Infinite Regress: Mystical Abstraction from the Permanent Collection and Beyond
Now through February 23, 2025, Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art presents an exhibit that will make your head spin—in a good way.
All creativity, all art, all knowledge is ever evolving, making connections from past to present, becoming cumulative over time. This exhibit offers a “dialogue” between works by artists Joseph Stella, Georgia O’Keeffe, and Marsden Hartley in the museum’s permanent collection and contemporary artists Eamon Ore-Giron, Chelsea Culprit, and Shannon Bool.
Infinite Regress is also the title of a series of paintings by Ore-Giron in which each work is a slight variation on its predecessor. The series is intended to disrupt notions of stable or fixed knowledge, progressing by always looking to the past yet with new perspectives. Art and ideas advance by recycling their own histories, an idea that curator Kevin Moore brings to our attention.
Vitamin String QuartetÂ
You might have had this happen to you. You’re out and about and suddenly you hear this classic crossover music. It’s Bach, but it’s contemporary. Or a pop tune that sounds like Bach. You’re trying to place where you’ve heard it. And suddenly, it dawns on you—Bridgerton.
On Thursday, November 7, the talented Los Angeles-based Vitamin String Quartet comes to the Kauffman Center with a one-night performance for all you Bridgerton, Jane Austen, and Taylor Swift fans out there. And you know who you are. Â
The New York Observer remarked, “VSQ’s atmospheric hits have made classical versions of pop music cool,” from Billie Eilish to BTS, Daft Punk to The Weeknd. Vitamin String Quartet has many covers featured in the Netflix series Bridgerton, such as Nirvana’s Stay Away and Robyn’s Dancing On My Own. Covers of Billie Eilish’s Bad Guy and Lady Gaga’s Poker Face were used in the 2024 Doctor Who episode “Rogue,” serving as an homage to Bridgerton.Â
Makes you want to minuet your heart out.
Figaro, Figaro, Figaro, FigaroÂ
From November 15 through 17, Kansas City Lyric Opera performs the classic The Barber of Seville by Gioachino Rossini (music) from the comedy written by Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais.Â
An opera buffa, or comic opera, this light-hearted comedy of errors from the early 19th century struck a major chord with filmmakers and cartoonists in the 20th. Charles Foster Kane tries, without success, to groom his second wife to be an opera star a la The Barber of Seville in Citizen Kane. The classic cartoons Tom & Jerry, Bugs Bunny, and Woody Woodpecker all took on the opera. Operatic strains also accompanied an episode of Seinfeld, when Jerry was attempting to change Italian barbers.Â
So, who, you might ask, is that Figaro whose name gets repeated? He was a former servant, turned barber, of Count Almaviva, who wanted the beautiful Rosina to love him for himself, not his money. Figaro even gets his own aria, in which he sings about his love of life. Figaro agrees to help his old boss woo Rosina. But of course, the path of true love never runs smoothly.Â
Hip-Hop Nutcracker
What happens when the classic German story by E.T.A. Hoffman and the Russian music of Peter Tchaikovsky meets the hip-hop culture of New York City?
You get a fun, fast, audience-participation holiday mashup by Emmy- and Tony-Award nominee Jennifer Weber, currently on tour across the country and in Kansas City for just one performance on Wednesday, November 20 at the Kauffman Center.Â
Twelve dancers, a violinist, a deejay, and digital graffiti bring the sights and sounds of hip-hop culture to the stage. MC Kurtis Blow, a rapper, songwriter, and record producer—sort of a godfather of hip-hop—gets things off to a rousing start with a medley of hip-hop cuts.
Then it’s New Year’s Eve, and we soon find Maria-Clara and the Nutcracker Prince battle a gang of mice and escape through a subway to the Land of Sweets. There’s a pair of magical red sneakers and lots of breakdancing stunts.Â
Wrote one critic, “In certain parts, the show’s hip-hop style seemed so perfectly suited to Tchaikovsky’s music that I became convinced this is actually a better way to tell The Nutcracker.”
Can’t say it any better than that!Â