Coming Attractions
Our expert critics supply a guide to film, visual art, theater, author readings, television, and music. More offerings will be added as they come in.
The Arts Fuse Currents
Music
Rob Duguay talks to members of Tiny Habits about the folk-pop band’s beginnings and the creative process behind its new album, “Keepers.”
Visual Arts
In “the drop falls” at 3S Artspace, the artist’s lush hybrid paintings bring Virginia Woolf, artificial intelligence, and ecological collapse into a seductive, disquieting flow.
Film
This lively live-action/animation hybrid turns the Road Runner cartoons’ eternal loser into a surprisingly moving plaintiff—and takes sharp aim at corporate impunity along the way.
Books
Wilbert L. Cooper examines the paradox of Black police officers seeking safety and status inside an institution shaped by racial violence.
Poetry at The Arts Fuse
This week’s poem: Buck Downs’s “solitaire for voices”
Dance
Animated calligraphy, dancers in half-shadow, and two industrial robots create an eerie, elegant theater of marks, motions, and metallic afterimages at Jacob’s Pillow.
Theater
Director Diane Paulus’s high-spirited A.R.T. adaptation of Ionesco’s anti-conformist play sometimes overplays its comic business, but John Turturro’s scruffy, strident, anguished Berenger gives the production its necessary mix of horror, humor, and desperate resistance.
Television
HBO’s docuseries on the illegal reptile trade is less wild than its predecessors, but its sorrowful, criminal undertow makes it unsettling in a different way.
Podcasts
Guest host Jessica Khan talks to DJ and broadcaster Kwame Daniels about his immersive live musical performance, “North Star.”
Short Fuses
Spotlight
Few things more clearly attest to the endurance of the human spirit and the drive for creativity than the uninterrupted and unstoppable torrent of brilliant new jazz albums we’ve already seen this year.
About the Arts Fuse
The Arts Fuse was established in June, 2007 as a curated, independent online arts magazine dedicated to publishing in-depth criticism, along with high quality previews, interviews, and commentaries. The publication's over 70 freelance critics (many of them with decades of experience) cover dance, film, food, literature, music, television, theater, video games, and visual arts. Support arts coverage that believes that culture matters.
August Short Fuses — Materia Critica
Each month, our arts critics — music, book, theater, dance, television, film, and visual arts — fire off a few brief reviews.