Author: Elizabeth Derby

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Arts

Romance grows through correspondence at Four County Players

Love Letters starring Linda Poser and Kenneth H. Waller runs through February 12 at Four County Players. Photo by Linda Hogan

Hollywood tells us that romance unfolds in a montage, in sparkling date nights and lazy Sunday mornings and in the inescapable gravity of consistent, insistent closeness. But as a veteran of long-distance relationships (I’m talking 10,000-mile commutes), I can attest that sometimes love grows in our absence from each other.

The space that separates two people who connect is the tension of Love Letters, A.R. Gurney’s classic play, now at Four County Players in Barboursville. Performed by Broadway veterans and real-life married couple Linda Poser and Kenneth H. Waller, the show follows 50 years of correspondence between childhood friends Melissa and Andy. Opening with an invitation to a birthday party, their letters (and what’s left unsaid) illustrate a lifetime of love, heartbreak and hope.

“We short-change our imagination sometimes,” says director Linda Zuby. “When something’s really explicit and outlines every single detail, it sometimes is not as interesting as something that’s left open. Like in scary movies, seeing the shadow is infinitely scarier than actually seeing the monster.”

Less is more as Love Letters builds. Sometimes its protagonists are very far apart, geographically as well as emotionally. When one person fails to get ahold of the other, silence speaks volumes.

“It’s not a play in a traditional sense,” says director Linda Zuby. “They are literally just reading the letters to each other as though they were not in the same room. Sometimes it’s the full letter, and sometimes it’s just a Merry Christmas card. They don’t interact.”

Clustered in the cellar of Four County, audience members will feel like strangers in their living room. Successful execution depended heavily, Zuby says, on the talent of the actors, who are a perfect fit for the show.

“You read this play and you think, ‘That could be boring.’ But [Poser and Waller] are so efficient in their presentation,” she says. “There is economy in the movement and voice. They know how to edit themselves and make the strongest point with as little angst as possible.”

Simply standing on stage and reading letters, Poser and Waller also manage to transform from children to full-fledged adults. “With just a little change of a voice or something, they make the characters grow up before your eyes,” Zuby says. “Toward the end of the first act, they’re away at school when suddenly there’s this shift in one of [Andy]’s letters. You hear it in Ken’s voice; there’s this little subtle change that he’s not a kid anymore. Adulthood hits right there for him.”

Zuby majored in theater and acting at Wright State University in Dayton, Ohio, and rarely directs shows, but she says Love Letters was a “win-win” for her. “For this particular project, I just needed to create an environment that they felt safe working in and were happy,” she says. “I just need to sit there and go, ‘Okay. That’s good. Yeah that’s good.’”

In their self-penned bios, Poser and Waller describe the circumstances that shaped their professional talents—and their many-lettered romance.

Waller, who performed in several shows on Broadway, including 16 years with The Phantom of the Opera, moved in 1969 to New York with his bachelor of fine arts in drama and, with no idea what to do next, got cast in the national tour of Zorba alongside Broadway giants. He went on to tour with the companies of Carousel, Kiss Me Kate, 1776, Showboat, South Pacific, Shenandoah and Evita. “During that time, I met the love of my life, Linda Poser,” he writes. “We later moved to the suburbs of New Jersey and produced our greatest success, our daughter, Amy.”

Poser, who began her stage career in Los Angeles, also performed in the Broadway version of Phantom (and several more Broadway shows). She and Waller “began dating whenever we were in New York at the same time, which wasn’t very often,” she writes, “so we corresponded with letters (and eventually love letters!!).”

With their own romance spanning miles and decades, the two stars know the power of the written word. So did the playwright, who penned Love Letters in 1988, “when people still mostly wrote letters,” Zuby says.

“Now there’s this shift where e-mails and text messages and unfortunately tweets have taken over what we think is correspondence and communication,” she says. “But handwriting a letter or a note is a totally different experience. I’m more thoughtful when I take the time to do that instead of whipping up something on my keyboard.”

In the show, Andy writes to Melissa that he feels at home with his pen and paper. He says, as Zuby explains, “I feel like I’m really speaking to you. I don’t feel that way on the phone. Once this phone call ends, it’s over.”

Because no matter what Sting or psychologists recommend, loving something means you don’t want to set it free. Through handwritten letters, at least, relationships may never really end.

“One of the characters mentions that,” Zuby says. “She says, ‘You can always keep my letter and read it again. It will bring back what we experienced at that time like nothing else could do.’”

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News

From the front lines at the Women’s March

James Yates, Beryl Solla and Polly Tarbell were part of the Charlottesville contingent that marched in Washington, D.C. Stacey Evans

At 4:49am on Saturday morning, I woke up just south of Washington, D.C., my eyes wide open and my stomach flipping.

My friend Abigail and I had driven up the night before, to join the Women’s March on Washington.

Per the organizers’ instructions, we packed clear plastic bags, loading up on wet wipes and fancy mixed nuts. I wore fleece-lined tights under my jeans, even though the weather promised to be in the 50s.

As we pulled out of a housing development, I asked our Uber driver if traffic on I-95 was bad. He paused and said, in a voice that implied I might be deluding myself, “No, it’s still pretty early.”

The Franconia-Springfield metro station was lively: lots of women, lots of pink pussy hats. I was already sweating, thanks to my tights, so I wasn’t yet sporting my purple beanie embroidered with #VirginiaForAll.

The train itself was crowded, the atmosphere jovial. A middle-aged woman with a brace on her knee spoke loudly to neighbors while resting her hand on a giant Dalmatian with mournful eyes. When someone stuck a pink pussy hat on his head, he looked at me as if to say, “I knew something like this would happen.”

The woman next to me was piled high with layers of jackets and lanyards. I asked why she was marching.

A public school teacher from rural New York state, she gestured to the teenagers sitting in front of us. “For my daughters,” she said, “and also because when I hear Betsy DeVos talk, I want to reach through the TV and shake her.”

She told me her 20-year-old recently came home crying from an auto mechanic’s shop. He told her that all Muslims are terrorists who want to cut off our heads. “My daughter’s best friend is Muslim,” the woman told me, “and she didn’t know what to say. She was shaking because she was so angry with herself.”

At L’Enfant Plaza, we followed a woman in a hat shaped like two ovaries. Hundreds of women swept up the stairs and spilled into the gray D.C. morning.

Hawkers sprung up like mushrooms around the head of the station, offering shirts with flash printings of Obama’s face and quotes from Virginia Woolf. Food trucks peppered streets devoid of cars, as did Jumbotrons poised at intervals along Independence Avenue. I saw my first male marcher, a gray-haired fellow with pants buckled up near his armpits and a “The future is female” T-shirt.

We had officially arrived.

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Scene from the Women’s March on Washington Photo Stacey Evans

I saw a man laughing and hugging his wife, wearing a sandwich board sporting the words “I married a nasty woman.”

I saw a woman holding a poster with a life-sized female mannequin tattooed with genitalia and the words “We are not ovary-acting.”

I clutched the sign I’d decorated with neon Sharpie and the words “Protect the Planet & Each Other,” soaking up messages held by passers-by.

“Honor Paris Climate Agreement.”

“You can’t over-comb racism.”

“I’m too worried to be funny.”

“Truth Matters.”

“Majority rules.”

“Feminist AF.”

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One of many, many signs at the Women’s March. Photo Karen Pape

We walked down quiet streets, watching stoplights flick red for no one.

We stopped about a block and a half from the main stage, where a large crowd had already gathered. Women, men and children stood in peaceful groups, beaming with excitement and purpose.

By the time Abigail and I returned, cups of coffee in hand, to the corner of Independence and Fourth, we could no longer see the stage. So we wedged up against the Air and Space Museum steps, eyeballed the Jumbotron and waited for the rally to start.

All around us, signs championed LBGTQIA rights, civil rights, native rights, immigrant rights, disability rights, reproductive rights, support for sexual assault survivors, stopping climate change. Even a small group of pro-life feminists held a banner calling for the end of all violence.

When America Ferrera took at the stage at 10am, she spoke for everyone.

“We march today for the moral core of this nation against which our new president is waging a war,” she said. “He would like us to forget the words, ‘Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,’ and instead take up a credo of hate, fear and suspicion of one another. But we are gathered here and across the country and around the world today to say, ‘Mr. Trump, we refuse.’”

For the next several hours, speakers and performers echoed her charge to uphold the soul of our nation.

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Jesse Jackson with speakers Gloria Steinem and Michael Moore at the Women’s March. Photo Karen Pape

Gloria Steinem spoke about solidarity. Michael Moore explained how to impede regressive policy during Trump’s first 100 days. Rhea Suh from the National Resources Defense Council explained her vow that her children will not inherit a polluted world, and a woman from Flint, Michigan, reminded us that her city has been without clean water for more than 1,000 days.

“If you don’t turn your back on us,” she said, “we won’t turn our backs on you.”

Civil rights activist Angela Davis, among other speakers, said that we must become “more militant in our defense of vulnerable populations.” Palestinian-American activist and march organizer Linda Sarsour  reminded us that our current discomfort is just a taste of what American Muslims have been experiencing for more than 15 years.

And as so many Carrie Fisher posters reminded me, “A woman’s place is in the resistance.”

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Planned Parenthood president Cecile Richards on the jumbotron at the Women’s March. Photo Karen Pape

By the time we marched to the White House lawn, the sky was turning dark. Our phones (and Uber access) were dead, so we headed to Starbucks to recharge.

I collapsed on the floor next to a woman with flushed cheeks and smudged glasses.

“Were you here for the march, or do you just happen to be in the area?” I asked.

She laughed and told me she came in from Kentucky, 16 hours overnight on a bus. “You know those seats are really narrow,” she gestured, huddling in on herself. “I’m heading back tonight.”

“Why did you come?”

“Because I felt like I had to do something,” she said, looking sad. “I live in a really conservative area, and there are signs for Trump everywhere. I used to be an activist in college, but I don’t know what to do anymore.”

“So what will you do now?” I asked her.

She shrugged. “I’m not really sure.”

“Michael Moore gave us that list of things we can do starting tomorrow,” I said. “And the organizer said if we go to the march website, they’re giving us 10 things to do over the next 100 days.”

Her face brightened. “Oh really? I’ll have to check that out. I couldn’t hear anything where I was standing.”

I thought about that. Thirty-two hours to sandwich yourself alongside strangers, unable to hear a thing, simply because you believe presence is better than absence.

“Yow, my knees are stiff,” she said, struggling to stand. “Hey, good luck out there.”

As she walked away, a Starbucks employee held up a discarded poster. “Does this belong to you?”

I shook my head no.

“I hate to throw it away,” he said. “Somebody worked really hard on this.”

In gold and pink glitter, I made out the words “Women’s Rights are Human Rights.”

“I think it probably served its purpose,” I said.

He smiled. “Yeah. You’re probably right.”

Categories
Arts

Gorilla Theater puts a final twist on the holidays

Broocks Willich stars as Esmerelda Scrooge in Gorilla Theater Productions' twist on the Dickens' classic. An Xmas Carol plays at the special events space at IX Art Park through January 15.

Last year was exhausting, right? No wonder people pushed themselves to have the merriest holiday of their lives in 2016. Online sales hit the highest mark ever during Black Friday weekend. Consumers wanted, more than ever, to escape real life and celebrate in tinsel wonderlands. Now that you’ve digested plenty of fa-la-las and other family favorites, you might be ready for a palate cleanser.

Gorilla Theater Productions has just the thing: An Xmas Carol, the new play that twists the Dickens’ classic into something subversive and sinister.

“We’re doing this as an anti-Christmas Carol,” says writer and director Nathan Anderith. “If you’ve got that last little bit of holiday stress, this [show] can get rid of it.”

Though 85 percent of Anderith’s script reads straight from the book, his adaptation upends the story entirely. Here, Xmas is a cult that demands and controls both charity and love. The miser, Esmerelda Scrooge, is the last holdout—until three high-level members of the cult use harrowing supernatural indoctrination to break her will.

“We ended up with something that was explicitly fighting against the text,” Anderith says. “We keep the same characters, the same flow lines, the same arcs [as Dickens]. Our subversive take comes in by adding levels of complexity to the characters.”

Scrooge’s nephew, for example, is now a menacing, high-level cult member with two wives. Bob Cratchit struggles between elevating his low ranking in the cult and conforming to a boss who explicitly resists it.

“A Christmas Carol is, at its core, the seduction of Scrooge,” he says. “We couldn’t show too many things [from the dark underbelly of the cult] because that would repel the character of Scrooge.”

What they can show, however, is plenty creepy. Tiny Tim has a “cult voice and face” that echoes Children of the Corn. The Spirit of Xmas Future reveals that Scrooge’s supposed friends don’t just steal her possessions, they remove her organs by careful autopsy.

Featuring a cast of 20 people, including six kids, as well as a large production crew, An Xmas Carol is a dark exploration of a familiar story—but not an attack on Christianity, or even Christmas.

“There’s a reason that we called the play An Xmas Carol and not A Christmas Carol,” Anderith says. “We actually explicitly, and multiple times in the play, draw distinctions between Xmas and Christmas. There’s a scene where a boy is seen reading a Bible, and there’s a lot of fear that he’ll be found out. Using any kind of religious iconography, even saying the word ‘Christmas,’ puts you in danger.

“It’s not trying to say that the religion itself is a cult,” he says. “It is simply about the ways in which a desire for these things [like] love, family, connection, joy and all of that, can be used as tools to create a compelling exterior with a hollow and corrupt core.”

The concept came to Andersen after Anna Lien, “the founder/dictatrix/mastermind of Gorilla Theater Productions,” asked him if he’d like to direct A Christmas Carol. Rather than reproduce a show that’s been done so many times, he brainstormed ways to flip it.

“If Scrooge was no longer the bad guy, how would that be possible?,” Anderith says. “You could either make him a nicer person, or you could make other people meaner, or you could take the ideas he was resisting—the love and family and all that—and make them dark and sinister. That I got excited about.”

The staged version of An Xmas Carol varies greatly from Anderith’s original adaptation, which he drafted in just a few days. Dramaturg Carol Pederson helped streamline, focus and straighten out the storyline, and actor feedback brought the script to life.

At first, Anderith struggled to keep the play from being gimmicky. Broocks Willich, who plays Esmerelda Scrooge, helped change that.

“We never intended to cast a woman,” he says. “I felt that would be pushing it a bit too far. But [Willich] gave such an amazing audition. She’s a professional actress, and her style, and the schools that she trained in, is all about realism and humanity. Everything needs to be true. I come from a more conceptual background, where I try to do cool ideas and visuals. We certainly butted heads a few times, but what we ended up with was something that felt like a real story.”

At some point, Anderith says, he also recognized the appropriateness of certain political allegories. “The idea of a woman who is very successful but is told her entire life that she’s not friendly enough, and not nice enough, and that she ought to be kinder and gentler and not so ambitious,” he says. “…how a certain group of people force this change and then break her.”

The edginess of An Xmas Carol is something of a hallmark for Gorilla Theater Productions, which has its own dedicated space and plenty of freedom for a director like Anderith.

“We can really take projects and run with them,” he says. “What’s fun is we also work with kids. At least half of our shows are teenage or children productions.”

During production a few months ago, he says, the theater faced an “existential crisis” when it ran out of money.

An Xmas Carol, and the theater company itself, shut down—until a few people, unwilling to let down the kids, created a board and became fiduciaries.

“Whenever we can’t cover payments with ticket sales, we cover it out of our own pockets,” Anderith says. “We’re not rich people, so it wasn’t the easiest decision to come to, but it was important enough to us to do it.”

Then IX Art Park stepped in, offering An Xmas Carol its stage space for no more than a cut of ticket sales. “I’m very, very, grateful to them,” he says.

He’s also outspoken about the kindness of the local theater network, from Live Arts to Four County Players and back. “People were just incredibly giving with their time, and their energy, and their resources,” Anderith says.

Xmas may be a cult, and Christmas may be over, but the love and kindness that thrives during the holidays? Turns out that spirit remains alive and well in Charlottesville.

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Arts

Observations on privilege and amnesia at Second Street Gallery

Charlottesville artist Matthew P. Shelton and Trinidadian artist Nikolai M. Noel’s (above)collaboration “contested bodies” is at Second Street Gallery through January 19. Courtesy Second Street Gallery

Despite living 2,100 miles apart, Charlottesville artist Matthew P. Shelton and Trinidadian artist Nikolai M. Noel are close friends.

They met in Virginia Commonwealth University’s MFA program, where they studied painting and printmaking, and were interested in the influence of colonialism and its aftermath on the creation of human identity.

“We were both making work about where we came from and where we come from,” Shelton says. “Noel quoted Heraclitus, ‘Geography is destiny.’ We’re focused on how the place you come from informs the possibilities and outcomes and ways you see the world.”

Noel, who currently lives in Port of Spain, describes himself as a multiracial artist who enjoys working conceptually, mashing up drawing, printmaking, painting and sculpture as the object requires.

Shelton, who lives in Charlottesville, prefers using collage, bricolage and found objects. “I’m descended from a lot people, but [my Confederate ancestry] is one strain I’ve been in dialogue with,” he says. “Particularly because my middle name is after my great-great-great-grandfather, who, according to historical documents, was a Confederate soldier and slaveholder.”

Unlike some friends, these two dive directly into topics that would otherwise divide them, consciously examining their identities in a holistic context.

“If you’re privileged, then it’s coming at the expense of someone else,” Shelton says. “You’re a member of the oppressor group. It doesn’t matter if you’re conscious of it or not. You’re receiving the benefit.”

Their latest exhibition is “contested bodies,” now on display at Second Street Gallery. Through drawings, prints, text, sculpture, film, audio and other media, the artists examine how our present realities—especially our day-to-day observations, opportunities and feelings—are shaped by race, privilege and historical and contemporary oppression.

As an example of identity-as-experience, Noel points to his “Disaster Series.” “These are about how I receive images of police shootings of young black men in the United States when I’m in the Caribbean,” he says. “They were images on the screen, so these are screen-sized. The dread and torment and sadness of those images made me think of Goya’s ‘The Disasters of War,’ which are also around that size.”

Noel “co-opted the language of Goya’s prints” to create his black-on-black images, which he intentionally made difficult to see and photograph.

“This is part of the conversation that Matthew and I have been having for a long time on race and nationality, about what is visible and what is invisible,” says Noel. “Being a white male in America—”

“And straight and able-bodied,” Shelton adds.

“—Matthew is probably in the category of one of the most visible human beings,” Noel says. “Me, being a multi-ethnic person from the southern Caribbean, living on an island most people don’t know exists, I live in a more invisible, obscure context.”

Shelton and Noel use “contested bodies” to translate the distance between them into an experience. Some subjects are easy to grasp. Smudged illustrations of palm trees; a massive black-on-black painting of Trayvon Martin’s sweatshirt. Others are difficult—a net made of chain, padlocks and steel hangs from the ceiling. A projector streams video of blood being drawn from both men and collected in two separate jars.

Curiosity, reflection and thoughtful conversation—the tools required to decipher “contested bodies”—is one treatment for what Shelton calls the “specific historical amnesia” of the American South.

“There’s a superficial memory about slavery and Jim Crowe and Civil Rights, but there’s not a personal memory that’s being cultivated,” he says.

Noel and Shelton say the purpose of their collaboration is “to bind our fates, further forge our friendship, to ward off depression and perhaps to inoculate ourselves from the fruits of the seemingly inexorable state of apartness characteristic of life today: anxiety, dread, exploitation, alienation from self and other, shame, lost futures.”

It is not, Shelton says, about racial reconciliation. “While that’s a project that is important in the world, we’re more focused on taking the temperature of what this moment feels like.”

“We talk a lot about justice,” Noel says, “and our sense of despair comes from understanding that in order to make things right and equitable, there is the whole weight of history to deal with. “

So how do these two men communicate clearly through the weight of despair?

“It’s a willingness to listen. The person might be saying something that’s difficult to hear, but once you express a willingness to listen, the other person has a willingness to be honest,” Noel says.

“Does listening come first or does trust come first? I would say that the onus is on white people to come to the table and listen,” Shelton says. “Stepping in and caring about these things—for me, it’s optional, but it has to become not optional.”

“contested bodies” challenges viewers to practice grappling with indistinct concepts. To challenge the assumption that powerful truths can be easily consumed and to experience the worthiness of people, ideas, emotions and experiences that are, at first glance, clouded by obscurity.

“Sometimes you have a map, and sometimes you’re dropped in the middle of nowhere,” Shelton says. “It’s like where you get born. Why did I get born where I was and to whom I was? Our collaboration is just having two people have that conversation, that expression of bewilderment, together at the same time.”

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Arts

Refugees make new connections through art

A sketch by Bishnu Maya Tamang from Bhutan is part of the “World Art Exhibit” on display at downtown’s Central Library (second floor) now through the end of the year. Image courtesy of the artist

Rarely do so many Americans feel divided, separated and isolated from one another as they have during this political season. Our inability to communicate and connect with one another as countrymen feels like an affront. For the thousands of refugees who flee violence, persecution, human trafficking or torture in their native countries in crisis, then arrive for resettlement in the U.S. every year, cultural isolation is a way of life. That’s where the International Rescue Committee comes in.

“They’re doing a wonderful job of bringing people from these war-torn areas to safety,” says Susan Patrick, a volunteer at the Charlottesville chapter of the IRC. “I think it’s a miracle people have this service.”

Every year, the IRC partners with the United Nations to help refugees rebuild their lives: to find affordable housing, enroll children in schools, participate in job-readiness training and receive medical care and mentorship. Patrick, who “went to the IRC because I was curious,” wound up teaching English to a Bhutanese man and his neighbor.

“I wanted to help someone improve his reaction to being away from his homeland, to being driven out and then coming to a new place where it’s very uncomfortable,” she says. After two and a half years, she believes he’s happier, better able to express himself and more acclimated to living in America.

Patrick, who worked for 30 years as an art teacher in Nelson County public schools, decided to take her support of refugee self-expression one step further.

“I wanted to get art into this idea, too,” she says. “When I taught, I felt like I was passing on the enjoyment of art and the importance of communicating through visual images. When I retired, that stopped.” Now she sees a chance for cross-cultural connection.

By displaying work that gives refugees space for self-expression, “[locals] would have an opportunity for a more intimate introduction to individuals who are new in the community, rather than just hearing about them, or seeing them on the Downtown Mall or at work,” says Patrick. “It would give them a real insight into something that they care about.”

She reached out to IRC volunteers for recommendations of potential artists, leading Patrick to create three workshops. The first was for a Girl Scout troop of refugees who were “very eager to draw images of their homes and farms. Some drew costumes. Some drew family. One girl drew a mosque that her father and brothers went to.”

A group of adults gathered at the apartment where they learn English from Zakira Beasley, another IRC volunteer. “Between us, we communicated this idea of people drawing from their memories, and they were very eager to do it.” The third group met at the IRC office, where Jim Gordon helped her communicate the idea to the English class he was substituting. Once again, Patrick says, people were very interested in drawing pictures of what they remembered.

She knew this project mattered because of how intensely they concentrated on their art-making. “I’ve seen that in the classroom, where it will get very, very quiet because everyone is so focused on doing the work.”

In total, the project generated 33 drawings by artists from eight different countries. Tom Otis from Fastframe volunteered to mat and frame the works for free, and for the next several months, the exhibit will travel through galleries across town.

Nearly all the pieces show happy scenes of houses, mosques, temples, animals or families. “These are things all of us can identify with, those of us who haven’t been refugees and those who have,” Patrick says.

Two drawings stand out, though. Drawn by a husband and wife from Syria, both depict the home they left behind. Hers is a pretty drawing of their house. “It looks like a big house, and it’s very attractive,” Patrick says. His drawing shows the same house—with a hand grenade drawn in the middle of the picture. “There are two bodies in the bottom of the picture,” says Patrick. “He told me that those were his parents. They died in the explosion.” The picture is made more disturbing by its normalcy. Only after you study it for a moment do you notice soft pink lines radiating outward from a central element, the shockwaves of a bomb.

“You sit with these people, and they laugh, and they thank you, and they bless you,” Patrick says. “They’re just so sweet. They smile easily. This man who drew his house after the bomb was really happy to draw this picture.

“I can’t imagine. I get so angry just being in traffic that’s too slow. It’s so embarrassing. When I’m with these people, they humble me.”

As an artist, Patrick says she feels a connection to all the pieces. But what about her goal to help locals get to know refugees through their visuals?

“One person drew a vegetable cart that was being pulled by oxen, and there was a dog barking,” she says. “He couldn’t tell me the words to explain that, but he did it with his drawing.”

Art may transport us to other worlds, but sometimes it’s the best way to connect us right here.

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Arts

Artist Damien Shen finds motivation in his past

Artist-in-residence Damien Shen’s “Self-Portrait #2” is on display at Kluge-Ruhe through December 18. Courtesy of the artist

Like many creatives, Damien Shen spent most of his adult life focused on building a career instead of a formal art practice.

But in 2013, the South Australia native and current Kluge-Ruhe artist-in-residence realized he had a calling. He just needed to work out what it was.

“I did this journey down the east coast of Australia and went to pretty much every gallery in our contemporary space I could find in a two-week period,” Shen says. “I just needed to try and work out what it all meant to be an artist.”

A descendant of Ngarrindjeri and Chinese bloodlines, Shen was inspired by fellow Australian aboriginal artists Tony Albert and Vernon Ah Kee.

“When I saw [Ah Kee’s charcoal portraits], I was quite overwhelmed,” says Shen. “I just sat there in front of it and thought, ‘Man, this is amazing.’ I wondered if I could still draw, and if maybe I could draw like that. And I thought, ‘Maybe one day I can have my own exhibition.’”

Shen enrolled in a three-day charcoal portraiture workshop. On the third day, he received word that his aboriginal grandmother, Charlotte, passed away.

“That really was the catalyst to begin drawing a lot,” he says.

Shen focused intensely on developing his technique. Through drawings, paintings and lithographs, he committed to mastering a level of technical excellence that would allow him to break the rules. His first project focused on family genealogy, sourcing his maternal uncle’s and aunts’ memories as the last generation to experience growing up on Raukkan, a Ngarrindjeri mission south of Adelaide. Much like the American Indians, Australian aboriginal men and women suffered intergenerational trauma and cultural disenfranchisement under the colonial regime, including genocide, segregation, dispossession, marginalization and assimilation.

During his research, Shen discovered that the remains of more than 500 Ngarrindjeri people had been stolen by William Ramsay Smith, an Australian coroner, and sent to a scientist in Scotland for comparative anatomy.

“[Smith] used to go out and actually look for remains down near the Coorong,” says Shen. “There’s a lot of sand dunes and stuff out there, so the wind would expose parts of the grounds and sometimes expose remains. Other times he would dig them up. When he died in 1937, he had 182 skulls in his house. That was his own personal collection.”

Shen’s current exhibition at Kluge-Ruhe includes portraits of the perpetrators of these crimes, as well as a portrait of Boorborrowie, a Ngarrindjeri man whose remains were later repatriated to Australia.

“I remember as a younger lad there was this event at Camp Coorong,” Shen says. “There was a ceremony and all these white crates. …Huge amounts of remains were being released by the museum in Edinburgh and brought back to South Australia.”

In addition to showcasing precise and fluid portraiture styles, Shen’s exhibit “On the Fabric of the Ngarrindjeri Body” references 19th century scientific anatomical renderings of the human form. The show’s titular work echoes an illustration from Andreas Vesalius’ medical book, De humani corporis fabrica (On the Fabric of the Human Body). The text is an apt reference point for Shen’s themes, as its clinical accuracy objectifies the physical body much like colonials, coroners and scientists dehumanized Australian aboriginal men, women and their remains.

Shen’s etching reclaims this spirit by inserting Vesalius’ version of the male form into a natural landscape and superimposing iconic Ngarrindjeri body designs, ritualistic paraphernalia and the face, hair and beard of Major Sumner (a Ngarrindjeri elder and Shen’s Uncle Moogy) in ceremonial dress.

In his series, “On the Fabric of the Ngarrindjeri Body—Volume II,” inspired by Irving Penn’s ethnographic photography, Shen sought to create a studio scene that combined hero shots with behind-the-scenes candids of himself and his uncle painting in the traditional Ngarrindjeri way. “These are images that could have been shot back in the 1800s but they were done a couple of years ago,” says Shen.

He wanted, he says, to highlight the tension between gazing in and observing a culture, “this part of Australian culture that is lost and I believe struggling to stay alive,” and the contemporary reality of cultural preservation and revivification.

“It’s very difficult to understand unless you’re from those areas that have been able to hold a cultural practice through time,” he says. “All we really have are old photos and illustrations by guys who were traveling through in the 1800s.”

Shen says the experience of actually painting his skin for the first time was surreal—and very intimate.

“It’s not an initiation,” he says. “I’m not going to pretend it’s anything like that. For me, it meant a lot to be able to do it with Uncle Moogy.”

Shen sounds surprised that The National Gallery of Australia asked to acquire these intimate moments. But these photos, in addition to his first volume of work, earned him an avalanche of critical acclaim. In just two and a half years, the artist has been featured in 30 exhibitions around Australia, and he’s won multiple accolades, including the 2014 South Australian NAIDOC Artist of the Year Award, the 2015 Prospect Portrait Prize and the 64th Blake Prize for Emerging Artists in 2016.

Shen’s current residency at the Kluge-Ruhe is also his first.

“So many times in the last three years I’ve been pinching myself,” says Shen. “You win an award or you get accepted into a residency or this and that. Like, ‘Wow, this is the artist’s life.’ It doesn’t always go your way, but today I have this incredible view [of Charlottesville]. I have an atrium I can call my studio for the month. I’m incredibly blessed.”

Contact Elizabeth Derby at arts@c-ville.com.

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Arts

Dating app for creative types makes a C’ville debut

The Hart App aims to take modern dating beyond the surface and connect people through their art. Photo courtesy of Scott Webb

The last time I went on an online date, I found myself at Buffalo Wild Wings with a guy named Tony. It was 2010, and I was living on the New Jersey shore at the time. (He was actually the second Tony I’d gone out with, it being the Jersey shore.) I remember feeling…underwhelmed. Missing the spark despite millions of messages exchanged, let down in a way that only deliberate, digitally orchestrated dates can inspire.

Technology has come a long way since then. We have apps now. All it takes is a finger swipe to dismiss someone, should you find their face and/or body parts unappealing.

Unfortunately, our modern approach to romance still fails to convey the visceral magic of a person. No app can capture the soul that animates your face, radiates your brand of warmth or talent, and shines when you immerse yourself in creative work that lights you up.

Or so I thought.

There’s a new app in town, and it’s designed expressly for creative, artsy types. You know, the ones who might classify themselves as more than just a pretty face.

The idea for the Hart App was born after Scott Webb attended a Rolling Stones concert and realized “Mick Jagger couldn’t compete on Tinder if he wasn’t Mick Jagger, but people love him,” says Webb. “It’s almost a form of hypnosis. When someone has created a great artistic revolution, people don’t care what you look like.”

“A headshot can’t capture the depth of a person’s character,” proclaims the website for the Hart App, and so this Tinder-for-creatives eschews your face entirely.

Users create a profile by uploading a photo to their “public canvas” along with a five-word caption. The photo can be anything—doodles, tattoos, the sidewalk, an airplane, whatever image you decide expresses your uniqueness. The caption can be poetic, descriptive or completely unrelated to your image.

The only catch? You can’t post a photo of your face.

Once you’re in the public gallery, you swipe left to dismiss the work that doesn’t move you and swipe right to engage with the spirit that does. Should you like a canvas, you’ll be asked to write a critique. If the person on the other side of the screen likes what you have to say, he’ll allow you to view his profile. Then the conversation can begin.

“If you post to this app, you’re one to two steps ahead of someone on Tinder,” says Hart’s founder, Scott Webb. “You want someone to understand you. That’s really who the app is for: those people who have evolved a notch ahead, who want to bypass all the bullshit of what dating is and just have a conversation about imagination.”

A colon hygienist and former philosophy major, Webb ran with the idea for Hart after recognizing its potential. “It seems very simple and it has a broad appeal nationally, and maybe across the whole planet, this idea that people could connect more via their interests or their passions, talents, versus just what they look like.”

At present, the app has launched in limited markets: first in Nashville, where Webb lives, then Asheville, North Carolina, and now Charlottesville. Brand-new users will find that the public gallery “unlocks” when 25 (or more) locals create and upload profiles.

So far, user profiles run the gamut, from a stylized sun painted on a guitar to a pair of legs on an outcropping overlooking the Blue Ridge to an oil painting of a woman looking out to sea.

But the real breakthrough, Webb says, is the way users take advantage of their caption.

“It’s not enough to just put up a photo,” he says. “It’s the five words that I think is the genius aspect of the app. Because now the post itself becomes a work of creativity.”

(Of the few I saw, my favorite was the image of an aquarium-bound jellyfish, underscored with the caption “don’t be jelly.”)

Helping people harness that artistic charisma—whether they are artists—is exactly what Webb wanted to do in the first place. “I think sometimes creative types, their photos may disqualify them from Tinder-type competition,” he says. “You could have someone highly creative and an introvert that has all this material, and they could thrive if they could put their art forward first.”

The idea for Hart was born after Webb attended a Rolling Stones concert and realized “Mick Jagger couldn’t compete on Tinder if he wasn’t Mick Jagger, but people love him,” says Webb. “It’s almost a form of hypnosis. When someone has created a great artistic revolution, people don’t care what you look like.”

A hypnotherapist himself, Webb explains how limited typical dating thought patterns can be.

“In society, all we’re providing people with is the hypnotic aspects,” says Webb. “It’s looking at a face and saying, ‘Yes, no. Yes, no.’ That encourages a generic, cookie-cutter model for what dating is and for what relationships are. We’ve been trained to focus more on what is. It’s a very linear, hypnotized, cause-and-effect model, whereas genuine love comes through the subconscious.

“What I’m suggesting is, for how the human mind works, we might introduce more imagination and more expression and getting to know each other, and that changes the whole dimension of the relationship.”

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Arts

Found letters put C’ville at the heart of a German opera

Victory Hall Opera’s Miriam Gordon-Stewart plays the Marschallin in Der Rosenkavalier for the show’s first performances in Virginia, at PVCC on August 14, 17 and 20. Photo: Publicity photo

Since its debut in 1911, opera-lovers have considered Der Rosenkavalier a masterpiece of the repertoire.

The German comedy follows the story of the Marschallin (Princess Marie Thérèse von Werdenberg) as she decides to end her affair with a younger man and save another woman from an unhappy marriage.

More than a century later, on the eve of its first Der Rosenkavalier performance, local opera group Victory Hall Opera unearthed a magical coincidence: The Marschallin’s character was partially inspired by a real woman, Countess Ottonie von Degenfeld, and her descendants live and work in Charlottesville.

“It’s just not common knowledge in the opera world that this relationship was based around a real relationship,” says Miriam Gordon-Stewart, Victory Hall co-founder, artistic director and the soprano who plays the Marschallin in the group’s upcoming performance. “Finding out about the link to Charlottesville was purely due to a conversation that we struck up with a German lady at an art exhibition.”

Following the lead, Gordon-Stewart and fellow co-founder Brenda Patterson discovered that von Degenfeld’s grandchildren and great-grandchildren did, in fact, live in Albemarle County. What’s more, the family possessed intimate letters that detailed a deep affection between von Degenfeld and Der Rosenkavalier’s librettist, Hugo von Hofmannsthal.

The private letters, bound in a blue ribbon and opened after von Degenfeld’s death by her daughter Marie Thérèse, detail the couple’s deepening relationship, which began in 1910, when von Hofmannsthal attended a dinner party at Schloss Neubeuern, a castle in Bavaria where von Degenfeld lived at the time.

“Their relationship was something probably we wouldn’t understand today,” says Ralph Miller, a Charlottesville native and von Degenfeld’s grandson. “It was very intellectual because it started when she was in a wheelchair.”

At age 26, von Degenfeld had been married only two years when her husband died of prostate cancer, leaving her widowed, essentially homeless and with a small child. Though she’d once been vivacious and charismatic, von Degenfeld was so devastated she could hardly speak or walk.

By the time von Degenfeld arrived in Neubeuern, von Hofmannsthal was part of a circle of intellectuals and artists who frequented the castle, which acted as a rotating world of art, opera and music.

“[von Hofmannsthal] took pity on her and said, ‘There must be some way we can we bring this poor creature back into a life.’ Being the intellectual he was, life to him was literature. So he started prescribing for her books,” Miller says. “She would read them. Then he would send her more books, all the classics in French, in German, in English and so on. That’s how he slowly brought her back.”

It’s also how their correspondence began. Each time she received or finished reading a book, von Degenfeld wrote von Hofmannsthal with thanks or a discussion of the book’s plot and themes. This went on for years, until she finally regained her strength and her joy and became active again.

Their mutual affection extended beyond literature. To understand its depth, consider this quote from von Degenfeld’s correspondence, cited in Victory Hall’s promotional video for the upcoming performance: “Should I continue explaining why I like you so much? Because you also love the dust upon the flower petals and would not think of placing the buds in a greenhouse to see them bloom before their time. And this is what separates you from other men and serves as a sort of balm for the wounded heart. I realize that if I love your letters, must I not also love your soul and you?”

Despite the tenor of certain exchanges, von Degenfeld and her family maintained that the actual relationship remained platonic.

“Like in any relationship, there were all the temptations, but one reason I know [it remained platonic] is that [my grandmother] was always very good friends with [von] Hofmannsthal’s wife,” Miller says. “She never had any guilty conscience regarding that.”

“The stories we hear about her were stories of great humor or great character,” says Marie Lefton, von Degenfeld’s great-granddaughter and a Charlottesville native. “The letters have to speak for themselves.”

During the pair’s correspondence, von Hofmannsthal also wrote the libretto for Der Rosenkavalier.

Guestbooks from Schloss Neubeuern log various dates on which he arrived to write particular scenes. According to Miller, he may have staged the first performance of the show in the castle salon.

No doubt, von Hofmannsthal’s relationship with von Degenfeld influenced his greatest work. He even told her daughter that he named the princess after her. Coupled with the librettist’s unique writing style, it’s easy to see why the show feels so poignant.

“There are sentences that aren’t finished,” Gordon-Stewart says. “There are thoughts that start one way and they sort of get hijacked in an attempt to avoid the subject. Then, they meander in a different direction. Then, one person starts talking over the other to try to draw them back to the point.

“It’s not a surprise that it’s based on a real relationship. It makes a lot of sense to us. I think that is a reason why it feels so personal and so naturalistic in a way.”

Once again, von Hofmannsthal’s art extended beyond the stage and into local lives.

“From what I’ve heard, Der Rosenkavalier stands out as an opera because it’s very much alive and real,” Miller says. “I gathered that that was his style of writing that differentiated him from some of the others.

“As a matter of fact, he taught my mother how to write letters. That’s why hers were not rigid and stylistic. She said [von] Hofmannsthal taught her to stop thinking of it as a letter. To just put down what you really feel.”

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Poet Amie Whittemore finds growth in Glass Harvest

Amie Whittemore reads at the launch party of her poetry collection, Glass Harvest, at New Dominion Bookshop on Thursday. Photo: Publicity photo

For some new readers, poetry feels light years away from reality. It reads like a dense abstraction—the literary equivalent of a modernist painting that makes you tilt your head sideways and wonder what the heck you are missing.

But when poet Amie Whittemore first found poetry, the self-described “voracious reader” felt like someone flicked on the lights.

“In my high school freshman English class, we got an assignment to find 10 poems that we liked and create a little anthology,” she says. “As a 14-year-old angsty girl growing up in the middle of a cornfield in Illinois, discovering poetry was like discovering a way to deal with being a teenager in a format that I already loved.”

Whittemore saw poetry as a way to explore the truth from new angles. “Poetry reminds me of making a collage,” she says. “You’re looking at feelings and impressions, a lot of different pieces and how they feel when they’re next to each other. You’re not necessarily fitting them together to make a realistic photograph.”

Ultimately, she says, “It’s a way to grapple with the world, with being alive. It’s a way to think about things. It’s not necessarily linear, doesn’t necessarily have to fall into a clear logic, yet it brings me clarity in how I’m trying to engage with an idea or feeling or moment in my life.”

Despite her love for the subject, she denied her dream of pursuing poetry for many years. “It really did feel a little self-indulgent to get an MFA,” she says. “I was like, ‘Why should I get this degree just to write poems? It’s not going to get me a job, blah, blah, blah.’ I talked myself out of it for years and got a teaching degree instead, because I thought, ‘It’s more important to help other people love poetry. It’s not important for me to write it.’”

But the truth won out, and five years after Whittemore graduated with a bachelor’s in creative writing, she went back to school at Southern Illinois University Carbondale for her MFA in poetry.

Photo: File photo

“I found with time, if you deny a part of yourself that really gets you jazzed, you’re diminishing your own life,” she says. “The more I choose to do the things I love, the more I serve the world. It lets me be a better teacher and a better member of my community when I am doing what fulfills me.”

As a Piedmont Virginia Community College English teacher, WriterHouse writing instructor and co-founder of the Charlottesville Reading Series, a monthly event that presents poetry and prose readings for community members, Whittemore has helped hundreds of locals engage with the written world.

This month, she amplifies her voice in that world with the publication of Glass Harvest, her debut poetry collection. Layered with farm and prairie imagery, the book meditates on Midwestern landscapes and the personal lives that unfold there.

“When I started the book, I thought it was going to focus on two of my grandparents who died six months apart,” says Whittemore. “I’d talked to relatives and done research on my family’s history, but I didn’t write many poems about me.”

Unlike nonfiction, poetry gives writers the ability to speak the truth without risking wrong facts. “In my thesis defense, I was told that the Amie character was not well-developed,” she says. “And I realized that for the book to ring true, I had to be more honest.”

As Whittemore says, you have the ability to reveal yourself while feeling a bit protected. But even poets aren’t exempt from sweaty hands and pounding nerves.

“A friend of mine challenged me to write a poem I was afraid to write,” she says. “So I asked myself to think of a gentle audience. Who would that be? My granddaughter, I realized. A granddaughter who wants to know the secrets of my soul.”

So began “To my future granddaughter,” a poem-turned-vehicle for the discussion of Whittemore’s recent divorce.

“That was definitely a poem that I was very nervous about writing, but once I wrote it, it clarified for me why I was so nervous,” she says. “More often now I try to go toward that [nervous feeling], because I think good art should make you feel a little uncomfortable. It invites people into a space where they can talk about uncomfortable things and feel like, ‘Okay, we’re all here together. This is part of being alive.’”

Like witnessing art, honoring our creative instinct isn’t always easy. “It did take eight years to do this book, and it wasn’t an easy eight years,” Whittemore says. “There’s a lot of crying and freaking out and having self-doubt. For any artist, skill is important, but resilience is also really important. You need to be able to come back again and again. You need to have faith in yourself even when you feel defeated.”

In other words, poetry is as real as it gets.

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‘Listening Spirit’ binds sustainability to art at Second Street Gallery

Kate Daughdrill and Patrick Costello’s “Listening Spirit” exhibition opens on Friday, with a medicinal food/tea pairing experience and a brief artist talk at Second Street Gallery. Photo: Courtesy of artist

Like many young urbanites, New York- based artist Patrick Costello finds satisfaction in a can.

“I started to get interested in canning when I was 19 and started growing food,” he says. “The knowledge was taught to me by my mom and my grandma, and it became a way of rooting myself to patterns that have sustained other generations of my family.”

At the time, Costello lived in Charlottesville, where he graduated from UVA with a studio art degree and co-founded C’ville Foodscapes, a worker-owned edible landscaping cooperative. He began making pieces related to canning food and preserving and arranging them in a color spectrum.

“My grandma wrote me this note that I still carry around with me,” says Costello. “It said, ‘I’m so glad you’re doing this, and I think it’s great that you’re using it in your art. Your great-grandmother would be so proud of you.’”

Canning may be trendy, but the practice marks a profound lifestyle shift for artists like Costello and Kate Daughdrill, collaborators on Second Street Gallery’s latest exhibition, “Listening Spirit: 5 Years of Burnside Farm.”

The pair met in Charlottesville where, Costello says, “we started to learn about growing food and building community.”

They met again at Burnside Farm, Daughdrill’s six-lot urban farm/art gallery on the east side of Detroit, where Costello spent three weeks as the farm’s first visiting artist. Elbows-deep in preserves, they decided to collaborate on a color spectrum specifically for Burnside.

“Suddenly we were like, ‘What other things could make colors?’” Costello says. “Kate was getting into herbal medicine, so we made tinctures out of plants that were growing wild around the garden.”

The expanding spectrum of plant-based material led to a full-blown exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit.

“We translated a lot of the visual and emotional aesthetic of my home into the museum space,” Daughdrill says. “We built these beautiful canning shelves and made a holy water station with beautiful, fresh, pure water we collected directly from the earth and blessed. All these visuals and experiential components connect to the magic of Burnside Farm and the story of growth and healing that that place seems to inspire.”

“Listening Spirit: 5 Years of Burnside Farm” expands the concept further, bringing to Charlottesville an installation that features shelves of jarred foods arranged in a color spectrum, a circular gathering table for sharing artist-made food and teas, a holy water station, plants, herbal medicines, ceremonial objects, an attuning station and the sounds and scents of Burnside. In addition to work by Costello and Daughdrill, the show includes contributions by artists Ali Lapetina, Phreddy Wischusen, the Right Brothers and The Printmakers Left.

The exhibition captures an intrinsic duality present at Burnside Farm: high-energy community activity and meditative calm.

“In the big room [at Second Street Gallery], we’ve got jars and food and stories and photos of Burnside,” Daughdrill says. “Then you move into the smaller room, which will be filled with wild grasses, and sit on a huge meditation cushion under a 7-foot dome made of woven yarrow and suspended from the sky.”

This attuning station highlights a deeper theme at play in “Listening Spirit.”

“The spaces we live in can help us adopt a posture of openness or invocation and make us more receptive to the healing energy of connection that’s all around us,” Daughdrill says.

That theme explains the exhibition’s relevance no matter where it goes.

“These processes—gardening, canning, knowing your neighbors, working with diverse groups of people, finding ways of creating nurturing spaces—those are the basic skills for building what cities might look like in the future,” Daughdrill says.

Communities like Burnside Farm nourish participants on a spiritual level, too.

“I thought I was working on Burnside, but it was transforming me,” says Daughdrill. “By learning these more essential skills, I found I connected even more deeply to myself.”

Costello is quick to jump in. “I’ve never had a religious practice, personally, and I’ve never been affiliated with a church in my adult life, but going to Burnside taught me that I didn’t have to be afraid of the word spirituality or of a spiritual practice,” he says. “Those things manifest in our relationships, in the energy of communing with plants and working with your hands in the soil.

“You took the time to start the tomato seedlings and transplant those outside of your front door. Then each day you go out and maybe you water them with water from a rain barrel. When you think about sustaining this other life, you start to think about your health in relation to that plant. A weird dialogue happens between you and this growing plant.

“Then it starts to fruit and you have a zillion tomatoes…in that bounty there’s real health, because you don’t need 20 dollars to go get a fancy meal. You just have a fancy meal.

“Then every August or September, you take the large amount of energy stored in these tomatoes that you helped create, and…on the coldest day of February when you’re just like, ‘All I want is summer air and warmth and comfort,’ you get a taste of that. To me, that’s spirituality.”