A baseball-themed double-header screens next in the UCSB Arts & Lectures free Summer Cinema series dubbed “Game On! Grit, Grace & Glory – Movies Under the Stars in Your Cars,” on Wednesday, July 29, at the West Wind Drive-In. At 8:30 pm, you can slide on down in your car’s front seat or folding chair […]
In other SBIFF-related news, psychological thriller The Night has received a license for theatrical release in Iran, serving as a historic benchmark for the country’s filmmaking community as it is the first U.S.-produced film to receive such permission since the revolution more than 40 years ago. Why that matters in our little berg is that […]
The Riviera Theatre is once again closed due to concerns about the spread of COVID-19, and online screenings of new arts films have also come to a close, or at least hasn’t ramped up again as the new closures aren’t in effect nationwide. So turning even more local, SBIFF has segued into a new online […]
Critics have been falling all over themselves to praise Palm Springs, the new ambitious yet taut genre-scrambling sci-fi/existential/rom-com starring Andy Samberg and Cristin Milioti that made its debut on Hulu on July 10. As the film buffs have suggested, the movie that employs an infinite time loop as its central conceit is much more than […]
The Santa Barbara Symphony next episode of its live streamed series is the first to feature its former concertmaster of a decade, the almost unbearably charismatic fiddler Gilles Apap. Curated and hosted by Music and Artistic Director Nir Kabaretti, the 30-minute broadcast, produced by local videographer David Bazemore, features an interview and performance of Fritz […]
Theodore B. Olson, the former Solicitor General of the United States from 2001-2004 during President George W. Bush’s first term, who prevailed in more than 75 percent of the 65 cases he has argued in the Supreme Court, will conduct a conversation with representatives of the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library & Museum that will be […]
Center Stage Theater’s daily Digital Arts Festival came to a close back in May, with the daily doses of videos, photos and interviews with local artists of all kinds to share their creative processes and samples of their work perhaps set to return later this summer. In the meantime, a Quarantine Edition of Speaking of […]
After the sensational success this spring of UCSB Launch Pad’s Alone, Together project that found more than 20 past playwrights-in-resident contributing short original works created to be performed and directed by theater students and faculty over Zoom, the 2020 Summer Reading Series: New Plays in Process might seem a bit anticlimactic. But don’t sell the […]
This innovative concept to keep live music happening during the COVID-19 crisis has turned the massive parking lot at the Ventura County Fairgrounds into a site for “pop”-up entertainment. The Concerts in Your Car drive-in series features two or three live performances each week that people can enjoy from the comfort and safety of their […]
The Sunken Gardens at the Santa Barbara Courthouse is off limits for events as the coronavirus pandemic continues, as UCSB Arts & Lectures summer film series’ grass-fed version of beach blanket bingo would surely lead to a bounce in new cases of COVID-19. Instead, pivoting has produced a more practical solution for the free annual […]
Music Academy of the West’s Sing! program – a free, after-school choral initiative that, in normal times, takes place at six elementary schools for Santa Barbara County kids age 7-12 – was only in its second year when the coronavirus pandemic forced schools to close back in March, obviously also ending any possibilities for the […]
Faced with closing down the campus this summer, the Music Academy of the West’s summer festival performed a pivot so dramatic that anyone watching in person might have suffered whiplash. Rather than having the 134 fellows from around the world immersed in studies, classes, rehearsals, and performances on the Miraflores campus in Montecito, everything would […]
Ensemble Theatre Company has announced a hybrid approach to cope with COVID for its upcoming 2020-21 season, which will consist of four plays, including spring productions of American Son and Tenderly that were originally scheduled for the previous season that was interrupted by the pandemic closures. The remaining two plays are reportedly set to be […]
RTC has also another gift for theater lovers this month by offering free viewings of Arlene Hutton‘s Nibroc Trilogy via Vimeo recordings of the award winning works directed by the company’s own Katherine Farmer. Nibroc is a set of three plays about the challenges of a young couple living in Kentucky and Florida in the […]
When the coronavirus caused shutdowns in California in mid-March, the married couple who run the Rubicon Theatre Company thought at first that maybe the Ventura outfit could just wait out the virus, postpone a couple of shows and get going again later in the spring. When it became clear that the Ventura venue wouldn’t be […]
Virtual meetings continue to blossom at Santa Barbara Central Library, with a wide variety of programs for kids, families, and adults. Now there’s also Game Night, which is nothing new to the experienced online gamers or even those new to Zoom, but this one gives you a chance to compete against a lot of locals. […]
UCSB’s Carsey-Wolf Center, which has been posting video recordings of discussions with directors, writers and other filmmakers that were held at the Pollock Theatre on campus following live film screenings, along with links to watch the movies available on streaming sites on your own time, is joining the ranks of organizations offering hybrid events. The […]
COVID-19 can’t conquer the community created by the Santa Barbara-Kotor Sister City Committee. While at this point nobody is able – or willing – to cross the ocean to meet and make music in person, the organization that fosters cooperation between our seaside city and the coastal town in Montenegro has booked a fundraising event […]
Opera Santa Barbara is not only eagerly anticipating a return to live performances in front of audiences, the company has already begun taking reservations for its planned production of La Traviata at the Granada Theatre on September 25 and 27. Due to the likely government guidelines about social distancing in public performances, fewer than 500 […]
If the novel coronavirus hadn’t brought the world to a halt this spring, Michael McDonald wouldn’t have been available to participate in the concert for the Council on Alcoholism and Drug Abuse (CADA) taking place this Thursday evening, June 25. That’s because the longtime Santa Barbara resident would have been out on the road as […]
What if they threw a concert and nobody came? That’s a situation famed Santa Barbara singer-songwriter Kenny Loggins will face when he performs at the venerable Lobero Theatre on Sunday, June 28 – with absolutely no one in the audience. Of course, the only reason the show wouldn’t fill the historic theater’s 600 seats is […]
COVID-19 has certainly crushed a lot of dreams since forcing a shutdown back in March. But it’s also had a silver lining or two: After having closed its doors, supposedly forever, just a little more than a year ago, the Westwind Drive-In movie theater reopened a couple of weeks back, and immediately became a desired […]
The unprecedented stay-at-home orders because of the pandemic have been a double whammy for service nonprofits such as the Council on Alcoholism and Drug Abuse, whose mission is to provide services for preventing and treating alcoholism and drug abuse to youth, adults, and families throughout Santa Barbara County. Not only has 70-year-old CADA had to […]
After spending more than a quarter century happily ensconced at the campground halfway up the San Marcos Pass that gave the festival its name, the Live Oak Music Festival that takes place over Father’s Day weekend every year packed up to return to its roots in San Luis Obispo two summers ago. Now, in the […]
A lot of things seem impossible to produce during a pandemic, most assuredly a parade, especially one as perennially popular as Santa Barbara’s Solstice Parade and Festival, which draws crowds of more than 100,000 participants and spectators from town and all around. Held at high noon on the Saturday closest to June 21, Solstice (as […]
Back in January, 2020 was looking to be a pretty exciting year for the Music Academy of the West. Not only had the summer music institute respected around the world just hired Jamie Broumas, the former Director of Classical and New Music Programs at Washington’s famed Kennedy Center, for the newly created position of Chief […]
It was exactly one week since George Floyd died in custody of the Minneapolis Police when Glen Phillips and I talked earlier this week over the phone. The issue of institutional racism and police brutality was weighing heavily on his mind, and would show up six hours later in that Monday night’s solo Zoom show, […]
Fight fatigue and pep up the popular pandemic platform Late in April, The New York Times published an instantly popular essay called “Why Zoom is Terrible.” The piece posed that the problem with the platform is that the way the video images are digitally encoded and decoded, altered and adjusted, patched and synthesized introduces such […]
Clarinetist Narek Arutyunian was supposed to make his Ojai debut on May 3 for the Chamber On The Mountain series that honors the traditional while celebrating the innovative. However the COVID-19 pandemic had other plans, so instead Arutyunian recorded a concert from his home in Queens, New York, exclusively for Chamber On The Mountain donors, […]
Having your CEO depart in the middle of a pandemic that caused cancellation of the rest of the season’s concerts probably isn’t the best thing for building the confidence of the local classical music community. Fortunately, the Santa Barbara Symphony was able to announce its Interim CEO, Kathryn Martin, even before the then-current Executive Director/CEO […]
SBCC School of Extended Learning’s summer session got underway earlier this week, but it’s never too late to join the ongoing classes, particularly now that all of their offerings are online. Among the selections in the Spirituality, Self-Management and Psychology sections are beginning and intermediate sections of “Nature and Self-Healing,” where students can explore the […]
Also taking to the great outdoors this week is the Santa Barbara Ecstatic Dance Co-op, which features music programmed by members of the community who are encouraged to express themselves through their choices of songs, rhythms, and beats. Its last dance took place at Divinitree Yoga studio the first Friday in March before bowing to […]
Carpinteria Qigong/tai chi teacher Jessica Kolbe was one of the last to shut down in personal classes, only giving up her gatherings that were fighting the spread of COVID-19 through social distancing on Carpinteria State Beach when the statewide stay-at-home orders became official in mid-March. She’s been offering online classes ever since, with the more […]
In the pre-pandemic era, last weekend would have marked the Topanga Banjo Fiddle Contest and Folk Festival’s 60th annual event, a downhome acoustic instrument extravaganza that is rivaled around these parts only by Santa Barbara’s own similarly-themed Fiddle Convention and Festival, which still has high hopes of holding its event in the fall. Instead, Topanga […]
The Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics has streamed more than 30 hours of videos of events by KITP’s visiting scientists since it launched the series of curated talks from its archives in mid-March. New videos are added each Wednesday, with a recent week’s interesting entries including “Welcome to Your Brain: Why You Lose Your Car […]
Festival artist Jennifer Lemay, who started street painting with chalk for I Madonnari in the festival’s second year in 1988 and has missed only a handful of I-Mads over the ensuing 32 years, is joining nearly 60 other artists in creating works in her own driveway to celebrate the Memorial Day Weekend event. We caught […]
Street painting artists have been compared to masochists, in that their hobby of drawing with chalk on the sidewalk has become an obsession, back pain and sore knees ignored in a mission that is exhibited annually on the pavement in front of the Santa Barbara’s Old Mission during the I Madonnari Italian Street Painting Festival […]
If things were different, if the novel coronavirus that causes COVID-19 hadn’t turned into a global pandemic shutting down almost everything across the world, this would have been a weekend of wonder for Otto Layman. The theater director had planned a big blowout of a show to serve as his crowning achievement in a career that […]
If things were different, if the novel coronavirus that causes COVID-19 hadn’t turned into a global pandemic shutting down almost everything across the world, this would have been a weekend of wonder for Otto Layman. The theater director had planned a big blowout of a show to serve as his crowning achievement in a career […]
Nick Meador, a Bay Area-based transformational life coach, holistic event producer, and mindful entrepreneur, is familiar to local seekers through his participatory workshops at the Lucidity Festival at Live Oak Campground each spring. Meador is also the founder of Soul Lift Cacao, which markets organic ceremonial cacao – the natural, unprocessed form of chocolate grown […]