Browsing: Arts and Life

Spring breakers staying in Waco can travel not across the state, but through time and experience rituals of a past time at the Mayborn Museum.
The Gov. Bill and Vara Daniel Historic Village is holding daily activities from 1 to 3 p.m. Monday through Friday for their Spring in the Village event. The village, which is based on a 1890s community on the Brazos River, will hold activities that mirror early Texas settler life.

NEW YORK — Ever feel like you’re on a big hamster wheel and you can’t get off? Ward Shelley and Alex Schweder know that feeling all too well. The two performance artists are spending 10 days living, eating and sleeping on a giant hamster wheel to make a larger point: We all have to work together to get through the daily grind.

LOS ANGELES — With a string of recent deals, cable and satellite providers are beginning to acknowledge a brutal truth that companies like Hulu and Netflix have known all along: Many TV viewers, especially young ones, want shows and movies on their own terms — wherever, whenever and on whatever devices they choose.

Instead of the routine approach of writing letters to family and friends asking for financial support for missions, a soon-to-be Baylor student decided to raise the money by releasing an original song.

After months of preparation and two weeks of performances, this year’s All-University Sing wrapped up Saturday night and declared Kappa Omega Tau’s “The Battle Within” the top act of the night. This honor moves the group on to Pigskin in the fall.

After months of preparation and two weeks of performances, this year’s All-University Sing wrapped up Saturday night and declared Kappa Omega Tau’s “The Battle Within” the top act of the night. This honor moves the group on to Pigskin in the fall.

In this week’s podcast, Taylor Rexrode and Taylor Griffin discuss their final predictions for Sunday’s Academy Awards in comparison with the trending top picks. The new “Godzilla” reboot starring Bryan Cranston is the subject for a new “Trailer Trash.”

Uproar Records’ singer-songwriter artist Trannie Stevens, a McGregor junior, has a lot of musical experience. She’s performed with big names like Toby Keith and Jack Ingram. She has been a headlining performer, recorded in Nashville and has big hopes for her musical future. However, performing with Sigma Alpha Epsilon during this year’s All-University Sing is a first for Stevens and an experience she calls incomparable.

This morning, more than 300 high school choir students will arrive at Baylor without any music. By 5 p.m. they will perform together for the first time, singing pieces they have been taught in one day.

This combination of intensity, teamwork and talent is the core of the 10th annual Women’s Choir Festival.

As a newbie to the tradition hype that is All-University Sing, it certainly has been interesting to observe the Baylor culture in this way: guys in eyeliner studying in the library, girls complaining about late nights and the overarching sense of competition in the fresh February air.

What makes a good All-University Sing act great?

Judges look at five main elements — entertainment value, musical quality, choreography, theme development and creativity. While most top acts have a solid combination of all five, there is often one that dominates the others — an exceptional soloist, a never-before-seen dance trick or maybe a tear-jerking theme.

Every year as the All-University Sing competition draws near, the Baylor campus readies itself for a festival of music, culture and memorable performances. The nights are filled with wonder as performances crafted over six weeks of intense preparation are realized on stage.

NEW YORK — iTunes is putting its stamp on South by Southwest, piggybacking on the annual event with its own music festival.

The company said Wednesday it will debut its popular iTunes Festival, a free concert series held in London for the past seven years. While the London version is a 30-day event, the U.S. festival will feature five nights of rock, country, pop and hip-hop at South by Southwest, an international showcase for music, film and interactive projects to be held next month in Austin.

WASHINGTON — Jazz musicians are famous for their musical conversations — one improvises a few bars and another plays an answer. Now research shows some of the brain’s language regions enable that musical back-and-forth much like a spoken conversation.

J.K. Rowling is back with a novel involving
a writer whose acid-tipped pen may have led to murder.
Publisher Little, Brown said Monday that it is publishing
a second book by Robert Galbraith, the “Harry Potter”
author’s thriller-writing pseudonym.

Born Dana Owens, she first became noticed as a hip-hop rapper in her teens, but it didn’t take long for Newark, N.J.’s Queen Latifah to blossom into a worldclass entertainer.

Eight times a day, a group of nuns files into a chapel in their rural northwest Missouri monastery to chant and worship.
Quite unexpectedly, this private, prayerful pursuit has made the Benedictines of Mary a chart-topping recording industry curiosity.

This weekend, Wacoans and students will have the opportunity to see athletes compete under the aliases of TailGator, Smashosaurus and Stinger while launching into the air and smashing cars — yes, this is monster trucks.