renovated theater in June.

With such a long history of woes, some might think Source is cursed. But Corbett isn’t one of them.

“If it was cursed,” she said, “it would be a billiards hall.”

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» EXPRESS: What exactly do you do?
» MUTU: I take what seems like an image that is one particular way, and I switch it around and give it a new life. I use images from National Geographic, which still have a very colonial underpinning, and I turn them into, sort of, fantastical, titillating, critical subject matter. And I do that with bits and pieces from glossy magazines, fashion magazines, hunting magazines, motorbike magazines. … I guess I’m an image optimist.

» EXPRESS: You have an MFA in sculpture. How does that training affect your work?
» MUTU: I did sculpture because painting felt very limited, and it lacked the space for investigation that I needed. I am not a believer in the religion of paint. … Painting schools tend to be very conservative. You could challenge a sculpture or challenge a work in the critiques in a way you couldn’t with paint.

I don’t believe in that well-protected, guarded [place] where you can’t question something — sculpture, to me, was a safe zone where you’re constantly arguing and critiquing and reinventing the field.

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All the world may be a stage, but these kids aren’t merely players.

There was acting, yes, but also the trying on of costumes, running amok in the theater, attending workshops and, at one point, drumming on the floor to illustrate Shakespearean meter.

It’s all part of the free ShakeXperience program, a new three-week “summer camp” at Gannon University that combined acting workshops with rehearsals of “Two Gentlemen of Verona.” The workshops end today, but the play continues through Saturday as part of Gannon’s Shakespeare Summer Nights festival.

And don’t worry, there are no men in tights here — the play’s been reimagined to take place in the 1950s, a suggestion from two of the students.

Organized by theater professors and Gannon graduates, ShakeXperience was conceived as a “page to stage” idea, looking at Shakespeare as a playwright, not as just a great wordsmith.

“I don’t mean to sound too noble, but it’s our passion,” Shawn Clerkin, Gannon theater director, said. “We’re committed to the notion of theater having the ability to change lives.”

Read the rest of this story on GoErie.com, or contact me for more.

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