Performance arts all in Acansa mix
The 2017 Acansa Arts Festival continues through the weekend with dance, music and theater performances at venues on both sides of the Arkansas River. For complete schedule or information, visit acansa.org or call (501) 6632287. Except as noted, tickets are $35, $15 students and military.
“To Life!”, a program conceived and directed by pianist Tatiana Roitman Mann, with violinist Kiril Laskarov, co-concertmaster, Arkansas Symphony Orchestra, and Andre Dyachenko, the Memphis Symphony’s principal clarinet, playing Dmitri Shostakovich’s Five Pieces for Two Violins, Bela Bartok’s Contrasts and S.I. Glick’s Klezmer’s Wedding, 7 p.m. Friday, New Deal Salon, 2003 Louisiana St., Little Rock. Tickets: $20, $10 students/ military.
Complexions Contemporary Ballet, a 15-member dance company founded by Dwight Rhoden and Desmond Richardson, formerly with Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, performs, 8 p.m. Saturday, University Theater, Center for the Performing Arts, University of Arkansas at Little Rock, 2801 S. University Ave., Little Rock. There will be a 7 p.m. pre-show music-and-dessert reception in the lobby and a post-show “talkback.” The company will also put on two Friday master classes for high school students and Saturday for college students.
It’s part of a “Day With University of Arkansas at Little Rock,” 5-10 p.m. Saturday, that will also include a 5 p.m. gallery reception and tour of the Fine Arts Building. At 6 p.m., Nine Horses will perform an original score in the building’s Stella Boyle Smith Concert Hall. Admission is free.
Los Angeles-based Impro Theatre, which puts on improvisational versions of fulllength plays (the company includes North Little Rock native Brian Michael Jones), will offer Shakespeare UnScripted at 8 p.m. today and The Twilight Zone UnScripted on Friday at Argenta Community Theater, 405 Main St., North Little Rock.
Not About Heroes by Stephen MacDonald, a play involving two English poets who meet at a military hospital during World War I and what happened to them afterward, will be onstage 7 p.m. today and Friday at the Arkansas Repertory Theatre’s Black Box at the Annex, 518 Main St., Little Rock.
New Orleans’ Dirty Dozen Brass Band performs at 8 p.m. Friday at the Arkansas Regional Innovation Hub, 201 E. Broadway, North Little Rock. Tickets are $25, $15 students and military.
The festival is donating 20 percent of ticket proceeds to relief efforts aimed at helping the Houston region’s working artists.