An exciting weekend in Dallas — yes, yes, of course, for the Mavs (sorry, a little hoarse this morning from screaming at the teevee). But hey, it was also exciting for contemporary dance: the Bruce Wood Dance Project debuted. And now, just in time, comes a new blog to cover the local dance scene.

It’s the revenge of the minstrel show. At the Undermain, Young Jean Lee’s “The Shipment” is a brilliantly assaultive comic vaudeville about race relations. As a hilarious attack on the pop-culture images of African-Americans, “The Shipment” hits a lot of targets — rap videos, edgy stand-up comics — but ultimately loses itself in the smoke.

It’s SNL JPN! The NBC franchise has gone Japanese.

The tour of ‘Billy Elliot’ is at the Winspear. The affecting film about a mining-town boy defying his father to dance has become a big, Tony-winning Broadway musical — with all the advantages and disadvantages.

It’s a late work by Henri Matisse — a radiantly colorful collage, a design for a stained-glass window. It’s also extremely light-sensitive, which is why the DMA doesn’t put it on display very often.

Congratulations to Brandon Burns of Fort Worth, the winner of the Flickr Photo of the Week Contest! Brandon’s shot of the Mississippi at high flood is a great vertical, so you have to click through to see it all.

He’s danced with New York City Ballet and Twyla Tharp, and his choreography has won national acclaim. But his own company closed down in 2006. Now Bruce Wood, North Texas’ leading contemporary choreographer, is starting over – in Dallas’ Arts District.

When it comes to transforming a city’s visual arts landscape, North Texas doesn’t have a residency program quite on the scale of CORE – part of the Museum of Fine Arts Houston. Now the MAC has launched a three-year collaboration with CORE, bringing its annual show to town, the first time it’s ever left Houston. Plus, a film documenting it.

Amid all the semi-finals and marathons last week, the Van Cliburn Amateur Competition hosted a panel of classical music critics — the competition’s press jury — discussing the music industry, the media industry, their jobs as critics and whether the Met Opera’s simulcasts are an abomination.

A Philip Glass-Allen Ginsberg collaboration from 1990, ‘Hydrogen Jukebox’ is another smart bit of counter-programming by the Fort Worth Opera. The chamber opera about Ginsberg’s America, circa 1950s thru ’90s, can be potent, even ravishing — when it isn’t tiresome.