Mostly Virtual Arts Round Up, July 16, 2020
By • July 16, 2020 0 927
With a free timed-entry pass, you’ll be able to see “Degas at the Opéra” starting this Monday, when the National Gallery of Art reopens the ground floor of its West Building. Speaking of opera, musical adaptations of plays by the Bard of Avon are the subject of Wednesday’s virtual Shakespeare Hour. For details about these happenings and others, click on the headings below.
Washington School of Ballet: Zoom Classes
Scheduled Monday through Saturday, the Washington School of Ballet’s live-streamed classes, held via Zoom, give students the opportunity to receive feedback in real time in a ballet class setting. Tuition is $13 per class. This weekend’s schedule of live classes is: Thursday, July 16, from 6 to 7:30 p.m., Beginner Ballet 1 with Jessy Dick; Friday, July 17, from 10:30 a.m. to noon, Advanced Beginner Ballet with Royce Zackery; Saturday, July 18, from 10 to 11:30 a.m., Beginner Ballet 2 with Therese Gahl; and 11:45 a.m. to 12:45 p.m., Variations Class Series, also with Therese Gahl.
Wolf Trap: Park Pop-Up Concert
Park Pop-Up concerts by local artists are recorded live at Wolf Trap National Park for the Performing Arts in Vienna, Virginia, and later shared online. On July 18 at 4 p.m., the Wolf Trap debut of t.l.a.o.o., a band featuring trumpeter Ross Huff, steel pan player Victor Provost, tuba player Michael W. Nickens and drummer Chuck Navyac, will be streamed without charge.
Alliance Française: Heure du conte
The librarians of the Alliance Française of Washington, D.C., invite little readers, ages 3 to 7, to listen to French stories read online on July 21 from 11 to 11:30 a.m. Admission is free.
Dumbarton House: Virtual Jane Austen Panel
The 9th annual Jane Austen Film Festival, presented by Georgetown’s Dumbarton House, is underway, with online events on Wednesdays through July 29. Audience members at a virtual panel discussion on July 22 from 7 to 9 p.m. will hear from author Kim Wilson on Jane Austen party culture, from JASNA News Editor Sheryl Craig on Regency money and economics and from novelist Carrie Bebris on the types of men a young lady might encounter while socializing in the Regency period. A Q&A will follow. Admission is pay-what-you-wish.
Shakespeare Theatre: Shakespeare & Opera
Hosted on Zoom by STC Artistic Director Simon Godwin and Dramaturg Drew Lichtenberg, the Shakespeare Hour on July 22 at 7:30 p.m. will welcome tenor Russell Thomas, an alumnus of the young artist programs at the Met, Seattle Opera, Florida Grand Opera and Opera Theatre of St. Louis, and Francesca Zambello, general director of the Glimmerglass Festival and artistic director of Washington National Opera, to discuss operatic adaptations of Shakespeare’s plays by composers from Henry Purcell to Thomas Adès. Tickets are $10 (free for members and subscribers).
DC Improv: Online Stand-Up Competition
DC Improv is presenting Kumite, “the world’s greatest stand-up competition,” via Zoom. Kumite Online III, on July 24 at 8 p.m., will match up Brittany Carney, Chris Lawrence, Alex Scott, Bridget Geiran, Sean Savoy, Lawrence Killebrew, Sofia Javed and Matt Deakins in one-on-ones until, at the end of the night, the audience chooses a champion. Tickets are $5.
Classical Movements: Socially Distanced Concerts
The secret garden of the Rectory, 711 Princess Street in Old Town Alexandria, Virginia, is the venue for Classical Movements’ Sounds of Hope & Harmony series of intimate and socially distanced Saturday-evening concerts. On July 25 at 6 and 7:30 p.m., cellists Eugena Chang and Britton Riley and a quartet made up of violinists Alexandra Osborne and Angelia Cho, violist Mahoko Eguchi and cellist Rachel Young — all National Symphony Orchestra musicians — will give one-hour performances of works by Barrière, Bartók, Bologne, Beethoven, Joplin and other composers. Tickets are $40.
Also in Old Town, the Athenaeum Gallery, 201 Prince St., reopened in June with a new exhibition, “Elzbieta Sikorska: Everything is Double,” on view through July 26. Hours are Thursday to Sunday, noon to 4 p.m. Capacity is limited and face masks are requested. Sikorska, who studied at the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts, begins her mixed-media works by making the paper on which she will draw and paint. Of this show, she writes: “The two faces of man, gods, nature, opposite meanings of ideas are an old tale. … We attach attributes to ‘she’ and ‘he’ and everything around us, but the established divisions are getting murky the more we investigate them.”
National Gallery: Ground Floor Reopening
The National Gallery of Art will reopen the ground-floor galleries in its West Building — the floor below the fountain level in the museum’s original building — on July 20. Free passes for timed entry between 11 a.m. and 3 p.m. will be released on Eventbrite on Mondays at 10 a.m. for the following week, subject to building capacity and safety. Face coverings are required and visitors are to practice six-foot social distancing. The special exhibitions “Degas at the Opéra” and “True to Nature: Open-Air Painting in Europe, 1780–1870” will be on view.
Building Museum: At-Home Learning
Families can explore architecture, design and engineering in fun and interactive ways with online resources from the National Building Museum (which remains closed). On the At-Home Learning page on the museum’s website are more than a dozen links to downloadable PDFs, including Tiny Tinkerers Coloring Sheets, Bell Pepper Architectural Drawings, Patterns in D.C. Architecture and a National Building Museum Paper Model.
