In a country where brutal and arbitrary punishments have for decades been used to uphold strict social, religious, and political orthodoxies, the Burmese artist Bagyi Aung Soe spent a lifetime trying to create a way of being that enabled him to live and work with relative freedom. If Burmese art was defined by displays of self-conscious erudition and technical virtuosity, Aung Soe would scrawl his works in cheap coloring pens. If decorum demanded one dress according to rank or class, Aung Soe would alternate between sportswear and religious costume. READ ON

So, not yet 20, Caleb Teicher, of Mahopac, New York (population 8,203), scooped up some tap shoes, blew into the Big Apple, found some footlights, and crowned a rookie season with the 2011 Bessie Award for Outstanding Individual Performance in the tap extravaganza Body Madness: A Shared Evening. Today, Teicher appears with the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra at PS21, a microscopic institution with astronomical dreams in the Hudson Valley community of Chatham—a little town, as Garrison Keillor might put it, that time forgot and the decades cannot improve. READ ON