HERE & NOW
Sunday, April 10, 2005; Page N04
WHEN L.A. POP-ROCKERS Maroon 5 bested such talents as hip-hopper Kanye West and redneck royalty Gretchen Wilson for best new artist at this year's Grammy Awards, snotty music scribes harrumphed that this was Hootie & the Blowfish all over again. (From Grammy to Burger King commercial: Ouch, that's gotta hoot.) Still, you can't deny Maroon 5's stranglehold on the radio ("This Love" was last year's ubiquitous pop annoyance) and steady selling power (its 2002 breakout album "Songs About Jane" has since gone multi-platinum). Plus Adam Levine, the quintet's lead singer, is a cutie with some decent pop chops. But the best reason to see Maroon 5 on Saturday is that it's at Merriweather Post Pavilion. That's right: outside. The summer concert season is upon us, kids. And what's not to love about that?
TWO NATIVE AMERICAN POTTERS, Lisa Holt and Harlan Reano, will be making their first trip out of the Southwest this week. They are traveling from New Mexico to participate in the 23rd Smithsonian Craft Show, which opens Thursday. Holt, who is the daughter of Cochiti Pueblo artist Inez Ortiz, and Reano, who is from Santo Domingo Pueblo, have attracted notice for artful variations of time-honored themes. Holt makes the clay forms, and Reano paints. Their work -- pots and storyteller figures -- will be displayed amid aisles full of one-of-a-kind and limited-edition crafts, including fiber art, fashion, furniture, glass, jewelry, metal and burled wood objects. Holt and Reano's presence will remain long after the four-day exhibition ends next Sunday. Organizers have arranged for one of their works to be given to the permanent collection of the National Museum of the American Indian on the Mall.
UNDER THE DIRECTION of Yuri Petukhov, Russia's St. Petersburg Ballet Theatre aims to export contemporary Russian productions rather than recycling well-known classics. To wit, Saturday's program features an updated take on the legendary Ballets Russes. The program, titled "Russian Seasons," does include a version of "Chopiniana" (known to the Western world as "Les Sylphides"), inspired by Michel Fokine's original. That's where nostalgia ends, however. There will be a version of "Scheherazade" on the program, though it bears little relation to Fokine's smash hit from 1910. Petukhov created his account in a neoclassical style and drew from the original "Thousand and One Nights" tale for his narrative. Also on the bill is Petukhov's "Capriccio Italien," which he has said was influenced by the work of George Balanchine. Next Sunday the company performs a two-act version of "Romeo and Juliet," also by Petukhov.
YOU HEAR IT FIRST: a quick, dry rat-a-tat that sounds like distant castanets. Head into the back room of Conner Contemporary Art and you find that your first guess came close: The video on display there is indeed about flamenco. The piece, part of a new solo show by Swedish artist Maria Friberg, shows a bottom-up view of the soles of a Spanish dancer's shoes as he stamps his heart out on a sheet of plexiglass. There's no music to be heard, so the strange artificiality of this classic dance form becomes that much more apparent -- Friberg distills it to a pair of disembodied feet doing odd moves. For all the romance attached to flamenco, the video feels like a live-action version of the diagrams that Arthur Murray dance schools used to issue for any difficult new step. Or, for that matter, like an update on the famous Warhol paintings that riffed on those same diagrams. But Friberg's man in motion turns out more engrossing than either of those static prototypes.
