Few dancers who have graced Kansas City stages possess the drive, the depth of curiosity, or the breadth of performance experience that Emara Vonae’ Neymour Jackson can claim. The 26-year-old multi-hyphenated artist is a dancer-singer-actor-author-choreographer-filmmaker-performance-artist — not necessarily in that order. Her résumé reflects an international profile, with activities in Paris, Marseilles, Seoul, New York, […]

Late playwright’s portrait of a Black family confronts truth with humor and compassion  Broke-ology is at once a Kansas City story and a universal story. It recounts a tale of illness and crisis in a particular Black family in the Midwest and at the same time shines light on a dilemma that nearly every family in […]

It was neither barbecue nor Constitutional debate that drew Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor to Kansas City this August, but a workshop to prepare a new project for the Coterie Theatre. Just Ask! which opens at the Coterie this January 29th, is an adaptation of Sotomayor’s children’s book Just Ask: Be Different, Be Brave, Be You, which became a New […]

… in music, theater, and dance  JANUARY-FEBRUARY January 29-February 23: Coterie Theatre; Just Ask!; The best-selling book by Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor, which Fran Sillau and Mark Kurtz have adapted into a musical, tells of a group of young people with differing abilities who wonder if they’ll ever be accepted into society; with What […]

Karen Paisley and the board of directors of the Metropolitan Ensemble Theatre have an urgent message for Kansas City theatergoers: We’re still here. Ten months after what appeared to be a devastating fire at the company’s home, the Warwick Theatre on South Main, this 20-year-old company has assiduously scrubbed, polished, demolished, salvaged. Now, armed with fresh […]

December is filled with choral concerts, and in the coming weeks nearly all of the operational non-profit choirs — not to mention dozens of choruses hosted by places worship — will see full houses for their holiday programs.  “There are audiences for these choirs, robust audiences,” said Ben A. Spalding, who formed Spire Chamber Ensemble […]

For more than five centuries, European settlers went to extravagant lengths to erase Native American tradition, culture, and even language from the face of North America. The effect was devastating for Native peoples already contending with disease, massacres, and forced displacement.  The past half-century has seen a dramatic turnaround, both in attitudes and in legal protections […]

We have long recognized that the arts can aid in certain types of healing. Music, art, and dance therapy — which have grown into sophisticated, goal-oriented disciplines — offer practical tools that serve both physical and psychotherapy and can assist in treating post-traumatic stress, dementia/Alzheimer’s Disease, and even certain mental illnesses.  Drama therapy, which traces […]

Christoph Wolff has devoted much of his life’s work to demonstrating not just that music is a unifying force, but that musical research itself can also be a place in which scholars and musicians from various cultural backgrounds, regions, and even political convictions can come together for a common purpose.  During the chaotic years after […]

Freddy Acevedo possesses a range as wide as any theater artist you’ll meet. A strong presence on Kansas City stages in recent years, locally the Texas-born actor/producer/playwright/educator has played a valiant Jonathan Harker (Dracula, Kansas City Actors’ Theatre), a wittily hyperactive Rafael (Clyde’s, Unicorn Theatre), an elegant Paris (Romeo and Juliet, Heart of America Shakespeare Festival), and an […]

If you want to understand the complexity of Stephanie Zuluaga Kneeman’s artistry, you need to gain an image of the whole person. She is a mezzo-soprano of rich musical gifts and wide-ranging interests: music and theater, but also family, community, and even the business world. She is operatically trained but sings everything from salsa to […]

Jerry Mañan Actor/playwright/director  Jerry Mañan is an actor, writer, director, and theater artist based in the Kansas City area. He graduated from Avila University, where in his last year he received the Best Classical Acting award at the American College Theatre Festival. Locally he has appeared at the Unicorn Theatre (Refuge, Backwards Forwards Back, The Lifespan of […]

The first thing you notice, when delving into the thousands of letters that artist Georgia O’Keeffe and photographer Alfred Stieglitz exchanged over three decades, is how many of them read like poetry. So much so, in fact, that when composer Kevin Puts determined to write songs for Renée Fleming drawn from the O’Keeffe letters, the […]

The health of a community’s performing arts scene is measured not only by the vigor of its large organizations, but by the constant proliferation of smaller groups that fill out the landscape with fresh voices and provocative ideas. The first quarter of the 21st century has seen a remarkable flourishing of new choirs, chamber ensembles, […]