Almost every week at the Downtown Mall, The Southern Cafe and Music Hall hosts Monday Night Mic standup comedy that is free and open to the general public. Pioneered and hosted by Chris Alan, professional comedian who has opened for the likes of Michael Che, Louis C.K. and Amy Schumer, the night allows comedians of all walks of life to try out their material amongst their peers and a small crowd.
SwingCville is a Charlottesville community dedicated to vintage swing dancing. We dance and teach the Lindy Hop, Charleston, Balboa, and Blues. We are proudly volunteer-run by people with big hearts and a passion for dance. Come join us every Wednesday for a lesson from 7-8pm and social dancing from 8-9pm. Please arrive 15 minutes before class to sign in. Stay afterwards to go out for snacks and drinks with friendly people from around town.
Is it possible to fully understand someone’s point of view? In Feeling: Empathy and Tension Through Disability features works by nine contemporary artists that reckon with how we empathize. Literally meaning “in feeling,” empathy implies the action of understanding or experiencing the feelings and thoughts of another. Yet the practice of empathizing—being aware of and sensitive to the experience of someone else—can also engender tensions relating to one’s own position and expectations. Exploring the relationship between empathy and tension, this exhibition highlights and celebrates perspectives that challenge assumptions about ways of being and living.
Live Arts Theater announces its 2025/26 Season of Passion: four plays, one musical and a new works festival. The 35th Season opens with Lisa Amour’s AIRLINE HIGHWAY, followed by a holiday offering, the musical WOMEN ON THE VERGE OF A NERVOUS BREAKDOWN. In 2026, Live Arts presents Sarah Ruhl’s STAGE KISS, followed by Shakespeare’s HAMLET, and Dominique Morisseau’s BLOOD AT THE ROOT. The Season of Passion wraps up with our fourth annual WATERWORKS Festival, our “fringe-adjacent” celebration of new theatrical works that continues to attract writers near and far and engage hundreds of volunteers every year.
The 2025 New City Arts Fellowship invited a select group of artists to make work responding to the annual theme, through this, to that, written by Fellowship Guest Curator, Eboni Bugg (read the full theme below). Following an open call and competitive application process, this year’s Artist Fellows were selected by a community panel. Inspired by water’s movement and transformation, these four artists considered their own movement “through this, to that” (as written by Lucille Clifton in her poem “blessing the boats”). During month-long Fellowships that included a studio space grant—located at Visible Records—and a stipend, Fellowship artists engaged with this theme through photography, interactive sculpture, installation, and assemblage touching upon themes of grief, joy, perpetual transformation, generative destruction, and displacement.
You’re listening to WTJU Charlottesville. For Arts This Week, we chatted with Joshua Trevorrow, the First Nations Arts and Cultural Manager at Country Arts South Australia. He talks about his upcoming screening of Nunga Screen at the Violet Crown on August 7th. Tell us a bit about yourself and your work.
For many aspiring actors in rural areas, opportunities to engage in the performing arts are scarce — theater programs in these areas are often underfunded or non-existent. Located just south of Charlottesville in Fluvanna County, Empowered Players is working to change that — by bringing free theater classes to children in the rural area, which culminate in a public production showcasing the students’ skills.
Roa says social dance can cure everything from partisanship and close-mindedness to existential crises. We are “at the risk of being so logical, we are losing our own humanity,” he warns. “We all come from different backgrounds, but we all desire the same thing: to be understood. You and I don’t have to agree, but we can have a dialogue. And that dialogue is the dance.”
Fielding has spent much of the last decade creating a powerful body of work. What is on display only hints at the breadth of his artistic practice. Traversing a range of mediums—including paint, print, photography, poetry, drawing, film, and sculpture—Fielding’s work is rooted in his personal experience of reclaiming culture as a son of the Stolen Generation. He employs language, whether Yankunytjatjara or English, in his truth-telling and reconciliatory call for unity. Through his highly collaborative practice, Fielding creates community around him and affirms that many cultural practices are stronger than ever.
Chroma Projects presents two solo shows during the month of August. In the Micro Gallery, “Delta” features prints and printing plates by Tim Michel that consider the motif of the delta, using it as a metaphor for life as it gathers matter, stories, and experiences along its route, spreading its beneficence as it ultimately concludes in the ocean. The form of the delta replicates the branching of trees, and the pattern of veining in humans, connecting to all of life’s formations.
Fire destroyed the Rotunda, the most iconic feature of the University of Virginia’s Grounds, in October 1895. University officials immediately pushed to rebuild. In 1896, after a false start with McDonald Brothers architects of Louisville, Kentucky, the Board of Visitors hired the prominent New York firm McKim, Mead & White to redesign the historic center of the University. Stanford White, the artistic force of the firm, took the lead in the Rotunda redesign.
You’re listening to WTJU Charlottesville. On Saturday, August 9th at 7:30 pm, Vinegar Hill Theater is showing “The Price of Resistance: Sala Udin, An American Agitator” and “Uprooted,” presented by the Indie Short Film Festival. Both documentaries recount stories of black resistance from the 1960s. For Arts This Week, we spoke to Ty Cooper, a co-producer of The Price of Resistance.
