Exploring the hills one hay barn, theater, wooden flute or cheese press at a time
H e was almost super human, says internationally recognized tap artist, choreographer and vocalist Brinae Ali. He could do things that no one could see.” “Baby Laurence Jackson has become a legend among people who saw and heard him dance. He could move in a blur, skim rhythms faster than the eye could follow, almost levitate up the wall. Improvising at the Hoofer’s Club in the back of a comedy…
A mother is giving birth in a prison cell. The authorities will forcibly remove her child from her and leave the baby exposed in another country. The mother’s closest friend speaks truth to a man in power who has fathered the child, rejected the mother, forced her into poverty and incarceration left them both sick and starving. “It is an heretic which makes the fire,” Queen Hermione’s friend…
‘G ood women and good whiskey improve with age — how can I miss it, honey, when I ve got dead aim?’ Gina Coleman lifts up a voice on the cusp of being lost. As composer and lead vocalist of the internationally recognized Misty Blues band, she has newly Uncrowned, the first full tribute album to Ida Cox, a composer and musician who changed the landscape of blues music. And very few people now know…
‘W ild women are the only kind that really get by Because wild women don t worry — wild women don t have the blues …’ Gina Coleman, lead vocalist of the Misty Blues Band, offers a toast and a tribute to Ida Cox, the Uncrowned Queen of the Blues. “She shifted the landscape of the blues music we listen to today,” Coleman said, “and nobody realizes it.” “… She didn’t get the accolades of Ma Rainey or…
W riters run a hidden press at night. They are printing pages by lamplight in a one-story house. The place is vivid stucco and corrugated iron, and I can imagine cobbled lanes in a hill village along a river in the semi-tropical forests of Gran Chaco beside Rio de la Plata in Argentina. In a real mountain stream and a farm garden in Ashfield, Double Edge Theatre performs Cada Luna Azul, Once in a…
I n a British military barracks, soldiers are sleeping on stone without blankets. Fevers run high with typhus or typhoid and cholera. At Scutari, across the Bosporus from Constantinople, women are risking their lives to tend the sick and the dying. Late at night, working by oil lamp, they can look out the window at the minaret of the Selimiye Mosque. Tamara Rojo, artistic director for the San…