May is dance month in Buffalo, a dreamland for dance lovers. This week, Buffalo Contemporary Dance will provide an emotional roller coaster through movement, in the performance space of the Church on Delaware, newly renovated for such happenings. The show includes interpretations of the film One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, a tale of sisters’ unconditional love, stress, chaos and survival through adversity. Eight outstanding dancers who have come to make Western New York home bring five works of modern and contemporary dance to life with their strength and grace. This performance is devoted to all of the mothers out there, and attendance at this concert is a suitable gift for yours. There is nothing so soul-stirring as watching the swift and easy movements of a skilled dancer, interpreting human emotion and intellect with her trained body. The concert includes a wide range of musical selections and spoken word as accompaniment, assisting those bodies in making the transition through many mixed worlds.

She is the one who brought you into the world. The one who cradled you in her arms, protected you from all harm and, whenever that failed, nursed you back to health. She’s your dear, sweet mom. And every year we take only one day, Mother’s Day, to honor her. Not anymore. Get ready for Mamapalooza 2006! New to Buffalo, but in its fifth year elsewhere, Mamapalooza is the only festival of its kind, celebrating mothers in the arts during the month of May on more than 30 stages across the U.S., Canada and Australia. Founded five years ago in New York City by Joy Rose of the band Mothers on Prozac, Mamapalooza has struck a chord that is reverberating around the world. The event is already making its Buffalo debut in fine fashion—complete with an official proclamation of Mamapalooza Days (May 12 & 13) by Mayor Byron Brown. Both days will feature a bevy of the area’s most (pro)creative performing artists including singer/Mamapalooza Buffalo organizer Annette Daniels Taylor, Kilissa Cissoko, Liz Abbott, Noa Bursie and Joyce Carolyn, as well as several dance troupes and poets expressing the strength, beauty, energy and sacrifice that is motherhood. Partial proceeds will be donated to Haven House and The Langston Hughes Institute.

It’s no secret that knowledge is power. Historically, repressive regimes have always stifled the possessors and distributors of knowledge—the professors, priests, poets, journalists and authors—first. And while the kind of wholesale censorship favored in countries like North Korea and Burma may seem far off in today’s America, censorship is still a problem. Last year, for instance, Reporters Without Borders announced that the US fell 20 places on the world press freedom index to 44th. The American Library Association reports that the number of books being challenged, and subsequently banned, is increasing yearly. Even today, many of America’s greatest novels are banned from libraries and school curricula around the country, including Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men and The Grapes of Wrath, Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five, Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye and Wright’s Native Son, among many others. That’s why the Buffalo and Erie County Public Library, along with UB’s Humanities Institute, is hosting “Read It While You Can: Challenging the New Censorship and Celebrating Free Speech.” The afternoon will begin at 1pm with a screening of Edward R. Murrow’s See It Now broadcast about the McCarthy years. Following will be a panel discussion examining the “new censorship” and readings by local authors, including Julian Montague, Chris Fritton, Ted Pelton, Kari Winter and Hershini Bhana Young.

A pioneer in the fields of interactive computer and net-based media art, San Francisco native Lynn Hershman-Leeson has turned to filmmaking in recent years. Her 2002 feature Teknolust, the middle part of a science fiction trilogy that began with Conceiving Ada, stars Tilda Swinton as a bio-geneticist who creates three “Self Replicating Automatons” from her own DNA. The Village Voice found the film intriguing for addressing such questions as “Can an ambitious woman protect her power? Is technology moral? Is body-on-body sex outmoded?” And, of course, Tilda Swinton fans get the chance to see her in four quite different, playfully conceived roles. Hershman-Leeson will be presenting Teknolust at Hallwalls as part of a program that includes her newest film, a documentary work-in-progress on a topic of local interest: the arrest and, well, persecution of UB professor and artist Steve Kurtz, founding member of the internationally acclaimed Critical Art Ensemble, who faces trial on charges stemming from the FBI’s seizure of harmless biological substances in his home.