FUN WITH NUNS: The touring production of Sister Act is currently setting up shop at the Music Hall at Fair Park. The Dallas Summer Musicals show opened on Tuesday, and this video captures the sights and sounds from opening night. So should you go? Lawson Taitte says that depends. “How much you enjoy Sister Act may depend on whether you can stand the big production numbers in which nuns in spangled habits dance in chorus lines, occasionally joined by a priest in a glitzy chasuble and some way-oversized altar boys,” he writes on dallasnews.com. You’ve got a little time to decide – the show runs through June 16.

A SPARE BUCK: An unpublished novel by Pulitzer and Nobel prize winner Pearl S. Buck has been discovered in a most-unlikely place – a Fort Worth storage shed. It’s been authenticated by Buck experts and will be released in October in both hardback and e-book form. “It’s a novel that encompasses some of Buck’s common themes: intercultural relationships, travel, China, Asia in general,” Michael Carlisle, a literary agent who represents the Buck estate, tells star-telegram.com. “This is a very, very exciting moment for anybody who loves the oeuvre of Pearl Buck.”

TEAM TIME-LAPSE: Just when you thought the ideas for smartphone apps had been exhausted, someone goes and invents one worthwhile. In this case, the inventor is a UNT professor. Ruth West’s idea is for an app that would assemble a time-lapse photo of landmarks comprised of photos shot by different people. So how would that work? You can find out on Saturday by checking out an exhibition called “rePhoto: Relating Urban Ecology to Participatory Culture” at UNT on the Square. More details on the project at at dentonrc.com.

It’s an all-interview show this week. In the first segment, Art&Seek’s Stephen Becker and Dallas Morning News movie critic Chris Vognar talk to The East co-writers Brit Marling and Zal Batmanglij about the idea of justified terrorism. Don’t worry – things lighten up considerably when The Kings of Summer director Jordan Vogt-Roberts and two of his young stars join us for a conversation about what makes a good coming-of-age movie. (The Kings of Summer is definitely one of them). Be sure to subscribe to The Big Screen podcast on iTunes. Stream this week’s podcast below or download it.

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For a shortened version of our The Kings of Summer review:

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• This weekend’s Van Cliburn schedule.

Six finalists remain in the 14th Van Cliburn International Piano Competition. And they get down to business tonight,  in performances conducted by Leonard Slatkin that continue through the weekend.  TheaterJones has reviewed every performance during the competition. Click through to see how the remaining six have performed so far. And check out TheaterJones.com this weekend for more reviews.

In this list below, click on the name to see our original profiles of these pianists. You can also click the links to our Phase I and Phase II reviews of their preliminary rounds, and to the reviews of the semifinal performances.

• Sean Chen, 24, USA
  • Preliminary Recital Phase I
  • Preliminary Recital Phase II
  • Semifinals
• Fei-Fei Dong, 22, China
  • Preliminary Recital Phase I
  • Preliminary Recital Phase II
  • Semifinals
• Vadym Kholodenko, 26, Ukraine
  • Preliminary Recital Phase I
  • Preliminary Recital Phase II
  • Semifinals
• Nikita Mndoyants, 24, Russia
  • Preliminary Recital Phase I
  • Preliminary Recital Phase II
  • Semifinals
• Beatrice Rana, 20, Italy
  • Preliminary Recital Phase I
  • Preliminary Recital Phase II
  • Semifinals
• Tomoki Sakata, 19, Japan
  • Preliminary Recital Phase I
  • Preliminary Recital Phase II
  • Semifinals

Afternoon Delight is a daily diversion for when you’re just back from lunch, but not quite ready to get down to work. Check back weekdays at 1 p.m. for another one.

You would think it would just be a straight line along the 49th parallel. But it’s way more complicated than that.

Justin Ginsberg, Glass into Water: Plunge 1, 2013. Photo by Alisa Levy.

Guest blogger Danielle Marie Georgiou is the artistic director and choreographer of DGDG: Danielle Georgiou Dance Group. She also serves as the Assistant Director of the UT Arlington’s Dance Ensemble. And she’s a member of Muscle Nation.

Closing this weekend at Ro2 Art DOWNTOWN PROJECT, “Mesophase,” from upcoming local artist Justin Ginsberg, takes glass blowing to an extreme. Ginsberg uses non-traditional means to direct the molten glass toward a violent end – he’s concerned more with capturing the material in a precarious state of transition. The result: fragile pieces of spun glass perched on the verge of destruction.

Born and raised in Dallas, Ginsberg spent eight years traveling the country, earning his Bachelors in Fine Art from the University of Texas in Austin and apprenticing with master glass artists before returning to his hometown. In 2009, he started working for the Art and Art History Department at the University of Texas at Arlington, earning his MFA in 2011. Now on faculty at UTA, he is teaching his methods to a new crop of students and showing his work around the city that gave him so much. In fact, he recently co-curated a series of pop-up exhibitions in Dallas with fellow artist and friend Jeff Gibbons, titled “Deep Ellum Windows.”

Additionally, Ginsberg has shown his work nationally, including a 2012 solo exhibition at the PEEL Gallery in Houston. He’s also had exhibitions at the Wichita Falls Museum of Art and the Corning Museum of Glass in New York, and he’s been included in New Glass Review, Architectural Digest, Modern Luxury and ArtLies.

A view of the exhibition through the hand-pulled glass threads that comprise Justin Ginsberg’s Existence No. 5: One Single Life. Photo by Alisa Levy.

His show at Ro2 continues the gallery’s commitment to showing work by new, up-and-coming artists, and its interest in glasswork. Last summer, Ro2 hosted a group of 30 glass artists (of which Ginsberg was one), in conjunction with the Chihuly exhibit at the Arboretum.

“Immediately, we recognized an artist who stood apart from the crowd. Justin breaks from traditional methods used by contemporary glass artists and invents his own processes to create forms that are otherwise difficult to imagine existing,” says Jordan Roth, partner at Ro2 Art.

Installation view of Mesophase. Glass into Water 2 (foreground); Reflect on the Broken 2 (triptych, left); Glass into Water 1 (center); Glass into water – Plunge 1 (right). Photo by Alisa Levy

“Mesophase” manifests what Roth saw in Ginsberg last year. Whether pulling glass threads (with tweezers) from molten glass to create a floating installation, or dropping hot liquid glass into an aquarium to salvage beautiful remnants of this violent physical reaction, Ginsberg succeeds in producing sculptures that are visually stunning and technically unprecedented. A video, also entitled Mesophase, gives viewers a glimpse off the process the artist uses when he allows glass to interact with water.

A closing reception will be held on Friday, June 7 from 7-9 p.m.

An Artist Talk with Justin Ginsberg will be held on Sunday, June 9 at 6 p.m.

Leonard Slatkin conducting the Detroit Symphony. Photo by Donald Dietz.

The Van Cliburn Piano Competition has entered its final round, and renowned conductor Leonard Slatkin will now be leading the concert performances. Slatkin is the multi-Grammy Award-winning music director of the Detroit Symphony and the Orchestre National de Lyon in France. But Slatkin is also the author of a book about being a maestro called Conducting Business. In it, he writes that through his lengthy career, he’s avoided music competitions. KERA’s Jerome Weeks spoke with Slatkin backstage at Bass Hall to ask him why he’s in Fort Worth.

• KERA Radio Q&A:

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• Expanded online Q&A:

Jerome Weeks: In Conducting Business: Unveiling the Mystery Behind the Maestro, you recount an early experience with a conducting competition which you thought was rigged. And you declare that you’ve avoided competitions. What changed your mind?

Slatkin: I’d had a personal note from Van. We weren’t particularly close, we worked together several times and we always had a wonderful time. And I thought this would be a nice thing to do, something different for me. And I thought it’s probably not fair to say that competitions were not something I cared about very much since I haven’t done one. And maybe I’ll get a different perspective in participating here.

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Starting today, Dallas is the epicenter for national theater. That’s because hundreds of people from theater companies across the country are in town for a conference.This is a great opportunity for local theaters to strut their stuff. It’s also a good time for the rest of us to take in a show.

• KERA Radio Story:

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• Online version:

More than 700 theaters belong to Theater Communications Group. The organization throws this annual conference so its members can get to know each other and discuss common challenges.

Undermain Theatre is a TCG member. Its artistic director, Katherine Owens, is on the conferences local host committee.

“The whole entire American theater gets to see itself for three days in one place,” she says. “So we all get to meet one another and we get to talk about best practices and different problems and confer about things.”

They’ll talk about the usual issues theaters face like fundraising and audience engagement. But they’ll also share tips on bringing diversity to the stage and setting up residencies for playwrights.

Also important: the national theater community will get an up-close look at what’s happening on North Texas stages. Several companies have timed productions to piggyback on the conference.

“I think people would be surprised the kind of programming that goes on down here,” says Kitchen Dog Theater co-artistic director Tina Parker. “It’s not just all musicals and the tried-and-true. There’s a lot of risk-taking that people are able to take.”

Kitchen Dog is hosting the National New Play Network, a group of about 30 regional theaters dedicated to producing new plays. As part of that program, Kitchen Dog is staging the world premiere of Se Llama Christina by Octavio Solis. Meanwhile, the Undermain is bringing back An Iliad, an acclaimed adaptation of the classic it staged in the fall. And plenty of other new shows can be seen at the Festival of Independent Theatres at the Bath House Cultural Center.

All of this means local theatergoers also have a lot to chose from.

“When you go and see a show at FIT or here at Kitchen Dog or at the Undermain, more than likely sitting next to you will be theater professionals from around the country,” Parker says. “So, it should be a really exciting, dynamic week to take in the arts if you’re a theatergoer.”

HONORING A LEGEND: Next week, the first annual Lev Aronson Legacy Festival Week takes place at SMU. Aronson was once the principle cellist for the DSO, and he also taught at SMU. The festival is founded by a former student, Brian Thornton, who’s currently part of the Cleveland Orchestra. The purpose of the event is to not only honor his teacher’s musical contribution, but also to shed light on his amazing story of surviving the Holocaust. Thornton talked to NPR member station WKSU in Cleveland about his beloved teacher, whose survival story would make a good movie.

A DRIVE-IN CONVERT: Fort Worth is now home to Coyote Drive-In – a definite throwback in a time when more people are content to just watch movies at home. And Christopher Kelly, the former Fort Worth Star-Telegram movie critic, is one moviegoer who figured the drive-in no longer has a place in this world. But a funny thing happened when he actually went to the Coyote. “Don’t get me wrong, I still love the multiplex, with its cushy stadium seats and bone-rattling sound systems. And with video-on-demand services, there’s certainly much to be said for being able to sit on your couch, push a button and instantly conjure up a well-reviewed indie flick that’s otherwise only playing theatrically in New York or Los Angeles,” he writes on dfw.com. “But Coyote Drive-In made me realize that not all throwbacks are an exercise in empty and sentimental nostalgia. Sometimes they are also a line drawn in the sand, a valiant last stand in what’s most likely a losing battle.” By total coincidence, Kelly will join Chris Vognar and yours truly this afternoon at 1 on Think, when we’ll be talking summer movies. Maybe we’ll squeeze in a little drive-in talk, too.

PLAYING DRESS-UP: WaterTower Theatre is embracing wedding season with its current show, Black Tie. In it, cultures clash and old conventions are threatened by modern thinking – all at a wedding. So what do the critics think? Lawson Taitte found it lacking. “When a play is all about the differences between social classes, it’s essential to get the nuances just right. Although it has other felicities, WaterTower Theatre’s production of Black Tie doesn’t quite do it,” he writes on dallasnews.com. Ditto for Lindsey Wilson. While she notes on Front Row that, “WaterTower Theatre and director René Moreno have assembled a mostly dynamite cast and an even better creative team,” she goes on to write that playwright A.R. Gurney wraps things up before any real drama can unfold. Judge for yourself through June 23.

Mayor Mike Rawlings and Dallas Museum of Art Director Maxwell Anderson are in San Paulo, Brazil attending the New Cities Summit — and making some news.

The pair, along with John Rossant, chairman of the New Cities Foundation,   announced that the next New Cities Summit will take place within the Dallas Arts District on June 17-19, 2014. And a new group, the Global Cultural Districts Network, will be based in Dallas and lead by Anderson.  The Network will be a consortium of top leaders of the world’s cultural districts, old (London, New York, Berlin and Paris) and newer (Chicago’s Millennium Park, Beijing’s Olympic Green, Singapore’s Esplanade).

Over the next decade,  $250 billion will be invested to create cultural districts, according to a statement released to announce the conference and new group.  The network will share resources, best practices for funding and building such districts and for ensuring they are not just a series of buildings, but viable and important to their communities.

Release after the jump.

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Congratulations to Brian Neary of Oak Point, the winner of the Flickr Photo of the Week contest! Lyn’s won our contest many times; his last victory came in March of last year. He follows last week’s winner, Lyn Caudle.

If you would like to participate in the Flickr Photo of the Week contest, all you need to do is upload your photo to our Flickr group page. It’s fine to submit a photo you took earlier than the current week, but we are hoping that the contest will inspire you to go out and shoot something fantastic this week to share with Art&Seek users. If the picture you take involves a facet of the arts, even better. The contest week will run from Monday to Sunday, and the Art&Seek staff will pick a winner on Monday afternoon. We’ll notify the winner through FlickrMail (so be sure to check those inboxes) and ask you to fill out a short survey to tell us a little more about yourself and the photo you took. We’ll post the winners’ photo on Wednesday.

Now, here’s more from Brian:

Title of photo: Downtown
Equipment used: Canon 7D/ Canon 17- 40 mm L series wide angle
Tell us more about your photo: This photo was shot from the roof of 750 N. St. Paul while I was working on some HVAC equipment.