Our Staff’s Top Picks for Summer Reads

Summertime is book club time at Carolina Performing Arts, as we read books that make us so excited for the season to come! Our Artistic Coordinator Ellie Pate and Marketing and Communications Coordinator Jess Abel put together their recommended reads.

The Cello Suites: J.S. Bach, Pablo Casals, and the Search for a Baroque Masterpiece by Eric Siblin
A book that delves into the technicalities of Bach’s six cello suites with the energy and curiosity of someone who’s just heard them for the first time, this read is perfect for the classical aficionado and Bach beginner alike. I can’t wait for Johnny Gandelsman to play them on his violin in front of an already (!) sold-out crowd in CURRENT ArtSpace + Studio on February 9, 2020. Fans of Johnny, stay tuned in case we add an additional performance! – JA

And Then We Danced: A Voyage Into the Groove by Henry Alford
What started as a personal account from a Zumba class for the New York Times turned into a new passion for longtime writer Alford. Much like Misty Copeland, Alford found his passion for dance late. But unlike the ballerina, who began dancing at the age of 13 (late in the professional ballet world) Alford didn’t discover his love of dance until he was 50. His story explores personal anecdotes and the history of dance—I’m looking forward to seeing Misty give her own perspective on similar things and much more when she kicks off our season on September 6. This book is a fun primer for all the incredible dance on our season–including Martha Graham and Alvin Ailey! – JA

Edna Lewis: At the Table with an American Original, edited by Sara B. Franklin
This collection of essays is the first ever to position the great chef Edna Lewis (who I admittedly hadn’t heard of before CPA started booking our 19/20 season!) as a fulcrum of American culture. It makes you consider food’s ever-present influence on who we are and what it took for Edna to share her knowledge. Whether you’re a Southerner, gardener, or lover of fried chicken, stories of Edna evoke both nostalgia and a desire to question the institutions that formed her legacy. I can’t wait to get Als’s take on this hero through his work-in-progress, Edna Lewis, this February! – EP

White Girls by Hilton Als
Hilton Als’s latest book paints an experience of life, gender, and race that he narrates and analyzes simultaneously. In this book, identities are less tangible than the dynamics and relationships behind them. I am intrigued by the way Als’s mind makes associations and, from an audience perspective, I’m eager to get such personal insight into the mind of the critic and playwright. This one is sure to be an excellent primer for anyone interested in how performance exists for us every day. – EP

Changes at CPA

We are incredibly proud to support Emil Kang, our executive and artistic director, as he tackles a new challenge in his career, starting fall 2019. Emil founded Carolina Performing Arts 15 years ago, and built it up from a single desk and a staff of three to an internationally renowned artistic organization that presents artists from across the world, fosters artist engagement with the academy and the community, and is a leader in paradigm-shifting models of work in our field.

We look forward to seeing Emil’s vision manifested in his new role as Program Director for Arts and Cultural Heritage at The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, an organization that has made possible the groundbreaking artist residencies we’ve forged here in Chapel Hill. Although we will miss hearing strains of classical music floating from his office, we are geared up for our 15th anniversary season and beyond, and are pleased that Chancellor Emeritus James Moeser will be serving as interim executive and artistic director of CPA.

Learn more about this news by reading the Mellon Foundation’s announcement and this message from UNC’s Interim Chancellor Guskiewicz and Provost Blouin.

Going HOME with Geoff Sobelle

They say you can’t go home again. But it turns out you can, if it’s a home that theater maker Geoff Sobelle built.

I recently plane-train-automobiled it (ok, I actually walked from the train station to my hotel and the theater) to see HOME at the Arts & Ideas Festival in New Haven, CT, so I could see for myself the magic behind this performance that CPA has been trying to bring to Chapel Hill for a couple of seasons now. The stars have aligned, and it will grace the Memorial Hall stage for two nights in March 2020.

HOME has been described as “spellbinding” (even in our own marketing copy!) and that’s true. I’ll add more words to that one adjective: wit-filled, familiar, nostalgic, uplifting and heartbreaking all at once. Filled with characters but void of dialogue, this piece of theater evokes many emotions, as a house comes together onstage with inhabitants from many different periods in the home’s history existing alongside one another. They do so quite deftly thanks to the sharp, witty choreography of David Neumann, whom you might remember from I Understand Everything Better in CPA’s 18/19 season.

I watched, sometimes through tear-filled eyes, as my fellow audience members laughed, gasped, and murmured recognition at what unfolded before us. We even got involved—at one point making a sort of bucket brigade to hang party lights above the house (this time I’m referring to the audience section) in the theater. When we succeeded, everyone cheered, together.

Without spoiling everything that happens in this 90 minutes of theater, suffice it to say that HOME recalls what it’s like to love a home, leave a home, and love IN a home. When the lights came up, I didn’t want the spell to be broken. Luckily for me: I get to see it again next March.

Christina Rodriguez
CPA Associate Director of Marketing and Communications

Not Manet’s Type

This is a guest post written by Lauren Turner, Assistant Curator for the Collection at the Ackland Art Museum. 

When Carolina Performing Arts presents Carrie Mae Weems’s Past Tense on April 19, the audience will see an internationally renowned artist lead a multimedia performance that investigates tensions of race, instances of violence, and demands for justice by combining spoken word, live orchestration, and still and moving images. To complement Past Tense, the Ackland Art Museum will exhibit Weems’ Not Manet’s Type from the museum’s collection, on view March 13 to May 12.

Not Manet’s Type is a 2001 offset photolithograph reproducing the second installment of a five-part photographic series created in 1997. A nude self-portrait of the artist, it shows her standing in a classic contrapposto pose at the foot of an unmade bed, as reflected in the round mirror of a dresser. Each work in the series features her in different positions in this bedroom, with accompanying text in which she deliberates how to prepare for critical study. Weems begins the series with: “STANDING ON SHAKEY GROUND / I POSED MYSELF FOR CRITICAL STUDY / BUT WAS NO LONGER CERTAIN / OF THE QUESTIONS TO ASK”.

By serving as both muse and creator, Weems imparts a sly duality to her challenge: is she referring to the scrutiny of her as the composition’s subject, or the critical study of her artistic output as a whole? At the time of this work, while there was much examination of women as the subjects of an artist’s gaze, less existed in regards to considering the representations of women of color in visual culture (or the lack thereof). This left Weems with the tricky imperative to introduce such representations while at the same time attempting to unpack them in her role as an underrepresented creative voice.

In Not Manet’s Type, Weems guides her rumination by incorporating mentions of canonical figures of art history in her texts. Below the image in the Ackland’s print is: “IT WAS CLEAR I WAS NOT MANET’S TYPE / PICASSO – WHO HAD A WAY WITH WOMEN – / ONLY USED ME & DUCHAMP NEVER / EVEN CONSIDERED ME”. By actively positioning herself among such recognizable artists, she both offers a familiar entry point with which viewers can engage while also laying the groundwork for exploring inherent power disparities in the art world. She closes the series with a self-portrait of her relaxing across the room’s bed above the observation “I TOOK A TIP FROM FRIDA / WHO FROM HER BED PAINTED INCESSANTLY – BEAUTIFULLY / WHILE DIEGO SCALED THE SCAFFOLDS / TO THE TOP OF THE WORLD”.

In this regard, Not Manet’s Type has a commonality with Past Tense, which parses the significance of contemporary topics like police brutality and the Black Lives Matter movement by framing them against Sophocles’ ancient Greek tragedy Antigone, a play concerned with a struggle between legal obedience and moral imperative. By turning again to a conventional cultural touchstone, Weems cuts through society’s frequently divisive rhetoric around these current-day subjects to emphasize instead the continuous and universal human need to productively mourn our losses.

Lauren Turner is Assistant Curator for the Collection at the Ackland Art Museum.

Donor Spotlight: Carol and Rick McNeel

Carol and Rick McNeel have been proud supporters of Carolina Performing Arts since its inception. After Memorial Hall’s grand renovation in 2005 and CPA’s launch as a major university performing arts presenter, the McNeels jumped at the opportunity to name two seats in the Beasley-Curtis Auditorium and have never regretted their decision.

Great travelers who have visited many corners of this world—from the Northwest Passage to Antarctica, Burma, and Cuba—they are just as curious when it comes to the arts. From Curlew River (Benjamin Britten’s church parable starring the inimitable Ian Bostridge) in 2015, which they sponsored, to Yo-Yo Ma, the Bolshoi Ballet, and, most recently, Plastic Bag Store at CURRENT, Carol and Rick are open to all kinds of artistic experiences. Rick’s favorites are the more traditional, much-loved works of the canon, while Carol delights in such experiences as CPA’s presentation of the National Theatre of Scotland’s The Strange Undoing of Prudentia Hart, conceived as “an evening of anarchic theater, live music and strange goings-on.” Put on at Top of the Hill, patrons tore up paper and tossed it into the air to simulate snow during the performance.

Their respective exposure to the arts growing up was minimal, Carol says, but once her love for the arts was sparked in college, it flourished and grew. “Many of my friends had different favorites, and I experienced a great variety with them.”

The decision to support Carolina Performing Arts back in 2005 was an easy one: “We were basically new in town and were anxious to get involved with the arts, and to get to know our community. CPA filled that need, as it is not just a one-size-fits-all kind of undertaking. The amazing talent, from the famous to the lesser known that come to visit, is just incredible.”

Every year, the McNeels look forward to browsing the season brochure, seeking out the particularly new and innovative. They are very pleased with the direction CPA is heading, especially the organization’s focus on changing the ways audiences experience art, as well as the ways in which the artists themselves interact with our community. Remarking upon their recent decision to become performance benefactors for a performance by Pedja Mužijević and UNC Chamber Singers, Carol said, “We were excited about the opportunity to support Pedja Mužijević and his vision for a more immersive, more intimate chamber music experience at CURRENT ArtSpace + Studio.”

With a soft spot for the unconventional and thought-provoking, Carol named October’s An Enemy of the People as one of her favorite performances of the 18/19 season thus far. Schaubühne Berlin’s staging of Henrik Ibsen’s classic yet timely drama broke down the fourth wall and engaged the audience in discussion in the middle of the play—just the kind of innovative interpretive approach that truly excites Carol and Rick.

The McNeels’ commitment to supporting innovative artistic excellence led them to create an endowment designed to help Carolina Performing Arts think outside of traditional performance conventions and reimagine ways of presenting. Their gift will allow CPA to reshape how audiences experience live music and theater of all types and genres. CPA is deeply grateful for supporters like the McNeels who enable us to keep pushing the envelope of what arts presenting means today and to rethink the ways in which audiences experience the performing arts.

Introducing our Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Creative Futures Artists-in-Residence

Carolina Performing Arts has named the four artists in residence for Creative Futures, the largest Mellon Foundation-funded initiative at CPA to date, which was announced in July 2018. The newly named cohort is diverse in background, expertise, and form of artistic expression, each bringing a unique perspective as well as experience in social practice to the role. The artists are vocalist and performance artist Helga Davis, singer/songwriter Shara Nova, performer and writer Okwui Okpokwasili, and musician, curator, and producer Toshi Reagon.

“We are humbled and thrilled to welcome Ms. Davis, Ms. Nova, Ms. Okpokwasili, and Ms. Reagon as Creative Futures fellows,” said Emil Kang, artistic and executive director of Carolina Performing Arts. “One of the primary goals of Creative Futures is to support endeavors that invest in the community and its residents, and that will thrive long beyond the life of the grant. I am confident that these artists will help us achieve our goals to be a catalyst for change and support meaningful, transformative work, on stage or otherwise.”

The four artists will work as team organizers, assembling “triangular collaborations” that include partners from among UNC’s faculty who are engaged in community-based research, and local partners in the community. Through these co-creative partnerships, they will identify multi-year projects that will empower communities to express their creativity and channel relevant issues. In addition to working with their respective teams, the artists will form a supportive working group together. They have collectively expressed their excitement at finding ways to support local communities and discover new models of collaboration, and the time and support that this grant secures for the creation of groundbreaking work. The artists will make their first visits to UNC and CPA in fall 2018.

Helga Davis is a vocalist and performance artist, and author of the evening-length piece Cassandra, completed under a 2014 BRIC Media Arts Fireworks Grant. An artist in residence at National Sawdust, she hosts the eponymous podcast HELGA, and is the 2018-19 visiting curator for the performing arts at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, MA. Davis has appeared many times on the CPA season, most recently in two projects helmed by fellow Creative Futures artists-in-residence: Shara Nova’s You Us We All (2015/16) and in Toshi Reagon’s adaptation of Octavia E. Butler’s Parable of the Sower (2017/18). She will also appear in Lives of the Performers, a work-in-progress reading of the forthcoming play by Hilton Als, on November 16 and 17 at CPA’s CURRENT ArtSpace + Studio. Ms. Davis said that “Creating bonds, and the ability for groups of people to engage with and hold vulnerability, anger, and love,” are chief among the lasting impacts she hopes her work with Creative Futures will have.

In thinking about opportunities created by the grant’s unique format, Shara Nova (formerly Shara Worden), remarked that what is most valuable to her is “Time…Time to ask each other questions. Time to deeply listen. Time to discuss possibilities, and the financial support to not only dream together as artists in community, but the opportunity to make the dream manifest.” Nova is the founder of the chamber pop band My Brightest Diamond, whose next album is set to be released in November 2018. She has composed works for yMusic, Brooklyn Youth Chorus, Young New Yorkers’ Chorus, Brooklyn Rider, Nadia Sirota and Roomful of Teeth, among others. Her orchestrations have been performed by the North Carolina Symphony, Indianapolis Symphony, American Composers Orchestra and the BBC Concert orchestra. Her baroque chamber opera You Us We All came to CPA in the 2015/16 season. Nova is a Kresge Fellow, Knights Grant recipient and a United States Artists fellow.

Okwui Okpokwasili is an award-winning artist who works in multidisciplinary performance. She is the author and choreographer of the Bessie Award-winning original works, Pent-Up: A Revenge Dance and Bronx Gothic. Okpokwasili was a 2015-2017 Randjelovic/Stryker Resident Commissioned Artist for New York Live Arts, as well as the recipient of the 2016 Lower Manhattan Cultural Council President’s Award for Performing Arts. In 2016, she created the performance installation when I return who will receive me? in collaboration with Peter Born at the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s River to River Festival. Their latest works were Poor People’s TV Room and the installation Sitting on A Man’s Head for the 10th Berlin Biennale. She has an ongoing collaborative partnership with Peter Born and has performed in works by Ralph Lemon and Nora Chipaumire. Okpokwasili will appear with Davis in Lives of the Performers at CURRENT ArtSpace + Studio. She is currently a Hodder Fellow at Princeton’s Lewis Center for the Arts. She is a United States Artist Fellow, a recipient of a 2014 Foundation for Contemporary Arts Award, a 2018 Doris Duke Artist Award, a Herb Alpert Award and a Creative Capital Award. She is also a 2018 MacArthur Foundation Fellow. Looking ahead to her work under Creative Futures, she said, “I am really looking forward to working in a comprehensive way to explore how a performance practice can build lasting bonds of kinship between diverse communities.”

Toshi Reagon is a singer, composer, musician, curator, activist, and producer. In addition to touring as a solo artist, she performs with her band Toshi Reagon & BIGLovely, who will appear on CPA’s 2018/19 season, on April 13th at Memorial Hall. Reagon is the composer and librettist of the opera Octavia E. Butler’s Parable of the Sower, which had its U.S. premiere on CPA’s 2017/18 season. In 2011, Reagon created the annual event Word* Rock* & Sword: A Festival Exploration of Women’s Lives. She is the composer and music director for Michelle Dorrance’s The Blues Project, which came to CPA in 2014. In 2015, Reagon was named a Ford Foundation Art of Change Fellow. She is also in the final year of her Mellon Foundation DisTIL fellowship with Carolina Performing Arts. Of the opportunity to continue working with the local community through Creative Futures, Reagon said, “The Triangle is so powerful—such a heartbeat for our country…. If you show up here and you show that you are willing to stand in the circle and contribute, people meet you, in small ways and in big ways.”

The grant will also fund a project director, who will oversee the initiative and support stakeholders. The search for this named position (Rothwell Program Director for Creative Futures), in recognition of a private gift from CPA board member Sharon Rothwell and Doug Rothwell, is open until October 18, 2018.

Read more about the Creative Futures initiative, funded by a $1.5 million grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. This funding makes a transformative vision of community engagement possible: collaborative creation in the arts that is informed by faculty research and driven by students.

YOU ARE A CITIZEN

Throughout history, artists of all kinds have played pivotal roles in when it comes defining what it means to be an active citizen in your community. In times of upheaval, change, or oppression, artists give breath to what one might not know how to—or be afraid to—say. Through their work, they can serve as a guiding light for others when considering how we can, individually and collectively, support the marginalized, invest in our communities, and speak out against wrongdoing.

This season at CPA, we’re focusing on supporting the work of artists who do just these things—and finding ways to bring that into the wider world of the Triangle and beyond. Creative Futures, our newest Mellon Foundation-funded grant, is one such way that we hope we can support impactful work that becomes embedded in the fabric of this place we all call home. You’ll hear more about this in the weeks and months to come.

Many of the artists in the 18/19 season bring performances to CPA under our You Are a Citizen theme—we hope you’ll be as inspired by the questions they provoke as we have been. On September 28, Brooklyn Rider teams up with singer Magos Herrera for Dreamers, in which they breathe new life into words written by poets and other artists during brutalist regimes: demonstrating the idea that art can serve powerfully as a reminder of the beauty that exists in the world even in the most trying of times. Then, in October, renowned German theater company Schaubühne Berlin brings their radical adaptation of the Ibsen play An Enemy of the People. Tainted water, whistleblowing, freedom of speech…who knew a 100-year-old play could be so relevant in 2018 North Carolina? (Not to mention that this production was just canceled in China.)

For an entirely different take on the importance of free speech, we’re thrilled to be hosting Bassem Youssef: the satirist (and surgeon) and former host of Al-Bernameg, who was exiled from his native Egypt for his criticism of the regimes in power. Youssef will also host an Arabic-language town hall for members of the local Arabic-speaking community-—a first for CPA. And in the spring, iconic American photographer and artist Carrie Mae Weems will explore ideas about justice and peace through the lens of the play Antigone, laying bare its enduring relevance.

On September 8, we kicked off our season in a new way: by giving the “stage” to local nonprofit organizations for a free event called Stories on Citizenship at CURRENT, which welcomed more than 200 guests. Our neighbors from Community Empowerment Fund, El Centro Hispano, Immersion for Spanish Language Acquisition (ISLA), the Jackson Center, and Student Action with Farmworkers told their stories through performances of their own making, all emceed by UNC students working with the Campus Y and in the community. The event was also featured on WUNC’s The State of Things. You can listen to the interview here.

This season is all about exploration: of who we are, how we find our place in our communities, and how we come together. We look forward to uncovering these exciting things with you.

From Surgeon to Satirist

BY Dan Ruccia

“You are a natural,” Jon Stewart raved after Bassem Youssef’s first appearance on The Daily Show. “I know you might find this weird, and that you made a leap of faith switching your career to be a satirist, but you will soon discover that you are made for this. You are not just another guest—you are a friend and a colleague.”

It was the summer of 2012, just after the end of the first season of Bassem Youssef’s wildly popular TV show Al-bernameg (“The Show”), a year and a half after the Arab Spring ejected Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak from power. Youssef was in New York and, through a friend, snagged a tour of the studios for The Daily Show. The biting satire and incredible success of Al-bernameg had already earned Youssef the title of “Jon Stewart of Egypt,” and Youssef was giddy at the chance to meet Stewart in person. In the documentary Tickling Giants, Youssef can be seen practically melting when he first lays eyes on Stewart’s desk. And in his funny, self-deprecating memoir Revolution for Dummies, he talks about “squeal[ing] like a fan girl” when he got to shake Stewart’s hand after an hour-long conversation. Later that day, Youssef was invited on the show itself.

Youssef’s excitement was entirely understandable given how unlikely his story is. Until early 2011, Youssef was a cardiothoracic surgeon with dreams of moving to the U.S. When the uprising in Tahrir Square started, he was waiting for paperwork for a position at a hospital in Cleveland. The utopian promise of the days after Mubarak’s resignation inspired him and a friend to create a series of short YouTube videos satirizing state media, Islamist politicians, and celebrities. Amazingly, his first video was watching 100,000 times in its first two days. Within months, numerous Egyptian channels were in a bidding war to put him on TV, and Youssef was a heart surgeon no longer.

The next three years were incredibly tumultuous both for Egypt and for Youssef. The election of Mohamed Morsi and his ensuing hypocrisy and corruption provided endless fodder for Youssef and his writers, and viewers flocked to the show. Youssef spared no target in the Egyptian establishment, earning him praise (from Egyptian liberals and free press advocates from around the world) and scorn (first from the Muslim Brotherhood and its allies, later the government of Abdel Fattah el-Sisi). He even managed to smuggle Jon Stewart in as a guest in June 2013.

While Youssef had always skirted the line with the authorities—including a notorious incident where the Morsi government tried to jail him for making fun of Morsi’s hat—his luck started to change after the military coup in July 2013. Sisi quickly became a kind of national hero, and his regime did not take well to any form of criticism. Youssef soldiered on, continuing to poke fun at any target he deemed fit, including the government. The government started harassing Al-bernameg, putting pressure on him and the network and even attempting to jam the station’s signal. Eventually, it all became too much. Despite continued high viewership, Youssef was forced to cancel the show in June 2014 and to flee the country that November.

After a brief stop in Dubai, Youssef moved to the U.S., where he has used his knowledge and experience of life under actual dictatorships to hilariously critique and contextualize the Trump administration while also continuing to provide his offbeat assessments of goings on in the Middle East.

Dan Ruccia is a Durham-based composer, writer, and graphic designer.

You Are a Maker

“I’m not creative.”

Chances are you’ve heard someone say this before. Maybe you’ve even uttered those words yourself. But creativity means many different things, and it can strike anyone, anywhere. Maybe inspiration struck you standing in front of the pantry wondering how to get dinner on the table tonight. Or in a moment of sudden insight you think of the perfect words to explain a concept in a new way, one that unlocks your child’s understanding of today’s homework. Or maybe, through your work with a local nonprofit, you find needs that aren’t being addressed and help create a solution.

Is it strange for a performing arts organization to be talking about creativity this way? Maybe—but that’s the point. We want to take down some of the walls around who gets to be creative and who doesn’t: creativity and ideas don’t belong only to those on a stage or in a studio. Individuals and communities create all the time. Maybe the idea just needs a little reframing.

You might already know about our 2018/19 theme, You Are Everything, and that we’ll be exploring facets of community life throughout the year. One such facet is the idea of co-creation, aimed at revealing the many ways any person can take part in creativity.

In September, we invite you to visit the Plastic Bag Store in the Studio at CURRENT. It’s almost an ordinary convenience store: except everything in it is made of discarded plastic—much of it collected right here in the Triangle. These items tell an imaginative, funny, and relevant story about our dependence on plastic and its effects. And you can return for evening performances and see the installation through the eyes of live performers and puppets telling their own tales.

At their performance in February, the music collective wild Up will be inviting audience members to join them in marching, chanting, and even singing, until it becomes impossible to distinguish visiting artist from ticketholder. In the week following, they’ll work with local community members and students to create a new piece of music that will be debuted at a second performance at their residency’s end.

And at the end of our season, we’ll celebrate everything that’s happened in 2018/19 with DJ Kid Koala. At Satellite, he’ll make amateur DJs out of everyone in the audience, leading them with lighting cues to play their own turntables. Then, at his Robot Dance Party, kids of all ages are invited to make robot costumes out of cardboard boxes and other flair and then take to the dance floor to shake it only as a tiny robot can.

These artists all offer wildly different experiences with one important thing in common: no part of what they’ll do here in Chapel Hill could be done without you. We hope you’ll join us for one or all of their visits. In the meantime, we invite you to tell us a little something about yourself for our #YouAreEverythingatCPA project. Maybe now, yours could say, “I am…creative.”

Artist Profile: Flutronix

Artist Profile: Flutronix
By Dan Ruccia

“In our first year of being Flutronix, we didn’t play any concerts,” Nathalie Joachim recalls. “We had to figure out what to play. Before we came around, there wasn’t a lot of music for two flutes and electronics.” Flutronix, the duo of Joachim and Allison Loggins-Hull, is not unique in that regard. Every ensemble with non-standard instrumentation—not a string quartet or piano trio or Pierrot ensemble—grapples with the question of what music to play. One solution, embraced by groups like Eighth Blackbird (of which Joachim is also a member), is to commission piles of new works from other composers, following the traditional division of labor in classical music between composer and performer.

Joachim and Loggins-Hull, both composers in their own rights before forming Flutronix, chose a different route: writing all of their music themselves as composer-performers. For Joachim, that choice was as much a practical decision as a manifesto: “In western classical music, composing is a very insular, individual process for everyone. When you’re writing smaller-scale music, it’s process that’s largely un-edited. Every other type of writing that happens, a writer works really closely with their editor in shaping their thoughts and guiding the process a little bit.” She contrasts that with the highly collaborative process in the rock and pop worlds, observing that “So many of the greatest rock albums happened by a band sitting themselves in a studio for many weeks at a time around the clock writing together.” Given that the duo’s stylistic ambit extends well beyond classical music to encompass rock, electronic, hip hop, R&B, jazz, soul, world music, and beyond, the choice makes sense.

At first, they wrote pieces individually. Almost everything on their eponymous first album from 2010 was written by either Joachim or Loggins-Hull. Their first collaborative composition, the album-closing “Brown Squares,” started out as an experiment. “I remember being apprehensive about it,” Joachim recalls, laughing. “Allison came over, and we were sitting in my home studio. We just started writing, and next thing we knew, we looked up and we had a piece. It just worked. The piece almost wrote itself.”

Both women were excited by the results, so their next album, 2014’s 2.0, was almost entirely co-written. Having someone to bounce ideas off allowed them to go places they wouldn’t think to otherwise, to sharpen ideas and discover unexpected solutions. “We rely on each other a lot to push how we normally think about writing because our approaches are very night and day,” Joachim says. “We have very distinct styles and voices, and we approach how we think about music in very different ways, but they are extremely complementary.”

In 2015, Joachim joined Eighth Blackbird and moved from New York City to Chicago, and Loggins-Hull gave birth to her daughter, moving the duo to reevaluate their compositional process. Having established a sound and a repertory, they decided to refocus their limited writing time on larger projects that responded to the current social and political climate. Discourse, the work they will write and perform here in Chapel Hill over the coming years, is their first such attempt at expanding their collaborative vision even further.

Dan Ruccia is a Durham-based composer, writer, and graphic designer.

Breaking down this season’s theme: You Are Everything

You are everything. Maybe you’ve seen these words on our 18/19 brochure cover, or splashed across the front of Memorial Hall as you were driving by, and wondered “What exactly does that mean?”

Here at Carolina Performing Arts, we’ve been considering the phrase a lot. In fact, it’s the theme of our new season. As we see it, small communities are created every time people gather to watch one of our performances. And in the years since we first opened, we’ve grown, both figuratively and literally. We’ve made spaces like CURRENT, which invite you to get closer to a performance–and sometimes even become a part of it. Our visiting artists help create those communities, by pushing us to imagine new possibilities and making connections between us all while we sit or stand shoulder-to-shoulder, in awe of what they share with us. But those moments also depend on what happens when you come through our doors. There is, simply put, no performance without you and the energy you create in those moments.

Communities exist whether we’re gathered together inside a theater or passing one another on Franklin Street or in downtown Durham. This season, we want to find the opportunities for us all to consider how we can take what we experience together during a performance and apply it to benefit our everyday communities. You’ve probably read, heard, or even experienced in your own life that the arts promote empathy and can motivate people to engage civically. The arts foster creative thinking and open us to different ways of thinking.

This, in fact, is what we mean when we say “you are everything”–it’s you who has the power to translate what you feel into something that ripples outside the theater to bring about change and transformation. This is especially important at a time when many of us are moved in new and urgent ways to explore our own civic duty: the responsibility each of us has to build a better future for others. At CPA, we also believe that artists play an integral role in this process. With the insights revealed by what they do, they can inspire to show up for humanity, and do so in ways that reveal our individual creativity and compassion.

Throughout the season, we’ll host many performances under the umbrellas You Are a Neighbor, You Are a Citizen, and You are a Maker. These ideas trace back to what we think of as fundamental parts of community life: connections between neighbors, engaged citizenship, and collaborative creation. We’re also asking our visiting artists to connect with you even more offstage, and we’ll be working throughout the year to find unique opportunities for this. Check out our season brochure for a sampling of upcoming gatherings, and find out what our artists are up to on their event pages at carolinaperformingarts.org as we plan more events.

Thanks for being a part of this season, and those that have come before it. We are so grateful to have you as our community.

Donor Spotlight: Karol Mason

By Tatjana Zimbelius-Klem 
 
Karol Mason, ’79, is one of those delightful people who seems to have endless energy and drive, gushing with excitement as she talks about her work, her family, and the things about which she is passionate. A former UNC Board of Trustees member, she is the president of John Jay College of Criminal Justice, serves on the International Advisory Board of Carolina Performing Arts, plays the piano, visits museums, and loves visual and performing arts. Born and raised in Amityville, New York, as one of four children to a teacher and a public health administrator, Mason was reared with a clear sense of the value of a good education and the importance of community service.  

Karol’s parents both grew up in the South during segregation, and went on to earn graduate degrees in their respective fields. The lessons they imparted on Karol and her siblings taught her that education is critical for opening doors to many opportunities. As president of John Jay, which is part of the City University of New York (CUNY), she is proud that students have greater access to higher education because of low CUNY tuition and the tuition-free degree program that was recently announced.  

The arts, too, are an integral part of both the John Jay community and Karol Mason’s life. “Art helps inspire you and gives you something to be happy about, especially in challenging times. Something to look forward to, but also something to learn from; most significantly, they offer a context for us to have difficult conversations,” she says. John Jay has an art and music department, their own gallery, and even a partnership with Lincoln Center. The hallway to Karol’s office serves as a gallery space as well, with rotating exhibits. In her spare time, Mason is an avid concert- and theater-goer, and she is glad to have discovered that there is a piano at John Jay for her to play. “My instrument is still in Atlanta, but next time, I will bring my sheet music, so I can practice,” she reports excitedly. 

For Mason, the invitation in January 2017 to join the International Advisory Board of Carolina Performing Arts could not have come at a better time. A former UNC board member, she had recused herself from UNC-related activities when she joined the Department of Justice—first serving as deputy associate attorney general and then as assistant attorney general. But the day before an email from CPA Director Emil Kang popped into her inbox, she had left the DOJ and felt ready to reconnect with her alma mater. Karol was elated to accept a place on CPA’s board. “The arts bring me such joy, and I love being connected back to Carolina,” she beams. “Carolina is critical to who I am. During my years at UNC I learned who I was and what my priorities were.” And now, Karol can share her expertise and get up close and personal again with the college that has meant so much to her.  

In fact, Carolina Performing Arts has always occupied a special place in Karol’s heart. Attending performances whenever she can, she is consistently amazed at the level of artistry presented at CPA. One of her favorite Memorial Hall memories is seeing “The Blues Project” by Dorrance Dance with Toshi Reagon and her band BIGLovely. “It was amazing! And to think that I saw it first in Chapel Hill and then made all my friends go buy tickets and see it when it came to the Kennedy Center!” 

Karol counts the day in May she receives the Carolina Performing Arts season brochure as one of the highlights of her year: “It’s like getting the Christmas catalogue in the mail. You’re so excited and can’t wait to make your choices.” Carolina Performing Arts, too, is excited that Mason chooses to volunteer her time and expertise to serve on its board, and for her heartfelt passion and support for the performing arts at Carolina. 

Research Embodied with Big Dance Theater

Research Embodied

Big Dance Theater Moves the Words Off the Page

“We like them because they don’t fit into one box or category,” said Amy Kolling Russell, Carolina Performing Arts’ director of programming, of Big Dance Theater. She didn’t mention, in this mild understatement, that there may not be a box of any kind big enough to hold these protean artists, whose latest work, 17c, is a CPA co-commission. It will have its world premiere in Memorial Hall on November 9th and 10th, before appearing at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, which is another of its co-commissioners.

17c, astonishingly, grows out of the famous 17th century diary of Englishman Samuel Pepys, who from 1660-1669 recorded both the minutiae and the major events of his life and times. We can read about where he went with whom, what he saw (including theater and dance), what he ate; his work, his health, his wealth, his wife and his extra-curricular adventures, taking in by the way the workings of the British Navy, major religious and political conflicts, war, plague and the Great Fire of London. What we can’t read about in this fascinating verbal selfie are the women around him. We glimpse them, certainly, through Pepys’ eyes, but we do not hear their voices, or indeed, perceive them as humans independent of Pepys’ associations with them.

In 17c, Big Dance has a few questions for Mr. Pepys about his behavior with women, some of which would be abhorred today—or admired by those still not admitting the radical proposition that women are people.

Big Dance Theater was founded in 1991 by Annie-B Parson, her husband Paul Lazar, and Molly Hickok, which makes it a mature company in an always-experimental artistic field. Parson (with experience from ballet to Butoh) choreographs; Lazar (whose experimental theater credits include much work with The Wooster Group) directs and acts; Hickok (multiple Bessie Award winner for her Big Dance work, and a screen actor) performs, in the works that evolve collaboratively into a rich brew of dance, theater, music, text and scenic design. But, as Parson asserts to every interviewer, “dance is the sacred object.” Or, as Hickok has put it, “we usually start with everything that’s not the words.” This makes Big Dance quite different from many contemporary dance theater companies, for whom the verbal component often dominates, reducing dance to an illustrative role and diminishing its poetics.

The company has been distinguished from the beginning by its dedication to the high craft of artmaking, and by its interest in literary source materials. But how do they get from first-rate literature (Flaubert, for instance, or Chekov) to dance theater? It is not a matter of mere transliteration. Through their artistic alchemy, they transmute the literary form into a theatrical one, although without destroying the original substance—instead of making lead into gold, they make gold into more gold. They use parts of the texts in performance, but Big Dance goes deep, moving under the surface of the words, into the soft substance shelled around by the words—and into the matters left unmentioned by the words, even while thoroughly interrogating the text.

In addition to turning a gimlet eye on the many passages of casual power and thoughtless sexism in Pepys’ diary, Big Dance looks at the ensuing centuries of commentary on his every word, and draws on a contemporaneous work, The Convent of Pleasure, by one of the few female intellectuals of the era, Margaret Cavendish. Putting these verbal sources on collision courses with each other guarantees the insight-generating crashes that are such a notable feature of Big Dance work.

The friction of ideas, (Big Dance are very thoughtful artmakers), rubbing together in close quarters results in a fueling heat, but the light for insight comes from the bodies and their relationships with other bodies. It is a wonderful paradox. The dance is prime, but the dance is only one component of a complex stage work—yet without the dancing we, the audience, would not experience what Parson calls “kinesthetic empathy,” that completely non-verbal phenomenon that leads us to real human sympathy with others, whether or not we agree with their ideas or approve of their behaviors.

17c also fascinates because Pepys diary-keeping seems startlingly similar to the sort of unfiltered self-reporting that many of us engage in regularly, on Facebook or other social media platforms. Our major life events, our random observations, our domestic trials and our tribulations at work, our travels, our broken hearts and broken legs, our social philosophies and politics, and most particularly, our meals, are all shared, often with alarming indiscretion, supplying information to our friends and ammunition to our enemies, while we make our lives more “real” to ourselves by recording them. We are very like Pepys in this incessant recording, and like him in our own failures to question our baseline assumptions about our places in the world. During his lifetime, Pepys kept the volumes of his diary on the “only me” privacy setting, but he made sure they would be publicly available (as he understood public, meaning educated men) in perpetuity, along with his library, in a “Biblioteca Pepysiana.”

This Biblioteca Pepysiana has been housed for nearly 400 years at Magdalene College, Cambridge, (which Pepys had attended), which brings us back around to the role of the university in preserving and generating intellectual culture. One aspect of the social role of the university is very like the role of an artistic entity such as Big Dance Theater. The university must preserve, disseminate and increase the hoard of human knowledge, but it must also explore different ways of understanding that knowledge, and grapple with its meaning in the present. In commissioning probing performance works such as 17c, Carolina Performing Arts demonstrates that it takes part in the core intellectual work of the university: to question received information, refine understanding and advance to a fresh synthesis, in the contra-dance between past and present. Big Dance Theater is an ideal partner in this everlasting human effort to see our world a little more clearly.

Kate Dobbs Ariail is a Durham writer, specializing in dance, theater, and the visual arts.

Reenvisioning Cold Mountain

Reenvisioning Cold Mountain

An inside look at how a book becomes an opera

That Charles Frazier’s Cold Mountain comprises 450 pages of engrossing prose is indisputable. The UNC-Chapel Hill alumnus’s novel bursts with thick description of the forests, rivers, and mountains of North Carolina, assembling a large cast of characters from all walks of life. Time and space become fluid as the Odyssey-like plot vacillates between the travels and travails of Ada and Inman as Inman treks from Raleigh to Cold Mountain during the waning days of the Civil War. Other than occasional flashbacks and brief memories, the two lovers are only united at the very end of the story. Frazier’s language is rich and dense, full of delightful details and powerful imagery.

All of which makes Cold Mountain an unexpected source for an opera, let alone one that clocks in at a mere two and a half hours. “It could have been a huge opera,” Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Jennifer Higdon observes. “To do all of it, you’d have to pack a dinner and the next day’s breakfast.” The relative brevity presented Higdon and librettist Gene Scheer with a challenge: to distill the essential themes and relationships out of the story to their purest form. Frazier recalls an early conversation with Scheer: “one my questions was, ‘This is a book about a guy walking a long distance. How do you do that on the stage?’ And Gene said, ‘I just finished Moby Dick. We’ll figure it out.’” Those challenges led to inventive solutions at all levels of the work, propelling the first large-scale opera to be set entirely in North Carolina.

Early in the process, Higdon and Scheer met over coffee and, in just a few hours, outlined the general shape of the opera, determining the major events they wanted to portray and the general pacing. For Higdon, it was important to vary the vocal texture on stage, moving between ensembles, choruses, and individual arias in a way that kept the music flowing. Somehow, save for a few minor tweaks, the final opera largely hews to that original outline. “It all worked. A lot of times that doesn’t happen. When you’re trying things out, you have to cut things and move things around,” Higdon, a first-time opera composer, adds.

Outline in hand, Scheer began the painstaking task of writing the libretto itself, condensing Frazier’s expansive novel into 23 short scenes. Surprisingly, the words were actually Scheer’s last concern. “Rather than thinking about what people are saying,” he says, “what I’m really trying to do is to figure out what they’re doing. In every scene, someone is making a choice, an active choice where they’re confronted with ‘do I do this, or do I not?’ It becomes an active theatrical experience, where the audience is watching these people changing the trajectories of their lives by the choices they make.” He singled out a few pivotal moments: Is Ada going to accept Ruby into her life? Is Inman going to stop the preacher Veasey from committing murder? Will Stobrod convince Ruby that he is a changed man?

At the same time, Scheer wanted to leave plenty of space for Higdon’s music to speak, to let it fill in missing details, allowing it to be what he calls “the marrow of the matter.” Higdon leapt at those opportunities, using her keen ear for orchestral color to tease out subtlety. For instance, whenever the villainous Teague is onstage, she calls for a variety of different percussion instruments to create snake-like sounds. “It doesn’t have to register in an audience member’s ear or their brain,” she says. “However, on a subconscious level you hope it does register so you don’t have to say, ‘here comes the bad guy.’” Similarly, to illustrate how Inman feels hollowed out by the war, she writes chords without thirds when he sings, leaving just an empty fifth. And in one arresting interlude in act two, Higdon writes a short tone poem that depicts Inman marching for a month as all the phases of the moon pass in the background.

Higdon takes this approach one step further when describing Ada’s evolution over the course of the opera. She views Ada as not fully formed in the first half, and so Ada’s music is more diffuse almost to the point of seeming adrift for the entirety of the first act. Only after intermission, as Ada learns from Ruby to be self-sufficient, does her music become more defined and directed. To further emphasize how long Ada’s process of self-discovery takes, Higdon only writes an aria for her in the second act, an unusual choice for a lead character in an opera. By the end, her music is assured, and she closes the opera with a quiet strength.

North Carolina is just as important to the story as any of the other characters, and Scheer and Higdon take complimentary approaches in rendering it. Before he started to write, Scheer, a New Yorker, visited the Fraziers in Asheville, staying in a farmhouse that had been run by women during the Civil War. Lines such as “Everything here is vertical” come from those few weeks he spent hiking the Appalachian Trail, absorbing the vastness of the mountains. Higdon’s sense of the land is more personal; she grew up in eastern Tennessee 60-miles as the crow flies from the actual Cold Mountain in North Carolina. She incorporates bits of local sounds into her score: a newly-composed bluegrass tune for Stobrod to play, some shape-note-inspired choruses, a folk-like melody for Teague to sing. In addition, she helped finesse the words themselves, bringing Scheer’s dialog closer to local dialect.

All this careful, intensive work pays off. The opera simultaneously captures much of the book’s grain while imbricating new, unexpected colors and emotions. So, it’s no surprise that its past performances in Santa Fe and Philadelphia were so well received. “I felt like I learned things about my book from seeing it through Gene and Jennifer’s eyes and ears,” Charles Frazier says, “about structure, about storytelling.”

Dan Ruccia is a Durham-based composer, writer, and graphic designer.

Connecting Chapel Hill to China

Like many of her music faculty colleagues, Clara Yang divides her time between the classroom and the stage. The UNC Associate Professor of Music balances the demands of teaching a full piano studio and advising students with her own impressive musical career as a guest artist and soloist. “As a professional musician, I really enjoy doing different things,” says Clara. “It makes your life a lot more interesting.”

This fall, Clara is learning a brand new concerto by the renowned Chinese composer Chen Yi that she’ll perform with the China Philharmonic Orchestra both in Beijing and Chapel Hill. Titled Four Spirits, the CPA-commissioned work depicts the four spiritual animals of ancient Chinese legend: the Blue Dragon in the east, the White Tiger in the west, the Red Phoenix in the south, and the Black Xuanwu (a turtle/snake hybrid) in the north.

Chen Yi began writing the work for Clara last winter after they met in person at the composer’s Kansas City home. Though the two had communicated over email for some time, Clara admits to being nervous about meeting a composer who she so admired. However that anxiety dissipated the moment Chen Yi greeted her at the door. “It was as though we knew one another for a long time,” recalls Clara. “Chen Yi is so easy going. I immediately felt comfortable.” The two got to know one another and forge a real connection that continued to grow as they corresponded in the months to come.

Fast forward to the start of the school year this September when Clara received the finished work. One of the things that first struck her about the music is how descriptive and intuitive it is. “When you hear the dragon, you’ll immediately know it,” explains Clara. “Right off the bat you can imagine the dragon swirling in the sky…It makes this grand appearance and the piano makes that clear with these perfectly crafted passages.” Each movement brings out the meaning and character of the spirit animal it honors.

Clara is excited to hear the work with a full orchestra for the first time when she travels to Beijing in November. Her parents and husband will join her at the Forbidden City Concert Hall for the piece’s world premiere with the China Philharmonic. Then she will reunite with the orchestra on December 8 for the U.S. premiere of Four Spirits in Memorial Hall. You can bet Clara’s UNC students will be in the audience cheering her on as will composer Chen Yi. “To have a concerto written for me by such a renowned composer is a great honor,” reflects Clara. “I love this piece and I can’t wait to share it with others.”