The Untempered Ensemble presents free performances at the UVA Memorial to Enslaved Labors on November 15, at the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center on November 16, and in the Rotunda’s Dome Room on November 17. Publicity photo.
The concert begins with a thunderous gong and booming timpani.
As the intro song progresses, a guttural drone pulses, seemingly from beneath the audience’s feet, while the breathy undulation of a distant horn floats over the rumble.
Audiences new to Bill Cole’s Untempered Ensemble may not immediately recognize what they’re hearing. That’s because they’re listening to a didgeridoo and a conch shell, two of the non-Western instruments that define the unique sound of this improvisational group joining the University of Virginia’s artist-in-residence program from November 15-17.
The ensemble’s instruments originate from six continents, and the methods used to play them are hypnotizing. Cole’s cheeks bulge as he stores enough air to fill his four-foot-long instrument. Taylor Ho Bynum’s fingers curl deftly inside the seashell. Althea SullyCole expertly strums the 21 strings of her round-bellied kora.
Most of these complicated manipulations happen without sheet music. In fact, the only thing on the musicians’ stands is a single opening line.
This line is based on proverbs shared with Cole by a Nigerian mentor. The syllables of each proverb shape the opening rhythms of the Untempered Ensemble’s unpredictable group journey through sound.
“It could be anybody that takes the lead on it,” says Cole. “After we play the line, whoever jumps out there starts it. It’s joyous to be able to play in a situation where the individuals who are in my ensemble are making equal contributions to the pieces that we’re doing.”
The improvised song grows like a living thing. Occasionally, the sound of individual instruments floats away from the pulsing core—the lilt of the flute, the thrum of the acoustic bass—but there are glowing moments of cohesion, where the entire band comes together as one.
“One of the things that I’ve been working on for quite some time now is to have everybody in the ensemble improvising at the same time,” says Cole. “In other words, we’re not doing solos. We try to play one music, but it’s improvisational style.”
Unlike pop and classical artists, who usually stick to chords shaped from the key the song is played in, Cole and his Untempered Ensemble float outside diatonic boundaries.
Deliberately discordant moments sometimes fit the tone of the proverb the song is based on. That may be the case at UVA’s Memorial to Enslaved Laborers, where the Untempered Ensemble will hold its first Charlottesville performance of the year.
Cole, a descendant of enslaved laborers, is shaping the rhythm of this performance around two proverbs: “No wicked man will escape the judgment of God,” and “As we behave, so we are blessed.”
“Music has a way of initiating certain kinds of feelings within people when they come and hear the performances,” says Cole. “That’s the kind of thing I hope we do in our band.”
The performance will feature Cole on Asian double reeds, Australian didgeridoo, and African wooden flute; Joseph Daley on low brass; Warren Smith on African, Caribbean, and Western percussion; Bynum on cornet, trumpet, and conch shell; Ras Moshe Burnett on saxophones and flute; SullyCole on West African kora; Mali Obomsawin on acoustic bass; and Olivia Shortt on baritone saxophone.
In 1992, the ensemble began with just Cole, Smith, and Daley. The group slowly grew over the next three decades—until COVID-19 abruptly reversed that trend.
As venues closed their doors, Cole’s group shrunk back to a trio once more. Cole and two fellow ensemble members sat on his porch in Vermont, and played music for neighbors who set up folding chairs on the lawn to listen to the unique musical style.
“It’s American music, but in a state like Vermont, people haven’t heard the kind of music that I do,” says Cole. “It’s an interesting experience for both the people we play for and the players that are playing.”
The ensemble will return in full force to Charlottesville as an eight-member group featuring musicians ranging in age from their 20s to their 80s.
“Everybody is learning from everybody else, so it works out,” says Cole. “It’s the idea that everybody believes in the fact that we’re trying to play one music. That makes this important.”
The musicians’ influences range from the Senegalese, from whom Cole’s daughter SullyCole learned the kora during research in West Africa for her doctorate in ethnomusicology, to Aretha Franklin, for whom Smith once played percussion on tour and live TV.
But these differences in age and experience fade away on stage, when communal improvisation turns disparate instruments into a single noise that sounds like, as Bruce Lee Gallanter of the Downtown Music Gallery described it in April, “the dawn of mankind.”
After setting up a time-lapse camera one evening and seeing herself master a 500-piece puzzle in under 90 minutes, speed puzzler Stephanie Owen began to wonder if she should enter a competition. Photo: Eze Amos
Down the street from the medieval cathedral at the stony heart of Valladolid, Spain, sits the Millennium Dome, a geodesic igloo made out of neon-edged hexagons that slot together like jigsaw puzzle pieces.
Inside the dome, thousands more jigsaw puzzle pieces wait in sealed boxes. Contestants from 40 different countries sit at white tables, poised to rip open their box when the timer starts the qualifying round of the 2022 World Jigsaw Puzzle Championships.
A Spanish competitor readies his puzzling fingers. A Turkish puzzler eyes the timer. A Ukrainian contestant nods to her blue-and-yellow supporters.
Behind her American flag, Charlottesville preschool teacher Stephanie Owen waits. She has traveled almost 4,000 miles from Virginia to race against the fastest jigsaw puzzlers in the world.
As a child, when she was home sick from middle school, Owen used to spend her days putting together jigsaw puzzles. As an adult, a positive COVID-19 test renewed her childhood puzzling habits.
“Our family has always been a jigsaw puzzle family,” Owen says. “My grandparents always have a puzzle out on the table when we go. We always do a puzzle with our friends on New Year’s Eve.”
One pandemic night, out of curiosity, Owen set up a clock and time-lapse camera, then watched herself move through a 500-piece puzzle in under one and a half hours.
That’s when she began to wonder if there was such a thing as a jigsaw puzzle race.
When the timer starts, the 60 contestants in Owen’s qualifying round unwrap an image of black dog sitting before a wall of paintings of black dogs.
The sound of cardboard on plastic reverberates through the quiet dome as contestants begin sorting pieces. Each one wants to be the fastest to put all 500 into place.
Some competitors flip over each piece before categorization. Others create color-based piles. The bravest start assembly with most pieces still untouched. Owen begins shaping the border. Officials patrol the aisles in bright yellow World Jigsaw Puzzle Federation vests with cameras and watchful eyes.
Owen methodically spirals inward until all that is left is every puzzler’s nightmare: A wide expanse of fur, one of the most difficult textures in jigsaw.
Her mouth is dry. She cannot waste the moment it would take to sip water, nor can she spare a glance upward when a burst of audience applause signals the first puzzle has been completed. She can only stare intently at her remaining pieces.
“I tried to just stay in the moment, doing the thing that I was there to do, which is putting the pieces together,” Owen says.
With one hand she shoves the 500th piece of black fur into place. With the other, she slams her palm upon the table, signaling her victory to the judge.
Owen is the second American and 15th competitor to finish her qualifier. She has registered the best time of her puzzling career, and earned a spot in the final round of the 2022 World Jigsaw Puzzle Championship.
Day one is over, and for the first time in 58 minutes and 41 seconds, Owen has enough time to unscrew the cap of her water bottle.
In late 2021, Owen’s Google search for jigsaw puzzle races turned up an upcoming Zoom-based competition. She wondered if it could possibly be real.
Days after she signed up, a puzzle wrapped in unmarked paper arrived in Owen’s mailbox. A sticker warned her not to open the package until the timer started for her first-ever speed puzzling competition.
Under the watchful gaze of her laptop camera, Owen crushes her previous times when she completes the 500-piece puzzle in one hour and 30 seconds, giving her a win and the confidence to register for the world championships.
“I think something about the atmosphere and the pressure of it pushes me to think less, and take less time on things, and make faster decisions,” Owen says. “Knowing that I’m competing against other people, not just myself, gives me a thrill.”
Owen’s friends are fascinated by her home puzzle library. They’re stunned when they learn she has an official JPAR score, the puzzling statistic based on the difficulty of competitors’ puzzles.
In contrast, by day two, Valladolid is no stranger to puzzle fever. In cafés and bars around the dome, patrons ignore drinks in favor of practice jigsaws.
A visitor can find puzzles everywhere, from the stones of the cathedral to the hexagons of the Millennium Dome to the rows of white tables where Owen and her nearly 200 fellow competitors wait for the final round to begin.
Ravensburger, the German company that manufactures the puzzles used by World Jigsaw Puzzle Championships, presents finalists with the world premiere of a brand-new puzzle. When the timer starts and Owen opens her bag, she is greeted with a never-before-seen 500-piece rendition of a row of pastel-colored doors.
As always, Owen begins with the border.
When Owen slots her final piece into place, just over one hour has passed. She has officially ranked among the top 50 fastest jigsaw puzzlers in the world.
When she first began competing, Owen worried too much puzzling would burn out her love for her favorite hobby.
But it only took one day after her return to Charlottesville before she was back at Shenanigans, selecting her next jigsaw puzzle.
“I would love to do more competitions,” Owen says. “I don’t have any more on my schedule at the moment, but I’m hoping to find more in-person competitions, along with virtual ones. … It’s a mental exercise for me. It’s meditative. It makes me feel good about myself.”
The Charlottesville Symphony, conducted by Benjamin Rous, opens its 2022-23 season with Sonic Spheres at Old Cabell Hall on Saturday, September 24 at 8pm. Tickets are available at cvillesymphony.org. Publicity photo.
Ancient Greek philosopher Pythagoras sought to find harmony, or the “music of the spheres,” in the vibrations of planets as they orbited through space.
Two thousand years later, Music Director Benjamin Rous is bringing the music of the spheres to Charlottesville in a surprising way: with harmonicas.
In Sonic Spheres, the opening show of the Charlottesville Symphony’s 48th season, eight orchestra members will trade their French horns for harmonicas to imitate what celestial vibrations might sound like for a performance of “Sinfonia (for Orbiting Spheres).”
Rous has taken his baton everywhere from the National Symphony Orchestra to the Buffalo Philharmonic, but this score by American composer Missy Mazzoli is the only instance in which he has conducted harmonicas.
“She does these wonderful crossfades between different keys that you could only really do with harmonica,” Rous says. “It’s quite brilliant, how she’s embodied this idea of the music of the spheres based on the idea of orbiting planets having a frequency, and being in harmony with each other.”
Elizabeth Roberts. Publicity photo.
To avoid getting lost in orbiting chords, Rous must sharpen his conducting style to help his orchestra members find the rhythm of the Sinfonia.
“They walk in and out in this kind of hazy outer-space way, instead of progressing in the straightforward and almost rectangular way that classical music changes harmony,” Rous says.
The five pieces featured in Sonic Spheres are designed to keep audiences’ attention with short jaunts into different genres, from Mazzoli’s celestial imaginings to Johannes Brahms’ “Hungarian Dances” to Johann Hummel’s classical bassoon concerto.
This bassoon concerto demands quick and complicated playing on one of the most difficult orchestral instruments to master, making it the perfect way to display the technical proficiency of principal bassoonist Elizabeth Roberts.
As a child in Alexandria, Virginia, Roberts fell in love with the bassoon, but wasn’t allowed to take up the massive instrument until after she graduated elementary school.
The moment her mom picked her up from the last day of sixth grade, Roberts excitedly directed her to the middle school to borrow her first bassoon.
Not only is the bassoon heavy, but finger positioning is notably difficult. Unlike clarinet or flute, where the instrument rests on a musician’s steady thumb, bassoonists’ supporting thumbs move to cover five different keys beneath the right hand and ten under the left. Many bassoonists run, bike, or swim, Roberts says, to stay fit enough in order to span the keys with agility.
“The same way athletes train, you have to train as performers, from the physical to the expressive side,” Roberts says.
Roberts’ technical abilities were shaped by former Juilliard instructors Arthur Weisberg, who honed her technical skills, and Stephen Maxym, who taught her how to play expressively. Now a teacher herself in Charlottesville, she finds herself reflecting on them in her own lessons.
“What is really nice about teaching music is you’re helping another human being find an expressive tool, and also come to know themselves as a person, so that they can then be better at whatever it is in life they want to be,” Roberts says.
During the bassoon concerto, Roberts will use her lyricism to introduce Hummel’s principal theme before drawing on her years of technical expertise during the rapid climb and tumble of complicated arpeggios.
“I think my strengths as a player are lyrical,” Roberts says. “When I get to play the slow movement, that’s where I feel like I really sing.”
Audiences will hear more of Roberts throughout the 2022-23 season, which will be split between UVA’s Old Cabell Hall and Charlottesville High School’s Martin Luther King Jr. Performing Arts Center.
Both present challenges for the orchestra. Rous says crowd density can drastically change the acoustics of Old Cabell Hall, while the performing arts center presents more air to fill with sound.
But neither obstacle is as great as what the orchestra has faced for the past few years.
“For so many of our students in the orchestra, for the first years and second years and even some of the third years, this will be their first time playing live with the full ensemble,” Roberts says.
COVID-19 protocols kept wind and brass players off the stage from the beginning of the pandemic to March 2021, making this the first time in three years the entire Charlottesville Symphony will begin the season.
“I told the orchestra in the first rehearsal,” Rous says, “that my guiding thought for the entire season was that it’s so exciting to be back together that I just wanted to have every time that we rehearse be a fun time, and to come from a place of joy for the whole season.”
In February, Charlottesville will hear one of Rous’ personal favorites, Anna Thorvaldsdottir’s “Metacosmos,” which the conductor describes as an “impressionistic landscape of Iceland.”
In April, the orchestra will feature a flute concerto by Christopher Rouse, a long-awaited piece which principal flutist Kelly Sulick was originally slated to play in April 2020 with the now-late Rouse in the audience.
And throughout the entirety of the season, audiences will be treated to old favorites from Beethoven to Brahms to Antonín Dvořák’s instantly-recognizable New World Symphony.
“I don’t usually program this much from the top 10 lists,” Rous says. “This season, I thought that I would lean in that direction a little more. And I think the result is going to be a lot of fun music that people already love, and will love to hear.”
Through her platform, Revolutionary Humans, activist Bellamy Shoffner organized the collection and donation of thousands of eggs and gallons of coffee for the Charlottesville day shelter. Photo: Eze Amos
Breakfast is one of The Haven’s largest expenses, so Bellamy Shoffner coordinated the collection and donation of thousands of eggs and gallons of coffee for the Charlottesville day shelter.
Like crafting a pop-up children’s library at the Wildrock nature playscape in Crozet, or buying out a theater for free community showings of The Hate U Give, this was one of the many initiatives Shoffner has led in Charlottesville through her activism platform, Revolutionary Humans.
“I’ve learned that overall, the Charlottesville community is tight-knit, fiery, and selflessly committed to being and raising a generation of revolutionary citizens,” says Shoffner.
This summer, Revolutionary Humans is launching When We Gather, a virtual collective of parent activists helping each other avoid burnout while creating change.
The collective is the culmination of an activism career that began with Shoffner’s Hold the Line, a digital magazine exploring the intersection between parenthood and social justice.
Originally an effort to stand against hate, the publication connected Shoffner with friends and allies across Charlottesville.
“I didn’t expect a digital publication to turn into years-long relationships, but the strength of Revolutionary Humans supporters has made endless opportunities to evolve,” says Shoffner.
Like many Revolutionary Humans programs, Shoffner designed When We Gather so participants can fit activism into their family schedule. That’s why membership includes everything from a book club “paced for busy people,” to family-friendly activity ideas, to an annual virtual retreat for those who can’t get away from home.
Seven years ago, Tikara Cannon went into labor nine weeks before her twins were due.
That day, she learned her daughters would be born on a military base in Nevada, thousands of miles away from her family on the East Coast.
As a new mother, Cannon had received no prenatal education. She was taken aback when, in the middle of preparing for her C-section, her doctor asked her about her breastfeeding plans.
Cannon’s new family received well wishes and hot meals during the twins’ first two weeks in the hospital. But as time dragged on, support trickled away, and Cannon found herself navigating the new and foreign world of motherhood without a strong support system.
In that month and a half spent waiting for her twin daughters to leave the NICU, Cannon decided to forgo a veterinary career in order to help other Charlottesville moms.
“My personal lactation experience is what really made me want to go into the field of lactation,” Cannon says. “I wanted to work more with people to make sure they have good experiences.”
Cannon’s training began with certifications in prenatal education and lactation guidance. Eventually, she added accreditation as a postpartum doula. Unlike regular doulas, who guide women through labor, postpartum doulas help new mothers after birth with everything from housekeeping to meal preparation to moral support.
“These people are next to the mom, really caring for her, and that goes hand in hand with lactation, because it’s not just about breastfeeding the baby,” Cannon says. “It’s about everything.”
When Cannon founded Milk & Cradle, LLC, in fall 2020, the company offered virtual postpartum support and lactation guidance. Her practice has since expanded to provide in-person help and guidance to over 20 Charlottesville families.
“I’m often assisting families that are here for military families, and don’t have support around,” Cannon says. “My story, with preterm infants, and isolation, and no support, and the military, is quite a heavy background most people can resonate with.”
As new mothers arrive home from the hospital, Cannon can help the new mother feed her baby while ensuring her environment is conducive to peaceful nourishment. Especially for women parenting alone or uprooted by military travel, the extra knowledge and support makes early motherhood less daunting.
“I find satisfaction in knowing that I’m doing my part in trying to prevent the experiences that happened to me,” Cannon says. “I’m not going to prevent it all. But knowing I’ve done my due diligence in attempting, that’s very satisfying.”
Before service, Cannon gets to know the family she is assisting. Afterward, she follows up on mother and child through text. Because her services come at such a transformative time for each family, connection with clients rarely ends with her last session.
As Cannon knows from experience, a connection with the local community provides much-needed stability for new families struggling to navigate the complicated world of postpartum care.
“When those sessions end, and they’re like, ‘Oh my God, I don’t know how I could have made it without you,’ it recharges me,” Cannon says. “I am so grateful for the families that have verbalized that to me. It means a lot. It keeps me going.”
The stone walls looming over the deep water of The Quarry Gardens in Schuyler do more than provide a scenic picnic destination 40 minutes south of downtown Charlottesville.
They also form a natural stage, where the Victory Hall Opera troupe performed everything from Mozart to Carly Simon last June in what Artistic Director Miriam Gordon-Stewart considers an acoustic collaboration with nature.
“It feels similar in some ways to singing in an opera house, as you are singing out across the water in these beautiful quarries,” says Gordon-Stewart. “But it is different in the sense that you also have the natural sounds. You have these beautiful bird sounds, and frogs, and all sort of critters that chime in as you’re presenting the music.”
Earlysville-based VHO will begin its seventh season with another unique collaboration. At Fry’s Spring Beach Club in the fall, Metropolitan Opera soprano Janinah Burnett’s Love the Color of Your Butterfly will intertwine soaring operatic vocals with soulful Americana piano in a groundbreaking blend of opera, blues, and jazz.
Australian-born Gordon-Stewart has performed everywhere from Sydney to Paris to Seoul, but she has never seen a performance like Burnett’s or an audience like Charlottesville’s.
“Engaging across disciplines and performing in alternative venues gives people a chance to experience opera in a way that they relate to, and that they can enjoy,” says Gordon-Stewart.
A student with a 15-year history of incarceration set a goal of getting a job in restaurant management during a cooking class conducted by Culinary Concepts AB at the Albemarle-Charlottesville Regional Jail.
Within two years of graduating Antwon Brinson’s training program, the student was a manager at a restaurant, where she hired another former inmate.
“I’ve lived in a lot of places, and I’ve never found a community like this before,” says Brinson. “Here in Charlottesville, I feel like people are more susceptible to lifting each other up and supporting each other, especially in the food industry.”
When Brinson launched Culinary Concepts AB in 2018, he knocked on hundreds of doors to let the community know about a training program designed to create an education pipeline between culinary entrepreneurs and understaffed kitchens. Just seven people applied.
But when every one of those applicants completed the course, passed certifications, and accepted restaurant jobs, Culinary Concepts AB caught the eye of Charlottesville food establishments looking for solutions to high workforce turnover in a city densely populated by restaurants.
“There’s not really an investment happening on the employers’ part, because the expectation is that this person is just here for a paycheck,” says Brinson. “And there’s not really an investment on the employee’s part, because they don’t see the value in the organization. Our goal is to build that bridge.”
Culinary Concepts AB now works with high schools, vocational schools, colleges, and jails to administer training programs, cooking classes, and team-building exercises to interested students at all skill levels. Students are trained in culinary arts and hospitality work, with an emphasis on general life skills.
Scholarships provided in partnership with Charlottesville’s Office of Economic Development and Albemarle County’s Office of Economics allow Brinson and his team to work with entrepreneurs interested in upward mobility in the culinary world, regardless of their current economic status.
Brinson, a father of three and a former high-end resort chef, is looking to expand to a second Virginia location for these programs. Classes mostly take place at Barracks Road, and Brinson receives between 60 and 70 applications each cycle for a kitchen with a capacity of 12.
“Everyone is in need of talent, and we found a recipe for success,” he says. “We found something that works, that not only adds value to the individual that goes to the program, but adds value to the employers.”
The most intense Culinary Concepts AB program is the GO Cook bootcamp, a five-week, five-day-a-week, four-hours-a-day program that trains and certifies workers in cooking and food safety. At the end of the boot camp, students get hands-on experience by shadowing chefs at Charlottesville restaurants. Over 75 local businesses have signed up to partner with the program.
Brinson says about 80 percent of Culinary Concepts AB training program graduates parlay their new life skills in communication, problem-solving, and time management into a food industry job, often with one of the program partners they helped during their training.
“Every single person on the team wants to do something that is making a difference in this world,” says Brinson. “I think that foundationally, because we’re aligned, it doesn’t feel like work… We love seeing people grow, and hearing success stories. It’s fuel on the fire. It makes you want to go harder.”
Yolanda Rabun plays Nina Simone in a one-woman show at UVA’s Culbreth Theatre through August 7. More information is available at virginiatheatrefestival.org. Supplied photo.
Half an hour before taking the stage in No Fear and Blues Long Gone: Nina Simone, actress and lawyer Yolanda Rabun sits in her dressing room listening to Bach.
The room is filled with the music Nina Simone’s grandfather played for her as a young girl, which later inspired the compositions on Rabun’s desk.
Even though she’s preparing to be the only person on stage at the Culbreth Theatre, Rabun is surrounded by her idol.
“I don’t think I feel tremendously the pressure of being by myself, because I’m not really by myself,” she says. “I have her with me. I have her memory. I have her energy. I have her spirit. I have all of my rehearsal. I have all of my learnings—what went wrong, what went right. I have all that with me, so I never feel alone on stage.”
Rabun portrays Simone in No Fear and Blues Long Gone: Nina Simone, an interactive one-woman production exploring the life of one of the most prolific artists and civil rights activists in American history.
The show is part of the Virginia Theatre Festival, formerly the Heritage Theatre Festival, which is returning to the University of Virginia for the first time since 2019.
No Fear is the culmination of Rabun’s lifelong connection with Simone, an activist who wanted freedom—which she defined as “no fear, I mean really, no fear”—for Black people and women in America.
Rabun first heard Simone’s voice at 8 years old, when her mother played a recording of “Four Women.”
To an inexorable beat, Simone used her powerful voice to paint a vivid portrait of four Black women suffering from the lingering impact of slavery and segregation: “My skin is black / My arms are long / My hair is woolly / My back is strong / Strong enough to take the pain / Inflicted again and again.”
When the song ended, the child was left stunned.
“It freaked me out, because she started talking about these four women, and I could see them,” Rabun says. “And I was like, ‘Who is that? Who can sing like that? … We can sing that low?’ And so I started building my contralto. The bottom of my voice is from that, listening to Nina Simone.”
In 2008, Rabun used her contralto to bring to life a vignette crafted by writer Howard Craft and director Kathryn Hunter- Williams for a Nina Simone exhibit at UNC Chapel Hill.
Craft used his script to connect real events in Simone’s life—from her relationship with New York neighbor Malcolm X to her mournful tribute to Martin Luther King, Jr.—with how she might have reacted to current events like the election of President Barack Obama.
“A lot of it, arguably, is speculation of what she would say,” Rabun says. “But I don’t think he got it wrong.”
Since 2008, the world has changed, and so has the play. Based on extensive study of Simone’s writing, career, and life, Craft expanded No Fear to connect Simone’s timeless songs with issues relevant to 2022 audiences.
“It’s a reflection on her experience, where she’s also giving us some tools on how to carry on,” Hunter-Williams says. “Howard has given us an imagining of what she might say to encourage us and strengthen our spines to fight the fights we are fighting.”
Simone’s music emboldens this message, just as it did during her lifetime. “Mississippi Goddam” was written in 1964 in response to the brutal murders of Black children like Emmett Till, but Rabun’s performance draws a visceral response from listeners today.
After performances, audience members share with Hunter-Williams how Simone’s fiery lyrics (“You told me to wash and clean my ears / and talk real fine just like a lady / and you’d stop calling me Sister Sadie / oh but this whole country is full of lies”) resonated with them.
“It’s the only reason we do this crazy art,” says Hunter-Williams. “Every play, every moment, everything I do, is finding a way to connect with the audience, to let them know how powerful theater is, and how it really can be a vehicle for change, and for reflection, and for inspiration. It is why we do what we do.”
Performing these politically powerful songs, which Simone later said damaged her career, is when Rabun feels closest to the artist she is embodying.
“That’s when I think Nina Simone started becoming more of the artist she wanted to be,” Rabun says. “She went into civil rights music because that’s a part of who she was. That was a part of her entire struggle, of facing the fact that her color was the barrier to the success that she wanted to achieve and was denied.”
The Merry Widow will take the Paramount stage for two shows on July 22 and July 24. More info can be found at charlottesvilleopera.org. Photo: Tristan Williams.
In the winter of 2019, Dr. Caroline Worra was in Hong Kong playing the role of wealthy widow Hanna Glawari, opposite Richard Troxell as her ex-lover Count Danilo, in a performance of Franz Lehár’s 1905 operetta The Merry Widow.
Three years and 8,000 miles later, Worra and Troxell are preparing to reprise their roles with the Charlottesville Opera. Accompanied by a cast of 127 people who have traveled from all corners of the United States, the group will perform two shows in Charlottesville, a city Troxell says talks opera “like New Yorkers talk baseball.”
“A lot of times when you’re in New York, at The Met, a lot of people who are going to see that opera are going to impress everybody else,” says Troxell. “In smaller towns, especially, I’ve noticed, in the South, people go because they love the opera.”
The Merry Widow is the story of Hanna, who has suitors vying for her fortune, and Count Danilo, her true love who is too proud to marry her for money. Drama, intrigue, and comical misunderstandings ensue.
“I think on the surface, the operetta can be ridiculous, as if it doesn’t fit in this time period,” says Troxell. “But if you go to the ‘true love’ part of it, we all do really ridiculous and stupid things for true love.”
A few aspects of The Merry Widow make it what director Stephanie Havey describes as “a great first opera.” It is an operetta, which moves along at a pace similar to a modern musical and relies heavily on spoken dialogue. It also features plenty of toe-tapping music, including a catchy crowd-pleaser in “The Merry Widow Waltz.”
The production’s original German lyrics have been translated to English. Combined with English supertitles above the stage, newbies can laugh along with the slapstick humor as bumbling side characters attempt to figure out who will win Hanna’s money.
“Especially for comedy, it’s nice to be in English, because then the audience is hearing the funny things right away instead of reading ahead,” Worra says. “It’s always a little strange when you haven’t said the punchline yet, and they’ve already started laughing.”
Like most things written by men over a century ago, The Merry Widow does not always lift its female characters. At one point, a number about how difficult it is to understand women escalates into a celebratory kickline. But these over-the-top moments fade into silliness behind the heartfelt love story, Havey says, allowing the operetta to resonate with a 21st-century audience.
“It’s pointing out the misogyny that would have existed in that time, and it’s making fun of it,” Havey explains. “In the end, Hanna really is the smartest character on stage, and she has complete autonomy. She chooses her future. She chooses the man that she wants to marry for love.”
In order to connect the audience with the operetta’s tongue-in-cheek humor, Havey works with the merry widow herself. Worra serves as both the show’s lead and the artistic director of the opera company, overlapping roles at times distinguished only by whether or not she’s wearing her artistic director name tag.
These intersecting roles offer Havey the rare opportunity to work alongside an artistic director with an insider’s perspective.
“Being a singer, performer, and artistic director, you’re able to see all of it,” Troxell says. “She’s been doing this for a long time, and she knows how it all could work, and should work, and does a better job of it than some people who have only worn one hat the whole time.”
In 2021, Charlottesville Opera broke from operatic tradition when it performed the first-ever theatrical production at the Ting Pavilion. Because of the space their voices needed to fill, the singers were fitted with microphones, an audio aid almost never used in opera.
The boom of La Bohème from enormous speakers on the Downtown Mall gave the most visibility to opera Charlottesville had ever seen.
“We had a lot of first-time operagoers come to the Ting Pavilion, because you could just be walking around right in town and hear it,” Havey says. “We had 100 people standing at the back wall, which was great, we love that.”
The opera capitalized on this visibility, and its return to The Paramount Theater, by beginning its 2022 season with The Sound of Music. The program drew in Charlottesville families and children, many of whom had never experienced opera before. Worra hopes they join Downtown Mall passersby in returning for The Merry Widow.
“To actually see an opera live, there’s something that’s just so special about that,” Worra says. “To hear the powerful voices that are not amplified, carrying over and touching these people in the audience. It touches them right in the heart.”
Jada Seaman is soaring at the University of Virginia. Photo: Matt Riley/UVA Athletics.
When Carla Williams took charge of University of Virginia athletics in 2017, she was the only African American woman directing sports at a Power Five school.
Now, she is one of three.
But Vanderbilt’s hiring of Candice Storey Lee, and Duke’s of Nina King, is not the only way Williams has helped shape sports during her six years as UVA’s athletic director. On March 21, Williams made one of the biggest hires of her career by naming Amaka “Mox” Agugua-Hamilton head coach of UVA women’s basketball.
In 2019-20, Agugua-Hamilton set a Missouri State record for wins as a rookie coach. After leading the Lady Bears to a 73-15 record over three seasons, she will bring four assistant coaches and her FABs (family, academics, basketball) coaching philosophy to Virginia.
While Agugua-Hamilton implements her fast-paced scoring style, which she says is influenced in part by men’s basketball head coach Tony Bennett’s mover-blocker offense, Williams will continue implementation of her “Master Plan,” a $12-14 million overhaul of UVA athletic facilities.
As these two women decide the future of UVA women’s sports, here’s a glimpse at 11 of the female athletes who have shaped the university’s 2021-22 season, plus a Notre Dame transfer who’s thrilled she’s “coming home.”
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Images: Matt Riley/UVA Athletics
Halfway through Virginia rowing varsity four’s grand final race, where senior Hailey Barnett (1) was rowing in lane five, Duke nosed ahead in lane six.
“We knew they would try to make moves on us,” Barnett says. “So, we decided to take a move against them.”
In the final 500 meters of the race, the Cavaliers made a power 10 move, where all rowers coordinated 10 powerful, simultaneous strokes.
The crew finished with the fourth-fastest varsity four time in conference history to help Virginia win its 12th consecutive ACC rowing championship.
“We didn’t do as well as we’d hoped throughout the beginning of the season, so we were honestly a bit nervous going into it,” Barnett says. “But our motto on the team is to stay humble and hungry, so we were ready to give it our all.”
That competitive mindset is a Barnett family tradition. Barnett’s father, Fred Lee Barnett, was an NFL wide receiver from 1990 to 1997. Her mother, Jacqueline Barnett, is a dancer. Both provide guidance and support for Barnett and her twin sister and UVA roommate Myla Grace Barnett (2), a senior defender for UVA lacrosse.
Myla Barnett recorded 10 caused turnovers in 2022, including a single game-best of three in the 2022 ACC semifinal. Growing up, she had few Black lacrosse players to look up to. Now, she is playing in this month’s nationally televised NCAA women’s lacrosse tournament.
“I know that there are a lot of younger Black lacrosse players who want to be in my shoes and want to have these opportunities,” she says. “I’ve had younger Black aspiring lacrosse players DM me on Instagram. That is something that’s super important to me, and a lot of why I keep going.”
Barnett has provided coaching clinics for young Black players, and played tournaments alongside Black college stars like Syracuse’s Emma Ward and Ohio State’s Chloë Johnson.
Meanwhile, as part of her Citizen Leaders and Sports Ethics Community Impact Fellowship at UVA’s Contemplative Sciences Center, Barnett is planning anti-racist student-athlete education and a commemoration for Virginia’s enslaved laborers. She is also a member of Generation Now, an organization diversifying the sport of rowing.
“There is definitely a disparity in Black collegiate rowers, and Black rowers in high school, and I think it’s because of the lack of exposure that kids of color have in the sport of rowing,” Barnett says. “I’m happy to set the example for other kids of color who want to row.”
After UVA’s NCAA lacrosse bid, Barnett is preparing for the strangeness of being “more than 10 feet away” from her sister for the first time when she starts a job on Wall Street this summer.
“I’m glad that there’s still FaceTime, and things like that,” she says. “We’ll definitely be speaking to each other every day.”
This year’s Virginia men’s and women’s swim and dive ACC championships, usually held at staggered times, played out side-by-side at Georgia Tech from February 15 to 19.
That meant 15 minutes after junior Kate Douglass (3) helped the women’s team set an American record for the 200-meter freestyle relay, she was able to watch the men’s team set a record of their own.
“I think that was one of the coolest things I’ve ever been a part of,” Douglass says. “Breaking the American record myself was super exciting, but then getting to see the men do it right after, our team just went crazy. You could just tell how much we all loved and supported each other.”
The relay record wasn’t the only mark statistics major and 2020 Tokyo Olympics bronze medalist Douglass made on college swimming history in 2022.
As she helped Virginia successfully defend its NCAA title on March 16, Douglass became the first college swimmer to claim three individual titles in three different strokes by winning the 50 freestyle, 100 butterfly, and 200 breaststroke.
What’s more, she set American records in all three events.
“I just wanted to get as many points as I could for my team, and I wanted to make sure that I was having fun with my teammates and that everyone was just smiling and enjoying themselves,” Douglass says. “I think what’s really special about our team is that we don’t really do it for ourselves. We do it for each other. And that definitely helps take the pressure off yourself.”
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Images: Matt Riley/UVA Athletics
Whether indoor, outdoor, or at a championship, junior sprinter and jumper Jada Seaman (4) loves the 200-meter race.
“It’s so quick and just fun to me,” Seaman says. “I feel like the 200 is the perfect length, too. It’s not too short, like the 60. It’s not too long and painful, like the 400. It’s just that happy balance.”
In 2021, Seaman set the Virginia freshman record for the 200-meter with a time of 23.70.
The next year, she clocked in at 23.18 seconds—just 0.01 short of Sonja Fridy’s 1987 all-time school record.
“I really want to break 23 seconds,” Seaman says. “That’s my goal, so hopefully I’ll be able to do that.”
In addition to working toward a school record and studying business with a “Mad Men”-inspired interest in marketing, Seaman has been perfecting her long jump.
“My strategy up to now has just been to run and just kind of hope for the best, because speed on the runway has kind of saved me,” Seaman says. “I’m not that pretty in the air, but I’m fast on the runway. I just need to be able to hone my speed and really put it all together in the end.”
Seaman put this work to the test at the ACC championships on May 12. This jump was different from the others. With the help of teammates and coaches, she had learned to enjoy the leap.
“I got sixth place, and I’ve won long jump three times now, but getting that medal means a lot to me,” Seaman says. “That was the first time I really had fun.”
After 70 scoreless minutes of soccer against defending national champion Santa Clara, Virginia was granted a free kick near the top left corner of the box.
Sophomore midfielder Lia Godfrey (5) lined herself up, thought of the team’s desire to win for recently injured senior forward Rebecca Jarrett, and curved her shot into the net.
“I work on shooting from different areas around the box, and getting it up and over the wall, because that’s kind of one of the most difficult parts of shooting a free kick…and it went up over that wall,” Godfrey says. “That was something that I’ve just been working on for so long.”
Godfrey’s goal decided one of the 15 victories, which allowed the Cavaliers to clinch the top spot in the ACC with a draw against Florida State on October 28.
“That is one of the hardest things to do, is win a regular season title, playing that many games and coming out on top,” Godfrey says. “We celebrated in the locker room. There was a lot of dancing.”
While completing the first two years of a biology degree and shadowing small animal vets in pursuit of a veterinary career, Godfrey has led Virginia in assists for two seasons.
“A lot of it has to do with connections between me and my teammates,” Godfrey says. “They make the right runs so that I’m able to play those passes. Sometimes I may not see them, but they make a good run…they’re able to read what you want, and I know what they want, so those passes are just able to connect.”
In the top of the first inning against Sacred Heart on February 19, a Virginia softball player waited in scoring position.
From the confidence with which freshman catcher and utility player Sarah Coon hit the ball to send her home, the crowd could have never guessed it was only Coon’s eighth college game.
Sacred Heart retaliated with three runs in the bottom of the frame. That blow might have felled a previous Virginia squad. Instead, Coon polished off a 9-4 comeback win in the sixth inning by cracking the first homer of her college career over the fence.
That four-RBI game helped ACC All-Freshman Coon rack up 32 RBIs in 51 games to help Virginia tie a school record with 12 conference wins.
When Virginia volleyball went down 23-21 against Bellarmine at Memorial Gym on September 18, it looked as if the Cavaliers were in danger of dropping the first set of the home tournament.
Instead, 6-foot 3-inch graduate student middle blocker Alana Walker, who joined the Hoos after racking up 741 career kills for Northwestern, led a comeback. She slammed down back-to-back blocks to clinch both the second and third sets of a 3-0 win.
Walker recorded 16 kills that day as the Cavaliers swept Georgetown and Fairleigh Dickinson to finish out a perfect 9-0 tournament. She went on to lead the ACC, rank second in the NCAA, and mark the second-best single-season blocking performance in Virginia volleyball history by averaging 1.51 blocks per set.
With 19.5 seconds left in the third quarter of a scoreless battle with No. 6 Syracuse, junior midfielder Danielle Husar found the ball on her field hockey stick at the side of the net.
She lifted it into the goal to help No. 16 Virginia grant Syracuse its first loss in over a month.
The goal reflected the Virginia midfielder’s international career as striker for Team Canada. In April, Husar traveled to Potchefstroom, South Africa, to represent Virginia and her native Mississauga as a striker at the FIH Junior World Cup. Last year, she helped win the first Pan American gold medal in Canadian history at the Junior Pan American Cup in Santiago, Chile.
During the May 10 Ann Arbor Regional, from which four golf teams advance to the NCAA tournament, all eyes were on Virginia sophomore Jennifer Cleary after three birdies put her 3-under par halfway through the second round of play.
A bogey on the 12th hole looked like it might set Cleary back—but the Cavaliers’ leader in stroke average knew how to rally. Cleary knocked in back-to-back birdies on holes 14 and 15 to record a career-best 4-under 67.
Cleary’s score marked just the fourth time in program history a Cavalier has recorded a 67 during regional play, and helped Virginia claim an NCAA berth with the third-best team score ever recorded in a single round at Michigan’s golf course.
A storm thundered through Charlottesville as Virginia tennis hosted Oklahoma State in the NCAA Round of 16 on May 14, causing the singles tournament to move indoors halfway through as Oklahoma State claimed four of the first six sets.
But it takes more than a two-set deficit and some rain to rattle sophomore Emma Navarro (6), who dispatched her opponent in two efficient sets to help the Cavaliers advance to the quarterfinals of the NCAA Women’s Tennis Team Championship for the first time since 2016.
After joining Danielle Collins (2014, 2016) as the second player in program history to claim the NCAA singles title in 2021, Navarro, in 2022, was the first Virginia singles competitor to enter the NCAA singles tournament as the No. 1 seed.
In her second game as team captain of Virginia squash on November 14, senior Caroline Baldwin won her first set against fourth-ranked Columbia’s Ellie McVeigh.
McVeigh claimed the next two sets, putting Baldwin—and Virginia’s hopes of emerging with victory against their Ivy League opponent—on the ropes.
Baldwin rallied to win the final two sets, earning the difference-making point in a historic 5-4 win over the highest-ranked squash team Virginia has ever defeated.
“I’m coming home,” Tweeted Ruckersville native Sam Brunelle on April 9, when she announced her decision to transfer from Notre Dame to Virginia.
In 2019, Brunelle emerged from William Monroe High School as one of the top basketball recruits in the United States. After leading ACC freshmen in scoring (13.9 points per game) in 2019-20, a series of injuries haven’t been enough to slow the 6-foot 2-inch Brunelle.
In Notre Dame’s November 9 season opener against Ohio, she came off the bench to drop 20 points in 17 minutes. That’s the kind of offensive explosion Agugua-Hamilton hopes Brunelle will repeat in Charlottesville.
