Author: Elizabeth Derby

Categories
Culture

Many angles: Lisa Speidel’s new book talks about happy sex and more

In her book The Edge of Sex, UVA’s Lisa Speidel hopes to encourage more comfortable conversations about sex. Photo by Dan Addison

When Lisa Speidel joined the Sexual Assault Resource Agency in the early 1990s, she had no idea her work in sexual assault prevention would lead to a career in sex education. But one graduate program, one assistant professorship, and 27 years teaching women’s self-defense later, she’s become an advocate for sexual awareness as a path to agency. 

“Sex is such a big part of who we are, but we’re socialized with so much shame, and not understanding that pleasure can be okay,” says Speidel, who is C-VILLE Weekly’s new sex columnist. “If we can’t talk about happy sex, how are we supposed to talk about sexual violation?”

As an assistant professor in the women, gender and sexuality department at the University of Virginia, Speidel’s background in sexual assault education lends a unique perspective to her work in the classroom.

“[At SARA], I started examining the role of masculinity and how that plays a role in violence against women in particular,” she says. “We’ve expanded in that language (now we call it gender-based violence) because it’s not just about violence against women.” 

Since then, Speidel says there’s been a movement to talk about sexual assault prevention not only through reactionary measures like self-defense and bystander intervention, but also through primary prevention—promoting healthy sexuality and healthy masculinity to stop assault from happening to begin with. 

“I really feel strongly that if we were able to have conversations around this more openly, a lot of damage could be avoided,” she says.

Today, Speidel teaches four courses at UVA: human sexualities, men and masculinities, gender-based violence, and gender and sexuality studies. She sees each subject as interconnected, a necessary educational offering for students who’ve been failed by traditional sex education.

“There’s no consistency for how sex education happens in this country, she says. “We don’t have a national curriculum, it’s really state-based, and a large percentage of the federal funding goes towards abstinence-only. So a lot of people aren’t getting any information at all, but then they go to college and start becoming sexually active, and it’s not a particularly great experience for a lot of people.”

Speidel hears it directly from her students. “I do a lot of reflective writing in my classes, and people are very open and honest,” she says. 

Ultimately, her students were the reason she began teaching about the pleasurable side of sex. During one of her intro classes on gender and sexuality studies, she remembers a student who raised his hand after she shared the statistic that only 25 percent of women can have an orgasm with penetrative intercourse. “He asked, ‘But I don’t understand why that would happen for someone with a vagina.’ For me, that was a pivotal moment. I realized I needed to be teaching a human sexuality class.”

Speidel points out that most people are terrified of having these conversations. In a dynamic where “people feel isolated based on sexual orientations or gender identities, women feel like they don’t have a voice, [and] men feel socialized that they’re supposed to have all the answers,” our lack of safe spaces to have open conversations about sex is a real problem. 

The world of academia offers a solution, she says, if educators work to create brave spaces for people to be courageous. “If you can create an environment where it’s like, ‘Okay, I have to read about this,’ and there’s research and books written about it, it’s a tool to get those conversations going. You know, the conversations we don’t do very well in our everyday lives.”

To help facilitate these conversations both in and outside the classroom, Speidel and her former student Micah Jones have co-authored a book titled The Edge of Sex: Navigating a Sexually Confusing Culture From the Margins. The anthology includes work from 37 writers, half of whom are former students of Speidel’s, as they discuss their experiences of sex and sex education in America. 

The Edge of Sex appeals not only to clinicians working on issues of gender identity and sexuality, but also to casual readers who want to immerse themselves in education outside the classroom. 

“It’s all about marginalized or unheard voices, and how exclusion, and exclusionary practices in sex education, really affects people’s identity and developing,” Speidel says. “If you’re going to have conversations with your own children, or if you’re having conversations with each other, there’s some skill building and understanding available.”

As Speidel has experienced firsthand in her career, exposure to a variety of voices and perspectives is the first step in creating positive change. The Edge of Sex not only sheds light for readers, it empowers them to realize they’re not alone, and community and resources exist to help them.

“I think a lot of people will find themselves in this book,” she says. “The first chapter is [by someone writing] about faking orgasms for 30 years. The next is about someone who’s trans. It’s just a huge spectrum of voices.”

Speidel says that it’s important to celebrate all the choices that people make in ways that are safe, happy, and consensual. “It’s such a cliché, but knowledge is power,” she says. “Learning how to communicate and how to decrease dynamics that make people feel shameful and bad about themselves—there’s a domino effect.”

Categories
Arts

Top tier: Live Arts gathers an excellent cast for The Humans

The imperfections of life unravel the hopes of a working-class family in the Tony Award-winning play The Humans, at Live Arts through February 16. Photo by Martyn Kyle

What do you do when structures fail? When you did everything right, you played by the rules, yet the safety you thought you’d shored up for the future disappears with a twist of fate? In The Humans, a Tony Award-winning comedy-drama by playwright Stephan Karam, characters wrestle to find peace and connection amidst the rumbles and groans of loss.

The play opens with the Blakes gathering to celebrate Thanksgiving in a Chinatown apartment with Mom and Dad, two college-educated children, plus a grandmother and boyfriend in tow. Their celebration of this uniquely American holiday, all about bounty and gratitude, provides a frame for examining the fragile complexities of family love and the fiction of the American Dream.

Young Brigid is a recent college grad, working as a bartender while applying for music jobs, and she offers a true millennial take on everything from student debt to superfoods. She shares the recently acquired apartment with her boyfriend, Richard, a much older grad student, who comes from money and has committed himself to becoming a social worker. Their furniture is stuck on a moving truck somewhere, so the meal is served at a folding table, a champagne toast swigged from Solo cups.

When Brigid’s Irish Catholic parents, Erik and Deirdre Blake, arrive from Scranton, Pennsylvania, they come bearing gifts. Erik gives his daughter a camping lamp and cans of tuna. He wants her to be prepared in case this part of Manhattan floods again. Deirdre offers Brigid a statue of the Virgin Mary for a more general type of protection. In addition to the stresses of low-paying jobs and the strains of longstanding wedlock, Erik and Deirdre are caring for Momo, the grandmother stricken with dementia.

Aimee, the older sister, is stressed out by her job as a Philadelphia lawyer, a recent breakup with her longtime girlfriend, and a painful flareup of ulcerative colitis. She’s a classic first-born child, bouncing between her Blackberry (the play is set in the early 2010s), the bathroom, and moderating bickers between her mother and younger sister.

The apartment itself is both backdrop and character. The top tier of the place is a ground floor room, its lone window bracketed by bars. The bottom is windowless, a basement that groans with the weight of the building. An upstairs neighbor thumps and bangs. Lights flicker and fail, one by one, throughout the course of the show.

The ominous setting gives the play a vaguely catastrophic feeling. Despite Brigid’s insistence that the place is palatial for the price (and, to be fair, she’s probably right), you aren’t surprised that Erik insists she’d have a much better life in Scranton.

A specter of fear haunts all the Blakes, originating from the failure of systems and people designed to protect them: pension plans, marriage, teachers, partners, the human body itself. To combat it, they turn to rituals—the songs they sing every holiday, the prayers before meals, being together and loving each other despite the small cruelties.

Live Arts’ production is directed by Francine Smith, who rose to a significant challenge. She not only orchestrates the subtle frictions of people managing secrets and sympathies, she does it across two floors, overlapping dialogue, and a script that requires unspoken communication and comedic timing.

The cast is excellent across the board. In a show where success depends so heavily on the humanity and authenticity of its actors, I was fully engaged throughout the two-hour runtime. Larry Goldstein plays Erik with an impeccable sense of that dad’s-got-it-all-figured-out distance, keeping things mellow and grounded and acting the part of provider until he just can’t pretend any more. Geri Schirmer is funny and real as Deirdre, bruised by the love she offers her daughters in turns both smothering, stoic, and outspoken.

As Momo, Meg Hoover makes it easy for us to believe her brain is crumbling; it’s no small feat to play in that liminal space, but she does it well. Lena Malcolm, as Aimee, gives us real pain with enough big sister chutzpah to bring back the laughs. Madeline Walker delivers a Brigid who is everything you’d expect—overly sensitive to her parents and wounded by small slights. Johnny Butcher rounds out the ensemble as Richard, who brings equal doses of sincerity and humor, acting as the palate cleanser and awkward-silence-filler that boyfriends typically play during the holidays.

The two-tiered set design creates a physical container that lives and moans around the family in action. Kudos to Gwyn Gilliam and the entire production team for using lighting, sound, and props to make this human experience feel real.

In Vulture, Jesse Green described The Humans as “the most, well, human play I’ve ever seen.” Live Arts’ production does an admirable job bringing that humanity to life. We see ourselves in its people, so flawed and familiar. Nothing distracts us from the discomfort of humans pretending not to struggle. But hope arrives alongside the pain. Forgiveness knocks on the door of betrayal. Being human is the thing that hurts, but it also sets us free.

The imperfections of life unravel the hopes of a working-class family in the Tony Award-winning play The Humans, at Live Arts through February 16.

Categories
Arts

Game winner: UVA Drama’s She Kills Monsters uses family, grief, and fantasy to tell a coming-of-age story about acceptance

Each element of this production, from the sets to costumes to lighting and sound design, is wildly, wonderfully creative. Photo by Martyn Kyle

The year is 1995, “Friends” is all the rage, and Tilly Evans is “the most uncommon form of nerd in the world”—a girl-nerd who loves Dungeons & Dragons.

So begins She Kills Monsters, the 2011 comedy-drama by Qui Nguyen. Known for his innovative use of pop culture, stage violence, puppetry, and multimedia, Nguyen transports us to a simpler time “before Facebook, World of Warcraft, and massive multiplayer online RPG’s.”

Agnes Evans is Tilly’s older sister, an English teacher in small-town Ohio. We learn that on the eve of her high school graduation, as she wished her life “was less boring,” a car crash killed Agnes’ mother, father, and Tilly all at once.

Agnes never connected with Tilly or her penchant for armor and fantasy talk. But when she finds a D&D notebook, handwritten by Tilly, she’s determined to make sense of it—to understand Tilly in ways that she couldn’t while her sister was alive.

To learn more about the role playing game, Agnes seeks out a Dungeon Master, an experienced player who acts as referee and storyteller, and so meets Chuck Biggs, a swaggering nerd who describes himself as “big where it counts—in the brain.”

That’s how Agnes learns that Tilly, aka Tillius the Paladin, was a highly respected, widely-known force in the D&D community. It’s the first of many surprises Agnes will uncover about her sister—once she steps inside the game.

From the show’s opening moments to its fantastical conclusion, UVA’s production of She Kills Monsters immerses audience members in a world of imagination. Like Agnes, we enter the theater fresh from “average” lives and quickly find ourselves flooded with the sights, sounds, and excitement of epic battles, supermodel elves, sexy demon-women, and slapstick crusaders. Each element of this production, from the sets to costumes to lighting and sound design, is wildly, wonderfully creative.

Consider the monsters (there are many), all of which need to be slain. The majority are massive puppets, wielded by students who operate the creations with grace and careful choreography. It took a team of 13 students to create these larger-than-life enemies, and the overall effect is fantastic. Up close, each monster is a standalone work of art.   

For scenes set in average spaces like high school hallways and suburban living rooms, towering gray set pieces create a muted backdrop without much color or character. But when you enter the world of the game, the simple canvas comes to life, illuminated by projections of Lord of the Rings-style landscapes, WWE-type announcements, and lights that shift across spectrums and sometimes strobe.

The costumes are equally evocative. Sweeping gowns with thigh-high slits, leather breastplates, and gleaming swords; the hooded cloak Chuck sweeps around him like a dorky Merlin DJ—each detail is vivid, colorful, and supremely entertaining. As time passes and she finds herself drawn deeper into the game, even straight-laced Agnes allows herself to don elbow-length gloves and a leather epaulet.

The sound design might be my favorite aspect of the production. As you probably expect, big-screen-worthy soundscapes usher our heroes along their quest. But it’s details like the sound of rolling dice between scenes and the occasional blast of ’90s anthems that make it fun. Keep your ears open for a special Mortal Kombat moment—you won’t be disappointed.

As Tilly, Karen Zipor is strong and composed, just untouchable enough to maintain her believability. After all, she’s a game character, not Agnes’ flesh-and-blood sister, though you spend most of the show forgetting this fact. Aaryan Balu is fantastic as Chuck, who toggles between bombastic DM and uneasy stand-in for Tilly. When he cautions Agnes against pushing the script to fill in the blanks of her sister’s identity, the torment and tension is real.

Tori Kotsen, who plays Agnes, does an excellent job carrying subtle grief into every scene, even when she’s down on one knee sword-fighting a five-headed dragon. As she slips deeper into Tilly’s world, she begins meeting the people who inspired the game. She comes to know her sister’s heartache, rewritten as sexy comrades-at-arms and cheerleader succubi.

Such a rollicking, complex production requires tremendous teamwork. It’s a testament to the entire cast and crew, and especially director Marianne Kubik, that this show delivers fast-paced comedy, multiple choreographed fight scenes, and enough heart to gives us space to feel all the feels.

She Kills Monsters is a deceptively simple story about family, grief, and coming of age. From Agnes’ viewpoint, Tilly is an outsider. From Tilly’s perspective, she is a leader and warrior who doesn’t want to fit in in the first place. But where these two sisters finally meet is someplace in between real life and high fantasy. In this world, young women battle for the people they love and become their own heroes in the process. Here, killing monsters means carving a path to the world as you want it to be.

She Kills Monsters, starring Aaryan Balu as Chuck, Ingrid Kenyon as Dark elf Kaliope, and Tori Kotsen as Agnes, is at UVA’s Ruth Caplin Theatre through November 23.

Categories
Arts

Ripple effect: Environmental action motivates a water-focused show at IX gallery

Portland, Oregon, artist Thea Gahr’s Risograph print is part of “Wellspring: A Portfolio of Prints Celebrating Water,” on display at The Gallery at Studio IX through September 1. Image courtesy artist

A little boy stares into a river while ghostly shadows move through the current. The long, lithe bodies could be lost souls or river spirits, past lives or unspoken dreams, but whatever life force they represent, they’re rushing onward away from the boy—and away from you, the passive observer. The headline reads, “What we do to water, we do to ourselves.”

The image is one of 13 Risograph prints that comprise “Wellspring: A Portfolio of Prints Celebrating Water,” at The Gallery at Studio IX. Created by artists from the Justseeds Artists’ Cooperative and curated by Sarah Lawson, the show features work that asks viewers to do more than sit idly by. Rather, it asks us to reflect on our own relationships to water, consider the critical role it plays in our lives, and hold the baton of preservation, prevention, or management in a rapidly changing world.

“For me, engaging with others’ art is a way to grapple with issues that are sometimes too complex to try to address head-on,” Lawson says in an email interview with C-VILLE. That same spirit moves Justseeds, the collective of 29 artists across the U.S., Canada, and Mexico, who work together to produce collective portfolios and other creative responses to contemporary struggles for justice, from environmental and racial equity to migrant issues and the prison-industrial complex.

Molly Fair

“For this exhibit specifically, I hope that people find the art interesting to look at and engaging to think about, but that it’s also a chance to get your feet wet and hopefully become motivated to take some sort of environmental action,” Lawson says. Though she recommends simple shifts like reducing water waste through more efficient appliances, donating to non-profits, or calling representatives about water-related issues like pipelines, the exhibit itself stops short of prescriptions.

According to the artists’ statement for Wellspring, “These graphic tools are for you, as a human that recognizes that you need clean water to continue to be. The messages can be used for uniting, inspiring, warning, inciting, animating, empowering, invigorating.” Rather than focus on specific struggles over water—such as contamination in Flint, droughts in California, or the Pacific Garbage Patch, among other issues mentioned in the statement—each print leaves room for personal interpretation.

The final exhibition offers a broad swath of creative concepts to generate viewer inquiry and impact. In response to the water theme, each artist created a unique visual they rendered via Risograph, a printing process akin to automated screen printing. By pressing single shades of vibrant ink onto paper, then layering new colors and images on top, the artists developed multi-dimensional work with a vintage feel.

Each piece takes a different approach to the topic of water. In one, two frigate birds swan dive alongside a polar bear poised atop a towering iceberg; the root of the ice feeds choppy blue waves through which jellyfish glide. In another, neon pink and blue raindrops scatter across the word “commonwealth,” simultaneously conjuring visions of Virginia and the universal wealth water provides.

Roger Peet

Calls for change range from literal, like Colin Mathes’ doodles and handwritten list of improvised water filters; to pointed, like Erik Ruin’s whale emerging from a whirlpool of trash; to abstract, like Josh MacPhee’s graphic blue-and-green grid embedded with the words “aqua para todos!” In the gallery itself, art pieces are punctuated by quotes from scientific and political commentaries on the contemporary state of water in our world.

Regardless of the clarity or obfuscation of storytelling, the overall message of the exhibit is clear: There are as many ways of approaching and working with contemporary water issues as there are voices communicating what’s possible.

Lawson says this diverse artistic conversation seeks to soothe viewers and would-be activists rather than overwhelm them. Given the scope of issues like climate change and global water pollution, “it can be really difficult to focus on [these problems] in any meaningful or sustained way without feeling like we’re doomed,” she says. “This exhibit attempts to create small moments of engagement with the issues, through each interaction with one of the prints, in order to foster awareness and concern but in a way that doesn’t make change seem impossible.”

In this way, an exhibition like “Wellspring” can become “a useful buoy in a sea of bad news,” as the artists say in their statement. Like the little boy watching spirits of past and future flow beneath the surface, we have the chance to reflect on what is, in order to change what could be.

“Wellspring: A Portfolio of Prints Celebrating Water” is on view at The Gallery at Studio IX through September 1.

Categories
Arts

Block by block: Local teen creates a full-length Minecraft animation film

“There are probably millions of Minecraft animations out there, but even adult teams have never taken it as far as to make a Minecraft-animated feature film.” Louisa teenager Jack Buckley made his first full-length feature film, Remnants, using Minecraft. The animated film premieres on June 22 at the Vinegar Hill Theater in Charlottesville. Courtesy of the artist

When it comes to creating a feature-length movie on the silver screen, animation studios like Pixar deploy millions of dollars and hundreds of people to make the magic happen.

Well buckle up, Hollywood, because one local teen did it right from his basement studio in Louisa. Fourteen-year-old homeschooler Jack Buckley created what he believes to be the world’s first full-length feature film using Minecraft animation.

Minecraft is the best-selling video game in the world. In it, players use digital blocks to create structures, resources, and just about anything they can imagine.

“There are probably millions of Minecraft animations out there, but even adult teams have never taken it as far as to make a Minecraft-animated feature film,” Buckley says.

The film is Remnants, an action-comedy movie that’s also a fantasy and a buddy film. It follows protagonist Chris and his mentor Milo as they attempt to stop the warlord who killed Chris’ father.

“There’s a lot of heart in the movie. It’s heartwarming…heartbreaking at some points,” Buckley says. “This film doesn’t have a message per se, but I [hope it will] affect people.”

The young filmmaker, who wrote, produced, directed, animated, and voice-acted in the project, says he’s a storyteller at heart.

“I started writing books when I was 7 years old. When I was about 10, I began to make games, but I realized the only part of making games that I really liked was the creative aspect behind it. Even with making this film, I didn’t necessarily love doing the animation. For me, it’s more about filmmaking.”

 

To create the visuals for Remnants, Buckley imported models and worlds from Minecraft into a 3-D animation program called Blender, then animated the characters and landscapes to suit the plot.

He worked with more than 40 other teenagers, including voice actors, animators, and a composer. His sister, Mia, wrote and sang the final track, but most of his collaborators live elsewhere. Buckley won’t meet his co-star, a Kentucky native named Nicholas McCamish, until the film debuts at Vinegar Hill Theater on Saturday.

Buckley found many of his collaborators through YouthDigital, a now-defunct company that gave student coders a place to share their work. The movie itself began as a 16-minute short, uploaded to the platform.

“It got an extremely positive response,” Buckley says. “Everyone was like, ‘We need more Remnants.’ So I decided to create more, and eventually it just turned into a feature film.”

It took three years and 3,200 hours for the young filmmaker to achieve the final product.

“I’m definitely more resilient,” he says. “What I found helpful, especially in these last few months when I’ve been working eight- to thirteen-hour days, is to not think about where you are now but where you will be when the project’s done.”

Remnants will premier alongside a documentary Buckley made about the making of the movie. A Q&A with several cast members will follow.

Eventually, Buckley says, he plans be an executive producer. Soon, he’ll begin making more live action films. But now, he just wants to inspire others.

“Throughout this entire process, I’ve learned that just because you’re a kid doesn’t mean you can’t do things, like creating a movie at 14, with the help of a bunch of other people,” he says. “I want to give the message to kids that they don’t have to wait until they’re an adult to try to do great things.”

More info at remnantsmovie.com.

Categories
Arts

Building happiness: Sculptor Mark Cline offers a double take through roadside attractions

Artist Mark Cline is known for his eye-catching, large-scale foam and fiberglass sculptures that are installed in unexpected places. He and his apprentice, Brently Hilliard, will be celebrated at the Virginia Folklife Apprenticeship Showcase, along with 14 other master/apprentice pairs on May 5 at James Monroe’s Highland. Photo by Pat Jarrett/Virginia Humanities

If you’ve seen a parade of 8-foot-tall ants climbing the side of a building, a life-sized foam replica of Stonehenge, or a T-Rex lunging through the trees with a Union soldier in its mouth, then you know the work of Mark Cline.

Dubbed “Virginia’s Roadside Attraction King” by Atlas Obscura, Cline has spent decades building foam and fiberglass sculptures, many inspired by monster and science-fiction movies. He’s got thousands of works at truck stops, amusement parks, restaurants, and other unexpected sites in the commonwealth and around the country.

Despite his relative fame as an artist, the Waynesboro native doesn’t seek accolades. “One time NPR asked me, ‘How do you want to be remembered? Give us three words.’ And I said, ‘A good man.’ They were expecting ‘a sculptor’ or ‘an entertainer,’ but none of that’s important. It’s really not important,” he says.

What matters to Cline is knowing that every project created in his studio in Natural Bridge, Virginia, entertains the people who see it. Whether he’s built a giant octopus eating a boat in a lake or installed Spiderman scaling down the outside of an old building, his projects mean something.

“[Seeing these sculptures] gives people a chance to smile. It gives them a chance to laugh, and laughter has been proven to heal people,” he says. “I had a conversation with my daughter earlier today saying, ‘Honey, if you can find something that you go into in your life that helps people, then you have found your place in heaven.’ Because that’s where heaven is. It’s a place that’s above poverty. It’s above hate. It’s above pettiness. It’s all about healing, and you’ve got to do it through whatever talents you have.”

You could call it divine intervention that Cline became a sculptor at all. He describes being 19 years old, “jobless, penniless, and fresh out of high school with no immediate or long-range plans.” One day, sitting on a park bench and feeling frustrated, he asked himself what he wanted out of life. As he wrote in his journal, he realized he wanted happiness—and the only way he would find it was by helping others.

He hitchhiked to Waynesboro, went to the employment office, and asked for a job. “They said, ‘We don’t have anything.’ I said, ‘Well, okay.’ I turned around and was getting ready to walk out the door—I had my hand on the doorknob—and the lady says, ‘We have something.’ I said, ‘I’ll take it.’”

The job was with Red Mill Manufacturing, a plant where they made figurines out of resin mixed with pecan shell flour. After work one day, a co-worker showed Cline how to make a mold of his hand. It was a revelation. “I said, ‘I can make all kinds of stuff out of this.’ He said, ‘You sure can, Mark. Here’s a five-gallon bucket. Go home and play with it.’”

That fortuitous connection gave Cline an outlet for the overactive imagination he’d embraced as a child, back when he built inventive props for school plays and pulled practical jokes like slicing off a fake hand in art class. The adult version of his creative streak became sculpting with fiberglass.

He taught himself how to do it, since “there was nobody out there to show me how it was done.” As a result, he developed his own technique—and for now he’s the only one in the world who sculpts the way he does.

As part of the Virginia Folklife Apprenticeship Program at Virginia Humanities, which pairs master artists with vetted apprentices, Cline is passing on his creative approach for the very first time. He’s begun teaching and mentoring Brently Hilliard in fiberglass sculpture. Through the process of mutual discovery, he hopes to transmit the aspects of the craft that matter most to him.

“I could teach anybody how to be a sculptor,” Cline says, “but it’s no good unless you’re using your talents for something good. So ultimately I would like to see [Hilliard] use whatever I teach him to help others and inspire them in some way.”

Being an artist isn’t easy, he says. The work itself requires a willingness to suffer. “I lost my first wife over it. I had two major fires. I came so close to going bankrupt, one time I was on the courthouse steps.” But he welcomes the failures as well as triumphs “because that’s where you learn.”

Turns out the young man sitting on that park bench had it right. “Twenty-four hours a day on this planet, someone is being entertained by something that I’ve built, something that came out of me, something that I created,” he says. “My goal was to create happiness, and that’s exactly what this stuff does.”

Cline and his apprentice, Brently Hilliard, will be celebrated at the Virginia Folklife Apprenticeship Showcase, along with 14 other master/apprentice pairs on May 5 at James Monroe’s Highland.

Categories
Arts

For the win: Live Arts fields teen angst in soccer drama The Wolves

A team of adolescent girls navigates life’s ups and downs during the course of an indoor soccer season in The Wolves, now playing at Live Arts. Photo by Martyn Kyle

When you think of teenage girls, what do you picture?

Perhaps you think of your own fast-talking children or your experience in high school. Or maybe you default to cliques and clichés: prom queens and geeks, victims and villains.

In its latest production, a Pulitzer Prize- nominated play by Sarah DeLappe called The Wolves, Live Arts asks audiences to look beyond caricatures of young women and see complex characters.

The Wolves tells the story of nine teenagers as they sprint, stretch, and celebrate one season as a girls’ indoor soccer team. When the story begins, you’re dropped into a circle of adolescents warming up on Astroturf.

Swift dialogue overlaps and ping-pongs from period blood to the pronunciation of Khmer Rouge. As you attempt to make sense of the cluster of jersey-wearing young women, your brain differentiates by doing what it does best: sorting and making sense by stereotyping.

You’ve got the jock, the ditz, the studious overachiever…the list goes on. There’s even an awkward new girl to serve as a counterpoint for the existing tribe. As gossip swirls about the newcomer in their midst, longstanding teammates sharpen their loyalty like a knife.

By playing into your expectations, the show disarms you quickly. Whatever you believe or remember from your teens, there’s a dynamic to suit your tastes.

Personally, when I think of young women and sports teams, I think of being fed to the wolves. Maybe it was my years as a competitive dancer, where I consistently felt like an outsider. Maybe it was my choice to bridge middle and high school with a season on the girls’ cross-country team (I’d never run outside of gym class, but I desperately hoped I’d find acceptance among sweaty, more muscular peers.)

On some level, I still remember high school as a jockeying for social status. My default setting is undoubtedly reinforced by movies and TV, which often portray young women as boy-crazy, vindictive, and unmoored from the world at large.

This is precisely the misrepresentation tackled by The Wolves, which fits into Live Arts’ commitment to diversity by allowing young women a multidimensional representation on stage.

As producing artistic director Bree Luck writes in the show’s program, “This 2018/ 2019 season was devoted to giving voice to marginalized and underrepresented voices. So when our teen selection committee recommended The Wolves for a main stage production, we listened. Never before had we read a play that captured so perfectly the dialogue, the concerns, the richness of discourse, and the intricate behavioral patterns of young women.”

The show quickly peels back the veneer of uniformity, if not the actual uniforms. Each of the nine characters has a distinct personality, with a backstory and conflict that reveals itself over time. We see girls who are foul-mouthed, religious, sexually active, sexually reserved, rich, poor, well-read, well-traveled, and generally confused. They struggle with anxiety and mounting pressure, and almost never talk about boys.

Credit goes to director Kelli Shermeyer and the show’s talented young actresses—including Schuyler Barefoot, Margaret Anne Doren, Mary Lothamer, Camden Luck, Navashree Singh, Alejandra Sullivan, Iris Susen, Chloe Rodriguez Thomas, and Erin Young—for the fact that each character quickly becomes her own person.

In the tight space of the Founders Theater, in identical uniforms and identical surroundings, each girl holds her own. Although it’s an ensemble piece, the play manages to avoid tipping favor to one or a few of its players. The dialogue is funny, the tension is real, and the experience is thoroughly enjoyable.

If these girls are wolves, we’re not meant to see animals tearing each other apart. Instead, we’re presented with a collective of fiercely complex and committed women standing side by side.

Throughout the play, each player carves her identity while facing some of the same heavy issues as adults face. In fact, when the show’s first adult appears, near the very end of the play, it comes as a bit of a shock.

Up until this point, every adult has been an absentee, from the substitute coach who also sells pot to the jet-setting parent with an empty ski lodge and loaded liquor cabinet. So when a soccer mom shows up to deliver orange slices, it feels like an afterthought. As she wonders, out loud, if she really knows anything, you wonder if anyone does.

That’s the moment you realize these teenage girls are holding up a mirror. They navigate depths of grief and joy with shallows of angst and laughter. They question the utility of self-discovery in a world with so much to learn. As you recognize yourself on the field, you see struggling, imperfect humans. So you hope the wolves will win—not just this game, but always.

The Wolves is at Live Arts through March 30.

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Arts

The world of the play: Boomie Pedersen gets inside the story with Chekhov Unbound

Chekhov Unbound travels to several Charlottesville-area venues through March 17. Visit hamnertheater.com for a full list of performance dates and locations.Publicity image.

When playwright and short story writer Anton Chekhov arrived on the Russian literary scene in the late 1800s, he changed the course of modern drama. According to Boomie Pedersen, artistic director of the Hamner Theater in Nelson County, Chekhov’s work meant that “theater went from being larger-than-life declamatory screaming to the back rows, to much more realistic and relationship-driven.”

Now Pederson is translating Chekhov’s realness for local audiences. Maybe even taking it up a notch. As the director of a Hamner Theater project called Chekhov Unbound, she’s expanded and experimented with the rehearsal process while developing a traveling adaptation of Chekhov’s play, Three Sisters.

“In this town,” Pedersen says, theater is “all about the performance.” But what gets lost in the shuffle of three rehearsals a week as you’re gunning toward production is “the creation of the community of the world of the play” and “what can we discover working together all the time.”

So instead of following the typical product-driven model for Three Sisters, Pedersen invited her actors to consciously take time for the show. “Not just get together, read the play, memorize your lines, and do it in six weeks, but spend time with it and see what happens.”

All told, cast members rehearsed for seven months prior to their first performance. Along the way, Pedersen also hosted open rehearsals, where anyone could come and watch, at private homes around town. “The environment affects not just the audience but the actors as well,” Pedersen says. “You’re doing your scene, and there’s an audience member sitting right on the sofa where you sit down. What does that do to you as an actor, and what does it do to the audience?”

These experiments in time and place will continue once performances begin.

“We’re doing [the show] in many different venues,” Pedersen says, including Unity of Charlottesville, private houses in Palmyra and Rappahannock, and the Firehouse Theatre in Richmond, among others. “As an actor, when you experience different audiences in different spaces, you get out of your comfort zone. You have to be present, and you have to be telling the truth.”

Telling the truth is at the heart of Three Sisters, which follows a brother and three sisters as they wrestle with love and longing.

The play has no hero, Pedersen says. “You see bits and pieces of relationships, and it all adds up to these lives. It’s very much an ensemble piece. It was actually the first play that Chekhov wrote for the Moscow Art Theatre specifically.”

Pedersen says she’s wanted to direct Three Sisters for a long time. “My mother, Carol Pedersen, studied acting in New York with a woman named Tamara Daykarhanova, who actually was in the Moscow Art Theatre, and who had been in the movie version of Three Sisters, directed by Laurence Olivier many years ago,” she says. “Chekhov is someone that my mother uses in her teaching all the time, because he is so good for actors. My mom is getting older, and she also has early-stage Alzheimer’s. I really wanted to do something that she could be connected to.”

To create Chekhov Unbound, Pedersen worked with Doug Grissom, a playwright and teacher at UVA, to adapt the show for local audiences. She also cast older actors in traditionally youthful roles to shine a metatheatrical light on ageism. Though none of Chekhov’s sisters are above the age of 30, Pedersen says “the things they experience in terms of yearning, like ‘Nothing’s ever turning out right. I want to find love.’ do not change as you get older. They get more and more acute.”

Although the show was written over a hundred years ago, Pedersen believes many themes are relevant to contemporary audiences. “So much of what the play is about is the notion of, ‘Who am I in this world right now?’ With the political situation the way it is, and global warming, everything is dire. We’re asking those same questions. We all have the need to figure out why we do what we do and what the value is of what we’re doing.”

Much of Three Sisters centers on the idea of ‘becoming’—people evolving into who they will be. Through Pedersen’s experimental process, the show’s performers are doing the same.

“They’ve discovered where their lives differ and where they are in parallel with their characters,” she says. “The other day, one of my actresses said, ‘Oh, I just discovered that my character doesn’t think very highly of her husband. She pays no attention to him.’ This came up because the actress hadn’t heard a line that her character’s husband had been saying. She discovered that she wasn’t listening.”

Pedersen believes that taking time and space to discover who we are becoming has tremendous value. “If we don’t slow down and pay attention to what we have now, we may never know. We won’t know what we’ve lost.”

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Dancing with disaster: Adam Nemett offers hope for the future in We Can Save Us All

Adam Nemett will read from and celebrate the launch of We Can Save Us All on Thursday at New Dominion Bookshop. Photo by Jen Fariello

After months of involvement with SURJ and Charlottesville Resistance Choir, author Adam Nemett saw the statue debate become a community catalyst during the events of August 11 and 12, 2017.

“I have tremendous respect for the anti-racist and anti-fascist heroes that were out there on the streets putting their bodies on the line to protect our community when the police refused to,” he says. “That experience showed how much needs to be improved here, but it also showed that there’s a lot of resilience in Charlottesville.”

Nemett notices how people band together in the face of potential disaster because he’s a longtime student of the subject. After graduating from high school in Baltimore, he went to college at Princeton during what he describes as a “pretty heavy” time. “1999 was Columbine, 2000 was the Bush/Gore election, 2001 was 9/11, and then the war that followed,” he says. “I feel like it was a period where we [as Americans] went from this naiveté, or feeling of pure safety and security in this country, to something a bit darker.”

Against this backdrop, Nemett took writing and religion classes while building something new on campus: a student organization that hosted parties and events showcasing diverse forms of music. “There was no one else that was going to come in and create the kind of social life that I and a lot of other people wanted,” he says. “So we all just said, ‘Well, let’s do it. Let’s us do it.’”

The group’s grassroots approach, taking one slow step after another, created a “mini-movement” with nearly 600 members at Princeton. Eighteen years later, MIMA Music has morphed into a global non-profit organization, one that provides innovative music education to kids and adults in underserved areas.

When Nemett started the Charlottesville chapter of MIMA two years ago, he drew on those same community-building skills, knowing “if you put in the hours and do the work, something cool can happen.”

His novel, We Can Save Us All, is a testament to his dedication (it took 12 years to write and publish), as well as to Nemett’s observations of how people behave during periods of upheaval. The story centers around a group of Princeton students leading a movement across college campuses while the world teeters on the brink of apocalypse: climate disasters create a global state of emergency and America is perpetually at war.

Those speculative aspects that “felt really far-fetched 12 years ago,” Nemett says, “now feel really realistic. Especially in terms of this very charismatic but very unhinged leader figure coming to power at a dangerous time, and other apocalyptic phenomenon going on around it. Unfortunately, the world caught up to the book a little bit.”

Crafting disaster while watching the world follow suit has been a jarring experience, he says. “Some of the book was based on 1930s and ’40s Germany. I’m Jewish and I’ve always been horrified and fascinated with how something like that could happen. In the beginning, it felt like light years in the past, and it was hard to imagine something like that could ever happen again.”

Writing the book became a thought experiment of sorts, a way for Nemett to challenge his own complacency around systems, institutions, and norms he felt could come crashing down at any minute. “What kind of organization might I have wanted to start if my issue hadn’t been ‘there’s not enough good music to listen to on campus,’ but ‘Oh, God, the power’s been out for three weeks’? What would happen if a new student movement rose up around this very dark period where the future was uncertain, and what would that look like?”

Officially out on November 13, We Can Save Us All has already garnered critical praise and landed on numerous top 10 lists. At a time when life imitates art—climate disasters loom large and political upheaval fuels fear—you might expect such a book to feed your anxiety. But after dancing with disaster for more than a decade, Nemett says he came away with a real sense of hope.

“We think of dystopia, the apocalypse, and the post-apocalyptic world in this very cinematic, Mad Max hellscape way,” he says. “Everything is terrible and everyone’s trying to kill each other over cans of soup.”

But, he says, the mob riot mentality doesn’t bear out in real life. “Historically, all the way up to Hurricane Katrina, the people on the ground do an amazing, beautiful job of banding together and creating these improvisational, mutual aid societies. The danger comes when the state or the elites or the media just want to portray it as a dog-eat-dog scenario.”

Which leads Nemett to another thought experiment. “What if it wasn’t dog-eat-dog?” he asks. “What if this destructive period is building something very progressive and evolved—a model for how civilization and communities can and should exist in the future? Maybe it looks very different. Maybe it’s simpler, harder, and there’s less comfort involved. But it might just be more human, more spiritually satisfying, and more uplifting in the long run. If we can keep our heads during these tough periods and work to help each other.”

Adam Nemett will read from and celebrate the launch of We Can Save Us All on Thursday at New Dominion Bookshop.

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Letting it flow: Kyle Dargan fights futility with poetry

Hear Kyle Dargan read excerpts from Anagnorisis during the Charlottesville Reading Series alongside author Crystal Hana Kim on September 21 at New Dominion Bookshop. Photo courtesy of Kyle Dargan

As a child, Kyle Dargan began writing rhymes largely as a matter of convenience.

“If you wanted to make music, especially back in the ’90s, you needed somebody with a studio and recording equipment,” he says. “But you could write [hip-hop lyrics] at home, on the bus, in a notebook, and share with people and workshop and take their feedback and try to get better at it.”

Now a highly awarded poet and writing teacher at American University, Dargan became interested in poetry just shy of high school. “One of the things I really push back against as a teacher at the college level is that by the time I get my students, most of them have probably experienced some poetry trauma,” he says. Whereas children are born with a basic element of creative freedom, he says he must “deprogram [his students] from the feeling that unless you are able to interpret a poem a certain way, you’re wrong or you’re wasting your time in reading it.”

Growing up in Newark, New Jersey, Dargan went to Saint Benedict’s Prep and then to the University of Virginia, where he was a graduate of the first-ever area program in poetry writing. He went on to Indiana University, where he received his MFA in creative writing, and then moved to Washington, D.C., to study art management and teach at American.

“I couldn’t have ever imagined it, but being here during the Obama administration I got to do some great work with the President’s Committee on the Arts and Humanities and [produce poetry programming] at the White House,” he says. “As much as D.C. is maligned, I really try to appreciate all the unusually marvelous things that can only happen here.”

Given Dargan’s penchant for exploring themes like contemporary masculinity and “America as a concept—not so much a place but an idea,” it’s easy to understand the relevance of his poems.

“As much as D.C. is maligned, I really try to appreciate all the unusually marvelous things that can only happen here.”

In his forthcoming collection, Anagnorisis, he explores the moment he understood his American fate in the same way a Greek tragic hero experiences crystalline self-awareness. “With all of the police shootings of citizens…I felt like, you know, ‘I have a feeling the country’s kinda going in a direction that I’m not quite sure of yet,’” he says. “And then the 2016 election happened. I was like, ‘Ah, okay, this is it. And I know what side of it I am on.’”

Still, he says, “when I think about America now, I’m one of the few who still believes America is heading in a post-racial direction. But I say that with a caveat that the hours, the years right before the change becomes real are often the most violent.”

After traveling to China twice in the last 10 years and examining why it continues to buy American debt, Dargan says he’s realized America’s biggest export is promise.

“I don’t want to look at it as hope,” he adds, “because I don’t think those ideologies are going to roll away easily. But I do think that America, more than anything, is a place of reckoning. It’s a difficult reckoning, and we are gradually becoming mature enough to handle that reckoning, but we’re not there yet.”

By helping heal the trauma inflicted on students’ creative self-expression, Dargan hopes to support that maturation process. “A big part of what makes creative communication work is being able to be present as yourself on the page, right? If you’re not open and vulnerable and honestly dealing with who you are and how you write, you’re limiting the potential of whatever communication you’re making with someone else,” he says. “I believe that the ability to communicate, first and foremost with yourself and then transferring that to others, definitely saves us all.”