This year's Ann Arbor Poetry Slam Finals are happening Saturday, April 16 at Espresso Royale on State Street.

The top 12 competitors from this season will deliver their best poetry for the chance to win one of four team spots to represent Ann Arbor at the National Poetry Slam, plus there will be a full feature performance by internationally acclaimed poet Tim "Toaster" Henderson.

Laboring all year to cook up their best poetic recipes, 12 champion poets will rush the stage with only three minutes each—holding nothing back—to tell it all and tell it well! The audience erupts with boos, roars, applause - or silence - to cast their votes in front of five randomly selected audience member judges.

Excitement rises as the number of contenders drops to nine, then seven, then five, until only four triumph, earning the right to represent Ann Arbor at the National Poetry Slam!

And, as if 12 award-winning local poets weren't enough to blow your mind and soothe your conscience, internationally acclaimed poet Tim "Toaster" Henderson is traveling in to offer a feature performance. Henderson, based in the Bay Area but originally from Chicago, is one of the most captivating poets and performers of our generation. Come ready for an epic final showdown at Espresso Royale on State St. on April 16.

Community contributor Garret Potter is a slam poet and a co-organizer of the Ann Arbor Poetry Slam along with Lindsay Stone.

The Ann Arbor Poetry Slam Finals take place Saturday, April 16, 2016 at 7 pm at Espresso Royale at 324 S. State St. in Ann Arbor. Advance tickets are $8 student, $10 general, the cost is $15 at the door. Visit the Ann Arbor Poetry Slam's Facebook page for more details.

The Ann Arbor Poetry Slam is free and open to the public and happens every first and third Sunday at Espresso Royale on State Street.

Despite what Roger Ebert once said, video games can be art. Art is anything that conveys a universal truth and, as psychologist Daniel J. Levity says, “if successful, will continue to move and to touch people even as contexts, societies, and cultures change.” The exhibit Winteractive: The Art of Video Games, currently on display in the University of Michigan Hatcher Gallery, has some great examples of games that do just that.

In Flower, you are the wind, controlling the movement of a single flower petal through the air. Though no words are involved, the game follows a narrative arc that explores finding balance between nature and a constructed environment.

The Unfinished Swan is an existential exploration into the equivalent of a Jackson Pollock painting. You, as the player, are a young boy chasing after a swan who has wandered out of a painting and into a surreal, unfinished kingdom. The game begins in a completely white space where you get to throw paint to reveal the world around you and venture into the unknown.

Passage is a metaphor for the human condition that explores the poetry of experiences and consequences. Each play-through is a five minute "poem" in which you get to experience an entire human lifespan. Passage asks you to choose which goals are most important and demonstrates how pursuing one goal can make the pursuit of others more difficult. Do you seek companionship, treasure, distance? It's up to you, and your early choices alter your eventual experience.

Winteractive is a hands-on exhibition. Eight games in total are set up for you to play at demo stations throughout the Hatcher Graduate Library Gallery.

Video games, just like writing and painting, are a creative medium. Early language existed as a means to communicate danger. Writing originated as bookkeeping. Painting began as an attempt to capture the reality of nature as seen by the human eye. It takes time to change the perception of an audience – sometimes many generations' worth.

Games can educate and often provide a means to escape your reality, but some can also touch your heart and connect you to the universe. Some games are art, as this exhibition clearly demonstrates.

Anne Drozd is a Production Librarian at AADL.

Winteractive: The Art of Video Games is on display through Friday, April 15 at the University of Michigan Hatcher Graduate Library Gallery, located at 913 S. University Avenue, Ann Arbor, MI 48109. This exhibit was a collaboration between the Ann Arbor District Library and the University of Michigan Library Computer & Video Game Archive.

Donald Harrison's latest project is, of his own design, a passion project which won’t happen without your support. Harrison is the Lead Producer, Director and Founder of 7 Cylinders Studio, which makes videos for a variety of businesses and organizations in the Ann Arbor area and beyond, from RoosRoast Coffee to the Huron Valley Watershed Council. Video production is a natural career path for the 43-year-old Southfield native, having previously served as Executive Director of the Ann Arbor Film Festival from 2008 – 2012.

His newest endeavor, Commie High: The Film, is a documentary that Harrison and his crew hope to make about Ann Arbor’s Community High School. The school started in 1972 as an experiment in public education and was one of the first public magnet schools in the country.

“It was part of a movement in the late 60s and early 70s,” said Harrison during a recent interview with me on 107.1 WKQL-FM. “The movement was to do education in a different way. Students were getting credit for going out in the community and doing things, actually interacting with different businesses and different people. If you were interested in blacksmithing, [you would] find a blacksmith and learn how to do that, how to work with metal. You were also able to design your own curriculum and you also called teachers by their first name - that continues to this day.”

Setting Community High apart from other alternative schools is the fact that it doesn’t skew toward a specific student population (‘gifted’ or ‘underachieving’), and it doesn’t favor a certain area of study above others. Community High, located on North Division near Kerrytown, has an impressive and diverse list of alumni which includes NPR reporter Neda Ulaby, author and Found Magazine publisher Davy Rothbart, party-rocker Andrew W.K., Evite co-founder Josh Silverman, and blues-rock guitarist Laith Al-Saadi, who’s currently tearing it up on NBC’s The Voice.

So what made Harrison want to make this film in the first place? “My initial interest in the film was when I met an alumnus who camped out for two weeks in 1996 to try to get into Community High,” he said. “That got me really interested in learning more. To me it’s such rich, local Ann Arbor history, but it’s (also) important nationally in terms of education and what can we learn from an alternative school that’s part of an already really great school system.”

Harrison is in the final stages of a Kickstarter campaign that hopes to raise $45,000 toward the making of Commie High, but time is running short as he hopes to find funding for the project. “It’s this roller coaster ride,” he said. “Over 200 people have already backed it, but we have some room to go before we make our goal. Either we make it and we go into production or we unfortunately have to go back to the drawing board.” As of noon on April 7, over $32,500 has been pledged, with the remaining $12,500 to be raised by next Wednesday, April 13 at 10 am.

“We’re optimistic and we think there are a lot of people with love for Community High or 'Commie High,' as so many people affectionately refer to it,” said Harrison. “Although at points it was used as a derogatory term, we’re really embracing it. We’re not teaching Communism, it’s just teaching people how to be better individuals.”

Martin Bandyke is the morning drive host on Ann Arbor’s 107one, WQKL-FM.

OK, so, H.M.S. Pinafore means a lot to me. I was into theater a bunch when I was a kid, and as a sophomore in high school in Overland Park, Kansas, I found myself in the role of Ralph Rackstraw, and found my crush in the role of Josephine. Or maybe she became my crush because she was in the role of Josephine. The 80s are a little blurry these days, but I definitely remember singing Twist & Shout on a parade float. Suffice it to say, this show gives me the FEELS, and I know it like the back of my hand.

So, naturally, I approach many modern stagings of H.M.S. Pinafore with a bit of trepidation. I love the of-the-momentness of Gilbert & Sullivan, and that moment was not the Roaring 20s, or the South Pacific circa 1943, or on the bridge of a Starship, or any such nonsense. I get it, the temptation of a stunty slant on such an endlessly reheated work can be irresistible for cast and crew alike, but I'm in the audience, damme, and I'm here to see something authentic-ish!

Which is why I was so delighted by what must have been the University of Michigan Gilbert & Sullivan Society's umpteenth staging of H.M.S. Pinafore. With the exception of a small amount of clever, harmless nonsense tacked on to the beginning of each act, this was a wonderfully authentic production, with very strong leads and a talented chorus, put on at a rollicking pace with a pit orchestra spilling over into the aisles of the Lydia Mendelssohn Theater.

Tom Cilluffo delivers an outstanding performance as Ralph Rackstraw. I really appreciate that UMGASS does not amplify their cast, and Cilluffo fills the hall with his mastery of the role, going for and easily nailing the high notes that even some professionals pass up. He's very funny as well, in a role that often gets played overly earnestly by high school sophomores in Kansas.

Adina Triolo as Josephine is even more excellent, anchoring the production with her talent and poise, balancing Josephine's ethereal solos with a gift for mugging as appropriate. Gilbert & Sullivan's original productions were famous for eschewing the stilted, heavily-stylized delivery of their time in favor of remarkably natural performances, and Triolo continues that tradition while still shining as a virtuoso in a challenging role. Yeah, so she also looks quite a bit like my high school crush. No, you have goosebumps.

Phillip Rhodes as Captain Corcoran does a great job with some of the show's best songs, and plays especially well with Don Regan, who is refined and funny as Sir Joseph. I will say I was disappointed by Sir Joseph's straightforward aristocratic costume; his frippery is usually a highlight of Pinafore Productions. However, Regan gets big bonus points for pronouncing "clerk" as "clark" to properly rhyme with "mark"; this is a Gilbert & Sullivan shibboleth; those who miss this rhyme should be put to death.

Andrew Burgmayer did an admirable job as Dick Deadeye, physically inhabiting the role thoroughly enough to make it a surprise when he shrugged it off for curtain call. I do wish I could have heard him a bit better, but it's a tough range. He and Rhodes did a wonderful job on "Kind Captain, I've Important Information," perhaps the only duet ever written about a torture implement.

Lee Vahlsing held the entire show together as Bill Bobstay, a role with a lot of exposition to deliver and did an outstanding job on "He is an Englishman." Vahlsing and Cilluffo were joined by U-M freshman and impressive bass Natan Zamansky on the challenging a capella sections of "A British Tar", and they nailed this song where community productions often run aground.

Lori Gould was a perfect Buttercup, adding some great asides to the role, and the director did a careful job to set up Meredith Kelly's Cousin Hebe as a love interest for Sir Joseph, which often seems to come out of nowhere once the social order inevitably goes all topsy-turvy. Surely that's not a spoiler, seeing as how THIS SHOW PREMIERED IN 1878.

All the sailors and sisters and cousins and aunts are well-rehearsed and the choreography is delightful, with some very clever and funny twists without falling into gimmickry.

My only real disappointment with this show was a truly nerdy nitpick; there's a short exchange between Sir Joseph and Hebe near the end that was a recitative in the early productions, but then became spoken dialogue. I don't care if the spoken version has been canon for 130 of the work's 138 years; I love that recitative and would have been thrilled to hear it! What do Gilbert & Sullivan know about Gilbert & Sullivan anyway?

And along those lines, there's an alternate ending where Sullivan added a chorus of "Rule, Britannia" to celebrate Queen Victoria's Jubilee. I love UMGASS's tradition of opening the show with having the audience stand and sing "God Save the Queen," and I was hoping they'd go with the Imperial ending! As you can see, these are very important concerns.

This is a fun, polished, and refreshingly straightforward production of one of the greatest works of musical theater, and a entertaining evening for total fo'c'sle noobs as well as for hopeless Savoy-savvy fussbudgets like me. Whether this is your first experience on the Saucy Ship or your hundredth, you're sure to enjoy the efforts of these safeguards of our nation. Congrats to cast and crew, and thanks for a trip down memory lane.

Eli Neiburger is Deputy Director of the Ann Arbor District Library and had no business being cast as Ralph Rackstraw in high school. Love levels all ranks, but it does not level them as much as that.

UMGASS presents H.M.S. Pinafore continues April 8, 9, and 10 at the Lydia Mendelssohn Theater. Ticket sales have closed online, but tickets will still be available for purchase at the Box Office.

The movie with the ghost grandpa in the mirror, the bright green food, and the absence of trolls despite being named Troll 2. The movie that repeated a five-minute scene four times. The movie where the dad tells his son that fool-proof plans are hard to come by. This year’s 25th annual Smithee Awards on Saturday, April 16th will honor all these and more of their B-movie brethren.

Named for the fake director credited when the actual director does not want their own name on such a horrible piece of cinema, the Smithee Awards celebrates all that is wonderful about really, really terrible movies.

Every year for the past 25 years, the volunteers behind the Smithee Awards have gathered fans of bad movies together on the campus of the University of Michigan to watch clips from movies such as Zombie Honeymoon, Frankenfish, and Superargo vs. Diabolicus.

This year viewers will enjoy categories like “Worst Special Effect,” “Most Ludicrous Premise,” “Stupidest Looking Monster,” and the self-explanatory “Whaaaat?!?!” Each of the 19 categories has five movie clips, and audience members vote on the best of the worst, or the worst of the best, depending on how one views life.

To up the awesome factor, the organizers provide free “food and drink” (they insist on the quotation marks). While watching a clip of, say, Die-ner, you may enjoy those weird, spongy, orange circus peanuts, giant Pixie Sticks, or bacon fudge. Wash that sugar down with a variety of soft drinks that often include the latest offering from Jones Soda.

Smithee Supreme Committee member Kevin Hogan says, "We are older than Pokemon. We have been around longer than Magic: the Gathering, and made several million fewer dollars. It's been 25 years of Smithee Awards shows -- this is the silver anniversary -- and every year is just as exciting as the first."

Previous worst picture winners include: Enter…Zombie King (about a zombie king’s existential crisis, of course), Metallica (robots in a junkyard make a suicide pact), and Back from Hell (featuring a scene wherein a hand reaches out from the Bible, grabs a preacher’s crotch and then tries to strangle him).

Whether you are a B-movie horror aficionado or not, come out to 1800 Chem Building on April 16 at 7 pm to enjoy movies that can be described as “like the darker side of Hee-Haw.” Because everyone needs a little dark-side of Hee-Haw in their life.

Community contributor Patti Smith is a teacher, writer, and lover of all things Ann Arbor.

The Smithee Awards take place in Room 1800 of the Chemistry Building at 930 University Ave. on Saturday, April 16 at 7 pm until around midnight.

For anyone in Ann Arbor who likes to work with yarn, the Fiber Expo is a highlight to the year. The Fiber Expo brings together local artisans, shopkeepers, and farmers. Walking through the expo can bring you into contact with anything from angora rabbits to hand dyed yarn to looms and spinning wheels. The expo always bustles with life and energy as friends move from stall to stall, looking at different yarns and shawl pins, envisioning what they can make with the wealth of raw materials before them.

Though vendors are a major offering of the Fiber Expo, it’s not just about buying yarn and roving (unspun wool). The expo is about meeting other fiber enthusiasts from the area, meeting the people who are growing their own fiber, and seeing what other people are creating with fiber. Each expo also features a strong offering of classes that cover a range of skills. The goals of the Fiber Expo are to get natural fibers into people’s hands and to spread knowledge about how to work with fiber. Ultimately, the Fiber Expo is a place for discovery and creativity for anyone who works with or has an interest in fiber.

Audrey Huggett is a Public Library Associate at AADL and can't get enough wool.

The Fiber Expo is April 9th and 10th, at the Washtenaw Farm Council Grounds on Ann Arbor Saline Road. Tickets are $4 for one day or $6 for the weekend.

The University of Michigan production of Molière's The Imaginary Invalid is giddy, bawdy, extremely noisy, and intermittently funny.

Translator James Magruder sought to recreate the theatrical carnival that would have surrounded and interrupted Molière's play when it was first produced in 1673, but in the process Molière's satire takes a back seat and a beating. Director Daniel Cantor takes Magruder's ideas and adds on some of his own. Molière is a mix of pratfalls and comic repartee but the physical action here is often aimless and drags on and the verbal wit is often lost in the noise.

The production seems less like a carnival than a mishmash of Ionesco and Beckett, fart jokes raised to art by Aristophanes and beloved by 12-year-olds everywhere, English music hall and French chanteuses and even a Saturday Night Live skit.

The set design by Vincent Mountain seems to borrow a bit from Chaplin's factory scene in Modern Times or maybe from Fritz Lang's Metropolis as a way to emphasize constant motion, and every once in a while explodes in bubbles. The costumes are not time specific and range from Molière's day to the early 20th Century. The Entr'acte Company wear form fitting suits that would work just as well in a Star Trek play.

The high point of the production is one of the interludes developed by Cantor and the company. The comedy here is quick-footed, makes good use of modern day references, and cheerfully involves the audience. A talented actor named Caleb Foote delivers the goods, dressed as part clown, part busker serenading his beloved. Foote knows how to grab an audience and hold them for dear life. He makes the best of the free form material with a good singing voice and lively banter.

The cast of the central play is fine. Jesse Aaronson gets to ham it up as Argan, the titled imaginary invalid. He moans, groans, and makes body noises as an insufferable hypochondriac. Argan does battle with his impertinent servant Toinette, played with proper spunk and fire by Kay Kelley. Savannah Crosby plays Argan's older daughter, whom he tries to marry off to a doctor's son so he can be under constant care. She plays the daughter as a pretty 19th Century melodrama maid with a bit of a twinkle.

Also notable are Delaney Moro as Argan's second wife, who plots to take his fortune and sneers appropriately; Brendan Alpiner as the unappealing suitor who reels out memorized spiels of twisted flattery; and Anna Markowitz as the younger daughter, who jostles amusingly with her father, verbally and physically.

But the acrobatics, anachronisms, noise, and busyness drown out the satire that still has some power in our times of medical disasters and cure all fads. A last bit of SNL comedy in the finale makes reference to the presidential campaign at a time when that campaign has turned into dangerous high comedy itself.

Hugh Gallagher has written theater and film reviews over a 40-year newspaper career and was most recently managing editor of the Observer & Eccentric Newspapers in suburban Detroit.

The Imaginary Invalid continues April 2, 8, and 9 at 8 pm, April 3 and 10 at 2 pm, and April 7 at 7:30 p.m. at the Arthur Miller Theatre on the UM North Campus. Tickets are available 9 am to 5 pm at the League Ticket Office within the Michigan League. Order by phone at (734)764-2538.

The Institute for the Humanities at the University of Michigan presents dozens of humanities-related events every year. A highlight of 2016 is the Jill S. Harris Memorial Lecture on April 5, when writer and The Nation columnist Laila Lalami will talk about the long and rich history of Muslims in the United States.

Lalami is a writer whose insightful cultural commentary, literary criticism, and opinion pieces have appeared in The New York Times and The Washington Post, among many other publications. She has also written three books, including the The Moor’s Account, a 2015 finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. A work of historical fiction, the book is the imagined memoir of Estebanico, a real-life Moroccan slave--and the first black explorer of America--who accompanied the Castilian conquistador Pánfilo de Narváez from Spain to the US Gulf Coast in 1527. The book gives an alternate narrative of the famed expedition, illuminating the role that black men played in exploring the New World.

In her April 5 talk, Lalami aims to illuminate the history of Muslims in America--from 14th-century Moors and Syrian auto workers in the early 1900s, to African slaves and Palestinians immigrating after the 1948 establishment of Israel. Lalami proposes that, not unlike the part Estebanico played in the New World exploration, the part Muslims have played in U.S. history is misunderstood and underestimated, and that they are often seen as “latecomers to America, recent arrivals who’ve grafted themselves into an already thriving country.”

Lalami makes direct connections between anti-Muslim sentiment--on the rise for sure, but not a new thing--with this “forgotten history” of American Muslims. But through better understanding of history and its transmission, Lalami proposes that fiction can help us fill in some of the detail missing from the mainstream narrative of Muslims in America.

Community contributor Stephanie Harrell is the communications specialist at the Institute for the Humanities at the University of Michigan.

Muslims in America: A Forgotten History, An evening with Laila Lalami is the 2016 Jill S. Harris Memorial Lecture, taking place Tuesday, April 5, 2016 from 4-6 pm in the Rackham Amphitheatre. The event is free and open to the public. Seating is limited; please arrive early.

Akira (1988), directed by Katsuhiro Otomo, and based on his 6 volume manga series of the same name, was my first non-Studio Ghibli feature length anime. As a dedicated fan, I grew up watching Speed Racer and Rurouni Kenshin, and after seeing Princess Mononoke, became obsessed with watching every Studio Ghibli film I could. I had never branched out to other anime films, but after reading a few books on early anime and its cultural impact, I decided that Akira sounded like a good intro to everything non-Studio Ghibli. So I borrowed a copy from AADL (the 2 disc collector’s set), and sat down to watch it, not knowing quite what to expect. And then I watched it twice. And then I watched the excellent documentary about the creation of the film on the second disc. After that I caved in and bought my own copy, plus the soundtrack. Visually, technically, and artistically Akira just blew me away.

The film takes place in 2019. Old Tokyo was destroyed in a cataclysmic explosion during WWIII, and Neo-Tokyo was built in its place, and the world we are shown is harsh. The divide between the rich and the poor is very obvious. Political factions fight each other for control of the government, anti-government revolutionary groups protest and set off bombs, and biker gangs openly feud in the streets. The scope of the story is huge, which is not surprising when you consider that over 1,000 pages of manga had to be condensed to a film that runs about 2 hours. What grounds the plot are Kaneda and Tetsuo, two friends living in Neo-Tokyo, and their individual struggles with power. All of the plots of Akira ultimately boil down to whether or not power, either in the hands of the government, revolutionaries, or children with psychic abilities, is used responsibly, and the repercussions of that use.

Although the story and characters are nuanced and compelling, the art and technicality of the animation is the real star. Akira is simply visually stunning, but in a way that is jarring and disturbing. This film is unashamed to show a gritty, dirty, and unattractive world, right down to images of garbage in the streets and a plethora of garish neon advertisements. There are no beautiful sweeping vistas of nature or effort to show Neo-Tokyo as a tastefully designed metropolis. Instead we have scenes of extreme violence that go hand-in-hand with fantastic visuals. A fight between two rival biker gangs at the beginning of the film is as shocking for the blood and broken bones as it is for the color trails of the motorcycle’s tail lights as they speed through the city. A building is completely destroyed in a psychic attack while broken glass from the windows glitters and dances as it falls to the ground. Even the characters facial and mouth movements, which were animated to closely match the movements of the voice actors using a technique called pre-scored dialogue, lends a realism that is not seen in other animated films of this time.

I would also be remiss not to mention the excellent score composed by Shoji Yamashiro. With an innovative blending of traditional Japanese instruments, electronic sounds, and the human voice, the soundtrack creates an immediacy and vibrancy to the action. Akira did not skimp on production values, and it shows. This is not a film to be missed on the big screen, from the shocking explosion at the beginning to the grotesque and extremely bizarre ending. If you are a serious, or even casual, fan of animation, you need to go and see this film!

Khemia Ensemble, a contemporary classical music ensemble based in Ann Arbor, will present Voyages, a one night-only audio visual performance at the Kerrytown Concert House. Their show will feature a customized interactive real-time display in partnership with Cincinnati-based Intermedio that captures sonic and movement data from performers for an immersive experience reminiscent of a rock or electronica concert.

The group's goal is to bring fresh eyes to the way contemporary classical music is taught, created, learned, and performed by focusing on dynamic performances, audience engagement, and the music of living composers. Members are selected as an inaugural Performing Arts EXCELerator team as well as an ArtsEngine team through a University of Michigan School-wide application process.

Khemia Ensemble have been the ensemble in residence at the Composition and Music Research Biennial in Cordoba, Argentina, as well as at the University of Cordoba and the National University of Colombia. Members hold degrees from the University of Michigan, Juilliard, Yale School of Music, New England Conservatory, San Francisco Conservatory, Rice University, and Hochschule für Musik der Stadt Basel.

Amy Cantú is a Production Librarian at AADL.

Voyages will take place on April 9th at Kerrytown Concert House at 8:30 pm. Doors open at 8:15 pm. Tickets: $10, students $8, children $5. Appropriate for all audiences.