Pittsburgh was suddenly a very hip place to be this weekend with the debut of Pearlann Porter's Pillow Project Dance Company at Attack Theatre studios in Garfield.

Armed with a passel of supportive friends and 20 dancers from Point Park University past and present, this concert shot out of the gate at warp speed and never let up.

Porter's industrial-strength dance was born of jazz accents and a contemporary experimentalism, with a liberal dose of street-smart movement and a sideward glance at the Zambelli Brothers.

Her style exploded in every direction, compelling to the core and voraciously gobbled up by the talented dancers from Point Park, where Porter is an adjunct professor in jazz, tap and dance improvisation.

At this point, Porter knows to shape a short burst of a routine and engage her audience. Although the program put George Balanchine's much-vaunted speed standard to shame, Porter also respected the value of silence (there were a few moments), although she doesn't know how to rest (not necessarily a bad thing).

Even the lighting changes had the accompaniment of DJ Sorta and Jillian Canastraro's ever-so-cool improv. And Jordan Grubb's hot spin of tap served as transitional elements.

By comparison, Kelsey Yates' "Twenty Something" almost seemed polite and Dionna PridGeon's "Heart Burnt," located in an insane asylum, merely fussy, although both had merit.

Porter mowed down any semblance of dance as we usually see it with a clever video take on "West Side Story," set in Downtown Pittsburgh, and with three pieces of her own.

"On the 45ive" was a flurry of plaids and stripes, and "Addicted to My Movement" a primal force of dance.

The finale, a triparte "To the Bitter End," dueled with demons throughout. But Porter ended it on a darkly comic note with an apparent duet that was danced only by Beth Ratas, until she pulled a gun and shot into the air.

Ryan Lanning, who until that time had morosely faced the back wall, fell to the floor -- a definitive "end" for us all to ponder.

-- Reviewed by Jane Vranish, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Three Stooges Festival

	The Oaks Theater in Oakmont is hosting a five-day festival of classic Three Stooges shorts. The above photo shows from left, Larry, Curly and Moe, in a publicity photo, circa 1943. Click photo for larger image.

All right, you knuckleheads, listen up. It's been 70 years since The Three Stooges ended their vaudeville apprenticeship and debuted as a solo act. The Oaks Theater in Oakmont is celebrating with new 35mm prints of classic Stooges shorts shown in a five-day anniversary blowout beginning Friday and continuing through Tuesday.

The festival includes some of the Stooges greatest hits -- six with Curly, one with Shemp. In 1934's "Men in Black," they're doctors disrupting a busy hospital, and in "You Natzy Spy," filmed a year before the United States entered World War II, Moe does his best barely veiled Hitler impression. "In the Sweet Pie and Pie" (1941) ends with one of the best in-your-face pie fights in cinematic history.

In all, the festival includes seven 20-minute shorts of eye-poking, butt-kicking character assassinations that violate just about every politically correct precept of modern times. Tickets are $5. The Oaks is at 310 Allegheny River Blvd., Oakmont, 412-828-6311.

Dierks Bentley

As the hot young performer burned through his set, a hot young crowd pressed against the concert stage or gyrated on the dance floor. Here's a surprise: It wasn't rock 'n' roll -- it was country.

Sunday at The Rock Club at Station Square, Arizona heartthrob Dierks Bentley brought all the in-your-face passion of a rock show to a rare Pittsburgh club-level concert of mainstream country music. Shouting the songwriter's lyrics back at him, the audience became a part of the show as Bentley reflected their obvious excitement.

Backed by a seriously talented four-piece band, Bentley packed his 110-minute set with mostly self-written songs from his 2003 Capitol debut, new material from an album due next year and a few fun classic country covers.

Not afraid to deviate from studio arrangements, he stretched many of the up-tempo tunes and used the eager crowd to help tell the story on his first hit, "What Was I Thinkin'."

Bassist Michelle Poe gave the music a big concert-hall bottom end, and, between songs, guitarist Rod Jansen lapsed into solo rock riffs, thrilling the young audience.

Oklahoma's Cross Canadian Ragweed opened with more than 1 1/2 hours of longhair '70s-style rock and a few electric country ballads.

Bentley joined the band briefly wielding a video camera, and Ragweed joined Bentley's band for a long, high-energy encore that closed one of 2004's most exciting country shows.

-- Reviewed by John Hayes,
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Duquesne Symphony

Veteran conductor Sidney Harth's extensive resume includes stints with several prestigious universities. He led his current band, the Duquesne University Symphony Orchestra, in a high-caliber but, sadly, poorly attended concert on Sunday at Carnegie Music Hall.

The program opened with the first suite of Respighi's "Ancient Airs and Dances." The suites are based on 16th-century lute pieces, but Harth rent the fabric from the start by imposing 19th-century grandiosity.

More in character were Kodaly's "Dances from Galanta," which have their foundations in Hungarian dances, particularly those of Galanta gypsies, who were much in demand as musicians among the aristocracy. The orchestra infused the music with plenty of Hungarian flavor, especially in the strings and clarinets.

Contemporary American composer Ezra Laderman's "Symphony No. 4 for Brass and Orchestra" was commissioned in 1980 by the Los Angeles Philharmonic. It's a three-movement work of multi-layered juxtapositions: diatonic tonality with 12-tone series and homophonic, serial and contrapuntal sections. The young musicians handled the jagged differences in textures and concepts with ease.

Laderman's symphony has an over-arching theme of dichotomous co-existence, with the same brass fanfare beginning and ending the work. Harth led a coherent, balanced reading, sustaining the direction and momentum through the final statement.

Harth's stick technique, while minimalistic at times, was always exact, and he maintained a high level of communication from the podium, to which his young charges responded with precise attacks, pure intonation and cohesive phrasing.

-- Reviewed by Eric Haines for the Post-Gazette