‘rie Shontel’s autobiographical theater work is a strange amalgam of comedy, pathos and public service announcement. Set in a shabby Oakland, CA, public housing living room where she grew up, which is oddly draped with a small fortune in brand-new bras, Mama Juggs is a series of related skits about the author and her family, focused on breasts, their life-giving force and their death-dealing disease.
This is certainly fertile ground for theatrical exploration, but Shontel does not take it very far-however, if you should somehow have been ignorant of the correct way to check your breasts for lumps, you will be educated.
If you have trouble with the idea of multiple generations of the same family living in public housing, keep in mind that the author-by day public radio producer Anita Woodley-has broken the cycle. Shontel is as adept as a mockingbird at creating the individual voices and forms of her characters, all of whom are piquant and interesting.
Some of the stories are wonderful, and she is an excellent storyteller, with an instinct for comic timing. This is not a play, with arc, crisis and resolution, but a story-telling event with some charming playacting.
After creating a series of “testimonial plays” based on South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission in the 1990s, playwright Yael Farber approached a group of women from the Xhosa people in 2008, and told them the story of The Oresteia. The Greek tragic trilogy still confronts us with dilemmas our civilization hasn’t fully solved. How do we distinguish justice from vengeance? What is the appropriate punishment for murder? And once “eye for an eye” violence is ingrained in a culture, how can it be stopped?
At the time she was looking for umngqokolo—traditional overtone throat singing for her new project. But the women’s responses to the tale shocked the playwright. What became a spontaneous Greek—yet uniquely African—chorus sought and found a solution to this ancient dilemma of justice. It differed from the one depicted in the writings of Aeschylus.
This week, those women, their musicians and three actors sing and enact the conclusions they’ve reached in the Farber Foundry production of MoLoRa (Ash) at Reynolds Industries Theater.
We spoke with Yael Farber by phone for an hour on March 11.
INDEPENDENT: I’m aware that South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission has had a profound influence on your work. I’m wondering what lessons you believe the rest of the world hasn’t learned yet from South Africa after the fall of apartheid. Why is a work like MoLoRa (Ash) needed—why is it a work the world should have?
FARBER: The genesis of project was actually images of New York City after Sept. 11. For days after the tragedy, there were those incredibly poignant and moving images of ashes falling down on people in Manhattan.
CAROLINA THEATRE/ DURHAM—Ask any high-school theater geek, and they’ll have heard of Gilbert and Sullivan. Ask me, I was one. But amazingly, I graduated high school and went all through college without once seeing one of their plays or hearing any of the songs.
All of that changed when I attended a rehearsal for The Mikado, performed by the Durham Savoyards. Founded in 1963, the troupe is dedicated to performing solely Gilbert and Sullivan standards. While they rotate through a number of titles, they return to the more popular ones more frequently.
This outing marks director Derrick Ivey’s second time helming the opera. His first time directing for the Savoyards occurred in 2003, when he directed a different version of The Mikado.
“The one we did in 2003 was a really radical re-visioning. It was a modern setting, and we had a huge back story,” Ivey says, noting that the text and music remained unchanged. The modern characters then stepped into the Japanese story after the choreographed overture, creating a layered story-within-a-story effect. That production was the last time the Savoyards performed the opera.
Though the Savoyards only have one large performance each year, they make sure to do it in style. Sarah Nevill, one of the show’s producers, says that the group has sold more tickets than at this point last year. As far as Nevill knows, no other group like the Savoyards exists in North Carolina.
A technical rehearsal was underway during my visit; as I walked through the Carolina Theatre’s backstage corridors, cast and crew bustled about, absorbed in their preparations. A peek into the makeup rooms revealed actors getting their faces brushed with white paste to simulate Japanese Kabuki-style makeup. Actors padded around the halls in dressing gowns, with hair held in caps to aid in wearing wigs later. Orchestra members tuned up in the pit the cast’s first full-dress rehearsal (involving not only costumes, but also make-up and wigs). Continue reading »
From the 2008 Art to Wear show: Jessica Monique George models a kente-inspired wrap made from her own woven and dyed fabric. (Photo by Jeremy M. Lange)
As veteran broadcaster Ron Burgundy of Anchorman might say, North Carolina State University’s Art to Wear fashion show is kind of a big deal.
People know it and mark their calendars for what’s become known as a reliable showcase of talent. The annual fashion show, put on by the College of Design (COD) and College of Textiles (COT), has made quite a mark in the burgeoning Raleigh fashion scene.
“People [tend to] stake out their seats hours beforehand,” says Vita Plume, COD art and design teacher and Art to Wear faculty advisor. Plume was the sole advisor until COT joined the event in 2006, and Dr. Cynthia Istook, associate professor of textile and apparel management, has served in the same capacity for COT since that time.
In 2002, Plume taught a fibers studio in which many students were working with garments. One student, Kate Crawford, presented a new collection for every critical evaluation, which gave Plume the idea to put on a fashion show. Crawford eventually became the event’s first director.
“If they hadn’t been making clothing, I wouldn’t have thought of it,” Plume says.
Two hundred and fifty people came out to witness the inaugural event, which was held in Kamphoefner lower courtyard (known as “The Pit”) near the Design School, with six designers showing their semester’s work.
“People heard the music, and they were hanging off [the railings],” Plume says. The second and third years saw audience members crammed in to the venue, and organizers introduced video projection screens to showcase the designs to more people.
As word of mouth spread about N.C. State’s unique fashion event, the show’s audience grew. By 2005, the show was big enough to warrant a permanent name. Art to Wear had arrived.
After five years, organizers realized they needed a bigger venue. Designers showed collections in the Court of North Carolina on the university’s East Campus in 2007 and 2008 (audience members either paid for seats or lounged in the grass for free), before moving indoors to Reynolds Coliseum last year. The number of attendees peaked in 2008, with an estimated 2,700 on hand. (Last year’s count dipped slightly, with the show attracting 2,500 attendees.)
Naturally, with that growth, the show’s budget has ballooned. In a meeting with committee heads and designers on Feb. 22, this year’s event director Eleanor Hoffman put that number as pushing $30,000. That’s a far cry from the event’s inaugural year, where each student ponied up $25 and relied on friends and family for assistance with set-up-for example, founding co-director Brannan Hackney’s dad DJ’ed and the participating designers used their own money for votive candles to decorate the runway. This year, each designer is responsible for raising at least $100 to help with costs, which include components such as still photographs, videography, and hair and make-up sponsored by local salons.
The event has also attracted established figures in the Raleigh arts community to be judges. One name especially jumps out: William Ivey Long, famed Broadway costume designer and North Carolina native who’s won five Tony Awards. In 2008, Long was a member of the three-juror panel (not unlike the judging triumvirate on Project Runway), that decides which designers get to show their collections. (That year, 17 out of 31 hopefuls made it in.) This year, Long is donating a cash prize to be awarded in a fashion that has yet to be determined.
This year’s show takes place on April 14 in N.C. State’s Reynolds Coliseum. Until then, I’ll be covering various aspects of putting on the show and creating collections with weekly installments on the process. Visit the Web site here.
On the phone about her appearance at Meredith College on March 8, Jodi Picoult is friendly, bubbly and frequently laughing. There’s no indication of the misery and tragedy visited upon the characters in her best-selling novels, including My Sister’s Keeper, Handle With Care and her latest, House Rules, which hit bookstores on Tuesday.
Picoult’s novels often involve such horrors as school shootings, execution, infanticide, date rape, sexual abuse, suicide pacts and more. The tales frequently combine courtroom drama with deeply flawed characters that don’t always make it through the story intact. (On the other hand, last year’s film of My Sister’s Keeper angered many fans of the book by cutting the last tragic twist, something Picoult says she was unhappy about.)
Though she’s closer to her characters than anyone else, Picoult has few qualms about what they go through in each book. “I don’t really feel bad about it, though very often I want to slap them. I want to say, ‘God, can’t you see the bigger picture?’” Picoult says with a laugh. “I wish they’d make better decisions, but if they did, I wouldn’t have much of a book.”
House Rules, Picoult’s 17th novel since 1992, deals with a teenager with Asperger syndrome who is accused of murder. The story uses the crime as a window into the teenager’s life and the effect his condition has on his family.
Picoult said that the idea for the story came from discussions with an attorney about how the legal system breaks down when there are problems with communication. “That got me thinking about what would happen if you had some sort of disability that made it difficult to communicate with law enforcement,” says Picoult, who has an autistic cousin.
“There’s always some kind of disconnect when someone who is autistic is brought in before a judge, or the police, or anyone in law enforcement, and I thought that was something people should know about.”
To research House Rules, Picoult not only shadowed CSIs, but met with nearly 50 children with Asperger’s and their parents, combining face-to-face interviews with a detailed survey.
Picoult says the surveys yielded hundreds of pages. “Many of the observations went into the book, because they said it better than I could myself.”
“The thing about a kid with Asperger’s is that while they might have trouble talking to you, if you ask them to write something down, they’re incredibly articulate, because they’re very bright, once you take away that fluster of being in a social situation,” Picoult says. “It’s one reason the Internet has been so important to people with Asperger’s, because in chat rooms, you don’t have to look anyone in the eye.”
Picoult has already completed her next book, a tale of embryo donation and gay rights called Seeing You Home, which will include a CD featuring songs “sung” by the main character (actually an actor-musician, of course). She believes the secret to her writing is the focus on the characters. “I think what attracts a reader is emotional honesty,” Picoult says. “Most readers can tell when a character doesn’t ring true, or the contrary, where the character rings so true that it almost hurts to read that part of the book. I think if you write with emotionally honesty, you can write about almost anything at all and you’ll be able to take an audience with you.”
Jodi Picoult appears at Jones Auditorium at Meredith College at 7:30 p.m. on March 8 to read from and sign copies of House Rules. This is a ticketed event; tickets are available with purchase of House Rulesor her other works. For more information, call 528-1588 or visit www.quailridgebooks.com.
If you haven’t heard of Roger D. Hodge, you’re likely familiar with the magazine he used to edit: Harpers Magazine.The 43 year old, who first began working at Harpers as a fact checker in 1996, was recently sacked from the editorship, which he assumed in 2006.
Why was he canned? Well, that’s the subject of tonight’s event, which bears the perhaps intentionally florid title of “My Rise and Fall: Roger Hodge on the State of Magazines.”
Tonight at the Center for Documentary Studies, Hodge will engage in a public conversation with Duncan Murrell, a Pittsboro writer and teacher who has published in Harpers, the Independent Weekly and points in between. The talk is free and begins at 7 p.m. in the auditorium of CDS.
The last Hodge piece we read was a corker called “The Mendacity of Hope.” In it, he called out Barack Obama’s failure to remotely live up to the hopes of his supporters—by perpetuating the travesty of Guantánamo Bay and escalating the war in Afghanistan, among other things—and he also criticized liberals for projecting such wishes on a man who, after all, ran as a centrist.
More programming news from Full Frame: Fourteen invited, out-of-competition films were named today.
The short version: It’s going to be a good festival.
No Crossover, Steve James’ Allen Iverson film, made for ESPN, that explores a controversial incident in his high school years that did much to establish his outlaw image
And Everything is Going Fine, Steven Soderbergh’s film about the late monologist Spalding Gray, who died by suicide six years ago
PELADA, a soccer documentary partly produced by Duke graduates that is receiving its world premiere this month at South by Southwest in Austin, Texas
A profile of the man who blew the whistle on Vietnam, The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers
A new one, previously announced, from Chris Hegedus and D.A. Pennebaker called Kings of Pastry, which follows 16 chefs as they compete for the Meilleur Ouvrier de France
And the world premiere of In My Mind, Gary Hawkins’ film of composer Jason Moran’s recreation of Thelonious Monk’s 1959 Town Hall concert.
A presenter and friend at IgniteRaleigh. (Photo courtesy of IgniteRaleigh)
Important takeaways from last night’s IgniteRaleigh 2, held Wednesday night in Lincoln Theatre: Raleigh boasts the third-highest concentration of modernist homes behind Los Angeles and Chicago, there is only one female boxer action figure and sexting is beneficial for relationships.
The unique event—and those very random facts—was part of Global Ignite Week, a social media meme turned PowerPoint phenomenon that spans 60 cities on six continents.
Similar to speed dating for the tech set, Raleigh’s version featured 19 presenters who each had five minutes and 20 slides that automatically advanced every 20 seconds to present an idea, story or business pitch. As Ignite founders put it: “Enlighten us, but make it quick.”
On the heels of Forbes crowning Raleigh with the top spot on its “Most Wired Cities” list (Wow. Tell that to THIS Raleigh. —ed.), more than 600 people flooded their Twitter streams with support, critiques and quotes from presentations, marked with the hashtag marker #igniteraleigh.
Smartphone batteries drained as Nadia Moffett, the reigning Miss North Carolina USA, and WRAL-TV meteorologist Elizabeth Gardner joined lesser known, if equally interesting, community-voted presenters such as health-enthusiast Dan Wilson and self-proclaimed redneck Jay Cuthrell.
Other brave souls touched on zombies, the importance of dumb guys in corporate America, DIY energy audits and 20 little-known facts about sex and pleasure. Some excelled, some bombed and anyone who went over their allotted five minutes was promptly cut off. (Or, in IgniteRaleigh’s case, offenders were “rickrolled,” a reference to the popular Internet prank involving the 1987 Rick Astley song “Never Gonna Give You Up.”)
Local social media champions Kipp Bodnar, Ryan Boyles, Jeff Cohen and Wayne Sutton organized the first IgniteRaleigh in August 2009, which attracted 400 people. Find more information on the event at www.igniteraleigh.com.
The Full Frame Documentary Film Festival announced its new docs competition lineup for next month’s festival, which runs April 8–11 in downtown Durham.
The full lineup is below, but our initial scan reveals a couple of names well known to festival fans, including Alex Gibney (Taxi to the Dark Side; Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room) and Laura Poitras (Flag Wars; My Country, My Country). The former’s film is on the notorious lobbyist Jack Abramoff, called Casino Jack and the United States of Money. Poitras’ film looks to be equally timely and topical: It’s called The Oath, and it focuses on two men—brothers-in-law—who worked for Osama bin Laden as a driver and a bodyguard.
There’s a well-known name not usually associated with documentary making that is attached to another Afghanistan film: Sebastian Junger. The author of The Perfect Storm has a new book due out this summer called War, and his first foray into filmmaking, Restrepo, follows a group of American soldiers during a long, dangerous tour in Afghanistan’s Korengal Valley. Tim Heatherington is his co-director.
Closer to home, we spot at least one local filmmaker: Durham’s Rodrigo Dorfman, whose Generation Exile tells the stories of “five displaced characters, including the filmmaker” to evoke their “experience of alienation and moral dilemma.”
We’ll have much more in the coming weeks. The complete list of docs in competition follows. Continue reading »
THE WINTER’S TALE Peace College
Through Feb. 27; www.peace.edu
The Winter’s Tale is one of William Shakespeare’s last and less-performed plays, and it’s easy to see why. It’s literally half tragedy and half comedy, with a dark, vengeance-filled first opening act that gives way to a second act filled with songs and romantic misunderstandings; the meaning of the title comes courtesy of a charming child who will soon die: “A sad tale’s best for winter: I have one/ of sprites and goblins.”
The new production of The Winter’s Tale at Peace College’s Leggett Theatre, co-directed by Kenny Gannon and Flynt Burton, offers intriguing insights into this relatively obscure work of Shakespeare, although the production’s eccentric design choices occasionally obscure the meaning of particular scenes.
This play, which was first performed around 1611, encompasses the classic Shakespearean themes of tragedy, prophecy, mistaken identity, tragic pride, disguises, young lovers, fools, kings and reconciliation. Also, in this play, someone gets eaten by a bear. The story opens in Sicilia, where the king, Leontes (Katja Hill), has developed a paranoid conviction that his wife Hermione (Johanna Coats) has cuckolded him with his friend, the Bohemian king Polixenes (Elisabeth Brewer). This results in Leontes’ daughter, Perdita (Cassidy Jane Hutchison), being exiled at birth, subsequent tragedy befalling the king, and many further travails before old wrongs can be rectified.
The all-female production isn’t a problem for the most part, but because all the characters are given gender-neutral blue pajamas, the action becomes difficult to follow in the first act. The use of classical music cues throughout the show also occasionally drags down the action, obscuring the points of some important soliloquies. Things pick up in the second half, though, when the costumes become more specific and the action lightens up (literally and figuratively) as the story moves forward 16 years from a claustrophobic tragedy and we find ourselves in a pastoral romantic comedy in far-off Bohemia.
There are some strong performances throughout this show, which mixes professionals with students: notable among the former are Hill’s implosive work as Leontes, Nicole Quenelle as the lady Paulina, and Emilie Stark-Menneg, who in multiple roles shows off a real talent for physical comedy. Among the students, Aneisha Montague and Sidney Edwards make for a compelling comic duo in the second act, respectively playing a shepherd and his son (accurately called “Clown” in the dramatis personae).
While it’s one of Shakespeare’s odder plays, The Winter’s Tale does have a certain magic in its combination of comedy and tragedy; and, unlike the author’s darker works, this tale ends on a note of redemption. For Shakespeare fans, it’s an opportunity to see one of the Bard’s least-produced plays come alive, and see unique local talents on display.
Lisa Creech Bledsoe on "Notes from IgniteRaleigh: To be a spark, and not to be rickrolled": "Speed dating for the tech set," funny! Nice write up of an incredible event. I'm voting for Scrubby next year. Scrub-by, Scrub-by, Scrub-by!
Lisa aka @glowbird (the boxing chick)
DK on "Notes from IgniteRaleigh: To be a spark, and not to be rickrolled": Just moved back to the Triangle from Seattle, which is where Ignite started. It kind of caught on and blew up really fast, and organizers had to keep upping the venue.
I think people have been looking for this kind of cabaret for a while. They like going somewhere and being a crowd together, and it's
Christine Fawley on "Notes from IgniteRaleigh: To be a spark, and not to be rickrolled": A fabulous night highlighting the diversity of talent and intellectual pursuits here in the Triangle. An event like this could be held every month and still barely scratch the surface of the passions of our community.
We were honored to be included and appreciated the support and enthusiasm of the crowd as we delivered "20
To research House Rules, Picoult not only shadowed CSIs, but met with nearly 50 children with Asperger’s and their parents, combining face-to-face interviews with a detailed survey.
