Archives for November 2016

This holiday season, the Academy is excited to present a new type of event to the Lynchburg community. Thanks to Rising Alternative, we will be screening High Definition footage of The Nutcracker as well as The Three Tenors in Concert. Rising Alternative is an innovative company that presents special events such as opera and ballet in High Definition. This company’s special events screenings brought diverse audiences to the wonderful world of cinema. Their team has provided live-recorded fine arts performances to venues in 44 countries worldwide. Rising Alternative has proven to be successful, bringing over 210 programs to around two million viewers. The first “alternative content” screening will feature the 1990 performance of The Three Tenors in Concert. Three of the world’s greatest opera singers, Luciano Pavarotti, Plácido Domingo, and José Carreras assembled on the outdoor stage of the Baths of Caracalla. They performed operatic arias and popular tunes with selections from operas like “Tosca” and “Turandot.” The tenors, accompanied by a 198-member orchestra led by Zubin Mehta, enchanted the audience through the regular program and three encores. This recording of the tenors’ debut concert holds the Guinness World Record for best-selling classical music album. THREE TENORS CHRISTMAS CONCERT HD […]

The Academy Center of the Arts partnered with Brett Thomas of Mobile Raku to offer a workshop about the unique process of raku. The students who enrolled in the workshop received a 25-pound bag of raku clay, with which they created stunning pieces by throwing on a pottery wheel and by hand building. The raku process is a low-fire method in which the clay is quickly heated in a kiln until the glaze has melted. The clay is then immediately transferred to a container filled with combustible material for the post-firing phase. This immersion beautifully affects the final outcome of the glaze and the raw clay. Normally, the firing process takes around 36 hours from firing up the kiln to cool down. With raku, the firing process only takes thirty minutes, from placing the clay in the kiln to dousing the pieces with water. The pieces sit in the kiln only until the glaze melts, which takes less than one hour. The beautiful glazes that Brett Thomas provided require about twenty minutes to melt in the kiln. Next, the fired clay spends about ten minutes in the post-firing containers. When that time is up, the pieces are then carefully transferred […]