Features & Columns

Silicon Valley Winter Arts Guide

The season's 17 best plays, art exhibits, dance productions and musical performances

Intro | Visual | Jazz, Opera & Ballet | Classical | Stage

Illustration by Marco Toxico

The holiday season is behind us and the days are growing longer, but there is still plenty of cold and dreary weather ahead of us before the spring. It's the perfect time to contemplate the heavy things—and just as Hollywood is dropping all kinds of thinky, Oscar hopefuls in cinemas around the country, the producers of art in the South Bay are planning works that ask difficult questions and push viewers out of their comfort zones and into the unknown.

The Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University is preparing a group show of Iranian and Arab photographers and videographers—all of them women—which is meant to challenge stereotypes about the role of women in the region. Opera San Jose is challenging itself and its audience by staging a brand new work, Where Angels Fear To Tread, about the prejudices of classist, early 20th century England.

Symphony Silicon Valley is taking on one of the more brooding pieces from the Disney canon—Fantasia, performing pieces from the iconic 1940 animated film live, while the movie is played on the big screen. And the San Jose theater company, City Lights, contemplates the uneasy intersection of business, engineering and art with Build—a play about a man who creates an digital version of his deceased wife.

We cover all these local works and more in our Winter Arts guide.

Intro | Visual | Jazz, Opera & Ballet | Classical | Stage