Author: erinohare

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UVA alum Sasheer Zamata gets serious on ‘Saturday Night Live’

Sasheer Zamata returns to Charlottesville on August 22 to perform stand-up comedy at the Jefferson Theater. Photo by Mary Ellen Matthews/NBC

Comedian Sasheer Zamata was a teenager when she realized that she wanted to make people laugh. All it took was a joke about a janky elevator.

“When I was in high school [in Indiana], I did a government camp where students ran the government; we had to elect our officials and run for office,” says Zamata. “We stayed in a dorm with an elevator that would kind of shake when you were in it.” Zamata ran for lieutenant governor of her party and won, and when it came time for her to make a speech before the big election, she told her fellow campers—all 800 of them—“You better vote for me before you die in this elevator!”

“People just lost their minds,” says Zamata, laughing as she remembers the satisfying moment. “It was the easiest joke ever, and people were just loving it!”

“People told me afterwards, ‘You should do something where you speak in front of people and make them laugh,’” she says. “But no one knew to say ‘stand-up comedian,’ because we didn’t think of that as a plausible job.”

While a student at UVA, Zamata majored in drama, founded the long-form improv student comedy troupe Amuse Bouche—and ate a Bodo’s bagel for breakfast most mornings—before graduating in 2008. But it wasn’t until she moved to New York City, began creating her own online comedy videos and performing sketch comedy with Upright Citizens Brigade that she realized comedy was, in fact, a plausible job.

And that she was pretty darn good at it.

She filmed zany impersonations of celebrities and posted the videos to her online comedy channel. She donned wigs and costumes to impersonate Michelle Obama reading a version of Go the Fuck to Sleep, Beyoncé singing “Love on Top” as a lullaby to a Blue Ivy baby doll while a framed mugshot of Jay Z hangs over the sofa, and Nicki Minaj reading Green Eggs and Ham.

Zamata’s Bodo’s order: Bacon, egg and cheese on a cinnamon raisin bagel. “That was my favorite go-to breakfast bagel,” she says. “It’s a really good combination of savory and sweet.”

She’s continued to impersonate these celebrities—and many others, including Eartha Kitt and Lenny Kravitz—as a cast member on NBC’s “Saturday Night Live.”

Zamata (now 30) joined the “SNL” cast midway through the show’s 39th season; her hiring ended a months-long talent search focused on minority women prompted by criticism of the show’s lack of on-camera diversity. Zamata was the first black woman to join the show’s company since Maya Rudolph departed in 2007, and just the fifth black female cast member in the show’s history (Leslie Jones, hired in 2014, is the sixth). “As a result, she faced unusual levels of scrutiny” during her first “SNL” appearance on January 18, 2014, the New Yorker’s Culture Desk column noted, “but her debut went without a hitch.”

She sees the show as yet another platform where she can “talk about things in culture or society that may be glossed over,” says Zamata, explaining that her job as a comedian is to analyze and critique under the guise of humor and make the sometimes painful truth “easier to swallow.”

During an “SNL” Weekend Update segment in December 2014, Zamata explained to co-host Colin Jost how she’d learned to convey black experiences via text through a whitewashed set of emojis. She pointed out to Jost, who is white, that of the 800 emojis available on Apple’s iOS at the time (they became more diverse in April 2015), “not one of them is of a black person.” If she wanted to refer to herself with an emoji, she used the dark moon emoji—but “it looks like…a baby Charles Barkley,” she quipped while looking directly at the camera, her expression telling the viewer, “It’s cool to laugh, but look at your phone; you know I’m right about all of this.”

She continued, “Unico, the company that creates emojis, thought that instead of one black person, we needed two different kinds of dragons, nine different cat faces, three generations of a white family and all the hands are white, too. Even the black power fist is white,” she said, making a point. “But on the plus side, they do have a KKK member that got punched in the face,” she said as the ghost emoji popped up on the screen.

In the recurring Vlog sketch, Zamata plays Janelle, a 15-year-old girl who films YouTube dance tutorials in her bedroom. Janelle doesn’t realize that her body has developed into that of a woman, and as she dances—naively, suggestively—YouTube creeps leave inappropriate comments that send Janelle’s dad (played by Chris Rock) into a hilarious panic.

“It’s about that moment where you are a girl turning into a woman, and you’re not really interested in boys, but your body is saying something different,” says Zamata. “And then there’s the way society views” a woman’s body as a sexual object. “It’s such an interesting moment that I want to talk about,” she says.

Joking about uncomfortable topics like racism, adolescent sexuality and Internet trolls is “a way to make us all laugh at the same thing and feel like we’re all together in this,” she says.

Zamata learned early on from that rickety elevator at government camp that nothing is funnier than the truth. It’s why she draws from her own experiences as a young black woman living in America to form her comedy. “I talk about things that I see and things that anger me or confuse me, and I sort of hash it out on stage until I have a fully formed thought on how I feel about it,” says Zamata. She’s joked about double standards, failed attempts to ditch a guy mid-date and her black hair.

By making serious points with a punch line, she says, perhaps people are more willing to listen.

Comedy can open your mind to new perspectives, but Zamata is quick to point out that it’s also an escape. A good comedy show can change you in so many ways, but in the moment that you’re watching, she says, “Just laugh out loud. Laughing feels so good.”

Sasheer Zamata

August 22

The Jefferson Theater

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Arts

Music nonprofit wants to help locals unite in song

MIMA, a music nonprofit originally started in New York City, opened a chapter here in February and wants to engage the community in collaborative workshops. Photo: Murphy Thibodeau

Rappity rap, rappity rap.

A 13-year-old tapped out a beat on a metal folding chair. Rappity rap, rappity rap. Dressed in black jeans, black untied high tops and a black Michael Jordan jersey over a white undershirt, he slumped forward, his restless fingers wandering over the edge of his chair, his gaze wandering up to the stained glass windows in the Music Resource Center’s chapel space on Ridge Street.

He was in the zone. Rappity rap, rappity rap, rappity rap.

After a minute, another boy—about 7 years old and wearing a brown Phish T-shirt—started tapping the seat of his own folding chair. Tap. Tap tap. Tap. Tap tap.

Two girls across the circle talked about swimming, and Charlottesville musician Julia J. von Briesen started chanting “breaststroke, butterfly, freestyle, backstroke.” Soon, all 20 people in the circle—children, teens and adults—stood, stomping and clapping in time to her chant.

They were improvising.

This lasted about 60 seconds before music teacher Kevin Wenzel led them to a new, different rhythm. “Goom-ba! Goom-ba!” he chanted, encouraging them to stomp their right foot then their left, to chant louder and louder before layering on “bunnybunny, BUNNYbunny” in double time.

The louder they shouted, the more confident they seemed. They weren’t caught up in making the music sound good; they didn’t stop and start over if someone missed a beat, they just continued on. They were creating and living together in that moment. Such is the power of improvisational music.

That creative flame is what MIMA, a New York City-based music education nonprofit new to the Charlottesville arts scene, has sought to ignite since its origin in 2000. MIMA’s trained teachers run programs for underserved schools and at-risk youth in Newark, New Jersey, and New York City and have held community music workshops in Cyprus, Nepal, Brazil and other cities and towns around the world.

“So often, we hit on moments that don’t feel good or sound good—in life, not just in music,” says MIMA founding board member Adam Nemett. “The biggest thing I’ve learned from [improvisational music] is that, in those moments, rather than curling up in a ball and saying, ‘It’s over,’ ask, ‘How do we improvise? How do we bend it back into tune or make it work?’” This is the underlying sensibility of the MIMA Method.

The method doesn’t rely on musical instruments or a set songbook. Workshop participants don’t even need musical ability or experience, says Nemett, they just have to show up.

The MIMA curriculum is a framework designed to “draw out the unique rhythms, melodies and lyrics that make sense for [an individual] community or environment,” says Nemett. “Harlem sounds like Harlem, Nepal sounds like Nepal.” And Charlottesville sounds like Charlottesville. “Shady Days,” the song MIMA campers created at the MRC workshop, is a keyboard pop tune with all-ages vocals and R&B drumbeats pumping through saxophone veins; it’s about escaping the intense heat of Charlottesville summer by seeking out the cool shade and waiting for nightfall.

“We do find—and this is a bit cheesy to say—that music is a universal language. People from different cultures, different ages, different languages can keep a beat together,” Nemett says while tapping out a beat on his chest. We can make music with our bodies, without instruments, “at any age, and make something beautiful happen,” he says.

Longtime MIMA music teacher Wenzel, who led that MRC community songwriting workshop, takes it even further, saying that “music is what it means to be human, and being human means interacting and being with others. As a method of communication, a space to experiment and a way of creating emotional bonds between others, creating music together is a human experience that builds empathy and understanding of other people unlike [anything] I have ever experienced.”

That’s why with the MIMA Method, teaching music skills—which already live within us—is secondary to teaching creativity, confidence and collaboration, says Nemett.

Charlottesville seemed like a logical place to establish a new chapter, adds Nemett, who moved to town in 2013 and helped launch the local chapter in February of this year. It is, after all, a town known for its music—there’s jazz at Miller’s, country at the Jefferson, indie at the Tea Bazaar, busking on the Mall and so on. “But there’s so much more that could be supported here,” says Nemett. He knows that there’s music being made in bedrooms, basements and living rooms all over town. People sing together in church, in the car and on their porches.

Nemett hopes that MIMA Charlottesville can help support music and music programs all over central Virginia—in elementary, middle and high schools, in community spaces like the MRC, in adult residential communities like Innisfree Village and through the International Rescue Committee, to name just a few.

MIMA programs are relatively inexpensive to produce, but for schools or organizations that can’t fully afford a program, there’s usually grant money available, says Nemett. Programs are always free for participants, because what’s important is that people—all people—come together to make music and learn the power of improvisation.

After just three MIMA sessions at the MRC, at least one local camper had picked up on that power. Following the group improv session, a young girl with braided hair and wearing beat-up silver sneakers told me that when her older siblings won’t play with her, she plays the piano to keep herself company. I asked her how music makes her feel, and she replied, “It’s just, like, going with it,” before dashing off to watch another camper set up a drum kit, humming the melody to “Shady Days” as she ran.

–Erin O’Hare

MUSIC MAKERS

Add some musical improvisation to your life with MIMA’s “Human DJ” game. Each participant plays the DJ, conducting the group and dictating the direction of a musical experience for a short period before passing the reins to another participant. The overall song never stops but changes gradually with the contributions of each DJ.

1. Gather your group in a circle. Start a basic beat or “pulse” with your feet.

2. Select a confident participant to be the first DJ to step into the center.

3. DJ leads the entire group in a looped musical pattern using voice, body percussion or anything available. Keep it going…

4. The DJ gradually splits the full circle into segments of two to four people, leading each in a call-and-response of a new musical idea or layer. Think in terms of instrumentation: drums, bass, guitar, horns, vocal melody, etc.

5. After five or six layers have been added or changed, the DJ chooses someone to take his place in the center and lead the group.

6. Continue changing DJs and sounds to improvise a constantly changing musical composition.

Tips:

Try an eight-beat phrase. A longer phrase equals variability.

Use eye contact and clear body motions to model dynamic changes, rests, etc. (i.e., raising or lowering your arms to adjust volume and achieve a balanced mix among the group).

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Cville Escape Room challenges your brain

Jessie and Keith Stowell are the creative team behind the mysterious (but not locked) doors of the Cville Escape Room. Image: EZE AMOS

Back in May, a sandwich board adorned with a painted skeleton key advertising the Cville Escape Room popped up on the Downtown Mall, between the Main Street Arena and Violet Crown Cinema. Intrigued, a couple of friends and I book three slots in the fortune teller’s Secret room.

Passing by the sandwich board we climb a staircase full of M.C. Escher prints. “Are you here to see the fortune teller?” escape room co-owner Jessie Stowell asks when we reach the top. We are.

Jessie and her husband, Keith Stowell, lead us to a room with a large, oval conference table and a whiteboard full of instructions; de-motivational posters cover the walls. After a brief tutorial letting us know what we are looking for (clues, puzzles, riddles) and not looking for (trap doors, clues hiding behind furniture or under the carpet), Jessie leads us down a short, arched hallway to a nondescript door.

“You’re private investigators investigating a series of missing person cases,” she tells us in a hushed voice, one hand on the doorknob. “The common link you’ve found is that they’ve all visited this mysterious fortune teller. You’ve learned that she has a very dangerous book, and you have now been hired to get that book. You have one hour until she returns.”

We step into a dimly lit aubergine room and Jessie closes (but doesn’t lock) the door behind us. We pause to notice our surroundings: bookshelves full of framed, spooky daguerreotypes, books and carved boxes, a side table with a globe, tarot cards, a Ouija board, scarves, a violin and sheet music. A silver mirror and some old-timey posters hang on the walls. In the middle of it all is a round table and a crystal ball.

The three of us spend the next hour opening every drawer and container in search of clues, locks, codes and keys, solving puzzles and brain teasers.

Some of the puzzles are easy enough for us to solve individually; others take teamwork. A series of small victories, like finding a lock combination or deciphering a riddle, leads to an “Aha!” moment at the end.

This is all by design—the Stowells want players to feel like they’re being sufficiently challenged and subsequently rewarded for their achievements.

Keith conceives of and designs the story-driven rooms. First, he devises a scenario, then creates a story around it. Next, he comes up with the clues and puzzles, working everything out on a trifold cardboard presentation board with sticky notes, pins and string. From there, they collect furniture and props to physically build the room. Keith says he starts big and narrows it down to what players of all ages can likely solve in an hour.

Everything players need to know exists in the room, and they can ask Escape Room staff for hints by holding a big pink poster board with a cutout question mark up to a surveillance camera hooked up to a screen in the lobby.

If groups continuously request hints on the same puzzle, the Stowells revise it—Jessie says the Spy’s Demise room has changed quite a bit since it first opened.

The Stowells learned about escape rooms while watching “The Intimacy Acceleration” episode of “The Big Bang Theory,” where some of the characters visit an elaborately designed, laboratory-themed escape room and finish the whole thing in just six minutes. (“To be fair, we do all have advanced degrees,” one of the characters notes.) Jessie says she had to try it for herself. She, Keith and their two children visited rooms in Washington, D.C., and Richmond before deciding to open their own. “I thought it was an amazingly fun thing to do–and a fun thing to do with our kids—so we wanted to bring the experience to Charlottesville,” she says.

Leah Combs, a Charlottesville resident who, along with her husband, Jon, has done escape rooms in other cities, recently solved the Spy’s Demise room. “Compared to other rooms we’ve been in, it was minimalistic, but just as challenging,” says Combs. “Other rooms we’ve tackled had hidden doors to other rooms or puzzles you had to solve through holes in the wall…but these puzzles were creative and not like ones we’d seen before,” Combs says.

The quality of the experience relies on the quality of the puzzles, Combs says, and the Cville Escape Room has it down pat.

The Stowells say they will eventually trade the stories out for new ones, perhaps in a year, or when players have completed all of the challenges and reservations start to drop. In the fall, they’ll add a fourth room with a Jack the Ripper theme to the mix. Keith says they’d intended to open an Alice in Wonderland room, but customers have requested darker scenarios, and they are up to the challenge. “We enjoy creating a theater scene where people can come in and play,” says Keith.

The fortune teller exists only in the story created by Keith, but when Jessie opens the door to tell us we have 15 minutes remaining, we are so absorbed in the story and the scene that we all jump, expecting to see the wicked fortune teller at the door, the death tarot card in hand, ready to hand us our fate.

After 64 exhilarating minutes, and with some help from Jessie, we find the fortune teller’s book and dash from the room, delighted by our escape from reality. —Erin O’Hare

Cville Escape Room’s current quests:

Fortune Teller’s Secret

In a room full of tarot cards, a crystal ball and the occult, up to six players race to save our dimension from a clairvoyant’s deadly ambition.

Spy’s Demise

Up to eight secret agents work to save themselves in a room full of double agents, deadly toxins and other wicked things.

Mad Scientist’s Laboratory

Up to eight players enter the laboratory of a deranged scientist to stop him from creating an army of the dead. If you’re into gruesome props, blood and guts, this is the room for you.

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Summer ensemble turns Shakespeare’s Pericles upside-down

After three weeks of intense training, the Troublemakers present Pericles at the Masonic Building in Staunton through July 30. Photo: Publicity photo

On a warm Monday morning earlier this month, a dozen twentysomethings gather in a bright, high- ceilinged room on the fifth floor of the Masonic Building on West Beverley Street in Staunton. Barefoot, they sit close together on the red carpet, pairs of shoes scattered among water bottles, backpacks, script packets and pieces of stage lighting equipment.

A hazy skyline and lush green trees beckon beyond, but the group’s eyes are glued to a cube drawn on a small white board. Local theater director, designer and teacher Thadd McQuade—also barefoot—holds a black dry-erase marker in one hand as he asks the actors to consider building a sizable cube, to be filled with water and placed on the stage for a production of Shakespeare’s Pericles.

Pericles, Prince of Tyre, is a guy with some really bad luck. Throughout the course of the play, he angers an incestuous king; is shipwrecked during a tempest; watches his wife die in childbirth, then gives the baby away; becomes king of Tyre; and hears that his daughter has died and then doesn’t speak for three months out of sadness. He never complains or seeks revenge on the gods, and by play’s end, his virtue is rewarded with wealth, happiness and a reunion with his wife and daughter, who are not dead after all.

“Let’s say yes to everything. Let’s play with everything,” McQuade tells the ensemble, who stir with palpable excitement as they discuss the cube full of water, shadow play with flashlights and how Pericles is a man not of action, but reaction.

For the past three weeks, the ensemble has spent 12 hours a day, six days a week in that room, running lines, rehearsing scenes, taking master classes, discovering characters, building sets, choosing costumes and interpreting a 400-year-old play, drawn from an even older legend, in a way that best suits the group.

This ensemble—the Troublemakers—is the more advanced of two groups participating in Make Trouble, a three-week intensive theater training program created and run by artistic directors McQuade, Colleen Sullivan and Amanda McRaven. Another group, the Trouble Ensemble, performed runs of both Measure for Measure and Much Ado About Nothing earlier this month.

Last summer, McQuade, Sullivan and McRaven worked together in a theater training program that Sullivan, a New York-based theater director and teacher, developed for the Shakespeare Academy @ Stratford in Connecticut. But when the academy chose to take the program in a different artistic direction, McQuade, Sullivan and McRaven decided to continue on their own. They asked students from their Stratford production of Henry V to apply to this new program (which has a tuition fee) and reconvene this summer in Staunton to mount another Shakespeare production. Nearly all of them said yes.

Make Trouble’s training method insists that there’s much more to Shakespeare—to any play—than the text; there are countless ways to interpret a script for the stage. “Shakespeare is malleable,” Sullivan says. “We want our students to understand that there is no one way of making Shakespeare. There are no rules.”

“We [often] look at the playwright as some sort of ultimate authority,” says Brian Watko, a member of the Troublemakers who grew up in Maine and creates theater in New York City. “Of course, the text is an element, but so is the body, and the voice, and everything else that goes into [staging] this play.”

Watko says that ensemble training—in which the group acts, produces, builds sets and costumes and learns more about the possibilities of the text—has allowed him to discover his physical acting side. For Pericles, he must embody two very different characters (Gower, the narrator, and Simonides, Pericles’ father-in-law) in the same play. He says he’s getting out of his head and into his body to explore the expressive physicality of theater.

Vic Chen, a Singapore-born and Glasgow, Scotland-based actor, says that in playing the passive lead character so deeply influenced by his surroundings, she’s learning to “just listen.”

These are the sorts of challenges—along with limited time, money and physical resources—that force the company to be more imaginative, more creative, says Chen. During that first ensemble workshop, McQuade encouraged them to strive for simplicity and always think outside of the box: What if, instead of swords, a knight held a sharp cheese-cutting string taught between his two hands?

McQuade also encouraged them to think about how Pericles can resonate with a current audience. After all, theater has been considered a dying art form for thousands of years. “There’s something about theater that calls to humanity,” says Chen. “What excites me is finding what makes theater necessary.”

For the Troublemakers’ production of Pericles, one part of that something is the Syrian refugee crisis. In that first ensemble meeting in the Masonic Building, McQuade pointed out that Pericles takes place in the modern-day Middle East, on various islands and in Tyre, Lebanon, not far from Syria, where millions of people are currently fleeing a brutal civil war. Shipwreck is a reality, not just a Shakespearean device, McQuade told the ensemble. “I think that needs to live in us” during these performances, McQuade said as the actors nodded their bowed heads.

It’s how they’ll move their audience toward a greater understanding of themselves, the world and the steadfast relevance of Shakespeare’s plays.

“Everyone says, ‘You need a degree to understand Shakespeare,’” Watko says, “but that’s just ridiculous.” All you really need is a passionate, creative theater ensemble to show it to you.

–Erin O’Hare

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Edinburgh Festival Fringe influences local theater

Charlottesville’s Performers Exchange Project will present 21 performances of The Convolution of Pip and Twig at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in August. Fundraising performances take place locally on July 21 and 22 at PVCC’s Maxwell Theater. Photo: Will May

Every August, tens of thousands performers from all over the world flock to Edinburgh, Scotland, and transform the 102-square-mile medieval city into the world’s largest stage: the Edinburgh Festival Fringe.

Just about every space imaginable becomes a venue for more than 3,000 unique shows, says Charlottesville actor, director and producer Ray Nedzel, who has been to Edinburgh Fringe eight times. Scottish teens might perform Macbeth under a bridge while Russian puppeteers are in a church auxiliary room and an Argentinian troupe dances under a tent in the park. Nedzel recalls a show staged in a woman’s bathroom, and another performed for an audience of four in the back of a van driving around the city.

Nedzel says it’s “the Holy Land of performance art.”

This summer, like many Charlottesville performance artists before them, Kara McLane Burke and Siân Richards, along with a small crew, will pack their bags full of costumes, set pieces and tech equipment and make the pilgrimage to Edinburgh.

From August 5-29 at the 64-seat SpaceTriplex, they will stage 21 performances of The Convolution of Pip and Twig, an original play that Burke and Richards created as members of the Charlottesville-based Performers Exchange Project and premiered locally in December 2014.

Intrigued by twins, vaudeville, boats, travel and mythology, and motivated by a desire to create something together, Burke and Richards began the play not with a script or a narrative, but physically, with choreography, expression and vocalization.

They brought in fellow PEP member Martha Mendenhall to help shape these themes into a narrative, and commissioned text from a fourth PEP member, Jennifer Hoyt Tidwell. They commissioned set pieces from Zap McConnell and music from Jim Waive, decided on costumes and even got the same shoulder-length haircut with bangs.

What emerged was a two-part play about adult identical twins Pip (Burke) and Twig (Richards) who do everything together. They wake up in their shared apartment, eat breakfast and go about their—very rehearsed—tandem routine, completely aware of the audience in front of them. When Twig decides she’s had enough of the twin act, she escapes out the window to discover the world beyond. Not willing to give up on the life she’s orchestrated for herself and her twin, Pip tags along on Twig’s odyssey.

By play’s end, Twig finds her voice and Pip understands that their lives are forever changed. Ultimately, Burke says, this is a play about “how we can find our own voice within.”

And for Burke and Richards, Edinburgh Fringe gives them the chance to discover more about their own voices as theatrical artists.

“We feel a little bit like fish out of water,” Mendenhall says. “But you go to Edinburgh and there are so many European companies that work from a physical collective creative perspective, so we’ll get the chance to be in conversation with people that work the way we do.”

Former Live Arts executive director and Pip and Twig co-producer Matt Joslyn (who has produced more than 200 shows at Edinburgh Fringe) says the show is a “sophisticated devised work,” and encouraged Burke and Richards to take it to Edinburgh partly because “physical theater and clown —especially that which transcends language barriers—does very well there.”

With the help of Fringe crew members Mendenhall, McConnell, Waive and Opal Lechmanski, the duo spent the past year preparing Pip and Twig for Edinburgh. They rehearsed and revised the play, sharpened their acting chops and attended last year’s festival to take photos and scope out the vibe. They’re also planning a pre-Fringe run of Pip and Twig at PVCC. (Tickets are available at Mudhouse locations.)

While in Edinburgh, Burke and Richards will rove around in character, perhaps busking with Waive or swallowing swords with Lechmanski, to drum up audiences, Richards says.

Nedzel says the quality of Charlottesville theater is better because of the many artists—like Burke and Richards—who have traveled to the festival over the years. They’re bound to return to Charlottesville carrying the gift that Fringe offers. And, Nedzel says, that’s “the confidence that good art here is good art everywhere.”

–Erin O’Hare

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The imminent rise of the Will Overman Band

Drawing comparisons to The Avett Brothers and Jason Isbell, the Will Overman Band has generated a huge fanbase and lots of buzz about what’s next. See them at Fridays After Five this week. Photo: Publicity photo

While playing an album release show at the Southern on June 4, the five members of local amped-up folk-rock outfit Will Overman Band stepped off the stage and into the crowd to perform an acoustic rendition of the song “Ode to Virginia.”

“We plopped down in the middle of the crowd and they formed a circle around us,” recalls frontman Will Overman. “We were all touching and all sweaty, and we were as much a part of the crowd as we were musicians. People were belting the words—I knew they knew our lyrics…but I didn’t know it would go that well. It was glorious,” he says with a wide smile.

Musicians and crowd alike beamed as they sang, “Take me back to Virginia! / Back before I had a name / Lay me in a golden field on a mountainside / Let the blue sky fill my veins / Let the James carry me home / And wash away all my sins / Like an old dogwood I’ll die where I began.”

The bouncy tune, with its fingerpicked guitar and just enough twinkle and twang, is the perfect opener for the Will Overman Band’s eponymous full-length debut, an 11-track love letter to the Commonwealth of Virginia, its landscapes, its people and the stories therein.

“We draw a lot of inspiration from where we’re from, and we love our roots,” says Overman, the band’s primary songwriter, who, inspired by John Prine, The Avett Brothers and other Americana artists with their hearts on their sleeves, picked up the guitar at 17 and began writing songs to work out what he was feeling.

Now 22, Overman continues to find songs through experience, and relies on his bandmates of more than two years—vocalist Brittney Wagner, drummer Christopher Helms, guitarist Daniel McCarthy and bassist J. Wilkerson—to help him bring those stories to life so they resonate with a wide audience.

Earlier this year, the group recorded Will Overman Band with producer and engineer Dave Stipe at Monkeyclaus Recording Studio in Roseland, Virginia. While the band prides itself on its energetic live show, Overman says the group was eager to get into the studio and lay down the tracks they’d been road-testing in venues up and down the East Coast. They also revisit some of the songs featured on their January 2015 EP, Die Where I Began.

The result is a record that glances back at the band’s past while casting a sharp eye toward its future.

Some of the songs on the record, like “Assateague Island,” “Trail Song” and “Son,” have been around for a while. Overman wrote “Son” six or seven years ago, when he was still a teenager, and says he’d lost the drive to play it live, because it no longer felt like an accurate representation. All of that changed in the studio.

Overman says that when Stipe recommended adding pedal steel guitar and starting the song in a different way, it helped him hear the song anew and understand that it’s still relevant—he’s still a son, he’s just moving forward on the journey.

In a Will Overman Band song, even the most mundane things—such as dancing in daisy pants, reading history books and being bit by bugs on Assateague Island—contain great beauty and wonder. The band aims to “give the common story an epic feel” by putting it into poetry and setting it to music, says Overman.

Many of the stories on Will Overman Band are indeed common. The fivesome sings about loving one’s home (“Ode to Virginia”) and wanderlust (“Gravedigger”), about fading romantic relationships (“All I Say”), about first cars and the loss of innocence (“Adventures with Sunny”), and encourages the listener to find deeper meaning in seemingly average experiences.

On “AHQ” and “Fix My Girl,” the band chronicles a not-so-common story: Overman’s girlfriend’s battle with cancer. The story itself is extraordinary and deeply personal, but the feeling is universal: It’s a horrible, devastating thing to watch a loved one suffer and to feel powerless in your ability to help her.

Overman says that listeners are often surprised to find out these two songs, the upbeat “AHQ” in particular, are about cancer. “It’s like The Smiths’ approach, where you put really grim lyrics over a happy melody,” Overman says. With the album release, Overman hopes fans will spend time with the lyrics, listen carefully and discover the songs anew.

And although the album may be finished, it’s only the beginning for the band. “This is in no way a time for relaxation,” says Wagner. “If anything, it makes me want to focus more time on making new music.” Overman agrees. “I’m glad [these songs] are recorded, and we can move on and write a fresh crop of new songs that represent us, as a band, right now.”

Will Overman Band wraps up with “Pilot Mountain,” a song about the bittersweetness of life on the road. “Pilot Mountain watches over me / Like a mother watches her kin / Though she stays while I’m moving on / I know I’ll see her again,” the song begins, echoing the band’s journeys back and forth across the Virginia/North Carolina border. “Is it a sunrise or a Shell sign?” And then, “Sometimes you gotta rock an empty room,” Overman and Wagner sing in wearily amazed unison. But there’s hope in the music and the voices—they’re playing music for an audience, and, for them, there’s nothing better.

The song ends, fittingly, with a jammy vamp-out “and leaves an open mind to everything,” Overman says. “That’s where we are. We’re looking forward, and we know all that we have to do.”

–Erin O’Hare

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Post Sixty Five rides an undercurrent of emotional energy

Post Sixty Five plays lush, beautiful, guitar-driven rock at the Twisted Branch Tea Bazaar on June 17. Photo: Martyn Kyle

Before a recent Post Sixty Five band practice, frontman Hicham Benhallam sat on a patch of grass outside the rehearsal space and stared into the trees nearby. The muggy June air blurred his vision, so he took off his dark-framed glasses and blinked a few times before acknowledging that there was no relief from the Virginia heat.

Not that he minds it. “For whatever reason, I am very capable of focusing, especially on writing,” when it’s hot and humid and “it feels like every breath you take is almost too much,” he says. Benhallam often shuts off the air conditioning in his apartment when he writes, and the resulting heat finds its way into the band’s songs.

Last September, Post Sixty Five released its debut EP, I Think We’ll Be Okay, featuring five gorgeously moody, atmospheric, post-rock-influenced songs that will break your heart and tenderly suture it back together for you.

Since then, Benhallam and his bandmates —guitarists Kim McMasters and John Matter, and bassist Matt Wood, with either Max Bollinger, Ryan Wood or Rob Dunnenberger alternating on the drums—have been performing those songs and a handful of new ones in some of the most emotionally charged sets being played in Charlottesville right now.

Benhallam says most of the songs deal with “particularly painful things,” like the infidelity of past lovers, feeling unworthy and longing for sex, intimacy and attachment to another person. They’re nearly universal experiences, but there are few platforms to deliberate most of this, he says, so he does it in song. “There is no social context in which it is okay for me to say [something like] ‘I look like a bruise,’” he says, as he does in “Fever,” one of the tracks off the EP and a mainstay in the Post Sixty Five live set.

“Fever” begins with a pretty guitar line that ushers in nervously quick drums and Benhallam’s sonorous voice singing with a hint of despair: “Yes sir, that’s my name / I think I look the same / I’m not growing, I’m afraid / Make sure you never age.”

The music and the lyrics dance delicately through the verse, building anxiety under the surface that quietly, forcefully erupts with cutting guitar and a crash of cymbals and bass once the chorus hits: “I look like a bruise every time we go out / I’m filled with pink I think I got you / Baby I’m gonna lose, I wanna stay in your car / I’m filled with pink, baby I got you.”

This is typical Post Sixty Five: the beauty of lush music, lovely guitar lines, rumbling bass and splashy drums pushing up against the lyrics’ ugly imagery of running a fever, of bruises and flesh, of aging bodies, doubt and inevitable loss.

The band’s songwriting process is slow, meticulous and emotional. Each song begins with a sketch—a small instrumental line—that Benhallam writes and shares with the band. Each band member then writes his or her own part, taking care that every note, tone, pause and word has purpose; it’s what makes the songs so intense.

These are not necessarily easy songs to hear, and the band knows it. There’s a lot going on, and “we demand a certain amount of emotional energy” from the listener, Benhallam says. McMasters says that Post Sixty Five’s music has been criticized for being too “sad,” and here in Charlottesville, “America’s happiest city” according to one study, that’s a tough label to break. It’s also an unfair assessment. (And hey, people still get sad in this town.)

Yes, Post Sixty Five songs can be sad “Will anybody love me? / Will anybody love me?” Benhallam sings on “Beginners”—but they’re visceral, exciting and sexy in their exploration of the dichotomies of beauty and ugliness, of fullness and emptiness, of silence and chaos. “That kind of contrast can be very jarring and arresting,” Matter says.

Benhallam says while writing lyrics for one of the band’s forthcoming singles, “I’m Not Saying This Right” (listen for it in the middle of their live set), he realized that he didn’t want to be a man singing to men about a woman who broke his heart. That’s “boring and overdone,” he says, not to mention unfair to a woman who made the right choice for herself.

The song is about longing. Its music and lyrics together insist that space can be as suffocating as a Virginia summer when you see something momentous happening between two people, but you’re not one of them.

“Virginia felt so swollen,” the song begins, before guitar and bass jump in and follow each other closely as the song continues: “He talks to you sometimes / and casts the net so wide.” As emotional and physical distance grows between Benhallam and other people in the lyrics, the instruments start to spread apart. Drums shimmer more urgently, and the bass reaches a heartbreaking register and splashes out and away from the two guitars. “I’m not good enough yet, I’m not good enough yet, I’m not good enough yet, I’m not good enough yet,” Benhallam sings while the instruments, once together, now separate and fall away, one by one.

The song ends with a single, reverse-looped guitar that swells and contracts, building unresolved harmonic tension with each go-round. It stops short at last, lurching you forward before snapping you back into place. You’re back where you started, but you’ve been moved. And if you’ve learned anything from listening to Post Sixty Five, you know you’re better off for taking the ride.

–Erin O’Hare

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Arts

McGuffey’s life drawing sessions turn perspective on its head

Amateur and professional artists hone their drawing skills with the help of a live model at McGuffey Art Center. Photo: Ryan Jones

On a recent Saturday morning, C arrived at McGuffey Art Center to pose for a life drawing session held in an artist’s basement studio. She knew to expect a challenge.

Robert Bricker, the artist running the session, posed C (not her real name) and another model together in a box with uneven walls jutting out at odd angles. Bricker laced a skeleton between their nude bodies and hung a necklace made of masks around the second model’s neck. After a while, says C, she began to sweat. Her grip on the wall started to slip and her muscles shook, but she held steady.

As the models posed, a dozen or so Charlottesville artists of various ages drew, their eyes fluttering up and down from models to props to page and back again. Each week, artists arrive at McGuffey with their pads, pens and pencils, ready to capture what many consider to be the ultimate challenge in art: the human figure.

These open figure sessions are part of McGuffey’s community outreach program. Member artist Jean Sampson says that the life drawing program began about 15 years ago. Currently, McGuffey offers four life drawing sessions each week, three two-hour nude drawing sessions and one clothed-model, long-pose drawing and painting session.

A rotating cadre of models of varying ages, genders, shapes and sizes sit for the artists each week, and no two sessions are the same. On Wednesday nights, models and artists go through one-minute, three-minute, five-minute, 10-minute and 15-minute poses before digging in to a one-hour pose. Saturday morning sessions give more time to a single pose. The artists don’t offer instruction or critique, but they’re often glad to share work and techniques. “We all learn from each other,” Sampson says.

Steve Taylor, a landscape painter who attended art school and worked in advertising for many years, says the class helps him maintain fundamental drawing skills. He likes the imperative of the short poses and finding difficult angles for the longer poses. But the most challenging thing is creating a drawing “that feels like a real person in a particular place or position,” he says. “It’s not about the level of finish—sometimes a three-minute drawing can feel better than a much longer piece.”

Life drawing session host Bob Anderson says the classes can be therapeutic. “Doing real quick sketches in life drawing will break you out of a painter’s or drawer’s block, and it’ll do it really fast,” he says. When he does a three-minute sketch, for example, he uses a pen, never a pencil—that way, he can’t change a line once it’s on the page, and he’s forced to accept a fluid drawing movement.

Charles Peale sketches during a recent live drawing session at McGuffey Art Center. Photo: Ryan Jones
Charles Peale sketches during a recent live drawing session at McGuffey Art Center. Photo: Ryan Jones

The sessions encourage each artist to develop his own style. While Anderson draws the shadows to create a striking line drawing, Sampson fills her page with all of the props and the setting before drawing the model—the result is somewhat like Picasso’s Guernica, with bodies and objects tumbling with energy across the page.

“There’s something special about interacting with the environment and with the drawing coming through you and onto the page,” Sampson says. “It’s like magic.”

For an artist, the time passes in a snap, but for a model, sitting still for an hour can be just as challenging as leaning over a PVC cube, with one foot in the air, for the same amount of time.

“Any position you hold yourself in for a long period of time, you learn that it’s much harder to hold for a long period of time after you get into it,” C says.

At the start of a session, C, who has modeled at McGuffey since fall 2015, says she’ll choose poses based on what artists want to work on—hands, feet, portraits or dynamic form. She’ll slump softly in a chair or contort her body, turn her face toward or away from the light, grip a prop—maybe a chain, a gourd, a chair—with her hands.

Though C is sometimes asked to assume difficult positions to conjure dramatic tension for the artists to capture, she says she’s never been pushed beyond her own physical or emotional boundaries. She’s found all of the artists to be respectful, supportive and understanding of her limits and those of the other models. If she’s not comfortable, she’ll speak up.

The artists also protect the models’ identities by not sharing their names outside of the classrooms and closed Facebook group. If someone comes to a session and makes a model feel uncomfortable, either in the room or after, that person is not invited back. The models are making themselves vulnerable for the sake of art, and saftey is paramount.

Anderson, known for his oil paintings and intricate landscape drawings, points out that centuries ago—for artists such as Michelangelo or da Vinci, or even Picasso in his blue period—drawing or painting sought to capture the human body exactly. Today that’s easily done with a camera. “Drawing now is much more of a spiritual thing, as opposed to reproduction,” he says, insisting that once an artist can master the human form, he can do anything.

Share your own drawing technique with us in the comments below.

–Erin O’Hare

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Illiterate Light searches for moral middle ground

Sly, modern pop duo Illiterate Light (Jeff Gorman and Jake Cochran) plays up life’s pros and cons at the Twisted Branch Tea Bazaar on April 22, Wild Wolf Brewery on April 23 and the Corner Indie Fest on May 3. Photo: Brandy Somers

On a freezing-cold night in February, Harrisonburg band Illiterate Light played a set under a red light bulb in the kitchen of a house on First Street South, close to the graveyard. It was 1am and a dozen or so 20somethings leaned against walls and countertops, holding cans of Pabst Blue Ribbon and passing around a bottle of Fireball whiskey to warm up, as Jake Cochran and Jeff Gorman played drums and guitar at full volume and sang a chorus in unison: “I want to be moral / I want to be moral / I want to be moral / I want to be moral.”

Heads bobbed up and down to the fuzz-drenched experimental indie rock that wasn’t quite loud enough to wake the dead, but raucous enough for tired neighbors to question the morality of the youth next door.

It’s exactly the scene Cochran and Gorman envisioned when writing songs. “We imagined where we would be playing and what venues, what people we’d be playing to and what would be interesting or funny to say in front of that crowd,” Cochran says. “We want to say things frankly and upfront.”

Many people would be happy to declare “I want to be moral,” Cochran says. And on the flip side, plenty of people would ask, “Who gives a shit about morals? Who cares about morality?” adds Gorman. So when a bunch of people are dancing around and drinking and scream-singing “I want to be moral,” “it’s a pretty fun thing,” Cochran says.

Like many Illiterate Light songs, “Be Moral” is both tongue-in-cheek and completely sincere. Gorman and Cochran aren’t saying they want to be moral, nor are they encouraging their listeners to follow some moral code, but…they’re not not saying that, either. Instead, says Gorman, the song explores how he’s not ready to throw morality out the window, but he acknowledges that his generation is tired of having the conversation.

That threshold between seemingly opposite things is what Illiterate Light likes to explore through song.

Cochran, 25, and Gorman, 26, are best friends. They’ve been writing and playing music together for years, first as a backing band for a vocalist while in college at James Madison University and later in a band called Money Cannot Be Eaten. After MCBE disbanded, Cochran took a break, while Gorman continued playing music and eventually started Illiterate Light as a side project. Once Cochran was ready to make music again, he joined Gorman and bass player Jake Golibart, and the group released the EP Langue in August 2015.

When Golibart left last fall, Cochran says the main concern was whether the band could produce a broad enough sonic spectrum with two musicians. It was challenging to rearrange the songs—they had to scrap some entirely—but, ultimately, the limitations pushed them to be more creative in their musicianship, their songwriting and their showmanship.

Cochran stands up to play the drums, to better facilitate the synergy between himself and Gorman. It’s unusual, and can be musically limiting, says Cochran, who has to balance on one foot in order to use the kick drum or cymbal, but it’s fun to watch.

Gorman covers the low end of the songs by playing a bass pedal and guitar while he sings. But that pedal is finicky, and Gorman spends most of the time between songs on the floor, tuning the pedal, so it’s usually up to Cochran to entertain the crowd. He’ll talk about his CASIO wristwatch, ask audience members about their favorite ice cream, what they’re into—it’s unscripted, off-beat and some of the best stage banter around.

Illiterate Light also tends to pair seemingly different songs together to point out bizarre incongruities of life.

“Chest I,” a song about Gorman and Cochran’s experiences of loss, is about losing fathers, grandfathers and, in many ways, the self. After playing “Chest I” they might launch into “Like a Peach,” a Langue tune about walking into a room intending to find your soulmate.

“One minute I’m grieving the [inevitable] loss of my dad to a degenerative disorder, but I’m still a horny 26-year-old,” says Gorman, eyes wide as he smiles and shrugs his shoulders.

“Like a Peach” begins with Gorman singing, “Come on friend, give me a high five / I really wanna slap your big hand / Pick me up, and we’ll go for a ride / Downtown, lookin’ / For our soulmates / Like a peach / Dropping from some tree.” A few verses later, Gorman’s imagining himself married to a woman he just met, even though he can’t remember her name.

But when Gorman and Cochran start alternating vocals, the song becomes a rather familiar internal monologue: “I recognize the absurdity / (You smell like soap and) / Of looking for real intimacy / (You just touched my leg) / Kids? How soon? / (There are two other girls dancing with us now) / Would you make a good mother?”

It’s funny and poignant because we’ve all been there. We’ve all been Gorman’s guy, looking for our peach, whether we admit it or not. But Illiterate Light is happy to admit it for us, to put it all out there so that we, too, can recognize the absurdity of it all.

–Erin O’Hare

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Arts

Jonathan Teeter takes us back to KNDRGRDN

KNDRGRDN (L to R: Eric Nelson, Jonathan Teeter and Max Bollinger) plays Crozet Pizza at the Buddhist Biker Bar on April 20. Photo: Ariana Miklowitz

During a recent KNDRGRDN gig at Twisted Branch Tea Bazaar, frontman Jonathan Teeter looked up from his guitar mid-song. Bodies were packed in tightly, close to the stage, and he could see people bobbing up and down and singing along to “Your Shadow.”

“Your shadow is coming in / Coming into my room / Your shadow is coming in / You, me and the sandman / Hanging, hanging, hanging / from the roof,” Teeter sang, grinning, joy apparent in his eyes behind his dark-framed glasses as he charmingly swayed back and forth.

He says it was “so, so cool” to have an audience full of friends and strangers connect to the music and sing along to one of his songs. “It’s exactly what I live for.”

Teeter, 26, has been playing in bands around Charlottesville for about five years. Before forming the three-piece KNDRGRDN (pronounced “kindergarten”), he played with the Co-Pilots, and he still plays the occasional solo gig for material that doesn’t quite fit with the loud-and-fast KNDRGRDN sound.

His catchy punk-lite songs with a Brit-pop edge will stick in your head for hours, even days, after hearing them. They stick because Teeter builds most of his songs around vocal melodies.

He says he knows he’s come up with a good vocal melody when he can imagine a trumpet playing it.

Teeter started writing songs when he was about 16. His parents bought him a guitar and he spent hours at a time playing chords in his bedroom and listening to Blur, The Clash and Pulp. During one of those sessions he started improvising lyrics over a chord progression. He says he didn’t know—at least not right away—that he was writing a song.

Now, his songwriting is much more intentional. He strives for simplicity, both in his solo material and in KNDRGRDN songs, but that doesn’t mean it’s easy. “I want people to know…it’s pretty simple, straightforward rock ‘n’ roll, but it’s all very meticulously put together, and it takes a lot of work to make something so simple sound good,” says Teeter.

The frontman is pretty open about the KNDRGRDN elixir. He tends to write complex lyrics, so he puts most of his energy into singing; that limits his guitar playing, so he sticks to power chords, bar chords and just a couple of distortion and delay pedals. With no lead guitar, KNDRGRDN relies on bass player Eric Nelson to pump sonic blood through the veins of a song. “Eric will work forever on bass parts that work both as bass and lead instrument,” Teeter says.

It’s unusual, but that deep, rhythmic lead, coupled with Teeter’s vocal melodies, is what makes KNDRGRDN so damn catchy. There’s plenty to hear, but the songs are simple enough that if you’re standing in the audience, you can hear everything that’s going on, from vocals to power chords to rollicking bass and relentless drums. It’s music to sing and dance along to.

If you listen closely, you’ll hear great variety in Teeter’s lyrics. He wrote the audience favorite “Your Shadow” about Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman comic book series. “Tama Changes Stations” is about the death of Tama, a stray calico cat who became station master of a train station in Wakayama, Japan. “Police” is a protest song examining righteousness: “The stylish kids put in their false teeth / They cut off their hair and occupy Wall Street / I wish I were pure enough to believe / I wish then again that all the fakers would leave / Then there’s the problem with the police / They cut their hair and keep the peace / They keep it with guns / and they keep it with mace / They keep telling me I’m in the wrong parking space,” Teeter sings, his voice hinting at Ray Davies, Damon Albarn, Joe Strummer and Modern Lovers-era Jonathan Richman all at once.

Teeter sees music as a way to conjure images and tell a cinematic story in sound. “The Orange Grove” is an image-rich tune about a man who is told by angels he must watch over an orange grove. He decides he doesn’t like being isolated, “I need a family / and a good place to stay / I need love / I need money and change,” so he escapes from the orange grove only to realize that the outside world is just as horrible.

Sometimes it’s heavy stuff, but it’s life and it’s real, and KNDRGRDN tackles it all with youthful aplomb.

–Erin O’Hare