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Cedar Lake Contemporary Ballet

An exceptionally talented corps of sixteen dancers performs new works by the world’s most sought-after emerging choreographers. Through their daring, athletic movement and integration of ballet into contemporary and popular forms, the dancers of Cedar Lake take audiences on an unforgettable choreographic journey.

The FAC program includes important new works by some of the world’s leading choreographers. Exploiting the company’s talents, Joe Strømgren‘s Sunday Again weaves abstract movement patterns with baroque musical ornamentation from Johann Sebastian Bach to tell the simple story of a couple taxed by the quirks of cohabitation. In Jacopo Godani’s Unit Reaction the dancers are pushed until they release themselves from the cerebral and are totally immersed in the purely physical qualities of dance. Tinged with irony and humor and set to a varied score, acclaimed Dutch choreographer Didy Veldman’s piece frame of view investigates how emotion can energize and overtake the body.

“A star in Europe, Cherkaoui made Orbo Novo for the New York-based troupe, his first for an American company, whose 15 dancers not only owned the intricately athletic moves but also breathed a kind of spectral life into them” (Victoria Looseleaf, Los Angeles Times).

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Christine Blue Lamb Toubeau

Toubeau’s paintings take us in to a world where the future is now. Her compositions depict humans and robots interacting in ways and places which may be simultaneously startlingly odd and yet eerily familiar.


In her undergrad illustration and design work at Massachusetts College of Art and throughout her more recent explorations in the MFA Program at Umass Amherst, Toubeau developed work investigating the global economy’s effect on human labor under exploitive conditions. This path fed her fascination with robots. Toubea’s position is that robotics are highly agreed upon to be the next world scale work force which will most likely replace most of third world human laborers. This led her to visually describe our interaction with machines and cyborgs.

This exhibition is part of Central Gallery’s T.E.A.C.H. Program (Teachers Exhibiting At Central and Hampden).

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Balam Soto: Digital Transition

Balam Soto creates interactive paintings, murals and installations by combining digital technologies with mixed media. The exhibit represents Soto’s transition from traditional to new media. As he states: “Digital technologies are taking a prominent place in the world of art and I take full advantage of this new tool. I use these emerging technologies to create custom hardware and software that add an interactive capacity to my artistic creations. I program my colorful and vibrant works to react to the presence or behaviors of individuals. Soto works so that the individual becomes part of the creative process by affecting changes in light, color or sound in the creative works, providing a seamless interaction between human and technology.”

Prolific and innovative, Balam Soto has exhibited in fine art venues worldwide. Venues include the Queens Museum of Art in New York; Everhart Museum of Natural History, Science & Art in Scranton; Pennsylvania, Colo Colo Gallery in Massachusetts; the Centre Cultural in Brussels, Belgium; the National Library of Cameroon in West Africa; and Museum Miraflores in Guatemala City, Guatemala among numerous others. In November 2009, he was awarded with the “Latino de Oro” [Golden Latino] Award for Arts & Culture in Connecticut; he was also awarded an Official Citation by Hartford, Conn. Mayor Eddie Perez. In April 2008, he was honored with a Diploma of Recognition as a master by the National Congress of Guatemala for “being a valuable and outstanding Guatemalan with international success.”

Balam Soto is currently based in Hartford, Connecticut. An online portfolio of his artwork and a complete list of exhibitions and honors may be viewed at: http://www.balam.us/.

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Tyler Tyler by Yasuko Yokoshi

Performance and residency project
Co-presented with The Five College Dance Department
Yasuko Yokoshi’s art-making explores the complex interconnectedness of culture and history that frames our perspective of contemporary life. Her inspiration for Tyler Tyler comes from The Tale of the Heike, a classic 12th-century Japanese epic of warring clans that documents the intense desire for domination and the inevitable fall from power. The central theme of the stories – the Buddhist law of impermanence – has special resonance for Yokoshi; born and raised in Hiroshima, she was often reminded as a child of the ephemeral nature of human life. These stories continue to resonate in our own times as ambition and pride continue to spawn war and greed.

“The sound of the Gion Shoja bells echoes the impermanence of all things;

the color of the sala flowers reveals the truth that the prosperous must decline.
The proud do not endure, they are like a dream on a spring night;
the mighty fall at last, they are as dust before the wind.”
– From the opening of The Tale of the Heike (translated by Helen Craig McCullough)

Housing for the artists in Tyler Tyler is supported in part by the UMass Hotel at the Campus Center.

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Bedwin Hacker

Bedwin Hacker (Nadia El Fani, France/Morocco/Tunisia, 2003, 98 minutes, in Arabic and French with English subtitles) In this sexy and savvy thriller, a politically motivated Tunisian pirate hacks into French satellites to broadcast her messages.

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Sleeping Child

Sleeping Child (Yasmine Kassari, Morocco/Belgium, 2005, 110 minutes, in Berber, Arabic, and French with English subtitles) In Yasmine Kassari’s lyrical feature debut, women carry on living in the absence of their husbands who seek employment opportunity abroad, including performing a folk ritual called the “sleeping child.”

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Dananeer

Dananeer (Ahmed Badrakhan, Egypt, 1940, 90 minutes) Umm Kulthum , the woman known as the voice of Egypt, shines in this gorgeous black and white classic about a Bedouin girl with an exquisite voice who is “discovered.” Screening will be introduced by special guest, biographer Virginia Danielson, Richard F. French Librarian of the Eda Kuhn Loeb Music Library, Harvard University.

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Solos And Duos

The gifted trumpeter and composer Taylor Ho Bynum joins his mentor, and 10-year collaborator, saxophonist and composer Anthony Braxton in a rare duet performance. The culmination of Ho Bynum’s New England bicycle tour (dates in six states via two-wheels), this historic concert in Amherst pairs “one of the most exciting figures in jazz’s new power generation” (Time Out Chicago), with one of the seminal musical figures of our time.

“Taylor Ho Bynum is one of those once-in-a-lifetime talents who can play everything and always sound like himself,” writes Robin D.G. Kelley. “Remarkable technique, inventiveness, energy…he can really ‘talk’ with that horn of his and the tunes he’s written are mad genius.”

Bynum’s resume includes extensive performances and recordings with Braxton, and the large ensembles of Bill Dixon and Cecil Taylor. He is also a member of groups led by Myra Melford, Jason Kao Hwang and Joe Morris. Bynum’s most recent releases include a duo with drummer Tomas Fujiwara, Stepwise (NotTwo), Taylor Ho Bynum & SpiderMonkey Strings’ Madeleine Dreams (Firehouse 12), Positive Catastrophe’s Garabatos Volume One (Cuneiform), The 13th Assembly’s (un)sentimental (Important Records), and the Taylor Ho Bynum Sextet’s Asphalt Flowers Forking Paths (Hatology). In addition, he is a curator and vice president of Dave Douglas’ Festival of New Trumpet Music (FONT Music), a partner in Firehouse 12 Records, and the president of Anthony Braxton’s Tri-Centric Foundation.

“To judge from his album of duets with Anthony Braxton,” writes Francis Davis, “Bynum has it all, including a devilish sense of humor…one of the savviest trumpeters to come along in recent years, a growling sound-and-space man in the tradition of Lester Bowie.”

Anthony Braxton (born in 1945) has had as great an impact on creative music as anyone in the last 50 years. Since moving from his native Chicago, where he was active with The Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, Braxton has released well over 100 albums, won a MacArthur Award, is a full professor at Wesleyan University and continues to perform, record, write, and influence the course of arts in America. “Whatever one calls it,” writes Chris Kelsey, “there is no questioning the originality of his vision; Anthony Braxton creates music of enormous sophistication and passion that is unlike anything else that has come before it."

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Sweetness and Light

Art Made Of or About Candy, Cakes, and Sugar.

All of the artists in this show use candy, cakes and sugar as an image or a medium to either understand a cultural convention or circumvent its resulting habitual thinking.

Works in the exhibition include a fully functioning gummi bear chandelier, candy button murals, a full size wedding cake balanced on a red hand, licorice mice addressing genocide and a motion graphic charting an entire day’s glycemic index.

Featured Artists: Richard Baker, Tom Bogaert, Ya Ya Chou, Sally Curcio, Lori Ellison , Emily Eveleth, Linda Griggs, Julia Jacquette, T. Charnan Lewis, Christina Marsh, Tracy Miller, Mary Schiliro , Rebecca Siemering, Lynn Talbot

Curator’s Statement:

As we measure our lives from the birthday cake to the wedding cake to the grief buffet., food has many meanings. Through every regional recipe and religious dietary restriction, our food-ways define us as much as our folk-ways and word-ways.

And when artists use food as medium, different meanings emerge. All of the artists in this show use candy, cakes and sugar as an image or a medium to either understand a cultural convention or circumvent its resulting habitual thinking.

In doing so, some use food as a metaphor for such varied issues as genocide in Rowanda, sublimated sex or disappointing relationships or to illuminate the lack of any nutritive quality in supposedly edible objects.
Others use the luscious tactility of sweets as a logical and natural starting point for in indulging in luscious painting.

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Where There’s Smoke

Curators Statement:

Explosions are an unfortunate part of our visual vernacular. For many, after 2001 every explosion–real or Hollywood–was a raw,fresh, anxious sorrow.

While some of those explosions became as iconic as mushroom clouds. Others were televised so often that they faded from horror to banality. We cease to see them. Art lets us see them again and although they are processed and seen from a distance, we truly look.

Yet while explosions are devastating unto themselves there is a perverse beauty to the visual experience. We watch the flash and the smoke rising and billowing. If separated from tragedy, it is mesmerizing.

As a culture we celebrate that fascination every Fourth of July when fireworks offer us a bloodless, joyful reminder of freedom earned.


It comes as no surprise that politics and religion try to exploit or explain our seemingly inherent fascination. Burnt offerings carry sacrifices to heaven in smoke and the story of the profit Elijah who called for God to send fire and accept his sacrifice is shared by Jews, Muslims and Christians. Censers burn in cathedrals and in Jewish, Buddhist and Taoist temples, where the rising smoke is symbolic of prayers rising to heaven.

Where there’s smoke you’ll find our greatest yearnings and our worst actions.