18th annual 8 Tens @ Eight one of the best ever

The philosophy behind Santa Cruz Actors' Theatre's annual short play festival, 8 Tens @ Eight, has always been what I call the Bus Theory: if one play doesn't get you where you want to go, there'll be another one along in 10 minutes. What's great about this year's festival is the quality of the plays overall is so high. Not one of this year's eight 10-minute plays ever runs completely out of gas; all are well-written, well-acted, and cleverly staged, and most have a story arc that delivers the viewer to a valid destination.

Author Rebecca Thistlethwaite helps small-scale farms find success 

When she’s not busy training baby oxen and learning to make fermented foods—her new favorite pastimes—Rebecca Thistlethwaite runs a small farm and food holistic financial planning business in Oregon and blogs about “honest meat.”

To top off her pursuits as of late, Thistlethwaite has released a new book, entitled “Farms with a Future: Creating and Growing a Sustainable Farm Business.” The former Aromas farm owner and UC Santa Cruz researcher will be back in town to speak about her new book at Capitola Book Café on Jan. 22.

Editor’s note: Tsering Wangmo Dhompa is the author of “My rice tastes like the lake,” “In the Absent Everyday” and “Rules of the House” (all from Apogee Press). “My rice tastes like the lake” was a finalist for the Northern California Independent Bookseller’s Book of the Year Award in 2012. Her non-fiction book on Tibet is forthcoming from Penguin, India in 2013. She recently moved to Santa Cruz where she is pursuing a doctorate in Literature at UC Santa Cruz.

Filmmaker depicts how music shapes the lives of the incarcerated

Any opening night jitters that Benjamin Harbert may feel at the Santa Cruz debut of his documentary on Louisiana prison music, will be tempered by one crucial fact: The film has already received a thumb’s up from its potentially harshest critics: the prisoners themselves.

New performance piece at Motion at the Mill explores how limitations can create opportunity

The first thing you should know about “Your Body is Not a Shark” is that it is not about triumphing against impossible odds. “This isn’t a piece about Joan [Jeanrenaud] and Denise [Leto] and their conditions, nor is it a piece about heroically overcoming these things,” says choreographer Cid Pearlman, referring to her collaborators on the performance piece, who grapple with multiple sclerosis and laryngeal dystonia, respectively. “It’s a piece that’s about the possibilities for generating creativity within limitation—we want to be careful not to create a false heroic narrative.”

“Your Body is Not a Shark” encompasses dance, live music, and sound collage, and runs Jan. 17-20 at Motion at the Mill. Examining the creative process through the prism of physical limitation and difference, the production is choreographed by Pearlman, with an original score composed by Joan Jeanrenaud, text by poet Denise Leto, and musical direction by Maya Barsacq.

Clowns and pot plants abound in Santa Cruz art icon Futzie Nutzle’s latest exhibit

When it came time to put together his new 100-piece retrospective, “Creating the Path,” local art icon and former Rolling Stone cartoonist Futzie Nutzle went to the attic and dug out some oldies, some dating all the way back to the ’80s. The resulting collection of paintings, drawings, cartoons and assemblages—some funny, some poignant and some a combination thereof—can be seen now through Jan. 26 at the new R. Blitzer Gallery location inside of Westside Santa Cruz’ old Wrigley building. “It's a remarkable collection of his work and a rare opportunity to see them all in this gallery space,” gallery owner Rob Blitzer states.

The journey is the destination in new MAH exhibition, ‘Work in Progress’

You can cut me off at any time, because I tend to ramble a little bit,” warns artist Ze Frank. More often than not, his responses to questions are a process: starting off in one direction, then making a detour down other avenues of thought, before coming back around to an insightful destination. His resulting answers prove to mine richer terrain than the relatively bland questions that prompt them.

Cabrillo Stage shakes up the season with a Marx Brothers-inspired holiday hootenanny

Breaking with traditional Christmas sentimentality, the musical farce “A Night at the Nutcracker,” takes its inspiration from classic Marx Brothers’ comedies, and imagines what might happen if, behind the scenes of “The Nutcracker Ballet,” a villainous thief plotted to make off with the money for the show, and the Marx Brothers—Groucho, Chico and Harpo—arrived to save the day. 

Editor’s note: Kim Dower’s first poetry collection, “Air Kissing on Mars,” described by the Los Angeles Times as “sensual and evocative, seamlessly combining humor and heartache,” and by Thomas Lux as “a rare and astonishing first book,” was published by Red Hen Press in 2010. Dower’s poems have appeared in Ploughshares, Rattle, and Barrow Street, and Eclipse. Her second collection, “Slice of Moon,” will be published by Red Hen Press in the fall of 2013. She lives in Los Angeles.

On the eve of what could be its final run, “An Altared Christmas” founder Rhan Wilson looks back on the show’s eight-year history

Once upon a time, a group of disheveled community members gathered to celebrate the holidays—dragging feet, feigning smiles and secretly praying for the whole thing to be over as soon as possible. Then, like a message from God etched upon Tupperware, a fruitcake appeared. As they ate it, the disillusioned crowd became family, discordance became harmony in a minor key, and colors brightened every doorway.