Sept 22 Metro Arts

Rose Scott, host of the radio program Closer Look on WABE, is known for her conversational style and tackling contentious issues in Atlanta. She has won awards for her interviews and is seen as a critical voice of public accountability. Scott's background and relatability have helped attract diverse audiences to public radio. In an exhibition organized by Esso Tillen Projects, artist Harrison Wayne created a skate ramp and playable level of Tony Hawk's Underground 2 in a church sanctuary, showcasing the fusion of art and gaming. 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 22nd. 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 Atlanta magazine online for WABE host Rose Scott sounds a lot like Atlanta. For the Closer Look host, a good discussion sounds the same everywhere. The conversation I have with my mail carrier, with a sister who does my pedicure, how I'm talking to you now, it's all the same conversation, she says, by Rachel Garbus. If there's an Atlantan with something interesting to say, there's a good chance they've said it to Rose Scott. Her radio program, Closer Look, which airs live every weekday afternoon on local NPR member station WABE, hosts a vibrant cross-section of the city's movers and shakers, interviewed by Scott herself. I always say we're a curator of conversations, she told me, community conversations. Both host and program represent a sea of change at WABE, which celebrates its 75th anniversary this month. When Closer Look launched in 2015, the station had shifted from all-day classical music and was hoping to draw a wider audience with more locally produced news and culture programming. Closer Look quickly became one of WABE's most popular programs and a critical voice of public accountability in Atlanta media. And that voice, indelibly, is Scott's. The voice of a black woman with a St. Louis accent, a dry sense of humor, and an encyclopedic knowledge of sports history and hip-hop. I have nothing against NPR host Steve Inskeep, Scott told me, but I don't want to have to sound like that. Scott, who first co-hosted the show with Dennis O'Hare and later Jim Burrus before going solo in 2017, has taken Closer Look's conversational model and steered it straight into Atlanta's most contentious issues. In recent years, she's covered the stop-cop-city movement, transgender youth health care, Atlanta's affordable housing crisis, conditions in local jails, and public transit failures. Her penchant for difficult questions has won her a string of awards, including a regional Emmy. It's also gotten her into some memorable clashes on the air. We've had some feisty moments on here with guests, Scott admits. For example, when Congressman Doug Collins insisted the Republicans' plan to repeal the Affordable Care Act would benefit poor Georgians. A frustrated Scott finally asked him, Congressman, have you ever been poor? She often returns to an issue over multiple shows, inviting stakeholders on all sides to share their perspectives. On different days, she talked with both Matt Westmoreland and Liliana Bakhtiari, city council members on opposing sides of the debate over the public safety training center. As long as I'm fair, then I'm doing my job, she says. Scott was born in St. Louis, the second youngest of ten siblings. From age two, she was raised by foster parents, though she remains close with most of her birth siblings. Scott isn't her real last name, but an on-air alias. Her foster parents, the best parents I could have asked for, she said, encouraged her to follow her dreams, and it didn't take long for her to find one worth pursuing. I grew up listening to Cardinals baseball on the radio, and I heard this guy named Jack Buck who called the games, she told me. I would pretend my transistor radio antenna was the mic, and I would call the game on the radio. I knew I wanted to be a broadcaster, probably around six or seven. After graduating from Indiana State University with a degree in radio, TV, and film, Scott looked for the best place to grow her sports journalism career. CNN was in Atlanta, she recalled. This is the Black Mecca, and all my friends were coming down here. She arrived three weeks before the 1996 Olympics. CNN turned her down. The person I interviewed with said, I don't know if the whole sports on the Internet thing is going to work, she said. So she improvised. After a few temporary gigs at 790 The Zone in Georgia State, she got her first big break in radio at WCLK at Clark Atlanta University. It was a public media show focusing on African American and rural communities, said Scott. Producer Reggie Hicks took a shot on me, and it just grew from there. She freelanced in the early 2000s, hosting SportsRap with Rose Scott on the AM station WAOK. But work could be sporadic. She once took a job as a traffic announcer to make ends meet. I worked under the name Reese Jackson because I didn't want anyone to know I was doing traffic, she laughed. WABE hired Scott in 2007 as the all-classical station ventured into more local news. When I first started, angry classical music fans would be outside picketing, she recalled. They were the politest protesters you ever met. She moved up to producing the local broadcast of All Things Considered, and when the station tapped legendary broadcaster Dennis O'Hare to anchor a daily news program in 2015, he insisted Scott come too. Dennis has been such a mentor to me, Scott said. I've learned so much from him about being a host, being a listener. Her foray into the rarefied air of public radio was eye-opening. I learned quickly that there was an elitism with the public media audience, she said. One listener called in to ask if the urban reporter would be sticking to coverage of HBCUs. But rather than change her identity, Scott told the station they needed to change theirs. I told them, look, I want to do this, she recalled, but you have to expand your coverage. You have to cover the LGBTQ community, the rural community. In the years since, WABE has done exactly that, influenced in no small part by Scott. Thankfully for Atlanta, Rose set out immediately to focus on other communities in the city, said longtime WABE host Louis Reitzes, whose show City Lights launched the same year as Closer Look and who counts Scott as a dear friend. Her vast range of interests benefits everyone. To Reitzes, Scott's great gift is that she approaches every interview with the same easy candor. Whether she's talking to some high-profile public figure or a child, she has this complete absence of pretense, Reitzes told me. For Scott, a good discussion sounds the same everywhere. The conversation I have with my mail carrier, with the sister who does my pedicure, how I'm talking to you now, it's all the same conversation. Sounding like herself, she added, means she sounds a lot like Atlanta. I am the community, she said. I know what it's like to get unemployment, what it's like to come home and have your lights turned off because you couldn't pay the bill. That proximity has changed who's listening. I was talking to some parents who had never even heard of WABE. Later, one reached out and said, I really like how you interviewed us, how you made a sound. Now I'm listening to your station. As public radio finally begins to attract diverse audiences, after years of well-intentioned but anemic effort, Scott and Closer Look offer a roadmap for others. You cannot have a newsroom that does not reflect the community it serves, she said. I'm really proud of the talent we have at WABE now because they all bring different lived experiences. Scott has changed the conversation in Atlanta, and she knows it. But keeping that conversation going, she told me, means cultivating a new generation of journalists as diverse as the city they cover. I ain't going to do this forever, she said. I want one of them to take this wherever it's going and make it even better. That was WABE host Rose Scott sounds a lot like Atlanta by Rachel Garbus. Next, we move to the Burnaway publication online for Skybox by Harrison Wayne at Esso Tillen Projects Atlanta by Kat Eves. Skybox was a solo presentation of works by Harrison Wayne organized by Esso Tillen Projects, a mobile exhibition space in Atlanta, Georgia. I had no idea what to expect when I parked in the small side lot of the College Park First Methodist Church on August 26th, the only day the exhibition was available for viewing. I wasn't sure I was even in the right place until I saw the large plywood skate ramp propped against the stairs leading up the entrance. Walking through the double doors, I heard hard wheels rolling and grinding over metal and wood, along with the occasional crash. The sounds echoed throughout the sanctuary's tall walls with stained glass windows. The 12 to 1 Esso Tillen exhibition space was by the altar. The small gallery stood at my eye level and was large enough for only three people to peer in at once. Miniature wooden skateboard ramps and metal grind rails were positioned within the maquette. Ten petite decals of stained glass windows lined the walls of the interior space, reminiscent of those towering nearby. On the back wall was a small screen. This is where the sounds are coming from. In collaboration with Joshua Satan, Wayne displays a playable level of Tony Hawk's Underground 2, 2004. With a GameCube controller mounted on the side of the exhibition space, viewers were invited to play as an avatar whom Wayne designed to capture the likeness of his mother. Clumsily using the GameCube controller, I skated around, attempting tricks and fell quite a bit. The sounds of my gnarly wipeout filled the sanctuary just like an organ would. I quickly realized the digital environment was familiar. The level was a spectacularly detailed and accurate model of the very sanctuary I was standing in. Using images provided by Wayne during his studio tenure at this church, Satan reconstructed the entire space and enhanced it to become an impressive Tony Hawk skate map. A handful of other pieces were scattered around the larger space, complementing the Esotillon exhibit. Seaside Girl, a large graphite rubbing of one of the stained glass windows in the sanctuary, hangs down from the balcony and folds over on itself, rolls down onto a pew, then lands on the ground. The piece is hard to miss. Seaside Girl depicts simplified silhouettes based on the iconic imagery of Christ walking on water as a disciple reaches up from the waves below. An image typically mounted above our heads is now at eye level, almost wholly recontextualized if not for its current setting. A cork board displayed printed screenshots of the skybox, the digital 3D model of the church it inhabits, floating and surrounding by clouds and blue sky. The images elevate the space and transform it further into an abstracted crucifix-shaped object. Presentation, Williams, 1914, a small wooden cross, is mounted on the backside of the cork board. It reads, nowhere you, everywhere the electric. State parks are like religious spaces, essential gathering sites for many. The church can be an uncomfortable space for people, but the playfulness and accessibility of the work recontextualize the hallowed ground, making it welcoming. The multiple transformations of this physical church, from rubbings to the infinitely variable digital map, show Wayne's concern with preservation. These acts of record-making reveal the artist's great care for this space and an archival approach to his own personal history. Wayne's work is energetic, humorous, and sincere. Skybox transported me to a place of nostalgia, fondness, and longing for a church I'd never visited, a game I had never played, and a person I was never able to meet. The interactive and site-specific quality of this work was ephemeral. Like a memory, the show was passing, only available to us for a moment, or a single day in this case. However, unlike the fickle and fleeting nature of remembering, the space has been perfectly memorialized in a digital Africa life, just waiting for someone to drop in. Skybox by Harrison Wayne was presented at the College Park First Methodist Church in collaboration with Esotillon Projects, Atlanta, Georgia, on August 26, 2023. That was Skybox by Harrison Wayne at Esotillon Projects, Atlanta, by Kat Eves. Next we move to the Arts ATL Publication for Out on Film Builds on Last Year's Momentum Includes More Georgia Work by Steve Murray. Every fall, I bug him about themes he sees emerging organically in his festival. This time, Out on Film Executive Director Jim Farmer beat me to the punch. This year, we have themes of family, and of families, you find, he says. The 36th anniversary of the film festival is a mix of international and local screenings peppered with several filmmakers attending and talking about their work. What Farmer says is true. A lot of the films here chart the delicate dance between generations, and of straight parents interacting with their LGBTQ children, and sometimes vice versa. Spanning 11 days, the festival starts tomorrow with the opening night screening of the tearjerker Our Son, starring Out actors Billy Porter and Luke Evans as a couple whose divorce leads to a custody battle over their child. It's very emotional, Farmer says. What surprised me about it is that a lot of times when you see custody films, they automatically lean to one side or the other. Our Son, by contrast, lets us see both of the dueling husbands with all their strengths and weaknesses. It was very realistic, but very painful, Farmer says. The film's director and co-writer, Bill Oliver, is scheduled to attend the screening. Like film festivals everywhere, Out on Film had to pause, adapt, then get back on track when COVID reconfigured the world. It has taken everybody a while, Farmer says. We did the 2021 festival, but some people were still just hesitant. Last year, I worked my butt off to get bros for opening night, but it was worth it. We were excited to have a real festival again, and that was our best crowd ever. Among its highlights, the festival presented actor Coleman Domingo its Icon Award. He'll soon be seen playing openly gay civil rights activist Bayard Rustin and director George C. Wolf biopic, Rustin. Out on Film has built on last year's momentum, offering a mini-festival of movies in the spring via a grant from Atlanta Pride. It was named number one of the nation's top ten film festivals this year by USA Today. We're kind of on a roll, knock on wood, Farmer says. For the record, the festival edged out its older sister, the Atlanta Film Festival, which came in at number four on the list. With the pandemic dammed up the film production pipeline for a time, there's no evidence of that now, given out on Film's abundance of strong work from around the globe. The initial films I watched this year were Big Boys and Lie With Me, Farmer says, naming two strong yet very different features from the United States and France, respectively. I completely related to that kid in Big Boys and what he was going through, and I was very captivated by the romance of Lie With Me. Farmer also name-checks the French juvenile detention drama romance, Lost Boys, and the U.S. documentary, Chasing Amy. I was really taken in by the back story of the filming of Chasing Amy, the 1997 Kevin Film Fest with Documentary Celebrates, and everything that was going on at the time with Harvey Weinstein. Another documentary he notes is Jewel, a just vision about author activist Jewel Gomez, who will attend the festival. Out on Film always has good local representation, but this year's is a boom crop. We had well over 100 Georgia filmmakers trying to get in, Farmer says. Usually the festival has one block of Georgia and Atlanta works. This year there are two, Atlanta LGBTQ Film Celebration and Homegrown Shorts. Our shorts program is always strong because we're Oscar qualifying in the best drama short category, Farmer says. But the festival includes a number of short documentaries as well. He mentions The Dancer. That began as a story in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. It's about a very famous black dancer who went from being very acclaimed to living on the streets and eventually being murdered. It wasn't one of the films I got to preview, but Dancer was co-directed by my former colleague Ryan Horn. Out on Film also features a fairly recent subgenre, LGBTQ-themed horror films. Fright Night is a bill of shorts designed to get the goosebumps going. Farmer also mentions the feature-length thriller Healed, about a celebrity lesbian couple invited to a mediation retreat that isn't what it appears to be. Queer filmmaker Guinevere Turner, whose on-screen insight enlivens Chasing Chasing Amy, is one of the cast members. Going back to recurring themes, one kept coming up for me as I watched 11 of this year's films in advance. All of the dramas concern the early years of coming out and of young gay men sometimes having to feign romantic interest with women in ways that quickly backfire. It's the same story that's been told for decades. While these films are made with a quality and assurance that older ones lack, it's depressing that the world hasn't changed enough and this familiar tale remains so central. Maybe that's just testament to the ongoing need for festivals like Out on Film. Most of the festival screenings happen at landmark Midtown Art Cinema. A few are at other venues, including Outfront Theatre Company, Roll Call Theatre, and House of Hope Atlanta, so double-check the schedule when making plans. Here are quick takes on the titles I previewed in alphabetical order. Big Boys Writer-director Corey Sherman's coming-of-age comedy can make many a gay man cringe in recognition, and I mean that as high praise. Jamie, played by the winning Isaac Krasner, is a chubby teen looking forward to the annual camping trip he and his girl-crazy brother Will, Taj Cross, the two boys have great prickly rapport, take with their now-adult cousin Allie, Dora Madison. Jamie's bummed that Allie's bringing her new boyfriend, Dan, David Johnson III. But his animosity quickly turns into a thick boy crush. The budding young gourmand starts quizzing Dan on his preferred spice blends for the hamburgers they plan to grill. He also proposes extending a hike in the woods with Dan, long after Will and Allie head back to their tents, and he fantasizes about returning to the park as a grown man and having hookups with fellow bears. A key scene in Sherman's film Comes with Jamie admits his attraction to Dan with a bravery many of us lacked at his age. Dan's kind response might be the stuff of wishful thinking, but it ends Big Boys on a warm glow. Chasing, Chasing Amy. The director started shooting this title as Savannah Rogers, but comes out by movie's end identifying as a man named Sav. That's one of many transitions in a film whose formal shagginess turns out to be a strength. The documentary begins as a love letter to Kevin Smith's 1997 dramedy, Chasing Amy, about a guy, Ben Affleck, crushing on a lesbian friend, Joey Lauren Adams. As a suburban teenager, the movie's portrait of sexual fluidity made Rogers feel seen. Chasing, Chasing Amy gives Smith's film needed context through generous hang time with Smith himself and from interviews with people like filmmaker Guinevere Turner. A pal and crush object of Smith's, Turner recalls Washington clerk's writer-director draw on elements from their own friendship and his off-screen romance with Adams while making his movie. For film lovers of any kind, the documentary demonstrates how movies we love can spark different responses in us when revisited over time. The documentary's strongest sequence comes near the end when Adams grants Sav an interview more emotionally loaded than the young filmmaker probably expected. Elephant. Bartek Jane Hrinskiewicz lives alone with his mom on a failing horse farm in the middle of nowhere. Not much happens except binge drinking at the dive bar where Bartek works and the pervasive homophobia infamous in his country of Poland. Both the booze and the bias get kicked up in his village when one of the locals drinks himself to death and the man's estranged musician son Dawid Pawel Tomazowski returns after 15 years. He has done awful things, Bartek's mom warns, which is exactly what Bartek is looking for. Soon the two young men are hooking up and Bartek has to decide if his loyalties to local life outweigh a chance of happiness elsewhere. Like Norwegian Dream, previewed below, Elephant nicely captures the secret afterglow the protagonist feels after the men hook up and it memorably captures the stark loveliness of the Polish autumn countryside. Golden Delicious. Take it as a diss and a compliment both, but this teen drama plays like an updated ABC school special with all the niceness you'd expect from its production country of Canada. The comparison continues with the initial focus, young Asian-Canadian student Jake's Cardi Wong relationship with his dad George, Ryan Ma, who tries to recapture his own high school glory by drilling his son in basketball. Meanwhile, Jake's longtime girlfriend Valerie, Parmas Sahat, is tired of his deferral of losing their virginity together. Soon enough, Jake is hanging out with new neighbor Alex, Chris Carson, who's aiming to make the school's basketball team alongside Jake and who's also openly gay. Alex has no problem sexually taunting the biggest homophobe in the locker room, me thinks the jock doth protest too much. Predictably, Jake and Alex start engaging in some extramural sports on their own. Lie With Me. Some people dream about going back in triumph to the hometowns they felt didn't appreciate them. That fantasy is fulfilled in this French film. But no matter how much Stephanie Belcourt, Guillaume de Tancredec, is photographed and fetid when he returns to his idyllic village, a vein of melancholy runs through his visit. It was here, as a book smart teen, that he fell in love with classmate Thomas, Julian de Saint-Jean, a tough farm kid who catches Stephanie looking at him and initiates a rough, steamy relationship. Young Stephanie, nicely played by Jeremy Gillette, has plans for the future, but Thomas can't see beyond his family's expectations. Ironically, this long-ago tryst is the source of Stephanie's first novel, leading to the fame that brought him home. Invited to write a memoir to celebrate his town's cognac distillery, Stephanie is chaperoned by, wouldn't you know it, Thomas's grown son, Lucas, Victor Belmondo. And whether Thomas, well, that's the story Lie With Me tells via poignant flashbacks. Though it remains an uphill challenge to make a writer's work look interesting on screen, Lie With Me makes a good attempt. The movie is small, but deep, smart, and wistful. The Lost Boys. Julian de Saint-Jean, the co-star of the previous film, returns here as William, another conflicted young lover. He is one of the teens in a French facility for juveniles interned for behavioral or family problems. The film's main focus is on Joe, Kahlil Garbia, who is coming up on a hearing that could lead to his release. But he has a problem with spontaneously running away and contending with general anti-Arab prejudice. Then new kid, William, rumored to have stabbed somebody, is admitted to the lockdown. The boys start a tentative romance, trying to obey the rules inside while dreaming about life beyond its locked doors. Director and co-writer Zeno Grayton maintains a taut balance between the tough and the tender in this film, finding star-crossed poetry in the boys' hard-won moments of freedom and connection, a radio broadcast shared through a cell wall, a shirtless run in the rain. Mutt. This day in the life, and two stressful nights, drama about a transsexual man adjusting to life post-transition is strong at showing the confusions that come from blowing up labels and redefining yourself. There's a lot of collateral, well, if not damage exactly, then adjustment. Take for instance, when post-op Senya, Leo Mihal, sees a familiar face at the bar. It's John Koldoman, newly back in town to care for his ill mom. Also, he used to be Senya's boyfriend, when Senya was Fernanda. Writer-director Vik Lugolov-Klotz's film captures the street-level daily grind of life in New York City, but as Senya sometimes abrasively asserts her identity to innocent bystanders like bodega workers and bank tellers, he comes off as abrasive. You can't disagree with John when he tells Senya, people don't hate you because you're trans. People hate you because you're a bleep asshole. At its best, Mutt dramatizes the difficulty and necessity of acceptance and forgiveness, no matter who you are and how you identify in the world. Norwegian Dream. As in elephant, Poland comes in for a drubbing for homophobia, if from a distance. Hubert Malkowski plays 19-year-old Polish boy Robert, newly arrived to work at a fish processing factor in Norway. He's welcomed by colleagues in the group dorm, but his presence, like that of other migrant workers, is starting to cause tension from locals who already feel squeezed by a tough job and limited opportunities. Most of the abuse, though, goes toward young co-worker Ivar, Carl Beckel-Steinland. He is black, for one thing, as well as effeminate, and worst of all, he's the adopted son of the factory's boss. Dream spends much of its time on Robert and Ivar's secret burgeoning romance. Like elephant, the film nicely captures the giddy, secret afterglow a young lover feels the day after a night of good, taboo sex. But the focus also shifts to the growing call for workers to strike for better conditions, putting both Robert and Ivar in awkward positions. Our Son. Out on film's opening night feature could be called a gay Kramer versus Kramer. It delivers heartache, social issues, and a little glitz in equal measure. Feature actors Luke Evans and Billy Porter play Nikki and Gabriel, a New York dream couple married for 13 years, raising eight-year-old son Owen. Being a dad in Gabriel's made focus. For Nikki, it's just one of the accoutrements of having it all. Director Bill Oliver and writer Peter Nickowitz's film demonstrates that just because LGBTQ folks can have marriage and legal families doesn't mean everyone wants to. The movie is generous to both of its main characters, showing us their strengths and flaws and giving each of the actors a nice, sexy scene with new romantic partners. Though a grittier take on the story might be more realistic, the sophisticated sheen of the Manhattan locale and the good-looking leads deliver the sort of middle-brow family drama that LGBTQ community doesn't get to enjoy very often. No Melancholia. Come for the skin, stay for the loneliness. Really, that's a recommendation. In this full frontal drama from Argentinian director Manuel Abramovich, Lalo Santos plays a Mexican man who has a day job but also spends a lot of time stripping for his smartphone and posting pics of himself as a sex influencer. He gets a lot of likes and followers, and soon he's learning the ropes on a porn set, dressing up as a Mexican hero Emiliano Zapata, getting it on with other hombres in and out of historical costumes, and learning the just-a-job ins and outs of sex work on screen. The film demystifies porn and DIY sex sites like OnlyFans with no judgment. But as we follow Lalo, usually alone, making cautious calls to his mom back home or checking in at the clinic to keep tabs on his viral load, Porno Melancholia builds a quiet mood of this sort of loneliness that comes with an age when we can film our every waking moment but feel endlessly alone. Silver Haze. An outlier from the male-centric focus of the other films, writer-director Sasha Pollock's British drama isn't a fun set, but a fascinating fragmented slice of working-class, sexually fluid life. Vicky Knight plays Frankie, a nurse with a chip on her shoulder, largely because of burns that cover her body due to a fire when she was a kid. The woman who set the blaze, her mother's former best friend, is now married to the father who abandoned Frankie and her sister Leah, Vicky's real-life sister Charlotte Knight. Yeah, that tracks. Both sisters have problematic boyfriends. So it almost looks like a silver lining when Frankie gets involved with a girl she meets at work, Florence, as McCreed Miles, look-alike daughter of Samantha Morton. That was Out on Film Builds on Last Year's Momentum Includes More Georgia Work by Steve Murray. Next up, Terminus Ballet to present new narrative work by Atlanta Ballet's Darian Cain by Jillian Ann Renaud. Terminus Modern Ballet Theater has been through a lot of ups and downs since it was founded six years ago. But a consistent thread has been director John Welker's commitment to creating new narrative ballets that push the art form forward. Storytelling is a hallmark of what we do, he says. Welker discusses that vision with every choreographer who creates for the company, but he leaves it up to her or him to decide whether to craft a literal storytelling work or something more abstract. One of the premieres launching the company's 2023-24 season on September 23rd is the new white box theater in Buckhead is the Adoption of Faith, a new, mostly literal narrative work by choreographer and Atlanta ballet dancer Darian Cain. It's the first work Cain has choreographed for Terminus and the first work she has created with her partner, Alec Zase, a composer, writer, and lover of history. He composed the score and created the storyline while Cain developed the movement, relying heavily on pedestrian gestures and stripping movement down to its raw essence. The Adoption of Faith is a fictional story set in World War II and follows a group of Romani, William, and children, giving them a voice not often heard. According to Zase, the idea emerged from his learning about the gypsy culture and its history throughout Eastern Europe. I was moved by their unique struggle, he wrote in an email, more specifically the near-complete ignorance of 800,000 of their people murdered in the Holocaust and what seems to be an unspoken general acceptance of their discrimination to this day. The day after a weekend of performances in Atlanta Ballet's La Sophie, Cain talked about the work and her process. She admits it's been a heavy lift, learning how to effectively weave storytelling with movement, but she clearly enjoys the challenge. This is the first time I've taken on narrative work and it slapped me around a lot, she said. We wanted to represent the lives of the people who have been forgotten during wars like this and show another type of bravery. It's a tragedy with a surprise ending, with a theme that it takes faith to forgive. When John approached her about creating a ballet, she was a little bit nervous. When John approached her about creating a ballet for Terminus, he welcomed her ideas without hesitation, she said, even though he didn't know Zeis and was aware Cain was new to narrative ballet. I don't know many companies willing to take this kind of risk, she said. For his part, Welker appreciates Cain's willingness to experiment. Darian dares to take chances, he said. I really appreciate that in her. She fully embraces her voice as quirky and at times humorous, and she has a high degree of integrity. The ballets she's created in the past are a mashup of unique musical choices and pedestrian gestures artfully embedded within the classical form. In Dr. Rainbow's Infinity Mirror, created for Atlanta Ballet in 2021, for instance, the vocabulary was unorthodox for a ballet company. The dancers also wore socks instead of shoes, giving the movement a unique, not quite ballet quality. Cain has also been honing her choreographic skills through dance films created for the Artists Climate Collective, a group of artists committed to bringing awareness to climate change. She knows that a dancer's career is short and that dancing won't always sustain her. That's one of the reasons why she and Zace are hoping the adoption of Faith will be the beginning of a long-term collaboration. The Terminus Knicks bill, out of the box, September 23rd, 24th, 30th, and October 1st will also include the premiere of Rachel Van Buskirk's Secrets and a work in progress by Shane Urton, a dancer with Royal Ballet of Flanders. His ballet is titled Devotion and Dreams and will be presented in its complete form later in the season. That was Terminus Ballet to present new narrative work by Atlanta Ballet's Darian Cain by Gillian Ann Renaud. Next up, review. Atlanta Ballet launches season with fine performance of La Sophie by Gillian Ann Renaud. La Sophie, which Atlanta Ballet presented last weekend at Cobb Energy Performing Arts Center, is a romantic ballet blanc, white ballet, with all the key ingredients, a man in love who turns out to be a faceless cad, a broken-hearted fiance, supernatural women in white, and a witch who creates magic, havoc, and death. The internationally recognized Johann Cobourg produced this award-winning version for England's Royal Ballet in 2005, and Atlanta Ballet brought it into its repertory in 2019. Cobourg added some of his own choreography, but this is a ballet firmly rooted in tradition. It can seem quaint to contemporary audiences, but Atlanta Ballet honored its history in two fine performances Saturday afternoon and evening. What's unique about La Sophie, compared with another familiar white ballet, Giselle, is the Bournemville technique, named after the creator of the original 1836 ballet, August Bournemville. This means that in two dance-filled acts, there is only one lift. It occurs at a critical moment, when the love-struck Scotsman, James, grabs hold of the elusive sylph he has stupidly fallen in love with. He's supposed to be marrying his sweet, sensible fiance, Effie. He lifts the sylph above him, but she starts to wilt and slips out of his embrace. Her wings fall off and she dies, poisoned by the witch's scarf. Saturday evening, the ballet opened with the always noble Denis Nidak as James, asleep in an armchair in front of the fireplace. Emily Carrico as the sylph next to him, all gossamer white. Her first gesture was almost imperceptible, a slight movement of the head, then shoulders and arms, delicate, otherworldly. She danced around his chair, then mischievously kissed him. Waking him. James's wedding preparations were underway, but distracted by the sylph, his romantic ideal, he followed her blindly into the forest. Nidak and Carrico are mature dancers, who embodied the drama, rather than simply acting it, and they were a joy to watch. Nidak has a large frame and style that is well-suited to bold, space-defying variations, but on Saturday, he compressed that energy in training into crisp, quick dynamics that ballet requires. Carrico darted between emotions like a firefly, coy and demure one moment, flirtatious, evasive, teasing or tearful the next. Her upper body was often tilted slightly forward in the traditional style, her arms lifted delicately in front, but her acting in the ballet's final section swept her performance onto a different plane. Her facial expressions reflected shock, sadness, confusion, love, her fingers stroking the air as if she was trying to roll back time. They were joined by Coburg himself. He portrayed the witch, Madge, as a seriously evil force. Victorious at the end and standing over James's lifeless body, Coburg's Madge opened her mouth in a merciless, soundless laugh. It was a dark and superbly etched performance. Darian Kane was the Saturday matinee Madge. Her portrayal was broader, her cruel laughter at human foibles more pronounced, but effective in its own way. Most of the opening act is firmly rooted in home, hearse and reality. Instead of tights and pointe shoes, the women wore knee socks and soft black shoes. Men and women alike wore brightly colored jackets and kilts. The Bournonville technique is demanding for even the strongest technicians, often requiring that jumps be executed with the arms low or carefully positioned in a way that doesn't do much to aid elevation. For the most part, the dancers met the challenge at both performances. The jolly, Scottish-inspired reel and variations for James, Effie and their friends featured small, fast jumps and beats, all well defined. Sergio Massero, the matinee James with Alire Agarashi as Sylph, sprang upwards multiple times like a rocket blasting off the launch pad, executing clean entrance six, six beats in the air, his arms cleanly based. Massero did an excellent job with the technique. His compact frame is really well suited to the style, but compared with Nidak and Carrico, his and Agarashi's emotions seemed skin deep. Almost there, but not quite. She is a lovely dancer, however, and aside from a wobbly turn in her first variation, she brought charm and delicacy to the role. If neither Nidak nor Massero were able to completely nail the multiple turn variation in act two, it's likely because their mastery of the technique earlier in the ballet had overtaxed their legs. The set design by Soren Fransen was perfect. Solid wood beams and a heavy chandelier decorated the antlers emphasized the groundedness of act one, while pale trees framed act two and set the mood for the Sylph's misty realm. The corps de ballet was well rehearsed in both acts. Giuliana Massano danced Effie at the matinee and was sweet, but reserved. So Jung Lee gave the role a stronger edge in the evening. Anderson Souza, matinee, and Eric Kim, evening, managed to bring life to the rather thankless role of Gern, the unpopular guy whom Effie eventually marries. It's always great to experience ballet with live music. Tara Szymanek deftly guided the Atlanta Ballet Orchestra through the HS Lovenscold score. During the curtain calls at the end of the evening performance, artistic director Gennady Nedkiewicz walked on the stage, knelt before Koberg and presented him with flowers, a gesture usually reserved for the lead ballerina. It was all well deserved. That was Review. Atlanta Ballet launches season with fine performances of La Sylphie by Gillian Ann Renaud. Next up, Cullum's Notebook, Impact of Haitian History, Afrofuturism, Papermaking, and Art by Jerry Cullum. Several startlingly different Atlanta art shows illustrate a point I have often tried to make, that some artworks require additional information to be understood completely. To be successful, however, the works must also have an immediate impact. In these cases, all of them do. The Haunts of Black Kirby, an exhibition of works from the dawn of Afrofuturism at the Arts Exchange through October 28th, is curated from the works in a 2019 show at the Atlanta University Center Robert W. Woodruff Library. It requires, at minimum, some understanding of the legacy of comic book creator Jack Kirby, transmuted in the service of Afrofuturist goals by artists John Jennings and Stacey Robinson. The Arts Exchange has accepted the challenge of educating the audience by arranging two events with the Atlanta University Center, a September 30th Arts Exchange community discussion, Afrofuturism, its relevance in today's environment and the path forward for artists, and an October 4th archival special viewing at the University Center Library, Afrosurrealism, the Negritude Movement, and the Archival Roots of Afrofuturism. At Hammond House through October 21st, Edward Duvall Carey's Histories and Others is based on the well-known history of Haiti's self-liberation from French rule. So it's useful to at least know who Toussaint, Dessalines, and King Henry were, since they're mentioned in the artwork titles. But the main impact of the exhibition derives from Duvall Carey's breathtaking ability to create a complex composition in the difficult art of engraving on plexiglass, and then surrounding the works with mirrored frames he also devises. King Henry and Haiti's royal court fills an entire wall with an image that is not a depiction of the famous Sanssouci Palace, but a surreal image-crowded evocation of it. The king's face is composed of floral and vegetal elements, like those of Giuseppe Archibaldo's Renaissance portraits. It is Duvall Carey's appropriate homage to the way the palace demonstrated that recently enslaved architects and artisans could create buildings and artworks rivaling those of Europe. King Henry's contemporaries noted this too. None of this historical information is in the exhibition, but in truth, it's secondary to the overwhelming impact of the work itself. The label for this monumental artwork describes only the impressive technique that went into its making. By coincidence, an explicitly articulated view of history from the perspective of growing up Black and queer in the South infuses the stunning and similarly monumental woodcut prints on fabric of Chiara Gilbert. Two of these can be seen through October 13th in Aura, an exhibition of 21 female and non-binary artists at Kai Lin Art. Regrettably, the leap year artist's solo show, A Balm to Soothe the Flesh at Mint, has closed. The two works at Kai Lin lack the interpretive explanation presented at Mint in Gilbert's wall text, but the linear qualities and 96-inch height of pecan season establish a context on their own. Visitors to Myth and Magic, the Book is Art, Volume 11 at Decatur Library Gallery through October 30th will find great pleasure in diving deeper into the informative artist statements on the BooksAsArt.com webpage of the four sponsoring organizations. This year's national and international entrance into the juried exhibition demonstrate unusually intense concern for the state of the world around them. Consider these titles, for instance, Your Leader Could Be a Tyrant, How to Tell by Tatana Kellner and Anne E. Kalmbach and Ellen Wintner's What Am I Seeing? Although Wintner's artist statement tells a slightly different story, pages with such phrases as zigzag of shadows and confusion of space suggest a world in which confidence has ebbed in anybody's ability to perceive things unambiguously. The theme is repeated even more forcefully in Evan Lewis's video, Everted Sanctuaries VI, in which a volume of Sherlock Holmes' confident detective work explodes into digital shreds. These turn into a maelstrom of isolated letters before recomposing and bursting open in another way. In Endure, Ashley Devan chooses to represent the endlessly cyclic struggle to maintain women's rights and human rights by combining text with an old-fashioned zoetrope, a cylinder with vertical slits that creates a moving image when a succession of pictures were viewed through a rotating drum. And the Yorkshire artist Carolyn Thompson offers an altered copy of Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, in which she obliterated every word except ones relating to silencing with the word silence. In a 14-day performance, she hand wrote the word 65,000 times. Geometry Aljamia, a cultural transliteration at the Robert C. Williams Museum of Papermaking through December 6th, offers aesthetic satisfaction but raises many unanswered questions. The curator's statement says, this six-artist show is united by their shared interest in geometric patterns inherited from Islamic cultures, geometry that reflects the larger hybrid relationship that the West shares with the Middle East. They also reflect the historic fact that since ancient times, geometric perfection has been thought to convey sacred and universal truth. This gives the visitor limited context for the unexpectedly intense emotional impact of the cut paper wall hangings and graphite wall drawings of Tamim Sazabaza, Julia Townsend, Mohamed Saleh Amin, Haneh Khorchi, and Rainie Gower, a multinational collaboration that evolved at a workshop held by the Virginia Commonwealth University in 2013 in Qatar. Jorge Benitez's often witty architectural models and drawings are another matter. Based on the same geometry, they bear such provocative titles as the School of Social Engineering and Recuerdos de 1492. The memories of 1492 are almost certainly about the end of centuries of Muslim rule in Spain. This occurred when Spain expelled or forcibly converted its Jewish population and in the same year sponsored the sea voyage of an Italian sailor searching for a westward route to India. Visitors unaware of this history may remember Christopher Columbus but not understand the whole history behind Benitez's title. Context counts. That was Cullum's Notebook, Impact of Haitian History, Afrofuturism, Papermaking, and Art by Jerry Cullum. Next up, review. The Excitement of Everyday Paris Permeates New Exhibit at High Museum by Catherine Fox. Most museums display a fraction of their holdings even as they continue to seek and acquire new works. The High Museum of Art, for instance, typically displays eight percent of its 19,000 plus pieces. Happily, Claudia Einicke, Francis B. Bunsey family curator of European art, has liberated a group of prints, drawings, photographs, and sculptures from the storeroom to mount in the City of Light Paris, 1850 to 1920. Deftly woven together with loans largely from the collection of Dr. and Mrs. Michael Schlossberg, they form an engaging snapshot of that beloved capital, its rich architecture, vibrant streets, cultural richness, and sassy nightlife. In the mid-19th century, French poet Baudelaire coined the term flâneur to describe those often artists and writers who strolled the city observing its people and places. Einicke and curatorial research associate Caroline Giddes organized the exhibition around four interlocking themes that encourage visitors to do their own flâneuring. Along the way, it is interesting to note the variety of ways artists chose to depict their own observations and visions. One might contrast, for instance, two etchings of Notre Dame. John Taylor Arm's view across the Seine River relays its Gothic grandeur, while Charles Marion's The Vampire brings us face to face with one of its gargoyles, a menacing vision representing another kind of Gothic. Eugene Atget, the preeminent photographer of pre-modern Paris, imbues his views with a whiff of melancholy. That's all the time we have for this article, which is entitled Review. The Excitement of Everyday Paris Permeates New Exhibit at High Museum by Catherine Fox. 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.