An officer at Spring Jam on Saturday saw a 19-year-old man fall approximately 25 feet to the ground from a wall near Boynton Health Service, according to a police report. The man was underage and had been...

University students who support the Iraq war attend Gophers football games, according to a study conducted by a sociology class at the University. For the second-consecutive year, professor Ronald Anderson's...

OThis is the final story in a four-day series about diversity on campus. ne program convinced Ahmed Jama to become a student at the University. Jama, a Somali refugee, came to the United States at age...

Someone stole approximately 20 artwork pieces last week from the basement of Rarig Center, according to a police report. The artwork was part of a gallery students from the Coalition for a Respectful U...

University police and other state police departments might have a new resource for solving crimes that lack much evidence. Bills currently in the State House and Senate are pushing for the creation of...

Two elevators in Sanford Hall short-circuited last weekend, said Katie Eichele, the residence hall director. Someone kicked in an elevator's call-button panel, instead of using his or her hand to push...

University police are investigating two reports of rape that happened during the first week of April, according to a police report. University police Lt. Chuck Miner said both rapes are part of one incident...

One of two suspects police arrested in conjunction with an October shooting at the Leaning Tower of Pizza restaurant pleaded guilty Friday in a Hennepin County court, according to officials in the Hennepin...

Bike riders and thieves beware. The University Police Department officially rolled out its new bike monitor program today in an effort to curb bike thefts and enforce parking and riding rules on campus. Ben...

Connie Sullivan said that she woke up while a man was going to the bathroom in her yard last fall. "Ma'am, I am (peeing) on your shrubs, and I am going to kill 'em," Sullivan said the man told her. As...

The streets remained calm in Dinkytown on Thursday after the Gophers men's hockey team lost in the NCAA semifinals game, ending their chances of a third national championship in four years. In preparation...

For the 55th presidential inauguration, University students Philip Goyette and Tyler Richter traveled approximately 1,100 miles to Washington Both, however, are on far different sides of the political...

Over winter break, some University students put on their tool belts and headed for Florida. Others piled into cramped vans and drove to South Carolina, New Mexico and Washington. All were volunteers in...

A new year is here. Brandon Murphy said he is still annoyed about last year. He did not receive an "A" in his biology class last semester. "I was kind of disappointed," the first-year student said. "If...

Alice Munro has not written anything new in years. So it is with her 12th edition of short stories, "Runaway," that readers can expect the same old, same old. This is, however, a good virtue for a storyteller...

Some University dance students will be pirouetting to the music of burning pinecones this weekend. That's right, burning pinecones. The sinister mind behind this music is John Cage, a composer whose arrangements...

In the end, after all the drugs and high heels, salvation still eludes Scott Sundvall. But let's start at the beginning. The very beginning. Sundvall was a shoe pimp in the great "Church of Purchase." Which...

All the king's horses and all the king's men cannot prove their leader is a deceitful, pompous murderer. Despite this predicament, they are going to sing and dance their butts off. This weekend, the Xperimental...

Scrooge, that tight-fisted, cheerless miser, is back this holiday season. Well, sort of. A man who would drive a stake of holly through Santa's heart, Scrooge was the invention of author Charles Dickens...

Give Thai filmmaker Apichatpong "Joe" Weerasethakul a couple of characters and a plot. Just try it. Most likely, he will transport the characters into the jungle, leaving the plot far behind like distant...

Sometimes, Quiana Perkins will wear gobs of make-up and bind her breasts in cloth. When she straps on cha-cha heels and steps onstage, look out. Bold and brassy, Perkins morphs into her drag persona, Princess...

Juliana Pegues, creatively speaking, might come from the accent that rolls off her mother's tongue. Chances are, if you ask Pegues and the minority artists performing in "Our Voices" where they come from...

The Bush administration is back by popular demand. But don't let anyone convince you the losers in this year's election are the Democrats. The losers are still the marginalized communities, such as lesbian,...

Once there was an orphan boy living in the charred jungles of the East. One day, the Dragon of the East sent him to seek the Dragon of the West's help. But the Dragon of the West swallowed him. The orphan...

This weekend, theater and psychoanalysis will have more in common than just sex drive. The disciplines will collide in Xperimental Theater's new production "Portrait of Dora," a blistering feminist rewrite...

Anselmo Cornejo has never seen a sad skeleton. Ask him. That's what the local Mexican artist will tell you. "No, no, no," Cornejo said. "I've only seen them with the big teeth and big smiles." Skeletons...

The cast members of Xperimental Theater's "Free Hummus" don't want to entertain the audience with plot resolutions. They have a political purpose, even though it doesn't support a Democratic or Republican...

What do you do with a black, female, experimental playwright? Produce her work. This weekend, Frank Theatre will stage Suzan-Lori Parks' "Fucking A," one of two pieces Parks wrote spoofing Nathaniel Hawthorne's...

While some pushovers blindly serve the law, the folks at the Xperimental Theatre enforce a code of theatrical investigation. Under inspection this weekend is "Red, Black and Ignorant." The first of Edward...

Mike Elko's political art isn't exactly made for contemplation. When you find the phrase "resume oligarchy" in his poster work, the blunt instrument of irony is already clubbing your sensibility. He's...

The first British settlers in Australia weren't searching for religious freedom like the pilgrims. They were pickpockets and small-time thieves from the lower classes. Some of them had merely stolen a...

A four-ton clay sculpture burst into flames behind the Regis Center for Art on Thursday evening. Part performance art and part spectacle, the public clay firing was the culmination of a two-week workshop...

President George W. Bush has been the object of many flattering comparisons (Hitler, pubic hair), but never one as apt as Macbeth. University senior Dan O'Neil sees witches in the Bush administration and...

Cheech Marin drifted into U.S. popular culture smoking Doberman poop in the 1978 movie, "Up in Smoke." It might be a surprise for some, then, that Marin is the nation's largest collector of Chicano (Mexican-American)...

It's 1981, and Carlyle Brown is as Afro-centric as the next guy. That's his problem. Brown is a black man living in an America he considers his illegitimate home. For him, Africa is the motherland he mythologizes...

Formaldehyde and memories share a common purpose in the Red Eye Theater's Midwest premiere of "The Museum Play." In this tight production, writer Jordan Harrison investigates why humans, such as museum...

Blessed are the rich in spirit and poor in theatrical budgets, for they shall inherit the Xperimental Theatre. "We're doing theater that people don't want to pay to see," said Jessie Glover, the theater's...

Put your mic to it and anything is possible. Eliana Reyes was once a hardcore tomboy rapper. Now, she is Spanish Royalty. In or outside of work, poet Anthony Galloway personifies Knowledge. They, however,...

The rapper Nas once boasted that he was "Langston Hughes' predecessor." He wasn't being literal. The hip-hop MC was acknowledging the oral tradition of storytelling that pervades black culture. From hip-hop...

Socialist labor unions are organizing. The workers want to be treated like humans. The machine of progress that enslaves them will not consent to their demands. So they murder Tulio Castradoti, an Italian...

C"When one tugs at a single thing in nature, he finds it attached to the rest of the world." - John Muir raig Blacklock can make landscape photography synonymous with the word "nude." The son of Minnesota...

Presidential incumbent George W. Bush won't be the scariest thing in St. Paul this September. Starting Gate Productions begins its third season with Peter Shaffer's menacing "Equus," a story about random...

In the exhibit "Expression Multicultural Latino," bold color is merely a prerequisite to reality. The rest is up to the artist. For artist Adrian Cruz, aliens and Clint Eastwood are building blocks in...

.5:30 p.m. Friday, 10 p.m. Saturday, 8:30 p.m. Sunday Illusion Theatre "Deux" is French. "Six Steps, Part Deux" implies a second time. Which is sad. Because it means the wussy superheroes at the center...

?"Visible Fringe" 5 p.m.-10 p.m. daily through Sunday Thorpe Building 1618 Central Ave. N.E., Minneapolis Of the 17 artists in the "Visible Fringe" that are exhibiting their work at the Thorpe Building,...

?2:30 p.m. Wednesday, 8:30 p.m. Sunday Red Eye Theatre University lecturer Ari Hoptman sees opportunity in cliche. In his world, a cat is to a hat, as a mouse is to a house, as pious Jews are to cement...

5:30 p.m. Thursday, 4 p.m. Friday, 7 p.m. Sunday Red Eye Theatre Miss Celtic avoids potatoes. Miss Latin is a blistering feminist in a mini skirt. Miss Black, well, she's a brick house. Scathing gender...

The "fringe" in the Minnesota Fringe Festival is a statement of artistic piety and frivolity. "I sort of think of the fringe festival as a nice barometer of what's out there in the (artistic) world," said...

Orange spray paint signifies death for some stately elm trees on the University campus this summer. The cause is Dutch elm disease, an ailment with a notorious history in the Twin Cities. In 1977, 31,000...

When all parties have been seduced and every one is a loser, sexual action is still one man's conquest. Meet Norman (Edwin Strout), an ill-mannered English cad in a sexual midlife crisis. Cold meat sandwiches...

Agatha Christie's "The Mousetrap," now onstage at the Minnesota Centennial Showboat, is very much like other whodunits. A well-mannered guest is murdered in an English country house. A shrewd detective...

Maybe it's the unlikely marriage between utility and flamboyant art, but the McNamara alumni center definitely looks like a piece of the Death Star from "Star Wars." Inside, another example of empire looms. The...

The area beneath Highway 280 on the University transitway is not an ideal space for displaying art. There are shards of glass and mud slicks. Abandoned cargo containers rest alongside the train yard like...

Hell, death and warlords are words synonymous with home in Nuruddin Farah's new book "Links," a hard look into Somalia's crisis after the fall of its military regime in 1991. Farah, a Somalia-born writer,...

A parade isn't just a parade when a gaping, 8-foot beast swallows fools and henchmen. No, then it toes the theatrical line. Winter is over and the 30th annual In the Heart of the Beast Puppet and Mask...

For Kaleena Miller, a tap shoe is the thing that makes the dancer sing. At the Cedar/Riverside People's Center, the University dance sophomore practices her a cappella tap routine "BoogiiiE," her footwork...

In the Twin Cities' vast theater scene, what is good for the majority is not always good for - or representative of - the minority. Traditionally marginalized communities (ethnic, sexual, religious or...

As if the world needed more U.S. patriotism, director John Lee Hancock now offers up his epic cinematic failure, "The Alamo." Covered with a thin veneer of history lesson, "The Alamo" depicts three heroes'...

Transsexuals aren't just sweet. In the University theatre's gender-bending production "The Rocky Horror Show," Dr. Frank-n-Furter (Jairus Abts), a transsexual, is proof that what was once biologically...

LDir. Jacques Doillon ove is prostitution in director Jacques Doillon's "Raja," a love story set in Morocco involving business transactions and cultural divisions. Bored with his fortune and solitude,...

Cecilie Keenan doesn't like to direct kitchen-sink television dramas. Instead, the Chicago-based freelance director enjoys productions that allow her to pull out all the tricks and trapdoors and make the...

SDir. Hanna Elias et amidst the brutal Israeli and Palestinian conflict, "The Olive Harvest" is a film struggling to be a dramatic social critique. Palestinian political prisoner Mazen (Mazen Saade) returns...

There's a whole lot of dancing in the Theatre de la Jeune Lune's production "The Ballroom." Communist wait staff shuffle with tables. A bandy-legged line of fogies pad around with punk youths. "The Ballroom"...

When fair Minneapolis was the home of flour power, its papa was the Pillsbury doughboy. Mill City, as Minneapolis was known, was the world's largest flour producer between 1880 and 1930. Thanks to the...

Some performers just can't live a life of cud-chewing complacency. These errant few bring their creativity to the edge. And some, such as Vanessa Voskuil, dance on that precipice. "Reference and Being,"...

Not all dorm-bound University first-year students live a life of boredom and dreariness. The 11th and 12th floors of Middlebrook Hall are the site of the West Bank Arts House, an artist community of students...

A painting hangs plumb and square on the wall in the first scene of "Far Away," now onstage at the Pillsbury House Theatre. In the picture a rocking chair in afternoon sunlight rests on a lazy front porch,...

A"The hottest places in hell are reserved for those who, in times of great moral crisis, maintain their neutrality." - Dante ll theater is political. Theater companies that avoid political subject matter...

A rural silence pervades the opening 10 minutes of "The Drawer Boy," now onstage at the Jungle Theatre. Birds chirp, a lawnmower drones in the background and Angus, the dimwitted farmer, sits slumped in...

Before it slipped into the obscurity of pop history, big band was infectious, subversive music that partied hard and swung harder. Now universities, high schools and middle schools use big band ensembles...

Under the rigors of the University's Bachelor of Fine Arts actor training program, Jonas Goslow, a University junior, has transformed himself from a human to an academic automaton to an old Italian miser...

This weekend the West Bank Arts Quarter will be a scene of imprisonment. Jeremey Catterton, a senior in the bachelor of fine arts actor training program, has combined contemporary literature by prisoners...

This is the story of a man, marked by an image from his childhood." So begins French director Chris Marker's 1962 film "La Jetée," the voiceover describing a still portrait of a young lady smiling. While...

Fort Snelling was never attacked. Stationed between St. Paul and Minneapolis on the muddy banks of the Mississippi, the fort was established as a U.S. army outpost in 1825 to defend what was then part...

The Kite-Eating Tree has a big chip on its shoulder. The band's Web site manifesto bares its teeth at "corporate approved pop culture trash," while reminding its fans "the only thing (the music industry)...

Love letters should be more than a cheap Valentine's Day card and chalky candy. As Italian Renaissance poets Petrarch and Dante proved, love letters can be highly stylized extramarital affairs, where intimacies...

One month is not enough. In February, our nation honors black contributions to culture and history. The underlying assumption is that a month of activities and platitudes, necessarily dwarfed by the wealth...

Making a major career change can be difficult, especially when your work is viewed by thousands of people. Darron L. West is the director and sound designer for the Children's Theatre Company's production...

Obsession with health and the body is rampant. A particularly ignorant portion of the population, thanks to keen marketing strategies and insidious scare tactics, now applaud the health benefits of organic...

Jabba the Hutt's grotesqueries never had such fierce competition. At one point in "Mercurius Lumen," the new production from Puppetry Arts Studio, a huge bullfrog head, looking like a decapitated Hutt,...

Most artists live under serious financial constraints. Laura Littleford and Margo McCreary, both seasoned Minneapolis writers and performers, understand the struggle to create their own material while...

There are two sides to every story. Supporters of Steven Sondheim, the recipient of countless accolades for his Broadway musicals, probably never hear the groans of his detractors. Likewise, those who...

Certain animals, such as cats and sexually frustrated cardinals, have a difficult time making sense of their reflections. Good thing you're human. Humans love their reflections. They put mirrors everywhere....

One's life, in recollection, could be nothing more than a product of narrative. We lead our lives as stories, and the stories we tell ourselves continually construct our identity. We often censor and select...

There are no differences," alleged the philosopher William James. "But differences of degree." For a New York-based theater troupe, however, there was darkness and then there was God. This is evident within...

All right kids, crowd around. Take your spots there on the carpet. Everyone over 21 go to the back. No, turn your cell phones off. Attention everyone, attention! Today's lesson is about "Wild Rumpus at...

The 1939 MGM film "The Wizard of Oz" had no trouble winning an audience. Angry apple trees, the Munchkins' Lollipop Guild and flying monkeys were some Oz amenities that made it a hard movie to resist....

Dragonflies can have sex in mid air. Bullfrogs can leap nine times the length of their bodies. Humans, those boring bipeds, were robbed of this acrobatic prowess. Yet fear not, denizens of academia. In...

Playwright Lee Breuer likes to mix it up a bit. The Mabou Mines, of which Breuer is a founding member, are an avant-garde theater group using unusual ideas and technologies to alchemize their plays. Puppets,...

A recent New York Times' article told of a Honduran woman's journey to the United States. Lydda Gonzalez, a sewing machine operator in a Honduran sweatshop, said she and many other Hondurans endure harsh...

Ah, men, those wooly beings of bestial id. With all their scratching, snoring and rude table manners, it's a wonder that women still consider them mating material. Yet we must remember that the spectrum...

Journalists, editorial cartoonists and comedians are some of the few who use levity to combat political sobriety. Then, there is the more rambunctious type of satirist. Beneath the sheepskin hide strong...

Inspiration is fast and loose. One second you are a rational and responsible individual, and the next you're frantically composing a piece of poetic doggerel. Artists of all kinds (visual, poetic, musical)...

Human actions are inextricably bound to moral codes. Society rests squarely on the principle of ethical clarity. The moral value of certain actions has always been a determinant of laws and codes of conduct....

Many writers have broached the subject of exile. Nobel Prize-winning authors such as Salman Rushdie and V.S. Naipaul have dealt with it not only in their fiction but also as exiles themselves. Identity...

Credit cards, stuffed animals, Barbie dolls and afghans. How does one make a patchwork quilt? In 1992, 17 quilted acres of memories (including the items listed above) were unfurled in Washington. The bedspread...

It's been a quiet week at the University, our ivory tower, out here on the margins of convention. Despite the threat of global warming, an abnormally temperate autumn does not ensure an easier winter....

Patricide and maternal coitus are the leading causes of blindness among dramatic men. Sophocles' ancient tale "Oedipus Rex" has been interpreted many ways. Jim Morrison wrote a song about it. Although...

Reason attempts to explain many things. A recent article in Scientific American smugly proposed that our universe is about 10 to the 10 to the 118 meters away from its level-one identical parallel universe....

Fictional characters often influence national identities. The machismo of James Dean's Jim Stark and Marlon Brando's Stanley Kowalski did as much to personify the modern male as capitalism did for American...