A walk around campus at night often leads to unexpected encounters with dance groups. Here’s a rundown of some you might see the next time you’re out and about.

Their official name is Design | Media Arts. But “Desma,” the affectionate abbreviation tossed around for the department in the UCLA School of the Arts and Architecture, seems much more fitting when one observes its students’ casually creative, communal vibe.

Appearing atop a short set of stairs front and center on the Freud Playhouse’s stage, Barbara (Sophina Brown) opens “No Strings” with the haunting song, “The Sweetest Sounds.” She is tall and delicate, standing in front of the live band and to the side of a gauzy Eiffel Tower.

Everyone knows you can judge a book by its cover, but they never said anything about the outside of a restaurant.

Internationally renowned author T.C. Boyle ““ that’s Thomas Coraghessan, for those who don’t know ““ kindly says it’s an accident that he wound up as a professor at USC instead of UCLA, since USC was the first university that offered him a job after he completed his graduate program in Iowa.

When Shannon Safino, a volunteer at the Fowler Museum at UCLA, showed up at an exclusive opening of the museum’s “Architecture of the Veil” exhibit in January, she thought she was there just to set up the refreshments.

Comedy might be the most extreme form of art. Being funny on a stage for a specified amount of time is daring enough, but bursting into the industry is akin to lighting an explosive’s very, very long fuse ““ the wait time before the blast can be interminable.

What’s fresher than the latest club banger from Akon or
Jay-Z?
Think back to Russia around World War I, when composers Sergei
Prokofiev and Igor Stravinsky became greats because of their
innovative contributions to classical music at such a pivotal time
in history.

It takes two to tango ““ or so the American proverb goes.
But members of the Tango Club at UCLA would likely insist that the Argentine tango requires and incites much more than the adage includes.

HIV/AIDS is a global tragedy so devastating that it seems as
though beauty would be scarce in any artistic depiction of the
pandemic. But the glittering lights of awareness, activism,
education and community strength give hope for the future,
brightening an otherwise-dim portrait of the situation.