Culture

Art Beat: 'Spirit,' Centennial celebrations and the age of mammals

Last weekend's production of "Spirit -- The 7th Fire of Alaska" in the Discovery Theatre came off beautifully. Alaska Dance Theatre, Theatre Artists United and the Alaska Native Heritage Center collaborated to present Peter Buffett's complex composition, significantly reworked to reflect Alaska Native culture. The storyline, such as it is, was somewhat amorphous and might have been made more clear with a different staging. But the story, as it turned out, was less important than the spectacle, which was a real crowd pleaser.

The music, a mix of rock and indigenous influences, and to some extent the action, suggests Cirque du Soleil. But instead of acrobats there were Native dancers from various regions of the state. Some were constrained to fairly basic gestures, but others had more to do in the way of miming and performing sustained and multilayered dances.

But the contemporary dancers from Alaska Dance Theatre were the showstopper for me. Wayne Cilento's original choreography was brilliantly reworked and, I'm thinking, added to by Nicky Maple. In a show generally to be praised for its tight attention to timing, they were particularly precise, graceful and impressive in their repertoire of actions that ranged from the vocabulary of Twyla Tharp to a classic en pointe solo.

Producer Steven Alvarez had made it a point to include the modern dance element with the Native dancers in traditional regalia in this version of Buffett's work. His instincts were right on target.

There are a lot of people who deserve special applause for their part in the show, and they got it at the long curtain call, but it's worth singling out the fine singing of soloist Ali de Guzman.

Sami symposia

An art exhibit titled "Sami Stories: Art and Identity of an Arctic People" will open at the Anchorage Museum on Friday, Feb. 27. The show includes traditional crafts and contemporary art conveying the history and culture of the Sami people of Scandinavia, Finland and Russia -- and associated with Alaska because some migrated here to teach commercial reindeer herding in the 1800s and many of their descendants remain.

In conjunction with the exhibition, there will be a series of talks and discussions. A group of international artists will explore and compare cultures in Alaska and northern Scandinavia in a symposium titled "Circumpolar Expressions and Identities" from 10 a.m.-3:30 p.m. on Friday, Feb. 27, in Room 117 at the UAA Fine Arts Building.

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Curator Charis Gullickson, from the Northern Norway Art Museum, will present perspectives on the exhibit and the history of the Sami at 7 p.m. on Friday, Feb. 27, at the Anchorage Museum.

Gullickson will also take members of the public on a walking tour of the show at 2 p.m. on Sunday, March 1, also at the museum.

Centennial note

Events commemorating the 100th anniversary of Anchorage are underway and we'll try to keep up with particularly interesting or important aspects here on a week-by-week basis.

This week, Anchorage students are attending "Monster School III: Happy Birthday Anchorage" at West High School. Written by West teacher David Block and the school's theater group, "Monster School III" was commissioned by the school district for the Centennial Celebration. It includes puppetry as the cast goes back in time to discover how we were.

In addition to the school shows, there are four performances for the community at large still scheduled, at 6 p.m. Friday, Feb. 27, and 2, 4 and 6 p.m. Saturday, Feb. 28, at West High's auditorium. Admission is $5, free for those age 12 and younger. They're available at the door or at www.blocksclass.com.

'Either Way' follow-up

A week after our article about the video installation at the Anchorage Museum, "It Could Go Either Way," The New York Times published an interview with one of the two artists involved in the project, Mariam Ghani. The Times reported that the American-born New Yorker is the daughter of Ashram Ghani, the present president of Afghanistan. Mariam Ghani noted that her connection with the head of the Afghan government is something not many people in the art world know about. She seemed happy to leave it that way.

The age of mammals

An article by Rachel Feltman in The Washington Post made me do a double-take. Carried on Page A-9 of the ADN on Feb. 21, it reported on an article published in the Feb. 19 issue of Science magazine that, Feltman wrote, "finds that the average size of marine mammals has increased by 150 times since the Cambrian period 542 million years ago."

The last I looked, current informed speculation holds that the first mammals didn't arrive until about 200 million years ago, and marine mammals appeared well after that. But, ironic as it sounds, nothing changes faster than paleontology and Science magazine has a pretty strict peer review process.

Then I found the same information, almost word for word, in a Los Angeles Times story by Amina Kahn: "scientists analyzing the body sizes of marine mammals over nearly 550 million years have found that average body size has increased 150-fold."

I contacted the lead researcher on the project, Stanford University professor Noel Heim, and asked if there'd been some startling new development since I memorized the geological tables, not long after the late Pleistocene, geologically speaking. His response is worth noting:

"The two articles are not correct," he wrote. "The mean size of all (fossilizable) animals," my emphasis, "in the ocean has increased by a factor of 150 since the Cambrian."

Mammals, Heim stated, "didn't evolve until sometime in the Jurassic/Late Triassic." Whales didn't hit the waves until about 50 million years ago, 1/11th as long as the time frame asserted in the articles.

"There have been a lot of stories on our study, and a lot of them seem to be using the same source, which is neither our original published study nor talking with me or my co-authors directly," Heim wrote. "I suspect someone miswrote 'animals' as 'mammals'."

After which a bunch of people who apparently started copying from one another, which also may be how they passed middle school science after sleeping through the classes.

As of Tuesday, "mammals" had been switched to "animals" in the online version of Feltman's story but not on Kahn's.

Mike Dunham

Mike Dunham was a longtime ADN reporter, mainly writing about culture, arts and Alaska history. He worked in radio for 20 years before switching to print. He retired from the ADN in 2017.

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