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The program is about two articles. The first one discusses an artwork by Mel Chin called "The Bird is the Word, North Carolina Variation," which showcases a bird made of wax and pages from a dictionary. The article explores the history and symbolism behind the artwork. The second article is about a new documentary called "The Harvest," which examines the integration of a public school in Mississippi in the 1970s. The documentary, produced by Douglas A. Blackmon, explores the complexities and challenges of integration in the South. This program is intended for a print-impaired audience and is brought to you by the Georgia Radio Reading Service, GARS. Welcome to Metro Arts for Friday, September 15th. I am Kristen Moody for the Georgia Radio Reading Service. Metro Arts is brought to you by the Fulton County Board of Commissioners. For our first article, we go to the Burnaway Publication for Unworded Bird Don't Come Near My Window by Laurel V. McLaughlin. Mel Chin, The Bird is the Word, North Carolina Variation, 2001-2019, Webster's Third New International Dictionary, Beeswax and Cherrywood, 11 x 10 x 6 inches, courtesy of the artist Mel Chin and the Nasher Museum of Art, Durham, North Carolina. Unworded Bird Don't Come Near My Window. Webster compiled many words to lament extinction. None were chosen from the weighty tome. The third international edition had a brief entry, a tiny illustration of a parakeet steeped in boiling wax, chilled, leaving entries entombed, texts turned to stone on thin pages. Like the culture carved away the bounty of life, word after word was pared away, leaving a lexicon of loss perched in solitude. Mel Chin. I heard the bird before I saw the word, the chirping from conceptual artist Mel Chin's Never Forever, the cabinets of conuropus around the corner of the room. But then I saw the bird is the word, North Carolina variation, also by Chin, a pearly beige fowl against a white wall at an unobtrusive scale and honoraic, the lone part of a binary. The word papyrus creeps out from under between its wax adhered Webster's pages, chiseled away by the artist to render its shape. Chin then wrote an accompanying and poetic text above the sculpture as a kind of textual mirror. In Chin's beginning, though, was a black and white image from the illustrated dictionary, now bird bodied, but really, in the beginning, if we can call it that, was the flying red, green and yellow crowned rush of the bird. The words came to be with us, amassing as a cunning double, parakeet or paraket, a handsome parakeet having a long tail and mostly green plumage, but with yellow head, red face and blue and yellow on the wings. It was remarkable as being the only member of the parrot family whose range extended far into the United States, having been recorded as far north as Albany, New York, owing to constant persecution by man, it is nearly extinct. And over time, the words kept stockpiling beside a marsh lush with osprey. I mined them on my computer, searching for the original half of this double that Chin's mournful North Carolina variation represents, using a rhizomatic dictionary, a Google plex of words. Some called this bird pot potchi in Seminole or kalinki in Chickasaw and later parakeet, but the last word is a lie. Others settled on the name conure in English upon George Patrick Peckham's discovery in Carolina when he collected visions across the Atlantic in service of the crown, transcribing it in a true report of the late discoveries of the new found land, 1538. Gentlemen birders and naturalists confirmed, reconfirmed and reconfirmed secondhand sightings of the bird as voracious. Catesby, Audubon, Wilson, Townsend, Baird, Nuttall, Tassin, Bonaparte, Lawrence, Coo, Ridgway, Bredster, Bent, names of supposed discovery were just more words. The bird had already been known unto itself. Winds of the north and south also knew it, recognizing its swaths of green plumage across the sky and nests in old growth forests knew its engineered warmth. John James Audubon's 19th century book, Birds of America, lists the bird as plate 26, Carolina parrot. Common water, not oil or wax this time, animates the colors of his dead specimen transcribed on the page. They make a little flock, one cocks its head upward, open beak towards another ruffling its wings. On a branch below, a bird reaches out for a cockle bird and another looks downward. One looks right at us. These reproduced game met the page before Chin's re-embodied ghostly variation, but were still preceded by the bird that took flight from South America and before that Antarctica some millions of years ago. Their ancient wings went unworded into the world. They never heard or read our mumblings. Now milky and perched on a wooden peg, the bird certainly remembers none of the words it never knew. Audubon's graphical illustrations, the palette for woven color, a special cockle bird diet, yields patterns stretched as grills over acoustic speakers set in shard-shaped cabinets. Consider them coffins, chunks of the large diamond lie on the floor resonating through the warp and wefted colors, a species imagined esprit de corps, softly audible, reconstituted dispirited squawks as bites transit through wires, technological approximation of mating calls with none living to deliver and none living to respond. Mel Chin. Consider it call and response here, dear reader, only to Audubon are we dear. Between word and image, parakeet and bird, taxidermy and stories. I heard the bird in Never Forever, the cabinets and cornea opus of Chin's detailed drawing Never Forever, a wiring diagram second installation study, which depicts infinitesimally connected wires from cabinets to the space and our ears as it depicts a simulation of chirps. The jagged sculptural wooden cabinets are swathed in textiles depicting the bird's favorite food, cocklebur, as they emit stuffed sound. Somehow, Audubon's taxidermized voice rings louder in my head. The parrot does not satisfy himself with cockleburs, but eats or destroys almost every kind of fruit indiscriminately, and on this account is always an unwelcome visitor to the planter, the farmer, or the gardener. The stacks of grain put up in the field are restored to the flocks by the birds. They cling around the whole stack, pull out the straws, and destroy twice as much of the grain as would suffice to satisfy their hunger. They assail the pear and apple trees, as on the stalks of corn, they alight on the apple trees of our orchards, pluck off the fruits, open them up to the core, drop the apple or pear, and pluck another, passing from branch to branch, until the trees, which were before so promising, are left completely stripped. They visit the mulberries, pecan nuts, grapes, and even the seeds of the dogwood before they are ripe, and on all commit similar depredations. They maze alone never attracts their notice. Eater, destroyer, visitor, resorter, clinger, puller, alighter, plucker, opener, dropper, plucker again, stripper, visitor another time, committer. Autobahn's account, and certainly my research here, falls short in explaining their mass deaths. They were shot in droves, enduring on perches atop then-fashionable hats. It is said when one died, the others would huddle around the fallen, doubling their number in mourning, only for return fire. Records show the last wild bird died in Florida. Later, scientific documents account for their caging, for study, for preserving, for safekeeping. The Cincinnati Zoo offered barred housing to the last bird, Incas, replacing another last passenger pigeon by the name of Martha. Gray-brown feathering with a light crimson chest, passenger pigeons had a double too, the mourning dove, confused throughout their lifetime for their duetted laments. In that cage, the bird took on the doppelgangers. They shared worded, discovered, and eradicated histories. Separated by four years and never meeting one another, Martha and Incas died in the same cell, both as the only of their kind. Could they sense one another through our ever-uttered words? Did our records matter as much as their colors, or did their dispirited squawks offer the resounding echo of an answer? Today, I held a bird in my hands as it died, a far cry from online research. It was not the lauded osprey, protected in their wooded nests above the hammonasset marsh grasses, or the feisty red-winged blackbird that wields dominion over vague territories, or the aloof snowy egret, slowly searching along the muddy bed. It was a common sparrow. The bird flew too close to the window glass, too close to us. As it rested, stretched out across my palms, the bird opened its mouth, but there was no sound, and I had no words. That was Unworded Bird, Don't Come Near My Window, by Laurel V. McLaughlin, from the Burnaway Publication. Next, we move to the Atlanta Magazine Online for, in a new documentary, a Pulitzer-winning Atlanta journalist examines the integration of his own Mississippi public school. In the fall of 1970, Douglas A. Blackmon's first grade class was the first in Leland, Mississippi, to have both black and white students. For a time, it looked like a civil rights success, but the documentary illustrates the many ways that new forms of segregation in public schools were created, by Felicia Feaster. Atlanta journalist and Douglas A. Blackmon has a distinguished career working at the Wall Street Journal and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. In 2009, he won a Pulitzer Prize for his book, Slavery by Another Name, the Re-enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II. Now, the Georgia State University professor is tackling the story very close to home as writer and producer of a new documentary, The Harvest. Debuting September 12th on PBS's American Experience, The Harvest explores the story of first integrated public school class in Leland, Mississippi, of which Blackmon was a part of. The film is produced by prolific Oscar-nominated filmmaker and producer Sam Pollard, Citizen Ash, Black Art in the Absence of Light, who also worked on the documentary adaptation of Slavery by Another Name. When 1954 Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Ed mandated the integration of the country's public schools, it did little to change things in Blackmon's corner of the South, where schools remained defiantly segregated, as did almost every facet of public life in Mississippi. That status quo changed with the 1969 decision in Alexander v. Holmes County Board of Education, which ordered still segregated schools to immediately desegregate. In the fall of 1970, Blackmon's first grade class was the first in the town's history to have both Black and white students. For a time, it looked like a civil rights success. But The Harvest shows that many ways the new forms of segregation were created in the wake of the 1969 decision. Private whites-only schools popped up. Access in the newly integrated public schools began to be divided into smart and average students along largely racial lines. And deep social divisions remained, so that students who spent their days together in classrooms never socialized or visited each other's homes outside of school. Black and white images from Leland yearbooks in the film show Black faces, but those students tended to stand apart, visually testifying to lingering divides. That dreamy Kodachrome home movie footage that opens The Harvest documents football games, beauty queens, parades, Boy Scouts, immaculately tended front lawns, and smiling toe-headed children that paint a picture of all-American prosperity. This was hardly the case for Leland's Black residents, working in virtual indentured servitude and trapped in grinding, inescapable poverty. Their exploitation was so intense, many refused to work for white employers and started an encampment, Strike City, outside Leland. Schoolboy Blackman foreshadowed his future as a journalist when he presented an essay on Strike City to the Leland Lions Club. The reaction of the Lions Club members to his sympathetic portrait of Strike City ranged from strange silence to rage. It was a formative moment for Blackman. That moment amplified an interest that I obviously already had in both the civil rights story, but also just a genuine reflection about why were the lives of my Black classmates so radically different than mine? The Harvest was initially a storytelling challenge for Blackman. Like most journalists, Blackman's job trained him to be an impartial observer. The idea of talking about his own experiences, narrating the film, even having his own mother, father, and brother interviewed felt a little uncomfortable. Sam Pollard, the film's producer, thought it was crazy to even suggest anything else, Blackman says. Sam comes from a very empathetic, human, emotional storytelling kind of approach. And so I think for him, it sounded kind of crazy to suggest that it would not be a very personal story, or that I would not narrate the story. He was right. Among the many insights and surprises in The Harvest is how it illustrates, in the voices of Blackman's Leland classmates and town residents, just what white privilege looks like, a kind of blinded, willful innocence that allows great injustice to unfold conveniently outside its peripheral vision. The members of Leland's white middle class interviewed for the film seem to lack any inkling of what the foundation of their comfort and contentment is built upon, says Blackman. The film is very much about this world is what was created on, this tradition of extraordinary white privilege. Blackman reached out to people he hadn't communicated with, in some cases for 30 years, and persuaded them to sit down and recollect with cameras rolling. He says getting people to reveal an unflattering collusion in an oppressive system, or the humiliating treatment some black residents endured, was mostly a matter of getting people comfortable. Pollard often stepped in to interview black subjects. The goal was just to keep people talking and encourage them to go to places that they might have been conditioned themselves to avoid because they were uncomfortable, Blackman says. At one point in the film, a former black classmate, Jesse King, recalled the humiliation and shock the day he watched his father's foreman kick him in front of his wife and children. The Harvest's origin was a 1992 essay, The Resegregation of a Southern School, that Blackman wrote in Harper's about the 10th anniversary of his high school's class graduation. He was encouraged to write a book about his personal experience of school integration, but the memoir he began to write, he later discovered, did not feel like an accurate reflection. I went back to the manuscript, and I was startled that some of my memories in my manuscripts and in my mind didn't match up anymore. Either I had gotten clarity, or I had gotten fuzzy about certain things. Not so much about whether specific events occurred or didn't occur, but how I interpreted them or the significance of them. And I realized that the manuscript was not the first draft of a book. It was an artifact, says Blackman. I was, in effect, an unreliable narrator. It made more sense after working with Pollard on Slavery by Another Name to tell Leland's story as a film. I need to be a reporter, Blackman realized, and I need to go back and find other people who were a part of all these different things and see how they remember it. The history Blackman documents in The Harvest, how, despite the inroads of school integration, public education became a racially divided enterprise over time, continues today. Public schools remain a battleground, Blackman points out, in states like Florida, where new legislation prevents instructors from teaching students that a person's race could contribute to their privilege or oppression. He says that under this law, The Harvest would likely be barred from high school classrooms. Even in Atlanta, a city divined by the civil rights movement, an assault on public education has impacted classrooms. We trick ourselves a bit in Atlanta into believing that some of these dynamics were not at play there, when in fact, they really were, Blackman says. Once desegregation of the schools was underway, white people abandoned public school in massive numbers, and that's what happened in Atlanta, and that's still the case in Atlanta. There is an increasing movement away from the idea that public schools are the great leveling influence in our society and the place where the rich and the poor become one, he adds. A series of screenings and discussions around The Harvest are scheduled through Georgia Humanities. That was, in a new documentary, a Pulitzer-winning Atlanta journalist examines the integration of his own Mississippi public school, by Felicia Feaster. Next, Arts ATL's picks for must-see events this fall. Consider this your fall arts to-do list, by Juliana Bragg and Parker Froson. Art and Design. We Are Each Other, High Museum of Art, October 27th to February 18th. Fiber artist Sonia Clark uses everyday fibrous materials, hair, flags, found fabrics, along with a range of textile techniques, including weaving, braiding, and quilting, to examine issues of racial injustice while centering the Black experience. We Are Each Other brings together in one space Clark's large-scale, community-centered participatory project. You Belong Here, Place, People, and Purpose in Latinx Photography, Emory Michael C. Carlos Museum, September 9th to December 3rd. In You Belong Here, Pilar Tompkins-Rivas curates dynamic photography of Latinx artists across the United States that illustrates a range of histories and geographies, reinterprets watershed social and artistic movements, and holds space for queerness. In Unity as in Division, Johnson Lowe Gallery, September 21st to November 11th. This early fall group exhibition will feature new works from Atlanta-based artists Dimitri Burke, Danielle Deadweiler, Leah Genas, Wero Kim, Masela Nkolo, Sergio Suarez, and Alex Suavani. Each micro-exhibition will offer a glimpse into Atlanta's artistic landscape, honoring the unique talents of each artist while emphasizing collaborative and communal relationships with artistic circles. Dance. Terminus Modern Ballet Theater Opening, Tula Arts Center, September 23rd, 24th, 30th, and 31st. For the first time, Terminus Modern Ballet Theater will perform at its new White Box Theater at Buckhead's Tula Arts Center. The performances will include two world premieres by up-and-coming choreographers. The first is by Terminus co-founder, dancer, and instructor Rachel Van Buskirk. The second is a new work choreographed by Atlanta ballet dancer Darian Cain, whose narrative was inspired by the war between Russia and Ukraine. In addition, audiences will get a sneak peek of Royal Ballet of Flanders dancer Shane Urton's new work-in-progress, which will be presented in full next year as part of the 2024 season. Last They'll Feed, Atlanta Ballet, September 15th through 17th. Inspired by the original 1836 Royal Danish Ballet production, Last They'll Feed, one of the oldest surviving masterworks of classical ballet, navigates the capricious high and low points in the tragic story of a Scottish nobleman who falls in love with a fairy-like spirit who is not of his world. Urban Nutcracker, Ballet Ethnic Dance Company, December 8th to 10th. The Ballet Ethnic Dance Company will present its annual performance of the Urban Nutcracker, which updates Tchaikovsky's original with jazz music and African influences. Music. Natalie Stutzman conducts Tchaikovsky, Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, October 5th through 7th. On opening weekend, maestro Natalie Stutzman's orchestra will swing from string melodies to booming brass and percussion to commemorate the work of Pieter Iliot Tchaikovsky. The weekend will also feature the debut of world-renowned harpist Xavier de Maistre, who will play Alexander Masalov's recently discovered showpiece, 1939 Harp Concerto. The Shining, Atlanta Opera, September 15th to October 1st. The Atlanta Opera and Alliance Theater are collaborating to produce the 1977 thriller by Stephen King, The Shining. Composer Paul Moravec and librettist Park Campbell have adapted this riveting story as an opera, a tale of possession and murder that follows Jack Torrance, a father with a troubled past, as he finds new employment as a winter caretaker for the Overlook Hotel. Joe Alterman plays jazz piano, Spivey Hall, December 1st. Atlanta native Joe Alterman is set to take the stage at the 400-seat Spivey Hall and will play from his just-released albums, Solo Joe, Songs You Know, and Joe Alterman plays Les McCann, Big Mo, Little Joe, a tribute work dedicated to his mentor and friend, the legendary pianist and composer, Les McCann. Theater, Passing Strange, theatrical outfit, September 27th to October 22nd. In Passing Strange, a young man sets off for Europe after finding his musical calling, leaving behind his mother and mundane suburban life in this rebellious, coming-of-age musical filled with sex, drugs, and rock and roll. Colored Water, Actors Express, September 21st to October 15th. Erika Dickerson DeSpena's Colored Water tells the story of the third-generation GM employee, Marion, who is on the cusp of a manager position while being the sole provider for her daughter's sister, an elderly mother, during the 2016 Flint, Michigan, water crisis. Tensions rise when her sister begins protesting against GM for the company's role in poisoning the water supply. The Light in the Piazza, Jenny T. Anderson Theater, December 15th to 17th. Based on a 1960 novella by Elizabeth Spencer, The Light in the Piazza is the story of Margaret Johnson, a wealthy southern woman, and Clara, her daughter, who is developmentally disabled due to a childhood accident. While spending the summer together in Italy, Margaret is forced to examine her dreams and regrets when Clara falls in love with a young Italian man. Arts ATL offers comprehensive coverage of Atlanta's art scene, including music, film and TV, books, theater, dance, and the visual arts. This article appears in our September 2023 issue. That was Arts ATL's picks for must-see events this fall by Juliana Bragg and Parker Frosis. Next, in a challenging world, it's important for authors to have spaces to connect. Thankfully, this fall in Atlanta is filled with literary events for authors and readers of all ages by Kalundra Smith. Arts Atlanta is a column dedicated to celebrating the artists, creatives, and designers who give Atlanta its flavor. Our city has long had a reputation for nurturing the courageous and the bold. From performers to musicians, painters to animators, Atlanta is enriched and enlivened by their presence. In this space, I'll highlight artists, discuss trends, and list can't-missed events. Let's paint the town peach. As a child, some of my best days were marked by books. Between the Six Flags 600-Minute Reading Club in elementary school and the added summer reading assignments in middle and high school, there was always a book cracked open on my bed. However, many of the books that were required reading when I was in high school and college, such as Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird, and The Little Mermaid, were not read by me. And Tony Morrison's The Bluest Eye are among the many books currently being challenged and banned across the country. I did some digging to see how this issue is playing out in Georgia libraries and schools. There were rumblings in Cobb, Forsyth, and Henry County schools last year, most of which wound up with the challenged books being reinstated. Then, just a couple of weeks ago, a Cobb County teacher was fired for reading My Shadow is Purple, a children's book about gender identity, to her fifth grade class. A few days later, the school district removed two books from 20 school libraries. Though these incidents are not reflective of all Georgia school districts, book bans are always a cause for pause. I recently had a chat with Nick Stone, who is an Atlanta native, Spelman alumna, and one of the most prolific authors of young adult literature today. Stone's 2017 book, Dear Martin, is about a black teenage boy named Justice who experiences police brutality and witnesses a violent racial incident. And he begins writing letters to Martin Luther King Jr. about how to remain peaceful in the midst of upheaval. Dear Martin has also become one of the most banned and challenged books in the country because it addresses racism and stereotypes. Its first challenge came out of Columbia County, Georgia, in 2019, where the then superintendent denied teacher requests for its placement on the supplemental reading list, deeming it inappropriate for school libraries due to extreme content. There and in other school districts across the country, Stone says that most of the time, the principals and school board members who ban her books admit they have not read them. Kids just want to see themselves in books and read books that aren't boring, Stone says. I love getting to talk to young people because I think the core of all this is a beautiful shared humanity that we all have access to. We just have to be willing to tap into it and see each other as human without a fear of scarcity, Stone says. She would like to see Georgia go the way of Illinois and ban book banning and libraries so that all people have access to the books of their choice. Stone wrote Dear Martin and the follow up Dear Justice to encourage kids to have bridge building interracial conversations about race and difference. She is currently working on the third installment in the series. The more we allow kids to create the world that's in their heads, the better we are, Stone says. Celebrating the literary South. Creating and imagining better and new worlds is the task of the writer, especially in the South. Stories are our currency, which is why I take heart in the numerous literary events that Atlantans can experience in late summer and early fall. Writing is a vulnerable art form and it's important to have spaces for people to connect to each other's unique life experiences. My hope is that people of all ages will forever have access to the books that celebrate, enliven, and inspire them. The power of reading is that it allows us to access our imaginations and when we imagine new worlds, we can create better realities. Below is a list of literary events I'm looking forward to across Metro Atlanta. Karis Books and More, the Southeast's oldest feminist bookstore, will be hosting two internationally acclaimed authors in the coming months. On September 5th, Tayari Jones will be in conversation with author and publisher, Deneen Milner. Then on October 26th, Regina Bradley, author of Chronicling Stankonia, will be in conversation with two-time National Book Award winner, Jessamyn Ward, about her Civil War novel, Let Us Descend. When it comes to professional basketball, what players wear off the court can be just as influential as what they do on the court. Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Mitchell S. Jackson will be at 44th and Third Bookseller on September 12th to discuss his new book, Fly, the big book of basketball fashion. This is definitely going to be a coffee table book flex. Decatur's Little Shop of Stories is one of the most beloved bookstores in the Metro area. On September 13th, hear Broadway star and voice of Elsa, Idina Menzel, and her friend co-author, Cara Menzel, talk about their newest picture book, Proud Mouse. Foxtail Bookshop is hosting Georgia's reigning queen of beach reads, Mary Kay Andrews, on September 23rd. They will be bringing Christmas in September with a meet and greet for her new book, Bright Lights, Big Christmas, at Huff Harrington. Tickets include a signed book, swag bag, and small bikes. The Fierce Reads Thrills and Chills Tour is making a stop at Brave and Kind Books on September 28th, just in time for young adult readers to grab their favorite spooky books before Halloween. Featured books include Ace of Spades by Farida Adebiki Iyamidi, I Feed Her to the Beast and the Beast is Me by Jameson Shea, This Dark Descent by Kaylin Josephson, and The Changing Man by Tomi Oyemakindi. Tickets are free. On Saturday, September 30th, from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m., kids of all ages can experience the Hey! Let's Read Book Festival for Children of Color. The annual festival, which is held at the Russell Center for Innovation, features author chats, arts and crafts, story time, and more. Acapella Books and Criminal Records are hosting culture critic Andrew Chan on October 6th for a discussion of his new book, Why Mariah Carey Matters. This is the first full-length critical perspective on the pop star known for hits such as Emotions, Honey, Fantasy, and We Belong Together. From their sip-and-paint events to after-school creative writing classes for kids, Lit Diaries is one of the most exciting bookstores to open in the last six years. Snag your tickets for their Fall into Books Fest happening on October 28th. The Marcus Jewish Community Center's Book Festival is one of the largest in the Southeast, featuring book signings and discussions with a slate of names ranging from Hillary Clinton to David Sedaris. This year's festival will take place from October 28th through November 18th and will include events featuring actors John Stamos and Henry Winkler. Every November, the Atlanta Writers Club hosts the annual Atlanta Writers Club Book Festival. This is the perfect skills-building opportunity for poets, novelists, and nonfiction writers who are ready to take their careers to the next level. Workshops cover everything from romance writing to how to self-publish. What books are you getting into? Use the hashtag, hashtag artlanta and share with us. About Colunder Smith. I grew up in Stone Mountain in Loganville where my parents and teachers got me into the arts early because that's where energetic girls who talk a lot go. I'm a theater critic, journalist, playwright, and lifelong arts lover. My articles about Southern art and artists have been published in the New York Times, ESPN, American Theater, Garden and Gun, Oxford American, Bitter Southerner, Arts ATL, and elsewhere. As a playwright, my scripts focus on lesser-known historical events in Georgia's history. That was In a Challenging World, It's Important for Authors to Have Spaces to Connect by Colunder Smith from the Atlanta Magazine. Next, we move to Arts ATL for Multidisciplinary Work Will Shed Creative Light on Japanese American Internment by George Stabe. When Japanese Americans were taken to internment camps in Manzanar, California during the Second World War, fragments of memories and hastily gathered keepsakes were sometimes all that tethered these American citizens to their ancestral past. In 1942, by presidential order, more than 125,000 Japanese American lives were dismantled as families were abruptly taken from their homes and placed in euphemistically labeled relocation centers. Inspired by this difficult period, Sanke, a multilayered and thoughtfully developed extended reality exhibit, dance, film experience, is being presented at Georgia Tech's First Center for the Arts. This union of technology and grit sheds light on powerful stories of Japanese diasporic histories and runs from September 16th through October 28th. A community building dance performance by San Francisco-based contemporary dance company Kambara kicks off the installation with a work titled Ikai, Means Once, a Transplanted Pilgrimage on September 16th. Tickets for either of the two dance shows may be purchased here while all other components are free and open to the public. Many senses will be engaged, choreographer Yeo Kambara told Arts ATL recently. Given the green light from Aaron Shackelford, the First Center's former director, Kambara has been developing the project for two years, working with her own company and collaborating with Georgia Tech faculty, staff, and students. Kambara was born in Japan and moved to the United States with her family when she was six. For those able to attend the weekend performances, Ikai will act as a pilgrimage, a gathering. Though Kambara's original desire was to deliver the work in an incarceration site, the logistics of such an effort proved to be insurmountable. Regardless, Kambara knew the community should play a role in the work, which is why audiences will be seated on stage at the first, surrounding the dancers as an act of solidarity. The narrative work will weave together modern dance, Japanese folk dance, and a score featuring taiko drumming and will conclude with an invitation to dance with the performers, a celebration of community. Divided into seven distinct sections, Ikai reveals a journey through images born from the devastation at Pearl Harbor, the abject confusion of people being transported on trains to unknown destinations, and the tribulations of camp life. Each component of the work is supported with live music and original poetry. The three-fold lobby installation supports the first missive to bolster art through futurism, placing technology on equal footing with sensitive subject matter and to unite each element of this prodigious effort. Still, Kambara recognizes the need to tame technology as it often invades personal privacy and consent practices. We are always being monitored via ring doorbells, security cameras, and listening phones, she says. As such, Sankai provides an opportunity to harness technology so that these important stories could flood the census on our own terms. Kambara suggests beginning the experience by entering the west lobby of the first center to witness Out of the Dust, a 17-minute multigenerational film told through the ghosts of lives that once inhabited the now-barren internment camps. The film, co-created by Kambara and Brian Stauffenbull, set a somber tone, contextualizing the raw source material for the overall exhibit. Moving along, audiences will discover reflective activities within the lobby exhibit titled Mi Do Tu, Never Again. The journey offers an encounter with a creepy and amazing prototype of the infamous Zoltar machine of the late 1980s. The pearls of wisdom and poetry-spewing funfair relic will connect audiences with the peculiarities of early technology while subversively shedding light on how far we have come with gender. Subversively shedding light on how far we have come with gaming and art-making. Case in point, audiences can learn a traditional Japanese dance from a hologram. There are other interactive games. One asks participants to fill a digital suitcase with what may feel personally essential for undefined uprooting, while another is dedicated to creating poetry, and another, perhaps more critical component, is a reflection station. Here, one can process, ponder, share thoughts, find a sense of relatability. Senkai lays bare the critical elements of history-derived art and sophisticated technology while underscoring Kambara's point of view. We do not want to be stuck in one place. Through Ikai, as well as the film, Kambara hopes audiences will feel as though they have been invited into a Japanese home to experience the warmth and generosity that defines her culture. Taken as a whole, the exhibit is likewise a cautionary tale, directing thoughts toward the questionable reality of social safeguards and protective containers. Could such an injustice happen again? For Kambara, the question is not necessarily if, but sadly when. That was Multidisciplinary Work Will Shed Creative Light on Japanese-American Internment by George Stade. Next up, Q&A, rocker James Hall gears up his new band with new LP, Star Bar Show, by Alexis Hawk. In rock and roll, there are all kinds of ways to get high. For Atlanta rock legend James Hall, who started out in his late teens, early 20s with a gothy, punky alternative group, Marry My Hope, in the late 1980s and never looked back, those euphoric moments have shifted over time. My mom will verify that over the last 18 years, journaling every day has been better for me than any of the psychotropic drugs that I've been on, he said. It's helped me access my mood regulation better than anything else. Over the last three decades of a career that would require reams to fully account for, Hall has shared the stage with Jane's Addiction and Rage Against the Machine, and paddled around with the Indigo Girls. Now, he's part of a supergroup comprised of fellow cult status rocker friends, guitarist Jim Johnny Blade Troglin and Mark Patrick, bassist James Wall, and drummer Jack Massey. They're known as the Ladies Of, and their latest album is Coming Out of Our Tenderness. The band kicks off a mini Southeastern tour with a sure to be raging gig at Star Bar, Thursday night. Arts ATL caught up with Hall ahead of their show, and he talked about the trials and triumphs of being a rocker in his 50s. Arts ATL, you're no stranger to recording with other musicians, and you've done a ton of solo work, too. Which is your favorite mode of working? James Hall, I'm a greater fan of collaborative work than I am just working alone. I tend to be more industrious, and it sort of forces me to make decisions. I'm a fan of being a soloist, and I'm a fan of being a soloist, and I'm a fan of being a soloist. It sort of forces me to make decisions. Working with someone else exposes me to other processes and other ways of working, and it creates a finite time window. Sometimes, when I'm left to work on an idea all on my own, I'll get into perfectionism, and it will take three months to render a song. And if you're going to call yourself a songwriter, that's expecting that you'll be around for 100 years. Arts ATL, you're now in your mid-50s, and have been in this industry for a while. What are some of the benefits of having grown and matured as an artist, especially when it comes to co-launching a new venture like the ladies of? Paul, I think being 55 has afforded me the luxury of focusing on my emotional health, and not a kind of borrowing strength or seizing power outside of myself. When I was in my 20s, I was so consumed with what somebody else might be doing, or somebody else's behaviors, that I was not even enjoying the moment or the experience. Arts ATL, the industry does have some craziness associated with it. What advice do you wish you had gotten at the beginning? What would you tell your younger self to look out for? Paul, that's a good question. In 1986, I was 18 and enrolled in college in Kentucky, and had the emotional maturity of about a 13-year-old. I was perhaps ill-equipped for formal education then, at least impulse controls-wise. I don't think that I'm anything special. There were others like me who knew little else about academia other than where to eat, sleep, and party. But if I had known a bit more about how relatable some of the topics were to my life, I might have been able to figure it out for at least three and a half more years. Arts ATL, what are your earliest memories of having it click into place, that music was the thing you wanted to do? Hall, I remember hearing Walk This Way on AM radio, riding in the car with my dad. I remember being like, what is that sound? And he's like, God, Jimmy, that's an electric guitar. I remember hearing how fast Steven Tyler was rhyming, and how fast Joe Perry was playing, and it had a lot of power for me. Then, when I heard ACDC's Highway to Hell, I studied that album back and forth. The guitarist has a devil's tail and horns painted on his photograph. And oh, by the way, their singer, Bon Scott, was already dead. It's hard to get much more gangster than that for the time. Arts ATL, when you were starting out in Atlanta in the late 80s, early 90s, can you talk a little bit about what that was like, and how it compares to being an artist here now? Hall, there was a lot less economic pressure in 1989, when creatives could support themselves working at Publix, or art supply stores, or a pizza joint, and it was enough to keep the basics covered while you're paying for rehearsal space, or travel to gigs. I do believe that Atlanta was easier then for musicians to kind of try things out and get creative. There was less pressure. I don't know that I could imagine myself being 23 and trying to navigate rent, you know, even on the low end of things, for $1,200 a month, or whatever space you were living in. $1,200 a month, or whatever spaces are going for right now. Arts ATL, what's one of the first moments when you realized you were achieving some actual success in this music business? Hall, Pleasure Club was the first band where I started seeing like 10 people kind of near the stage singing my choruses back to me. Like, wait a second, they know the words. And at that point, things started really feeling good. I was no longer in this lonely laboratory of experimental music. Arts ATL, how do you grapple with the strong strain of perfectionism that lots of artists experience? Hall, about 20 years ago, a friend said it had taken him time to get to where he knew even if a drawing didn't come out the way he'd envisioned it, at least he had respect and appreciated it. As he was telling me this, I thought, oh, I so wish I could love my own songs. I wish that could be peaceful for me. It's something that kind of keeps me interested in rock music, that endless subjectivity. Arts ATL, you've got this show coming up at Starbar, a beloved venue that has somehow scraped by and survived all these years. What is one of your all-time favorite live performances in this city? Hall, a lot of them have happened at the Starbar. It's a former bank. For whatever reason, people don't feel that they've got to dress a certain way there, and they are highly inclined to dance at the Starbar. You ever notice that? The Starbar is a dying breed of rock and roll honky tonks that you just won't find left in many cities in America. Arts ATL, and it always seems to barely escape getting redeveloped. Hall, it's pretty remarkable, and it would be kind of interesting if they said, OK, we're done with this bar business. We're going to open back up as a bank. Arts ATL, you got signed to Amy Rae's label in the early 90s, and you also played trumpet on the Indigo Girls' Swampophilia. How did your friendship with them evolve over the years? Hall, Amy and Emily's sailors are both gems. They're about as different of people as you could ever meet in terms of wiring and sensibilities, but they are case in point of why collaboration works. When they start harmonizing together, there's nothing like it in the world. I have a lot of respect for them both. It's an essential partnership at work there, which schooled me considerably. The other thing I'll say about them is that from the late 80s, they were supporting the Atlanta music scene in a substantive way. Like, if we had a show, they would put it on their calendar, and if they weren't gigging anywhere else, they would go see it. And I think that level of goodwill shows up in their melody. It shows up in their truth. And I think that's why you see such a wide array of fans. I mean, what is the average Indigo Girl fan? It's all over the map. Arts ATL, the band name The Ladies Of is intriguing. It makes me think of Joni Mitchell's Ladies of the Canyon, but I'm sure it invokes different things to different people. What does it mean to you? Hall. Oh, yes. I think it is, in a way, a commentary about how it may have taken every minute of my 55 years to be calm and comfortable in my own skin. It kind of reminds me of the Rolling Stones album, Some Girls, and some of the artwork that Warhol did for that album. We're having a little bit of levity with the album because nobody's getting out of here alive. You know, we're putting our parents into assisted care facilities. We're making arrangements and that sort of stuff. At some point, even though I've worked very hard for credibility as a gloomy rocker, it just will not hold up in a court of law. Arts ATL. So you're in the phase where you're just generally taking yourself a little less seriously and bringing in more lightness? Hall, I want to have joy. And I also believe that if humor has no function in rock music today, count me disinterested. That was Q and A. Rocker James Hall gears up his new band with new LP, Star Bar Show by Alexis Hawk. Next up, Jenny T. Anderson's A New Brain opens the mind with equal parts quirk and heart by Jim Farmer. The musical A New Brain is something of an anomaly. It's a work many people love, but also one a lot of folks have never seen. Jenny T. Anderson Theater's concert series gives audiences that chance this weekend. Running September 16th and 17th, A New Brain features music and lyrics by William Finn and book by Finn and James Lapine. While Finn is best known for his falsettos and the 25th annual Putnam County Spelling Bee, Lapine has taken home the Tony Award for best book of a musical three times for Into the Woods, Falsettos, and Passion. According to Jono Davis, Jenny T. Anderson Theater's artistic director, the highly autobiographical work is about how art can help heal. Lead character Gordon Michael Schwinn is a composer for a children's television show who is overworked, highly stressed, and anxious, and always under pressure from his boss from the corporate world. Although he is in a loving relationship with his boyfriend and has a strong circle of family and friends, he eventually develops a brain aneurysm and is admitted to the hospital. It's a reflection of how tragedy can affect the world. It's a reflection of how tragedy can affect various people and what can come of that, whether it be love or change, said Davis. It's a universal theme. It's a whimsical, funny musical with a charade of tragedy, but it's not a tragedy. It's a giant love story and a story of survival. A New Brain has always been a favorite of Davis's. He even has a tattoo of the show. He calls it an ensemble piece where everyone has an integral part from Gordon's boyfriend and his mother to the hospital staff, even to a homeless lady who asks for change. Davis also likes that the show put a queer relationship front and center in the mid-90s and Gordon is hospitalized, but not because of HIV AIDS. That was such a central theme to musicals during that time, he said. Davis started working for Cobb County in 2015 and took over as the manager and artistic director of the theater in 2018. As part of the Cobb Parks program in Marietta, the theater presents four to six productions a year, starting with Guys and Dolls back in 2020 before the pandemic. Its work is part of the Overture series, the Southeast's only musicals in concert series, with the goal of producing rarely staged shows. A New Brain fits that mold. The musical premiered off Broadway in 1998 and developed a following, prompting productions around the world. It was later remounted as part of a 2015 City Center Encore series at the New York City Center with high profile performers Jonathan Groff and Anna Geister in its cast. This version is the company's 16th concert series offering and features new and veteran performers. Besides James Allen McCune, who plays Gordon, the production also stars Mary Nye Bennett and Jeff McCurley. Davis likes to make the company's work collaborative. He doesn't like the concept of picking a show and assigning it to a random person. He prefers the personal touch of having his director and music director have a knowledge and passion of the work before. Because they are involved, it yields better results, Davis said. Music director John Michael de Havilland calls the score dense, with 10 characters in the ensemble and moments where they are all singing at the same time about different topics. The harmonies, the rhythmic complexity, and all the storytelling makes it a little challenging, he said. Directing the project is Justin Anderson, formerly the associate artistic director at Aurora Theater. That's all the time we have for this article, which is entitled, Jenny T. Anderson's A New Brain Opens the Mind with Equal Parts, Quirk and Heart, by Jim Farmer. That concludes today's MetroArts program, which is brought to you by the Fulton County Board of Commissioners. This has been Kristen Moody for GARS, the Georgia Radio Reading Service. Thank you for listening to GARS.
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