If all you know of Jeff Hayner is that he's a sometimes controversial member of the Ann Arbor City Council for Ward 1, Jordan Stanton's Impulse Ann Arbor documentary will be an eye-opener. 

The film is primarily about the university-affiliated Michigan Electronic Music Collective (MEMCO), a group of student DJs, producers, dancers, and fans who support and promote techno via a variety of events, including the monthly Impulse party.

But Impulse Ann Arbor also explores the connection between the current techno scene and the people who helped launch it -- and that includes Hayner, who was a longtime co-host of WCBN's Crush Collision, which began in 1987 and continues to this day (Thursdays, 10 pm to 1 am, 89.1-FM). 

Hayner's DJ name was Jeffrey Nothing -- borrowed from David Lynch's Blue Velvet. In the early 1990s, Hayner and Crush Collision co-host Brendan Gillen (aka BMG, aka Ectomorph) were early enthusiastic supporters of Detroit techno and its offshoots, helping draw a line of influence to Ann Arbor from the Motor City (with a zig through Belleville -- home of electronica pioneers Juan Atkins, Derrick May, and Kevin Saunderson). 

Gillen and Hayner are two of several talking heads in Impulse Ann Arbor, including current MEMCO members DJ Holographic, Cat Kenzie, Kavin Pawittranon, and others, as well as Shigeto, aka Zachary Saginaw, whose accent is so PURE MICHIGAN that it adds an extra level of local love to his affectionate words about the town where he grew up. They all pay tribute to A2's legacy as a progressive place -- musically and otherwise -- and the MEMCO DJs do a fine job of explaining the collective's mission to be inclusive and mentoring, passing knowledge to anyone who wants to learn how to create a dancefloor-filling mix. The 22-minute documentary also gives nods to the Nectarine Ballroom -- aka Necto -- which was an early Ann Arbor home for industrial electronic music and techno, and to WCBN's legacy as one the local scene's hubs in the 1990s.

Director Stanton is a senior at U-M and co-president of MEMCO, so it's no surprise his Impact Ann Arbor reads like a love letter to the organization he helps lead and the university town that supports it. But what's not to love about dancing the night away among friends, or DJing music that makes people from different backgrounds come together under the same beat?

Even councilmember Hayner still spins from time to time -- on the turntables. There are no politics on the dancefloor.

See Impulse Ann Arbor below:

In its juried exhibition Way Opens (Disability Arts and Culture), Riverside Arts Center asks, “What does ‘disabled’ mean to such a broad range of people who identify as such?”

Works in the show certainly address artists’ personal experiences with disability, but also offer opportunities for audiences to explore what this means interactively, ideally working toward empathy and interrogation into internalized perceptions of disability. Artists in the show grapple with questions of identity and disability, mostly in America, through multimedia installations, interactive exhibits, painting, fiber arts, video, sculpture, and written word. 

The Riverside Arts Center gallery space included multiple changes to the layout typically used for a group exhibition. The center space, instead of being open, or containing installations that require physical engagement, contained tables and chairs to allow visitors to sit and enjoy the show from many positions. The gallery’s book of artist statements is printed in large type and, in addition to the usual statements and bios, includes detailed descriptions of each exhibit for visually impaired visitors. 

Generally, when we’re suffering and in pain, we know the cause.

But when it comes to identifying what will heal us -- let alone knowing whether healing is even possible -- that’s another matter entirely.

This all-too-human struggle makes up the core of the 1991 stage musical adaptation of The Secret Garden -- book and lyrics by Marsha Norman, music by Lucy Simon -- on stage at Dexter’s Encore Theatre.

Inspired by Frances Hodgson Burnett’s classic 1911 children’s novel, the story begins -- rather confusingly, to be honest -- with a young British girl, Mary Lennox (Jojo Engelbert), surviving a cholera epidemic that leaves her an orphan in India. She’s dispatched to the country home of her Uncle Archibald (Jay Montgomery), but he doesn’t bother to greet her, so steeped is he in his own grief for his deceased wife, Lily (Sarah B. Stevens). 

Mary’s only company at first is a maid named Martha (Dawn Purcell), but then Mary befriends Martha’s nature-loving brother, Dickon (Tyler J. Messinger), who feeds Mary’s curiosity about the walled-off, locked-up secret garden that was once loved and tended by Lily. Plus, Mary soon stumbles upon another young resident of the house: sickly, bedridden Colin (Caden Martel), who fears that his father, Archibald, hates him because his birth caused Lily’s death.

If this all sounds pretty dark and gloomy, well, it is.

On November 6, Bob Dylan visited Hill Auditorium for the 7th time as part of his Never Ending Tour -- 57.5 years after his initial performance in Ann Arbor on April 22, 1962.

The Pulp feature "Highway I-94, M-14 & US-23 Revisted: A Comprehensive History of Bob Dylan in Ann Arbor" noted that this was the legend's 12th concert in town. But unlike his early shows here, which were marked by banter with and by the audience, Dylan's most recent show at Hill Auditorium was defined by his longtime approach to performing: he did not once address the audience verbally, instead only interacting through the music.

Theatre Nova has chosen, appropriately, a showbiz musical as a fund-raiser for the innovative professional theater that specializes in new plays and new playwrights.

This play isn’t new nor are the writers, but the show-business environment and its emotional ups and downs are perfect for reminding theater-goers why live theater matters. Follies, with music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim and book by James Goldman, is a tip of the hat to obsessions, from being on stage to matters of the heart.

Nova recently received a matching grant of $15,000 from the Michigan Council of Arts and Cultural Affairs and the National Endowment for the Arts. The two-weekend limited run of Follies is one of several fund-raisers to meet the match. Nova is presenting a stripped-down, concert version of the musical that puts the spotlight on the songs and keeps the focus on the central story of two former showgirls and their unhappy marriages. Actors double up on some roles and side plots are eliminated. 

The story concerns a reunion of Weismann Follies showgirls (a fictional Ziegfeld). They gather together in an old Broadway theater in 1971, 30 years since they last performed just before the U.S. entry into World War II.

The University of Michigan Department of Afroamerican and African Studies' GalleryDAAS is hosting a multi-media collaborative exhibit by artist and scholar Rachel Willis, titled Il faut se souvenir, we must not forget: Memorializing Slavery in Detroit and Martinique. It combines Willis’ background in fine arts, history, and Francophone studies to bring the under-told history of slavery in Detroit and Martinique. 

Willis was raised in Detroit and received a Bachelor of Arts in French & Francophone Studies from the University of Michigan. In her current work, Willis employs a multi-disciplinary approach to her subject matter, using photographs, historical texts, and technology to explore the history of Detroit’s ties to slavery and the French Caribbean Island of Martinique. Willis is currently working on a Master of Arts in Transcultural Studies, with a focus on Francophone and Caribbean history. Her passion to make little-known yet highly important histories accessible through gallery text and voice tour, paired with photography, creates both a challenging and dynamic experience in GalleryDAAS. 

The first solo show in the United States for Japanese artist Mari Katayama is right here in Ann Arbor.

Katayama’s works are on display at the University of Michigan Museum of Art in the Irving Stenn Jr. Family Gallery through January 26, 2020. Her creations include both photographs and sculptures that disrupt normative viewing of the body, which weave a narrative that rejects dominant cultural and societal attitudes toward disabled bodies. Katayama not only uses her own body as a subject, but she also incorporates surrealist, complex, and skillful handmade prosthetics from textiles and other materials. Her works explore concepts of the self, the body and objectification, voyeurism, and agency. 

Saturday night’s Hill Auditorium performance by John Cameron Mitchell drew a crowd that likely skewed a bit younger and edgier than many University Musical Society audiences.

From where I sat, bold body art and piercings, asymmetrical haircuts, and statement eyeglasses abounded. And although about two decades have passed since Mitchell first created and performed in the groundbreaking show (and film) that would become his calling card, Hedwig and the Angry Inch, he not only rocked Hill Auditorium on his ongoing Origin of Love Tour but crowd-surfed, Superman-style, during an encore number.

But the two-hour concert kicked off with a direct reference from Hedwig, as powerhouse guest vocalist Amber Martin arrived first on stage and announced, “Ladies and gentlemen, whether you like it or not … John Cameron Mitchell!”

If you aren’t paying attention at the beginning of Andrew Norman’s “Music in Circles” you might miss it. The first note is just so quiet, an almost imperceptible harmonic whispered high in the viola, the kind of airy, insubstantial noise you have to strain to hear.

But once you hear it you’re hooked.

That first lonely pitch is like a slow intake of breath, interrupted after a moment by a stuttering spiccato exhalation that foreshadows the energy that is to come. Slowly the viola is joined by other strings, and patiently the music unfolds and intensifies until, some two and a half minutes in the viola takes off with an up-tempo rhythmic pulse produced by bouncing the bow vertically off the strings, generating a sound that is a blend between being pitched and being a percussive noise.

From here the music grows in volume and intensity as the cello and trumpet play yearning arpeggiated lines, the bass clarinet pitches in with a fluttering falling figure, the violin scratches wildly and the flute shoots jets of air. It’s thrilling. And then it winds down again, just as patiently as the music of the opening developed.

Eventually, the piece closes out with soft, slowly moving echoes of the previous material, pared down until it’s only the viola, again, playing alone, with that same airy harmonic it began with.

“Music in Circles” has always been one of yMusic’s more popular pieces, at least on the classical music side of things, so it’s no wonder that the group chose to program it on last Friday’s performance at Rackham Auditorium.

Near the end of Joseph Zettelmaier’s play Dr. Seward’s Dracula -- now being staged by The Penny Seats Theatre Company, at Ann Arbor’s Stone Chalet Inn -- a character observes, “People need their monsters.”

So it seems. For it’s far more comforting and palatable to believe that humans like ourselves simply aren’t capable of committing the very worst acts of violence and depravity.

But we are, of course. And this unnerving truth is precisely what drives Zettelmaier’s unconventional take on the Dracula story.