Author: Sarah Lawson

Sarah has lived in Charlottesville since 2002 - long enough to consider herself a local. In addition to graduating from UVa and co-founding The Bridge Film Series, she has worn a variety of hats including book designer, documentary film curator, animal caretaker, and popcorn maker. The opinions here are completely her own and unassociated with her work at Piedmont Council for the Arts (PCA). Sarah's interests include public art, experimental films, travel, and design.

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Arts

Tune up: A new generation of concert bookers finds its niche

Local musician Katie Wood launched the booking company Valence Shows to take on the duty of filling the Twisted Branch Tea Bazaar’s live music calendar. Photo: Rammelkamp Foto

“A valence bond is when atoms are held together by the electrons they share. It seemed really fitting for how music events can bring community members together through the things they share,” says Katie Wood, describing her new endeavor, Valence Shows. Under this moniker, Wood is one of the newest live music bookers in town.

Wood’s venue of choice is the Twisted Branch Tea Bazaar, where she stages bands and solo acts to share their musical stylings. “To me, the Tea Bazaar holds a critical niche in the Charlottesville music community by showing what couldn’t or wouldn’t be put on anywhere else,” says Wood. “This includes fringe genres, smaller acts, more intimate shows and acts by misrepresented performers.”

Though Valence Shows is new to the local music scene, Wood has booked shows in Williamsburg, Virginia, and is a musician herself. She had some help from the previous Tea Bazaar contact in getting the project off the ground. “Annie [Dunckel] from Lap The Miles offered me the Tea Bazaar,” says Wood. “I was one of a list of interested and qualified people. I jumped at the offer, and she saved the spot for me while I was traveling out of the country the past few months.” She launched Valence in October, taking the reins from Lap The Miles. But the story of how bands get to play the Tea Bazaar goes back much further than that.

When Jacob Wolf started Holy Smokes Booking, he was a student at Bennington College. After graduation, he moved back home to Charlottesville and eventually began booking shows at the Tea Bazaar under the same moniker. In 2013, Wolf passed the task of filling the venue’s event calendar to Amanda Laskey, who started her own company named Lap The Miles. In due time, Laskey migrated to New York, but not before showing Dunckel the ropes. Now, Dunckel is stepping away and Wood is taking over, beginning another chapter at the Tea Bazaar.

Born and raised in Nelson County, Wood is connected to the local arts and culture community in more ways than one. In addition to forming Valence, she is a visual artist who draws inspiration from the region. Her prints and collage-like paintings invoke the subtle curves of the Blue Ridge Mountains; her drawings have a folk art quality to them, with an emphasis on lines and texture.

Music, however, is clearly where Wood’s passion resides. Performing under her own name, she plays dreamy, lo-fi tunes with a haunting, fuzzy underbelly that keeps them from being pure pop. She performs locally, and it’s this very detail that makes her such a great fit for the Tea Bazaar. “Having been on the other side of the booking process as a musician, I try to be as good as I can to the artists by responding to e-mails in time, paying them well and just being nice,” says Wood. “What musicians like about the Tea Bazaar is that it’s so personal. It’s just me setting stuff up—there’s no bureaucracy, no overhead.”

This welcoming environment and creative freedom is something the local music scene has come to depend on over the years, at venues ranging from the Satellite Ballroom and The Bridge PAI to the Pudhouse and Dust Warehouse. Musicians and those interested in supporting their work have consistently led the efforts in fostering independent venues and putting on the shows that appeal to a variety of tastes. It keeps Charlottesville’s music scene diverse and vital.

“I’m trying to continue to make this space available,” says Wood. “In particular, I’m working towards creating more chill, queer space, which is something that I feel like Charlottesville needs.”

As Wood gets underway with Valence Shows, another up-and-coming group is working to “showcase touring and local artists that might not necessarily get commercial backing,” according to Andy Dunlap, who, along with Jack Lilienthal, Alexander Tanson and Mike Waite, has recently started arranging shows under the name Dead City.

The Dead City approach is simple and “open-sourced,” according to the four. “We just want people to have fun and get excited about music. We think it will really bring the community and music scene closer together,” says Dunlap on behalf of the team. This means that Dead City shows could more readily be described as underground or punk. Dead City venues can be anything from a parking lot to an under-utilized stage, with wide variation in between.

The group has already booked a handful of shows that represent the local music scene, from rock bands like New Boss to more experimental acts such as analog synthesizer project The Voice of Saturn, and there’s more planned for the coming months. In fact, if all goes well, Dead City will demonstrate that Charlottesville is anything but.

What type of live music is missing in Charlottesville?

Tell us in the comments below!

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Arts

The mouths of monsters: Lincoln Michel’s Upright Beasts finds cohesion in the surreal

Lincoln Michel’s debut book, Upright Beasts, reflects his genre-bending style in a collection of short stories that challenge interpretation. Photo: Andrew Owen

Charlottesville native Lincoln Michel knows a thing or two about literature. A familiar face in the New York literary community, he received his MFA in fiction from Columbia University and is currently the editor-in-chief of electricliterature.com as well as a co-founder of Gigantic, a magazine dedicated to flash fiction. Michel has also been publishing short works of his own in literary magazines for the past decade. Heck, he even wrote a recent BuzzFeed piece titled, “The Ultimate Guide to Getting Published in a Literary Magazine.” You get the idea.

“There is an odd aura that comes with putting out a book,” Michel says. “Readers and critics take you much more seriously when you’ve gone through the process of publishing an actual book.”

Michel read selections from his debut book, Upright Beasts, at the New Dominion Bookshop on November 13. For those who missed the reading, there are still plenty of reasons to pick up a copy.

Michel received commendations leading up to and following the book’s Brooklyn launch party in early October. Admittedly, the praise is warranted. Though each story was published previously as a standalone piece, the nuance with which they’ve been organized in the book warps and enhances the reading experience. Some stories lean in the general direction of something resembling reality; others tack strongly toward the surreal. However, all share Michel’s knack for examining the fissures that, at times, open between the ordinary and the profound. In The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human, literary scholar Jonathan Gottschall writes, “No matter how hard we concentrate, no matter how hard we dig in our heels, we can’t resist the gravity of alternate worlds.” This is certainly true within the pages of Upright Beasts.

Narratively, each story works well as a singular piece but, like the best collections, gains in significance when stitched together with others. The individual stories begin to coalesce into a singular reality—very different from our own, but difficult to separate from each other at times. “Dark Air” takes place on a farm that feels like it might share a fence line with the pastoral landscape where “Things Left Outside” is set, yet the former features a monstrous, fleshy creature with supernatural powers, and the latter a woman who encounters a dead body that may or may not be her own. Both require a suspension of disbelief and both nudge the reader to imagine the extraordinary in the mundane.

While many aspects of this world differ from our own, in minute or monstrous ways, others are more familiar. Indeed, the influence of Central Virginia is felt in more than a few of these stories. For instance, the quarry in “Halfway Home to Somewhere Else” will remind many local readers of afternoon escapes to nearby swimming holes.

“I think the landscape of Virginia greatly influenced me,” Michel says. “The first house I grew up in was surrounded by woods, and the Virginia forests and the deer, salamanders, crayfish, birds, water spiders and hills covered in kudzu form a lot of my early memories. I’m certainly drawn to those things when writing; they’ve been imbued with personal meaning. Most of the second section of the book, ‘North American Mammals,’ is more or less based in Central Virginia.”

Michel’s stories explore our world by reflecting on a simulacrum through the lives of the titular upright beasts. These characters exist and the reader witnesses as they have experiences, but each story is about more than the action that takes place on the page. In “The Room Inside My Father’s Room” and “My Life in the Bellies of Beasts,” one character is hampered by the expectations of family and home, while the other is marooned in a series of fleshy stomachs along an upward journey on the food chain. However, both stories are effective meditations on the limitations of reality and the psychic fallout they can create. When the stories succeed, they do so in part because Michel leaves space for the reader to inhabit the narrative, filling in meaning and allowing a certain leeway in interpretation.

Citing his influences, Michel is genre-agnostic, including everyone from Ursula K. Le Guin and Raymond Chandler to Flannery O’Connor and Italo Calvino. “My absolute favorite authors were…writers of weird happenings and off-kilter worlds,” he says. With Upright Beasts, Michel has succeeded in writing that very type of multifaceted and unexpected book for his own readers to be shaped by and to enjoy. His future projects promise the same, including an upcoming novel about super villains, a collaborative graphic novel imagining Werner Herzog as a park ranger and a ghost story.

“I always knew I wanted to write in different genres, in much the same way that I want to write with different styles, different voices and different structures,” says Michel. “There’s no reason to box yourself in with fiction.”

Who is your favorite writer from Charlottesville?

Share your answer in the comments below.

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Arts News

PCA executive director exits after less than a year

Piedmont Council of the Arts announced Gram Slaton's departure earlier this week. He joined the organization in January 2015. Image: Martyn Kyle

On Tuesday, November 10, Piedmont Council for the Arts announced that executive director Gram Slaton will leave his current position effective November 15. The PCA Board of Directors hired Slaton in January.

In May, Slaton was quoted in C-VILLE Weekly, saying that he hoped to avoid “constantly losing all institutional knowledge” through staff turnover at PCA. He also proposed a two-year timeline for his efforts in reimagining the ad hoc local arts council and its services to the local population.

His major achievements at PCA include the creation of an advisory board of 20- and 30-somethings, known as the 2030 Board, as well as collaborations with the city such as the upcoming Arts Pitch Night with Energize!Charlottesville on November 19.

Given the lack of an immediate replacement for the leadership role, it remains to be seen how this staff turnover will effect the small nonprofit’s continued efforts to implement the Create Charlottesville/Albemarle cultural plan. However, the PCA Board of Directors reports that a search for Slaton’s replacement is already underway.

 

Related stories:

Reimagined: PCA finds new direction under Gram Slaton

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Arts

The big picture: Filmmaker Geoff Luck on what we can learn from elephants

National Geographic filmmaker Geoff Luck has global experience in the natural world. He will give a TEDx talk on Friday about how working in Botswana with an elephant named Naledi became a life-changing event. Photo: Kris Denton

In the parable of the blind men and the elephant, each man takes his hands and feels a part of the elephant—a tusk, a haunch, the trunk, perhaps even the tail. Each then reports back to the others with a conflicting impression of the animal, based on the small square footage he covered. The lesson is about how we lose by focusing on a single part of the whole, rather than opening ourselves up to the big picture.

As a National Geographic filmmaker, Geoff Luck has experienced a wide swath of the microcosms that make up our world, covering diverse continents and cultures—but he also knows a hell of a lot about elephants. As part of TEDxCharlottesville’s November 13 event, Luck will give a talk on lessons he learned during his recent experience documenting a baby elephant in Botswana.

Though Luck has worked on more than 100 programs for National Geographic, he says this project was different. “This is really the first time where I literally called back from the field to tell my wife, ‘I’m changed from this,’” says Luck.

Using Amsterdam as a home base and relocating his family there for a year, Luck headed to Botswana for weeks at a time to work in the Okavango Delta. There, he became part of a team that was producing a documentary on an orphaned baby elephant named Naledi, which means star in Setswana, the primary language spoken in Botswana. For Luck, the simple act of “being able to touch the baby elephant and have it wrap its trunk around me” was momentous.

“I’ve had the chance to get up close to and film a number of other animals, great white sharks, komodo dragons, wolves—and I’ve found them all astonishing,” Luck says. “But for whatever reason, there’s something about the otherness in elephants. It’s so radically different in every way and yet it is astonishingly the same. They look after each other and care for each other. They have empathy and can recognize human speech. It’s amazing.”

He remains in awe of the ongoing scientific discoveries related to the multifaceted intelligence that elephants exhibit, ranging from vocal communications to sign language and other behaviors that aren’t very different from our own, as humans. “I got to learn about them and get a little glimmer of insight into how complex, emotional, intelligent and humbling they are,” he says. Despite this, Luck describes African elephants as “basically political refugees, fleeing human beings,” and part of the purpose of the documentary project in Botswana was to raise awareness about the plight of elephants in terms of poaching and the impact of human expansion.

This particular project completed, Luck and his family have returned home to Charlottesville. “There are certainly times that I’ve missed Naledi. You develop emotional ties, and your connection doesn’t just go away,” Luck says.

According to Luck, Naledi will continue to be very fragile for a while, until she’s about 3 years old and more fully developed. He adds that his TEDxCharlottesville talk will use Naledi’s story as “a way to talk about how we, as a species, separate ourselves from the natural world, when that’s not the case at all.”

Just as each individual human is not so very different from each other, so too are all of the species on the planet. Luck feels that the trick is to learn to perceive the similarities rather than the differences; the big picture rather than the narrow focus.

“You want people to have appreciation for where we sit in the natural world and have a greater sense of acceptance about others that are different, whether those are other species or other human beings,” he says.

Luck is one of the 23 presenters who will each have 18 minutes onstage at TEDxCharlottesville on Friday. Each year, speakers are drawn from a pool of applications and nominations, based on their areas of expertise and presentation skills. Once selected, they have the opportunity to work with coaches including Kate Bennis, Ray Nedzel, Bree Luck, Miller Murray Susen and Chris Patrick, among others.

Presenting on the theme of “What If…,” each speaker for this year’s event was selected for his or her ability to convey a unique part of “the elephant,” as it were. These range from Charlottesville’s own Dr. Neal Kassell and his talk on focused ultrasounds, to internationally acclaimed hang drum musician Daniel Waples. Local poet and performer Bernard Hankins will also present at the event, following his win at the TEDxCharlottesville Open Mic Night in September.

What connection to the natural world has influenced you?

Tell us in the comments below.

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Arts

Miraculous music: Early-music group Mira hosts a choral sing-in at The Haven

The Mira early-music sing-in led by Raven Hunter (center) takes place on Saturday at The Haven. Photo: Publicity photo

The term early music mostly refers to Medieval and Renaissance compositions, and it’s easy to imagine it as haunting choral melodies echoing off the vaulted ceilings of a stone cathedral in the 15th century. Other-worldly? Yes. Imposing? Pretty much. But this week, one of Charlottesville’s early-music ensembles, Mira, is taking a different approach to the tradition by staging a Saturday afternoon sing-in.

Though early music continues to attract fans, it has never quite garnered the mainstream following of Romantic or other classical traditions. Locally, however, there is a rich tradition of early-music ensembles. “I called some of the singers that I knew [who] wanted more early music, and they brought in a few others, and the word got out,” says Mira founder Raven Hunter. That was 10 years ago, and, according to Hunter, “The core of the group has been together the whole time. We have a huge repertoire, so when a new member comes on board, there needs to be a deep commitment.”

As a group, Mira performs compositions that are polyphonic—featuring two or more independent vocal melodies—and unaccompanied by instruments. Like past Mira concerts, the sing-in event will feature a performance by the ensemble, with one major change: Attendees of all ages and levels of experience will be invited to join in the singing.

In fact, embracing the amateur as part of the performance is a fitting homage to the roots of early music. For centuries, inclusivity was an integral part of the form, until a move to professionalize it began in the mid-1900s. Since then, the collective, participatory nature of early music is often lost in modern performances that feature trained choral singers.

Although “it can seem fairly difficult to singers who are not used to singing unaccompanied, or who are used to many singing vertical harmonies,” according to Hunter, there will be a variety of ways to enjoy the sing-in. “There will be places for confident singers on the stage, and people who want to sing from the audience or just listen, [they] can do that, too,” she says. Either way, the performance will be immersive and unlike most that you’ve attended in the past.

The ensemble’s members are known as Mirans, a term that, like the group’s name, plays off the Latin word miraculis—or, as we write it, miraculous. Hunter herself is also heavily involved in the local music community, ranging from her roles as a performing musician to those of music director at a local church and a certified therapeutic music practitioner. The other singers in the ensemble number somewhere between 10 and 20 at any given time.

“Many of us enjoy the variety of music that Raven chooses,” says one of the original Mirans, David Slezak. “There are beautiful four-, six-, and eight-part pieces with roots in church music. But one can always expect some lighter English country dance pieces, even drinking songs.”

Though ensemble members are especially interested in English and Flemish compositions from the 15th, 16th and 17th centuries, they have been known to perform works by more contemporary composers, such as Benjamin Britten. “Programming is and always has been very exciting for me,” says Hunter. “We do some secular music, of course…a madrigal here and there.”

Selections for the sing-in will be taken from The Oxford Book of Tudor Anthems. Originally published in 1978, the songbook is an essential resource on early music and includes a variety of compositions. Songs will include “Ave Maria,” “Justorum Animae” and “Sing Joyfully.” “There is something about the music of this period that is so very spirit-centered. The world was still focused on what, to my mind, is more real—a mystical approach to music,” says Hunter.

Though Mira has performed in the Washington National Cathedral, the group is committed to offering local performances for the Charlottesville community as well, and is hopeful the sing-in might become an annual tradition. “We’re hoping that this might bring the music of this period to a wider range of singers,” Hunter says.

Copies of The Oxford Book of Tudor Anthems will be available to borrow at the event on a first-come, first-served basis. The songbook is also widely available by special order through your local bookseller, or occasionally found in used bookstores. Free choral and vocal scores of select compositions are also available on the Choral Public Domain Library.

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Arts

Screen scene: Afrikana Independent Film Festival comes to town

Second Street Gallery partners with the Afrikana Independent Film Festival for a series of screenings that begins with the documentary BaddDDD Sonia Sanchez (pictured) on October 30. Photo: Attie & Goldwater Productions

There’s a film festival coming to town, but it’s not the one you’re thinking of.

Beginning on October 30, the Richmond- based Afrikana Independent Film Festival will launch a series of screenings at Second Street Gallery.

“Afrikana started with the mission of showcasing cinematic works of art from people of color from around the world, with a focus on the global black narrative,” says founder and creative director Enjoli Moon.

While plans for the multi-day festival set in Richmond continue to take shape, Moon launched the monthly Noir Cinema Series in late 2014 as a way to present free screenings of independent films, augmented by in-person discussions with the filmmakers. Now in its second season, the series has hosted 10 screenings at a growing list of venues including Ghostprint Gallery, Balliceaux, 1708 Gallery and the Byrd Theatre, as well as outdoor venues such as the Tredegar Iron Works.

“Enjoli had been so successful with getting galleries in Richmond to support what she was doing, I thought that it would be something that would add a layer of programming,” says Second Street curator Tosha Grantham.

And a rich layer it will be, as the featured film for the inaugural screening will be BaddDDD Sonia Sanchez, a full-length documentary about the titular African-American poet.

Since releasing her first collection of poetry in 1969, Sanchez has published more than 15 works—primarily poetry and children’s books—and her work is anthologized widely. She is also the recipient of prestigious poetry awards, including the Robert Frost Medal and the Langston Hughes Poetry Award. Just as importantly, Sanchez incorporates her art into her work as an outspoken activist, as a member of the Black Arts Movement in the 1960s and onstage as a Def Poetry Jam performer.

Sanchez is unafraid of stutters and twitches in her poems, keying in anxiety by adding extra letters and words to mimic speech patterns and embracing the resulting discomfort as a way to give voice to some of the lived realities of gender and race. It seems impossible to separate her politics from her pen. Her poetry and performances are not for the faint of heart, but her words are sharp and their force is powerful. The poet describes herself as “a woman with razor blades between my teeth.”

As a documentary about Sanchez’s life and work, BaddDDD Sonia Sanchez mixes traditional biographical storytelling with footage of performances and readings. Earlier this year, the film was an official selection at a variety of festivals, including the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival. It’s the second documentary from the team of Janet Goldwater, Barbara Attie and Sabrina Schmidt. Prior to that, Goldwater and Attie had been making documentaries together for more than 20 years, earning Pew Fellowships in the arts for their work. Goldwater will also be in attendance at the upcoming screening and will participate in an audience discussion.

In addition to its strength as a documentary, BaddDDD Sonia Sanchez connects with the current exhibition at SSG, “Beyond Classification.” On display through November 20, the show features photography and videos made by eight Egyptian women, exploring themes of gender, religion, modernity and contemporary art. Both the exhibition and the inaugural Noir Cinema Series screening will feature work made by women, celebrating women’s voices as political forces, and both tie in the theme of sustainability.

“The season itself looks at these different ideas of sustainability that artists are working with, whether they are cultural, visual, musical or related to social change,” says Grantham. “So, here it’s the aspects of culture that are sustainable in an environment of revolution.”

The second Charlottesville screening in the series will feature short films on November 13, including El Khateeb and Trials of Spring. Both films also connect with the same exhibition themes, respectively celebrating the golden age of Egyptian cinema and documenting the Arab Spring uprisings.

In between the two Noir Cinema Series screenings, yet more filmmakers will present work at SSG as part of next week’s Virginia Film Festival and its Digital Media Gallery offerings. According to Grantham, the timing isn’t accidental, and one of the goals of the screenings is to “promote the Virginia Film Festival in advance and keep it going after it’s done.”

Through these diverse offerings as well as other community programming throughout the month, the SSG staff try to squash the stereotype of a contemporary art gallery. “We’re a gallery but we’re also a civic space,” says Grantham. “We’re free and open to the public. We want people to come here and feel really comfortable.”

Moon and Grantham are also interested in fostering a stronger connection between the arts communities in Charlottesville and Richmond. “We would love to be able to engage the Charlottesville community more,” says Moon.

Along with that goal, Moon is optimistic that the inaugural Afrikana Independent Film Festival will take place next summer. To help support that goal, she plans to launch a crowdfunding campaign in addition to hosting monthly Noir Cinema screenings with suggested donations that go to support her larger efforts.

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Arts

Fresh airwaves: Local radio station provides a new home for hip-hop

Damani Harrison (left) and Elijah Campos in the studio of Charlottesville’s new hip-hop radio station, 101.3 Jamz. Photo: Staff photo

It’s time to update your car radio presets, Charlottesville. The long-anticipated launch of a new hip-hop radio station happened on October 5 at midnight when WVAI 101.3 Jamz took to the airwaves. The launch came as the result of more than a year of work by Damani Harrison, Elijah Campos, Jaquan Middleton, Cle Logan and Travis Dyer. The five collaborators are deeply invested in the local music community and joined forces to create the new station.

Barely two weeks into 101.3 Jamz’s existence, approximately 15 DJs are involved—they hail from Charlottesville and Richmond, but also further afield. Some will record mixes and send them in to be played on-air; others will host live shows in the station’s Seminole Square studio. Through this network, the 101.3 Jamz team hopes to cover the entire spectrum of hip-hop, with reggae, go-go and R&B mixed in.

“We’re representing a whole lot of regions and styles,” says Harrison. “Hip-hop has so many sub-genres and we’re really trying to represent the art form in its totality.” Plans for original programming also include hosted shows during the morning and afternoon commute.

Local musicians are encouraged to get involved by submitting recordings to be considered for airplay. Harrison, who is also the artistic director at the Music Resource Center, sees potential in the area. “I’ve seen a lot of amazing artists come through there and then continue their careers locally,” he says. “I’ve always felt as if all these people that I’ve worked with get to this point where they have no outlet for what they’re doing. Now, they’re going to have an outlet. If we see an artist really making a push for themselves, then we want to help them.”

In addition to the genre format, 101.3 Jamz’s coordinators hope to set the station apart by embracing an around-the-clock policy for clean lyrics. “We made a decision to not play explicit songs at any time,” says Campos. Though Federal Communications Commission regulations prohibit obscene broadcasts anytime, indecent and profane content is actually allowed from 10pm to 6am, but 101.3 Jamz’s programming will remain clean at all hours as a way to support what Harrison calls “the positive energy that’s around the scene.”

For now, the team is working on the larger issue of getting new music into rotation and keeping the nascent station running smoothly. “It’s a 24/7 job,” says Campos. “We all have our own careers aside from this, but this is something that we’re going to put the time in to make it work.”

As C-VILLE reported earlier this month, 101.3 Jamz is an addition to a radio landscape that was recently altered by WUVA’s format change to country. “By being a centralized hub for hip-hop in Charlottesville, we’re providing a service for a lot of people,” says Harrison.

Though the new station wasn’t conceived as a competitor to WUVA, it wasn’t originally meant to replace it, either. The timing just worked out that way, as minor delays pushed back the launch date. “We all wanted this to happen so much, so we were willing to put as much time into it as we need to,” says Campos. “It’s mainly been an issue of getting enough money to actually make it happen.”

With significant support from individual investors, start-up funding finally came together in time for a test run in September, after which equipment needed to be tweaked and other work accomplished before the station could go on-air.

The 101.3 Jamz team wasn’t alone in these efforts, though. The station is a member of the Virginia Radio Coop along with three others, including Rock Hits 92.3 and WPVC 94.7, a progressive talk radio station. The cooperative model allows the four stations to split monthly facilities costs. Each operates as a Low Power FM station, a broadcasting option created by the FCC in 2000. Stations within this designation are required to function as nonprofits and produce non-commercial radio at a lower wattage than commercial radio stations. At present, the FCC reports there are five LPFM stations in Charlottesville, with the inclusion of WXTJ 100.1, an outgrowth of the University of Virginia’s WTJU 91.1.

Over the past few months, the co-op station coordinators have been busy building fan bases on social media while constructing shared studio space. What was once a large, open retail store has now been divided into four on-air studios with recording and common areas. It’s still a little rough around the edges, but three of the four stations are broadcasting, and online streaming will launch soon.

Harrison is hopeful that underwriters will be attracted by the opportunity to reach the co-op’s diverse audience through group packages rather than underwriting an individual station. This can help ease the fundraising burden on any one station. The 101.3 Jamz team plans to support the station’s ongoing operations with DJ appearances and branded merchandise.

“We got [the station] started, but it’s going to take the community to keep it going,” Harrison says.

Which local radio stations do you listen to the most?

Tell us in the comments below.

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Arts

All-nighter: UVA’s TechnoSonics festival returns for 16th year

Composer and shakuhachi player Kojiro Umezaki is one of the guest artists who will collaborate at TechnoSonics XVI, a weeklong festival of sound at UVA. Photo: David O’Connor

“The connection between music and many people’s sense of their spiritual nature is one of the essential engines driving our mad (yet perfectly reasonable) devotion to music,” says Ted Coffey, associate professor in composition and computer technologies at UVA’s McIntire Department of Music.

Each year, CCT faculty members lead the process of selecting a theme and curating the annual TechnoSonics festival, which brings cutting-edge computer music composers, performers and experts to town. Originally launched by Judith Shatin, founder of the Virginia Center for Computer Music, and current McIntire department chair Matthew Burtner, TechnoSonics focuses on pushing boundaries within the field of computer music, with an emphasis on intermedia—or interdisciplinary—works.

The program creates countless opportunities for collaboration between faculty and students as well as concerts and installations that are open to the public. This year’s gathering kicks off on October 14, and Coffey is leading the planning efforts and bringing his own devotion to music as a performer, composer and teacher. He has been involved with TechnoSonics since he moved to Charlottesville in 2005 and is well-acquainted with its boundary-pushing schedule.

For TechnoSonics XVI, Coffey selected the theme of Music and Contemplation, but it’s important to note that the event takes more than a solo effort. Faculty, staff and students from the music department work together to select guest composers and the performances and installations. As the technical director of the VCCM, Travis Thatcher supports the event as stage manager, sound engineer and pre-production coordinator. “This year’s theme is very open to interpretation,” says Thatcher. “I’ve always been interested in contemplative and meditative forms of music and how the experience of listening to music can allow your body to gain a different understanding of your surroundings.”

A series of roundtable discussions launches the weeklong festival, addressing topics such as music, contemplation and the brain and music and trust. “Contemplation can accommodate a lot of different activities and situations,” says Coffey. “We can contemplate complex musical objects, the political dimensions of musical practices and the sound of dentists’ drills. We can also contemplate past experiences, reflect on them.”

Audio installations will also be part of the festival, featuring work by Thatcher and UVA graduate students Eli Stine and Max Tfirn, among others. A formal concert will be held on October 16 in Old Cabell Hall, featuring Shatin and Burtner along with guest performers Brenda Hutchinson and Kojiro Umezaki and UVA Ph.D. student Paul Turowski.

Following the more traditional event, TechnoSonics XVI will try something new: a 24-hour concert. Beginning at 11:59pm on Friday, this concert will continue overnight and all day on Saturday, showcasing live acoustic and eight-channel electronic music in the UVA chapel. “The 24-hour concert provides a very different setting and allows for the performance of long-form pieces that wouldn’t really work in a concert hall setting,” says Thatcher.

The combination of venue and format creates new possibilities for the audience, encouraging a self-guided experience of any or all of the performances over a period of time. “We’re going to create a space where the musical offerings are brilliant and bountiful, while the social conventions of a formal concert have been relaxed. People can wander in and out, walk around, take a little nap,” says Coffey.

Over the course of the week, the festival will feature a variety of performances by UVA faculty and students, as well as Coffey and Thatcher. Indeed, many of the programs throughout the week are the result of extensive collaborations. “I think TechnoSonics has grown more ambitious over time, and we’re more interested in community-building, both within UVA and with the arts communities in Charlottesville and beyond,” says Coffey.

An examination of the work by guests Dylan Bolles, Michelle Lou, Hutchinson and Umezaki reveals some of the key juxtapositions and explorations within TechnoSonics. For example, Lou is a double bass player and guitarist who increasingly incorporates analog and D.I.Y. electronics into her compositions and performances. Umezaki plays the shakuhachi, a traditional Japanese bamboo flute, in addition to composing electro-acoustic work. Hutchinson is an artist who composes work based on social improvisations and recently created an app that allows users to explore sounds through the act of drawing. Bolles builds compositions, performances, shared listening experiences and installations, as well as new musical instruments. The common thread among all is an experimental approach to a multi- disciplinary exploration of sound and music—an area in which the McIntire Department of Music excels.

TechnoSonics XVI takes place at Old Cabell Hall, the UVA chapel, OpenGrounds and surrounding areas through October 20. All performances are free and open to the public. A detailed schedule for the event is available at music.virginia.edu.

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Fired up: New studios and upcoming exhibition at City Clay

The classes offered at City Clay run the gamut, from basic hand-building for beginners to intermediate wheel or workshops in glazing techniques. Photo: Courtesy City Clay

When City Clay owner and artist Randy Bill started her business in 2011, she knew that her rented space on West Main Street wasn’t long for this world. Though the specter of the new Marriott loomed large, Bill refused to be daunted by it. “I knew it was the best location possible for visibility and that it would put me on the map,” she says. “And it did exactly that.” Celebrating its fourth anniversary last month, City Clay has had a couple of years to settle in to its new home in the historic Silk Mill building behind Bodo’s on Preston Avenue. All the while, it’s continued to develop its class offerings and facilities.

Any time the doors are open the space is bustling with clay enthusiasts tackling projects that range from minute to monstrous. As long as it can fit into one of City Clay’s three kilns, it can be made. The space has a wide variety of public and member work areas, a kitchen and office, and a deck to encourage teachers and students alike to relax and take time to build relationships. City Clay participates in efforts like last month’s Virginia Clay Festival in Stanardsville as well as the upcoming Artisans Studio Tour in November. All of these details are signs of Bill’s ongoing efforts to foster the development of a close-knit group of clay artists in Charlottesville. “The big benefit for me is the community because I really do love it,” says Bill.

Over the summer, City Clay added a new space, rather than relocating from its home for the past two years. A short walk down the hall from the main City Clay space, the expansion provides a separate section of individual studios for more experienced artists. “The only rule in here is that you can’t put up opaque walls. You can hunker down, you can be by yourself, and people will leave you alone—but if you want to talk, you can,” says Bill. She also has a studio space for herself in the expansion, a new luxury for the artist-turned-small business owner. “I haven’t had a studio of my own since I was in McGuffey,” she says. However, her studio practice must coexist with her work building the business side of City Clay, so it makes sense to do her creative work on-site as well, albeit at a slight remove. Now, Bill has shelves of her works-in-progress and her tools, allowing her to access and see everything that she’s working with at once. “The value of that is amazing, and I don’t think I quite fully appreciated it until I got in here and could see it,” she says.

Currently, 16 artists have studio space in the new wing and, interestingly enough, it’s not all clay artists. “I advertised that I wanted a mix of people because I thought it was good cross-fertilization,” says Bill. She didn’t receive as varied a response as she’d hoped, but there is one artist in the space who makes decorative floor cloths. Bill remains excited by the prospect that other non-clay artists will join in the future, fostering a more vibrant culture of idea- and skill-sharing between artists. “A lot of the people who come to us have studios in their basement, but they don’t use them. In the creative process, you get to a certain point where it either isn’t working or you don’t know what else to do. And so, suddenly the sink is full of dishes or you have to do this other thing and you avoid it like the plague. What you really need to do is push through it, but most people don’t get that. That’s where being in a group can really help give you that support and good critical feedback,” she says.

In addition to providing artists with studio space, Bill hopes the new addition to City Clay will provide opportunities to mentor the artists working there and help them professionalize their craft. In the coming year, she plans to host exhibitions of work by the studio artists, helping curate and promote their work. “A lot of these people have never been in shows, so to have the opportunity to put their work up is really nice. This coming year, most of the shows will be member shows,” says Bill.

This month, City Clay hosts an exhibition of member work that focuses on surface textures in clay. “We have an awful lot of people doing really interesting surface design and it’s become more and more important in the studio. As people get more proficient with making things, they get more interested in surface,” says Bill. This is easy to understand once one observes the studio shelves of knickknacks used to imprint clay, leaving trails of tire-like tracks around the base of a bowl or adding a pleasing texture to the handle of a mug. Works in the exhibition will range from sculptural to functional, but all are made by member artists, teachers and advanced students from City Clay, and all are a direct result of Bill’s deep, personal investment in clay and community.

An opening reception will be held at City Clay on October 9 from 5:30-7pm. For additional details, visit cityclaycville.com.

What local arts classes do you enjoy?

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On (not over) the hill: The McGuffey Art Center looks back at 40

The McGuffey Art Center membership has grown to more than 170 members since its inception 40 years ago. The center kicks off a month of celebration events on Friday. Photo: Bill Moretz

With its stalwart presence atop the hill at the northwest end of downtown, there’s no doubt that the McGuffey Art Center is a defining part of the local arts community. Its sturdy brick exterior commands respect while its large sash windows hint at the building’s original use as a school. Built in 1916, McGuffey was a public elementary school until 1973. After sitting empty for a couple of years, it was reborn as the community art center in 1975. This month, a series of exhibitions, performances and other activities is scheduled to celebrate the center’s 40th anniversary.

Perhaps one of the most remarkable aspects of McGuffey is that it has been artist-run from the beginning. In the early 1970s, a group of visual and performing artists began working together to create a shared space in Charlottesville.

Dancer Anne Megibow was one of them. “Word got out that there was this old abandoned school and we wanted to do something like the Torpedo Factory,” says Megibow. Founded in 1974, the Torpedo Factory Art Center in Alexandria is a repurposed munitions plant that now houses studios and galleries. Using this as a model, the group formed the McGuffey Art Association and went to work trying to secure a home for their dream. “We met for our very first meeting downstairs in what had been the auditorium. A bunch of us were sitting on the concrete floor talking about art,” says Megibow. Forty years later, the creative community at McGuffey is still actively engaging in that conversation.

The early period of the McGuffey Art Center was one of experimentation and visible engagement with art. Artists moved into the former classrooms, transforming them into shared studios. At that point, members joined simply by expressing an interest. “If you were breathing and you did something artistic, you were in,” jokes Megibow. Studio doors were decorated with whimsical, even provocative, artwork. Hallways were painted with tri-color stripes of red, orange and yellow that curved over doorways and around corners. This mixed well with the building itself, which still had historic window shades adorned with scribbles and graffiti made by past students. Indeed, dramatic structural changes were slow to come to McGuffey, where the main office and original layout of the school remained fully intact for the first few years.

That changed in August 1981, when a two-alarm fire caused by an electrical malfunction threatened the future of McGuffey. “I was in New York and my studio mate called me and said, ‘McGuffey’s burning,’” says Megibow. The flames gutted the main office and damaged other spaces, but the fire department’s quick response saved a significant amount of work. The destruction even had an unexpected upside: Non- vital renovations that had been postponed for years became necessary, including the addition of a small shop to accompany the downstairs gallery.

Since then, the space has evolved. Hallways became gallery space and formal signs were added to studio doors to identify the work inside. Lunchtime performance art began happening with less frequency, before vanishing entirely. In the early 2000s, “There was a lot of talk about professionalizing,” says Rebekah Wostrel, a ceramics artist who has been a McGuffey member for approximately a decade. “I felt that in those first two or three years there was a funkiness that went away. I felt a loss in that regard…not necessarily in a bad way though, and I think we’ve lived into that change pretty well.”

Mirroring this aesthetic progression, McGuffey membership structure evolved as well, developing and refining a jury process. Though the process isn’t perfect, it enables the submission of a portfolio to be reviewed by the membership of McGuffey and guest jurors from City Council or the local arts community. Once accepted, renting and incubator artists receive studio space; associate members work remotely. Of McGuffey’s roughly 170 members, only about 50 have studios in the building and a handful of them have actually remained in the same studios since 1975. There is turnover though, and efforts continue to be made to open up the space to others, addressing the critical need for space. “My career would not have happened without McGuffey,” says painter Cynthia Burke, who has been working in a McGuffey studio since the late 1990s.

As part of the 40th anniversary, McGuffey will host a collective show titled “Past, Present, Future,” with a First Fridays opening reception on October 2. The exhibitions will include an alumni show as well as a display of center memorabilia and a speculative plan for the building’s future, as imagined by UVA School of Architecture students. In addition, McGuffey artists have created 18″x18″ panels of original artwork to be sold as a fundraiser for the association.

During First Fridays, live performances will accompany the exhibitions and a time capsule will be buried in the front lawn of the building at 6pm. Coordinated by Burke, the time capsule reflects the “State of the Arts—Charlottesville, 2015” through an assortment of items from the local arts community, with plans for it to be unearthed in a century, when its recipients can look back and appreciate our local art through the years.

What item would you add to the arts time capsule?

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