Sept. 20: Philadanco!
JOHNSON CITY, TN - The Mary B. Martin School of the Arts, under the direction of Anita DeAngelis, announces its fall schedule, which includes a potpourri of arts including contemporary and cultural visual art, dance spanning ballet to hip-hop, country and folk music, as well as a rousing turn-of-the-century community band program, a storytelling series and lectures by artists and critics.
"We're bringing some artists who are really well-known regionally and address regional concerns and artists that will expose us to other cultures and ideas," DeAngelis said.
New to Mary B. Martin School for 2012-13 is "When Worlds Collide," a multicultural storytelling series that on Oct. 11, will feature Noa Baum and her A Land Twice Promised tales of her homeland and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Tellers Jay O'Callahan and Diane Edgecomb will complete the series in spring.
Bringing regional and arts concerns to the fore, as well as her signature country/traditional melodies is Grammy Award winner Kathy Mattea, who will be in concert at Martha Street Culp Auditorium Nov. 11. She will also be the keynote speaker at the Artists-in-Education Conference.
In a different musical vein and era will be – straight from Lynchburg, Tenn., – Mr. Jack Daniel's Original Silver Cornet Band, tooting its horns Nov. 1, also in Culp Auditorium. Their music reflects on a time when community bands were really important. "They perform on period instruments, in period costume and bring a gazebo with them," saidDeAngelis.
The first ticketed event of the fall, on Sept. 20, will feature the much more modern sounds of Afro-jazz and funk fusion as accompaniment for the hip-hop gyrations of Philadanco!, the Philadelphia Dance Company. The group, celebrated for its athleticism, innovation and preservation of African-American traditions in dance, will be performing choreography by Pew Fellow in the Arts Rennie Harris, commissioned and funded by the National Dance Project. The diverse program crosses genres from ballet to modern dance.
Cultures and styles will also coalesce in two visual art exhibitions in ETSU's Slocumb Galleries and lectures co-sponsored by Mary B. Martin School of the Arts, Slocumb Galleries and ETSU's Department of Art and Design. MBM SOTA opens its season Aug. 20-Sept. 14 with Day on Fire: Apocalypse in Contemporary Art and a Sept. 11 lecture by fantastical painter Christopher Mir. "I was worried that we wouldn't have enough entries and there were 147 artists and 483 entries from as far away as Germany and Canada," says Karlota Contreras-Koterbay, gallery director. "That was really amazing. That was the most entries for a juried show in years, record breaking, and it was really a very wide range of submissions – printmaking, painting, sculpture, photography, video art, some graphic design and poster design."
Then for most of October, Slocumb Galleries will house a collection of 40 colorful ceremonial Mexican masks called "Masks of the Michoacán." On Oct. 22, Dr. Marion Oettinger, curator of Latin American art from the San Antonio Museum of Art, will present a lecture that will, "put the work we will have in the gallery space into context," DeAngelis said.
In two lectures, on Sept. 26 and 27, writer and art and music critic Crispin Sartwell will turn the topic to not only visual art, but also bluegrass.
Finally, Mary B. Martin School will be bringing back one special program from previous seasons – the South Arts Southern Circuit Tour of Independent Filmmakers, which each year features independent films in groups of six that tour the South along with their filmmakers and, sometimes, actors.
The fall portion of the series begins on Sept. 24 with Joe Papp in Five Acts, featuring Kevin Kline, Meryl Streep, Roscoe Lee Browne and a host of stage and screen stars, who recall producer Joseph Papp's impact on making theater and the arts in New York more diverse and accessible to all.
On Oct. 8, MBM SOTA will screen An Encounter with Simone Weil, a documentary on the French philosopher and humanitarian, and on Nov. 5, the film subject will be a humorous-but-serious ecological look at plastics and the environment with Bag It. Each South Arts film is followed by a question-and-answer session with someone involved with the film and a reception in the Culp Alumni Gallery. All films and lectures are free and open to the public.
For information about the ETSU Mary B. Martin School of the Arts, call 423-439-TKTS (8587) or visit www.etsu.edu/cas/arts/ or www.Facebook.com/ETSU.MBMSOTA.
