Plan the next 72 hours of your life with help from our critics. Herewith, the five unmissable events going down this weekend in the East Bay.
21 Projects
When Elizabeth Bernstein and Carrie Hott opened the Royal NoneSuch Gallery (4321 Telegraph Ave., Oakland) two and a half years ago, they knew they wanted to create the kind of space where people could really interact with the art. And, indeed, in its short two years, the gallery has presented a slew of multisensory, multidisciplinary, interactive, and occasionally risky shows, workshops, and community events that often have little in common with the prototypical passive white-walled gallery experience. In that sense, the gallery’s current undertaking, 21 Projects x 21 Days x 21 Hours, is the natural extension of that impulse. The concept is simple: take 21 artists, broadly defined, and give each of them exactly an hour to do whatever they want with the gallery. “It was kind of like a dare: If you had one hour and a blank space, what would you do?” Bernstein said. Thus far, the answer to that question has been, well, just about everything. The first project in this year’s series, Dan Graham’s “2011 Zevon Awards,” was a borderline absurdist performance piece that placed elaborately characterized genre authors at a fake science-fiction awards ceremony; two nights after that, Aaron Terry invited guests to wear hand-sewn “Urban Yetti” outfits while he documented their actions as part of a meta-social experiment. The remaining half of the series, which ends Sunday, April 17, promises to be equally manifold, with projects including drawing sessions, a citrus tasting, and workshops both utilitarian (how to make your own paint) and less so (how to speak with a convincing fake accent). Check website for full schedule; free. RoyalNoneSuchGallery.com — Ellen Cushing
Dimensions Dance Theater
