'Your Art Here' sponsors fundraiser\nThe 'Your Art Here' project will sponsor a benefit show and art auction for the National Youth Art Month project of 2004: Billboard Generation II. The benefit show and art auction will be held at 9 p.m. Saturday at Second Story, located at 201 S. College Ave. Musical performers will include TV Mike, Cheer Up Charlie, Secret Girl, The Coke Dares and more. \nThe art auction will begin promptly at 9:30 p.m., run throughout the course of the evening and feature work of local artists. Tickets are $6 and all proceeds go to fund youth art on community billboards in Bloomington and Indianapolis. The Billboard Generation II project is meant to encourage young people to think about how to enrich their community through visual dialogue. Eight different artworks made by students in grades 1-12 in response to the question, "What would you like to tell your community?" are currently on display on billboards in Bloomington and Indianapolis. Winning themes include the effects of pollution on our environment, diversity and the importance of community involvement. For more information, contact Alyssa Hill at (812) 219-1695, alyssa@yourarthere.org or visit www.yourarthere.org.
Theater guild presents Shakespeare\nThe Bloomington Indiana Guild for Theater will be showing four performances of "The Complete Works of William Shakespeare" (abridged). The shows will run at 2 p.m. Sunday, midnight Saturday, April 17 and 2 and 8 p.m. Sunday, April 18. All shows will take place at at the Bloomington Playwrights Project, located at 314 S. Washington St. The Montreal Gazette described the production as "the funniest show you are likely to see in your entire lifetime." Tickets are $5 and are available by calling 355-9001.
Ballet company turns to NASCAR \nROANOKE, Va. -- The race has gone for almost an hour, and dancers in bright jumpsuits have started to crash in their midair leaps like a squadron of misfit superheroes.\nChoreographer Jenny Mansfield frowns. They're supposed to look like race cars, she says, not superheroes. Two weeks before the debut of her new ballet, her dancers still haven't mastered the part.\n"C'mon, you've got to get your arms right," she calls out, demonstrating with a complex twist and flex of her wrist. Dancing ballet in this small southern city of 95,000 can be a mind-bending experience. Hoping to reach a wider audience in Virginia's Appalachian highlands, Mansfield's Roanoke Ballet Theatre Dance Company has had dancers pirouette to bluegrass music and prance along the sides of buildings, suspended from ropes. Her latest creation, a ballet for NASCAR fans, aims directly at a potentially huge audience that's been especially hard to get into the theater. "In this business, you've got to take chances," Mansfield says as her dancers start swirling around the track again. "The 'Nutcrackers' of the world don't interest me anymore." Mansfield's "NASCAR Ballet" will play April 15 and 17, just in time for the April 18 Winston Cup race in nearby Martinsville. Just maybe, she says, race fans will take a break from the action and venture north to see something that's new, yet familiar. At the wave of the starting flag, 30 dancers will round an oval-shaped stage to new age music punctuated with the sounds of revving engines. Their suits will be festooned with logos from the show's sponsors. Above, three giant TV screens will show the action from different camera angles while a local sports anchor gives a live play-by-play.
