Metro Arts May 17

Neil Young and Crazy Horse put on an amazing concert, showcasing their raw tenacity and rock 'n' roll spirit. Neil Young's authenticity and refusal to sell out make him one of the most important artists of our time. In another exhibition, French-Algerian photographer Camille Fara-Lenane captures the world of women hunters in rural France and Louisiana, exploring their deadly gaze and the connection between hunting and photography. This program is intended for a print-impaired audience and is brought to you by the Georgia Radio Reading Service, GARS. Welcome to Metro Arts for Friday, May 17, 2024. I am Kristen Moody for the Georgia Radio Reading Service. Metro Arts is brought to you by the Fulton County Board of Commissioners. For our first article, we go to the Creative Loafing publication online for Concert Review, Neil Young and Crazy Horse, Ameris Bank Amphitheater, May 7, 2024, A Euphoric Journey, by Michelle Malone. I have been restored and redeemed. I saw Neil Young Tuesday night at Ameris Bank Amphitheater, or Verizon, or whatever it's called this year, and he did not disappoint. I've had the pleasure of seeing him six or seven times when I wasn't on the road myself, and it's always deeply moving and inspiring. This time, however, it felt like he had something more to prove than usual. It felt like he wanted to share some kind of enlightenment that only a 78-year-old may have gathered over a life well-lived, or perhaps his agenda was to prove he could still rock with abandon like he always has and deliver us from corporate evil. After all, he is preaching his gospel of love and environmental sustainability, things that are somewhat antithetical to the megacorporations of today. I watched in amazement as he poured through his 50-plus-year catalog with as much energy, sweat, and grit as I'd seen with him 30 years ago. I stood stunned in amazement, literally slack-jawed with my hands on my face, as he opened with a 15-minute version of Cortez the Killer, a dirge with guitar growls of epic octave proportions. His faded 1953 Gibson Les Paul guitar kicked and whined with feedback as if he were wrestling a wild horse into submission, daring it to fight back. Still drove that guitar into submission, jerking the whammy bar and then caressing the strings with his hands like a guitar whisperer. Who would ever doubt that he would win this battle? Suffice it to say, he has won the war as well, still giving the finger to the establishment whenever necessary. There were no dancing girls or aerialists, no pyro, not even any video screens for the folks on the lawn. There was a stage filled with 20-foot Fender amp stage props from his Rust Never Sleeps tour, 1978, and a perfectly loose band bunched together center stage who seemed able to read each other's minds and take the audience on a euphoric journey through Neil's foggy, trippy world and career. Throughout the 90-minute show, the audience was both assailed and fortified with Neil's raw tenacity and his damn-the-torpedoes attitude. We got on board his pirate ship wholeheartedly and collectively. There was an actual pirate flag flying from Ralph Molinas' drum kit. We generously yelled, clapped, whistled, laughed, and even cried out pure, unbridled joy. In fact, one of my favorite moments of the show was when Neil donned his weathered Martin acoustic guitar and harmonica and played a mini-acoustic set. He stood alone on stage, plotting awkwardly around, and sang songs we've loved for 50-plus years, including Comes a Time, Heart of Gold, and Human Highway. When he truncated Human Highway, ending it earlier than the recorded version, the audience kept singing thunderously so. It was then that Neil started playing the rest of the song. I got a big lump in my throat and a huge grin on my face. It was one of those concert moments you remember forever, one of those reasons we go to shows in the first place, to feel a part of something, to feel connected to others who you may not even know. It was rock and roll church. It was religious. And I was transported back to summer camp in Dahlonega at Camp Glisten, where I first heard a counselor strumming Needle and the Damaged Dun. It stopped the 11-year-old me in my tracks. And in that moment, I knew I had to get serious about playing my guitar and learn to write songs that might possibly stop others in their tracks. Crazy Horse was also in rare and perfectly imperfect form, and still sounding usefully rebellious, maybe in part due to the addition of Micah Nelson on rhythm guitar, who seemed as comfortable sparring on guitar with Neil as long-time Crazy Horse members, bassist Billy Talbot and drummer Ralph Molina did. Micah is Willie's son, so we know he's got the talent and none of the B.S. just like the rest of Crazy Horse. It must be a refreshing shot in the arm for all the guys to play with someone half their age who obviously loves what they are and have been doing longer than Micah's been alive. And what a great gig for him. Yeah, I would jump at that gig. Yeah, for a moment, I dreamed of what that would be like. The thing that makes Neil Young truly special, of all the greats, isn't necessarily his beautiful and sometimes clunky lyrics, his memorable melodies, his elementary chord changes, or even his bombastically unique guitar prowess. It's the authentic simplicity that so obviously comes straight from his heart. As an audience member, we instinctually feel the honesty of his music, something that has somewhat been elusive in pop culture and society for decades. That honesty, combined with all the other aforementioned elements, is what makes Neil Young one of the most important artists of the rock and roll era and even the 21st century. He refuses to sell out and continues to keep it real in a time when we have all but forgotten what real is anymore. He doesn't know how to do it any other way, and I am so grateful for that. Michelle Malone is an Atlanta-based musician who has been walking the tightrope between acoustic and electric music for over 30 years. She performs Friday, May 10th at Eddie Owen Presents at Red Clay Music Foundry, 3116 Main Street, Duluth, 30096. Call 678-892-6373, doors 7pm, tickets $35-$39. Malone will be joined by Canyonland. The crickets open. Visit michellemalone.com, that's M-I-C-H-E-L-L-E-M-A-L-O-N-E dot com. That was Concert Review, Neil Young and Crazy Horse, Ameris Bank Amphitheater, May 7th, 1984, by Michelle Malone. Next we move to the Burnaway publication on online for Sisters of the Hunt at NuNu Arts and Culture Collective, Arnottville, by Nikki Cormacchi. Camille Fara-Lenane is a French-Algerian documentary photographer and filmmaker living and working in New Orleans. Le Soir de la Chasse, Sisters of the Hunt, culminates five years of Lenane's work photographing and interviewing women who hunt in rural France and Louisiana. A multimedia exhibition gathers a film and sound installation alongside photographic portraits of the huntresses and the land. The gaze of a young huntress meets the eye of the viewer entering the gallery. Her lashes shadow half of her blue-gray irises, a shotgun slung over her narrow shoulder. Her hair tied back, chapped berry lips set. Small flecks of blood splatter across her white cotton tank top. The wood, grain, and black steel of a gun in her arm lend her stare their threat of life or death. The women on the walls often gaze back like this, like killers. I am not used to the deadly gaze of a woman. In another photo, two sisters embraced, the taller behind the shorter, hands and arms entwined, a bleeding hangnail, a ring, one in camo, the other in fleece. Kin of the sisters at the opening pointed to the image explaining to friends, it's on the little house on the pond, see the red door? Lenane paired the portrait of the two sisters with a photo of an azalea ablaze with pink flowers shot through a stand of trees, a diptych of the huntresses, and their line of sight. What is all this red, a woman asked, her finger tracing a curved trail of blood in the gravel of an image. She looked at the title, Death, and went silent. Lenane paired this photo of a red streak where the huntresses dragged a hog from the road in a diptych with another landscape of the drape of berries nestled in lichen-covered branches, titled Growth. A deer stand hangs in the bend of an oak branch, and another shotgun is cocked in the crook of an arm, loaded with two gleaming shells. The French huntress Rachel's pigtails, braids, rest under her orange cap, a small bronze snipe pinned to the side. Her gold star-shaped chandelier earrings dangle above a brown quilted vest over a green plaid shirt. In another photo, her hand unfolds the delicate wings of a snipe, its lifeless feet trailing, black beak held high between thumb and forefinger, suspended in front of the blunt fan of a green palm with leaves that echo the wing. Lenane told me about first meeting Rachel, now a dear friend, in the hunter's home in Arlis. Lenane, who was from Paris, didn't grow up with guns or hunting. Her interest in gun culture emerged out of exposure and fear. Islamophobia is endemic to both France and the U.S., and Lenane has a visible tattoo in Arabic on her wrist. In the Acadian setting of the gallery, the sound of shooting is commonplace. Lenane was held up at gunpoint in New Orleans. I needed to understand how they work, she said. She felt vulnerable in Rachel's home, surrounded by her hunting rifles. Rachel admitted she also felt vulnerable in the photographer's gaze. She didn't know Lenane's intention for the work, and whether she would present her and her culture as brutish, backward. Lenane gave up making a metaphor out of the camera as gun, lens, as scope, shooting her subjects as they shot their prey. Yet she remains aware of resonances between her and the hunters' processes. Four of the photographs on view are digital. The others she shot on medium-format film. When you scan medium-format, you remove dust for hours, Lenane said. Sitting in a duck blind or a deer stand for hours, she, too, observed the patience of the hunt, waiting in stillness and silence for that quarter of a second that disrupts time, that irrevocable moment of harvest. A celebration honored the opening of the exhibit. In the center of all the carnage on the walls and under the sure, mournful gaze of the huntresses, quiet Akkadian music filled the space, followed by couples two-stepping. One couple danced so small, leaning and swaying, that their two-step a gesture as natural as their embrace. Lenane called the women she portrayed, huntresses, in a nod to Monique Wittig's 1969 novel, Les Goyeres, set among a speculative society of revolutionary queer feminist militants. Wittig invented a diminutive feminine form of French word for warrior for the title, a useful evolution of the language and the gender-expansive militancy of post-1968 France. Women hunters are still outsiders in both Louisiana and France. Over the course of the project, Lenane also began studying ancient mythological goddesses of the hunt, from Diana to Artemis, research that developed out of her time with the women waiting in deer stands and duck blinds, as if the goddesses appeared necessarily to the artist on their own. There seems always to be more to love and to violence than meets the eye. A farmer unearthed a 4,500-year-old statue of Anat, the Canaanite goddess of love and war, from his field in Khan Younis of April of 2022. American thinker Abdul-Jawad Omar writes of resistance subjectivity as a melancholic disposition, referencing the work of Lebanese Marxist Hussein Moreau, whose 1982 essay The Sadness That Kills versus The Sadness of the Fighter proposes the latter sadness as noble. This most beautiful sadness, he writes, is as distant from the sadness that defeats the morale of the fighter as the sun setting into the ocean is from the water. It only appears to touch. In a sound installation outside the gallery, the women spoke of the thrill of the hunt, but more so of their respect for the animals they harvest and the weight of taking a life. Everything we kill we eat. It's something to be grateful about. We don't just take their life for nothing. The daughter and mother, Rebecca and Dana, said, I feed my home and I feed my mother's home, Rebecca said. The hunt also sustains the matriarchal lineage for Valerie, a black Creole woman and the only black huntress Lenane photographed. Valerie also has a daughter, and Valerie's mother was the first person she spoke to when she killed her first deer. Black and Creole women are in a minority as hunters in the area, Lenane said. However, Valerie is exceptional. The soundscape lives in a little structure lined with palms, bamboo, and fairy lights where interviews with the huntresses are woven through an original score by Lafayette-born musician Tiff Teddy Lamson. Here in the Palmetto Blind, Lenane invites the audience to come sit and wait the way the huntresses do. Beside the glowing palms, I listened as they discussed their relationship to animals, to guns, to gender, and to the irreversible act of killing. In the installation, the constellation Orion beamed over the brown rows of farmland. He's a hunter too, and the great love of Artemis, virgin goddess of the hunt in the Greek pantheon. She placed him there in the sky after his tragic death as a tribute to their blinding, if forbidden, love. Orion reigned before dawn over the prairie winter sky several years ago as my father, brother, and I prepared to hunt pheasant. Ice caught like dew on the grasses. My father's old friend taped one of the lenses of his eyeglasses on the drive. Then came the long walk, slow and ceremonial, after dawn. We spread across the tall, skin-brown grass in a four-man front, careful to hold the line. I told Lenane the story of my hunt, of holding a camera rather than a gun, of one wounded bird that got away. My brother Jack missed his shot, so the two of us stayed behind in the field searching for the bird after it fell and hid to heal or to die. Jack told me how the fathers of his suburban friends took him and their teenage sons to the shooting range to fire AR-15s for fun, how it felt like being in a video game. Once we were home, my dad dressed his own kill. He showed me how he would pluck and gut it by pointing to his wife's neck and belly, indicating where the cuts would be on her petite frame. She gave him a hard, quiet look. As a huntress in the palmetto blind, said, this is how we are built, and this is how they are built. I roasted the pheasant with care, with juniper and bay. The bird's long autonomy felt astonishing, miraculous. Cut down mid-flight, this bird died free, I told Lenane. Near the end of our conversation, she said, I can't stop thinking about that, this bird died free. In some versions of the myth, he was murdered by Artemis, less disputed is the hunt together in Crete. She is also the goddess of the moon. Lenane's photo of the moon over the water at Blue Hour in Henderson, Louisiana, became the backdrop for the bandstand on opening night. Camille Farah Lenane, Sors de la Chasse, Sisters of the Hunt, is on view through May 26, 2024 at the NuNu Arts and Culture Collective in Arnottville, Louisiana. Closing events will take place the weekend of May 17-19. That was Sisters of the Hunt at NuNu Arts and Culture Collective, Arnottville, by Nikki Cormacchi. Next, we move to the Atlanta Magazine Online for The Seed and Feed Marching Abominable band celebrates its 50th anniversary in style. The energetic marching band, a staple of Atlanta's parades, emphasizes creativity and community over musical bona fides by Tess Malone. Marissa Rainey always wanted to play flute in a marching band, but the competitive one at her school didn't seem like the right fit. Rainey's mom, Megan McCloskey, then told her about Seed and Feed Marching Abominable, and all-volunteer band that dresses in kooky costumes and marches in parades, parties, and Atlanta street fests. Rainey, now 15, immediately felt at home in the multi-generational group. When I joined Seed and Feed, no one cared if I had bad intonation and couldn't play high notes, Rainey says. They were just happy I was there. Seed and Feed Marching Abominable, which celebrates its 50th anniversary this year, has long been a home for Atlanta's wonderkins, weirdos, and whimsical musicians. It began in December 1974, when Kelly Morris grabbed his bass drum and invited a few musicians' friends over to Seed and Feed, this avant-garde theater. Henry Slack showed up to that first meeting, trombone in hand, and has been a loyal band member ever since. I get to play fun and varied music and throw antic energy out to the world, he says. The band's signature event is the Inman Park Festival Parade, where they first performed in 1975. Seed and Feed is such a great fit because we're all freaks, friends, and neighbors, said parade coordinator Karen Heim. The extravagantly costumed ensemble, featuring dozens of musicians and dancers, stands out in every parade. Last month, in honor of the band's anniversary, the Inman Park Festival appointed them parade grand marshals. Festivals and parades are Seed and Feed's mainstay, but you can catch the band in any number of surprising places, including, recently, the High Museum. We played for people waiting to get in, and then went on all three floors of the atrium, says Alicia Cordia, tenor saxophonist and musical director. I stood on a chair conducting from the ground level. Unexpected concerts like this are possible only because over 250 members appear in various configurations in the band's 50-plus gigs a year. As many as 150 performers may show up for the Inman Park Parade, but most smaller events feature around 30, and house parties as few as 10. The band's flexibility for whatever members can offer has been key to its longevity. We have great musicians. We have mediocre musicians. We don't care, says band manager Joanne Cybulski, who dances in the band. People may start as a Despicable, dancers and other non-musicians, and then learn the tuba. Seed and Feed emphasizes creativity and community over musical bona fides. During the pandemic, they gathered for regular Zoom chats and supported struggling band members with a Ferry Band Member Fund. At its core, Seed and Feed reminds everyone that life is meant to be fun. My high school band director didn't encourage me to wrap Christmas lights around my saxophone and wear sequins, says baritone saxophonist Molly Brown. Not only has Rainie the teenage flutist thrived in Seed and Feed, but her mom has also found a home with the band. McCloskey manages the band's social media and dances alongside the musicians. I can swirl a baton a little bit, she says with a laugh. Mostly she's involved to bond with her daughter and watch her blossom. She has a wonderful social circle in the band, which is funny considering she is 40 years younger than most of her band friends, McCloskey says. But now she has the confidence to march down Peachtree Street in front of 70,000 people while playing her flute. That was The Seed and Feed Marching Abominable Band Celebrates Its 50th Anniversary in Style by Tess Malone. Next, we move to the Arts ATL publication for Strong Atlanta Ballet Premieres Play with Gender Roles by Robin Wharton. On the surface, from a purely visual perspective, the two works on Atlanta Ballet's final program of the 23-24 season, Liquid Motion, could hardly have been more different. In their structure, however, Yellow by Brazilian-born Juliano Nunez and Nighthawks by Atlanta Ballet's choreographer-in-residence Claudia Schreier demonstrated their creators' shared willingness to experiment with and even jettison some of the most persistent conventions of neoclassical ballet. Where Yellow was seriously playful, Nighthawks was playfully serious. Nunez is currently resident choreographer with Philadelphia Ballet and has created work for Ballet Jazz de Montreal, Ballet West, and the Royal Ballet in London, among others. Writing about his 2022 work Interlinked for Birmingham Royal Ballet, the Guardian's Lindsay Winship described Nunez's choreography as technically conservative but socially progressive. The stage and costume design in Yellow reflected a similar fusion of seeming opposites, joining postmodern maximalist touches with modernist leotard ballet aesthetics. For example, the set transformed the dimensionality of the stage with three simple nested drops of plain white silk. The wings were shallowest downstage and deepest upstage. As a result, the dance, set to a recording of Beethoven's Piano Sonata No. 29 in B-flat, performed by Claudia Aru, seemed to unfurl within a square tunnel rather than against a flat screen or canvas. The ensemble of 16 dancers wore plain unitards in deep, warm saffron yellow. Over the course of Yellow's approximately 20 minutes, Ben Rawson's lighting design took the backdrop from white through a series of contrasting hues, hot magenta, cool cyan, soul-soothing lavender. In the introductory video played before curtain, Nunez said the work is an exploration of the realm of connections, the comings and goings, pairings, and partings that make up a life. The costumes and lighting transformed the dancers into flames, flickering into and out of the performance space, flaring into a conflagration together, and then scattering like sparks. Where Yellow tested the constraints of neoclassical minimalism with its visual aesthetics, the design team for Nighthawks pretty much maxed out the expressive potential of clean lines and smooth surfaces. As in Schreyer's beautiful 2021 work for Atlanta Ballet, Playade's Dances, the dancers' bodies in Nighthawks offered a canvas for visual art. In this instance, details from paintings commissioned from Atlanta-based muralist and tattoo artist Charity Hamadula during the creative process for Nighthawks. Further, like the costumes from last year's Carnival, which were also designed by Schreyer's frequent collaborator, Abigail Dupree-Poulston, the t-shirts and jogging pants and sleek tops and shorts for Nighthawks reflected a playful nostalgia. They recalled popular street fashion of the late 1990s and early 2000s. Think couture tracksuits and Vivian Tam's culturally and politically significant screen prints. With the scenes and colors of the city imprinted on their bodies, the 12 dancers in Nighthawks, together with the musical score, recorded excerpts from The Jungle by Wynton Marsalis, brought to life episodes of urban life. They were framed by Dave Smith's evocative but spare set. He used the same perspective technique deployed in Yellow, also frequently seen in the elaborate sets for classical story ballets. On each side of the stage, abstracted skyscrapers with lit windows created an illusion of greater depth, calling to mind the architecture line vistas of New York's cityscape. Both Nighthawks and Yellow broke with convention regarding the dancers' footwear. As a general rule and in contrast to classical ballets, the female dancers in neoclassical ballet all wear the same shoes. A nomenclature has evolved to distinguish a slipper ballet from a sneaker ballet or a pointe shoe ballet. Schreyer's flaunting of the rules in Nighthawks was the more flagrant but ultimately less transgressive. In the first of the two main pas de deux, the women's partner slip off her white tennis shoes. He then gives her a pair of pointe shoes, which she wears during their second pas de deux. Arts ATL observed two different liquid motion casts in the Friday evening and Sunday matinee shows. As was the case with Nighthawks, overall, Sunday's cast made better work of this moment. Patrick Palkins, whose foundation in theater served him well in this role, and Airi Igarashi played up the slightly risque sensuality of their interaction, making it feel intimate, even sexy. For Yellow, some of the women wore slippers and some wore pointe shoes, even while executing the same steps that the entire ensemble danced together, corps de ballet style. None of the men in Yellow wore pointe shoes. Nonetheless, Nunez's decision to combine unisex costuming with a disregard for convention on this point, pardon the pun, tiptoed right up to, but didn't cross, one of the most tenacious sartorial gender binaries that still persists in modern ballet. Like Interlinked and his more recent PS for Philadelphia Ballet's 2023 program, Forward Motion, Yellow featured Nunez's signature inattention to gender norms when assigning partners in roles and supported adagio. Yellow also played how Nunez may be developing a less conservative technical vocabulary. His athletic partnering sequences seemed just as likely to draw from contemporary dance as from traditional adagio. One full ensemble section featured challenging and well-executed floor work, and Nunez integrated an extended Trisha Brown-influenced gestural phrase into another. On both Friday and Sunday, a long passe de trois from Yellow was performance highlight. It featured three men partnering each other through lifts, turns, and controlled arabesques and à la seconde extensions. Individual standout performances in Yellow included Giuliana Massano on Friday and Anastasia Chaplinosky on Friday and Sunday in their respective passe de deux sections. Darian Cain on Friday looked very strong as a soloist, ensemble member, and adagio partner. Yellow ends with a gorgeous solo in which Severin Braschel on Friday and Munkjin Osejaro on Sunday were spectacular. Like Nunez, Schreyer pushed the envelope on gender norms in structuring the partnering sections in Nighthawks, though her innovation in this regard was made through the more traditional gendered costume design. Her technical vocabulary was jazzy and brisk, her phrasing carefully mapped to the signing horns and the driving percussion of Marsalis' score. Though the costumes and sets may have embodied New York in the decades before and after 9-11, the movement hearkened back to the Bob Fosse era on Broadway. Jordan Leeper danced the Puck-inspired male lead Friday and Sunday, and he captured perfectly the exuberance of Marsalis' music and Schreyer's choreography. The rest of the Sunday cast also did excellent work using weight and movement quality along with musical phrasing to convey the action expressed in the steps and score. They were self-absorbed passengers headed home on the subway, or exhausted stragglers leaning on one another while waiting for the next train, or anonymous strangers navigating traffic-congested streets and busy sidewalks, or young lovers out for an evening stroll. Except for Leeper, Friday's performance lacked that substantive edge. The dancers' technique was strong, but their effect was less Broadway and more cheer squad. It felt as though the energy level was dialed way up throughout, smoothing out the varied and interesting texture of Schreyer's imagined metropolis. The pas de deux with the shoe swap was cute and theatrical, a prank rather than a promise or hint of something more. Liquid Motion brought together two of the most interesting choreographers working in modern ballet, creating a well-balanced program that highlighted how the form is evolving in the current moment. Additionally, Yellow showcased the deepening artistic and technical strength of Atlanta Ballet's roster of male dancers and contemporary work, a style that requires them to step outside classical ballet's comfort zone. That was Strong Atlanta Ballet Premieres Play with Gender Roles by Robin Horton. Next up, Lala Essayidi sees Bullets and Bottle Caps in Modern Morocco by Virginie Kiplin. Conflicted Identities, the latest exhibit by Moroccan-born Lala Essayidi, through June 29th at Jackson Fine Art, is a complex and provocative work that reflect on the artist's uneasiness in reconciling her multicultural identity in the context of Islamic culture. The exhibit of six large-scale color photographic prints combines two ongoing series that, taken together, span more than two decades of work. Bullets Revisited, a continuation of her previous series, Bullets, which denounced the violence women were subjected to following the repression of the Arab Spring, and Conflicted Identities, her latest series, for which Essayidi uses beer bottle caps as a metaphor to expose the rise of alcohol consumption in Morocco. As a self-proclaimed feminist, Essayidi has always been interested in conjuring the rights of women and condemning their limitations in Islamic culture. But since her Bullets series, she has manifested an engagement with contemporary political realities that were less salient in previous work. My work has become heavier, more intense in the process as well. It is almost like there is a crescendo where all of these things are getting together. Every aspect of Essayidi's art is metaphorically loaded, from the confined space in which she has framed her models to the monumental dresses she has created for them. She resists stereotypes and embraces a polyphony of representations. In my work, I wish to present myself through multiple lenses, as an artist, as Moroccan, as traditionalist, as liberal, as Muslim, she says. The complexity is what makes her work both rich and absorbing. Born in Marrakech, Morocco in 1956 to a traditional Muslim family, Essayidi grew up in a post-colonial country struggling to find its own identity. She left Morocco at age 16 to attend high school in France and lived in Saudi Arabia before moving to the United States. She felt the urge to go back after the COVID pandemic, during which she had been locked down in Boston and separated from her family. It made her rethink her ties to her home country and her desire to go back. Her years away from Morocco informed her sensibilities and shifted her gaze on the country she left. She started noticing behaviors in her home country she wasn't accustomed to, such as alcohol consumption. Morocco is a Muslim country, yet we manufacture and export alcohol, both wine and hard liquor. Inebriation is common in Morocco, a country that prides itself on its Islamic beliefs and traditions. This pretending manifests itself in strange ways. When bullets revisited, she positioned her subjects in front of monochromatic tapestries composed of thousands of bullet casings sewn together. Her models almost disappeared into their backgrounds, wearing metallic dresses made of bullet shells. In her ongoing series, Conflicted Identities, she replaced the bullets with used beer caps that she collects wherever she travels. The dresses become the symbol of the conflicted society she is now part of, torn between an idealized past and an undecided future. One of them on display at the gallery reveals the intricate work of weaving thousands of colorful caps into the fabric of the dress. The process requires painfully long hours of labor and months of preparation. As excruciating as it is, it remains a process that she deems necessary to become intimate with her work as well as with the dozens of women who help her build the dresses and backdrops. It is during this time of exchange with other women, young and elderly, that she collects notes and reflections that she will later inscribe on the surface of her models' bodies. Inspired by 19th century Orientalist imagery, she uses calligraphy, a sacred Islamist art that is historically inaccessible to women. But she applies this writing with henna, an endowment traditionally reserved for women. Through this subversive act, she reclaims a female agency, the henna-calligraphy combination, becoming both a veil and an expressive statement. Saidi knows that intimately the gaze she is projecting and her way to go beyond the stereotypes would not have been possible without estrangement from her homeland. It is precisely this conflicted state, as uncomfortable as it might have been, that has allowed her to take a critical distance from modern Morocco and to convey her rich and sensitive experience as an Arab woman. That was Lala Saidi Sees Bullets and Bottle Caps in Modern Morocco by Virginia Kipling. Next up. In The Red Nose of Courage, the god of war is neutered by clowns by Luke Evans. John and Yoko once asked us to give peace a chance. Now this group of clowns is giving humor a chance instead. They say laughter is the best medicine, but have you also heard that it is an effective weapon? In the hands of Clown Corp LLC, laughter will be wielded as an assault rifle as they tackle themes of war and violence in the upcoming workshop, The Red Nose of Courage. This experimental workshop will take place on Friday, May 17th in the Swartz Theater Lab at Emory University. Clown Corp LLC is a troupe composed of Emory alumni Tommy Sullivan-Lovett, they, them, Nathan Ray, he, him, Julia Byrne, she, they, and Jake Krakowski, he, they. If you are unfamiliar with traditional clowning, these are not your typical birthday party gestures. Clowning is a long-standing performance style that aims to elicit a wide variety of emotional responses from laughter to sadness to fear to discomfort. The Red Nose of Courage was originally conceived in May of 2023 as a commentary on the absurdity of war. Inspired by the war propaganda often pushed onto citizens, particularly boys from a young age, The Red Nose of Courage seeks to undermine the traditional narrative around war by depicting it as a ridiculous enterprise, more deserving of mockery than reverence. There's a lot of work being done in America media consumption to make sure that you think it's really cool to be a soldier and if not cool, then really tragic and noble, says Sullivan-Lovett. We would love it if people could see the show and then can't do that anymore. They can't find it cool, they can't find it fun. They have to find it stupid because now they've seen clowns do it. According to Ray, their goal is to neuter the god of war. Sullivan-Lovett acknowledged this is a lofty goal, especially for a one-night workshop. However, clowning always involves an element of risk. That said, the group briefly considered abandoning their show, wondering if it would be tasteless to produce it in the midst of the ongoing conflict between Israel and Palestine. They ultimately decided that the current geopolitical landscape only makes this show more necessary. This project toes the line between laughter and discomfort and perhaps interrogates where that line actually is. My ability to write and devise does kind of fray under the conditions of an active genocide, right? Sullivan-Lovett says. You can't do this while that's happening or you can, but your little comedy world with your twee clowns needs to fray and needs to be changed in some way. And that's what we've tried to do with this one. An emotionally charged enterprise, the workshop also promises to be physically intensive. Previous shows by Clown Corp LLC have clocked in at close to 30 minutes while the Red Nose of Courage will be a full hour event. An hour's worth of clowning is already a physically demanding task, but especially so with a show that incorporates violence as a part of its central concept. However, these clowns are no strangers to physical comedy. Clown Corp LLC came together with the original intention of exploring how sex could be integrated into traditional clowning practices. Julia Byrne and Nathan Ray had sort of a jokey argument about whether clowns were allowed to fuck. Nathan didn't think that was something that could work and Julia really, really believed it could, says Sullivan-Lovett. With no actual show prepared, Byrne submitted them to the Atlanta Fringe Festival and invited Krakowski, who has more professional clowning experience, to direct them. The four of them constructed a narrative around the marriage of Argyle and Gingham, Ray and Byrne's characters, who work in the same office space. Gingham wants to have sex with Argyle, who is too focused on his work, and hijinks ensue, which end up with the two having a threesome with Wensley, Sullivan-Lovett's character. This performance earned the group the 2022 Atlanta Fringe Festival Audience Choice Award. While the Red Nose of Courage involves a different premise, these character dynamics are still present as Ray, Byrne, and Sullivan-Lovett reprise the same roles. Ray's character, Argyle, is still a stickler and a staunch rule follower. Byrne's character, Gingham, is still a desperately horny but submissive secretary, and Sullivan-Lovett's character, Wensley, is still a self-serving scoundrel. The current workshop is a flagship project of the Emory Alumni Theater Studies Workshop Program, which was started by Emory professor Lydia Ford to give alumni a space for creating new work. This program aims to produce one project per year, possibly growing to one per semester, and includes financial support provided by a small grant from Theater Emory. The present is always a time for experimental artwork, but especially in the doom and hopelessness that tends to pervade modern consciousness. Audiences are seeking something that makes them laugh, but they also need to do something that makes them think, and the Red Nose of Courage aims to do both. Sullivan-Lovett admits that they are not sure how this performance will land, but how else does theater move forward if not through artists being willing to take risks? That was In the Red Nose of Courage, the God of War is Neutered by Clowns by Luke Evans. Next up, Spano and Stravinsky, How the Rite of Spring Shaped a Career by Mark Thomas Kederson. Robert Spano returns to the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra to revisit Igor Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring. For many years, the man has helped to define the music, but the music has also come to define the man. Conductor Robert Spano assumes the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra's podium again this month, his first appearances here since 2022. On May 2nd and May 3rd, the venerated ASO Music Director Laureate conducted a mixed programming featuring pianist Garrick Olson. On May 16th and 18th, he will lead the orchestra in two pieces, the world premiere of Jonathan Leshchinoff's oratorio The Sacrifice of Isaac, followed by a work that has become strongly associated with Spano and Atlanta, Igor Stravinsky's brutal masterwork, The Rite of Spring. Most classical music mavens are familiar with the scandal that the Rite engendered in its 1913 Paris premiere with Sergei Diaghilev's Ballet Russus. The audiences were appalled by Stravinsky's pictures of pagan Russia in two parts and voiced their displeasure with a passion later described as a near-riot. Part of the problem lay with the unorthodox choreography of the brilliant and brilliantly tormented dancer-choreographer Václav Nijinsky, who had already scandalized Paris with his blatantly erotic staging of Debussy's Afternoon of a Faun. But Stravinsky's musical portrayal of primitive life confounded everyone. No composer of Western music had created such rhythmic complexity before. The Rite's unique combination of lyricism and irregular meters, and the movements of the dancers on stage meant to evoke primitive cultures, drew titters and outright rage from first-night listeners. A century later, that uproar seems quaint, even amusing. The Rite of Spring is now one of the most popular works in the concert repertory and still enjoys a healthy life in the theater, most notably in the Joffrey Ballet's recreation of the original production in 1987 and in the raw 1975 Pina Bosch version, which was recently revived for an all-African cast. Curiously, the work even entered the family-friendly entertainment arena more than 80 years ago with Walt Disney's Fantasia, where its driving rhythms underscore a depiction of the earth in pre-paleolithic times, a primitivism of another sort. Stravinsky's Rite has also enjoyed more than 100 commercial recordings, dating back to the first from Pierre Monteux, who led the world premiere and who, upon encountering the score, reportedly left the room muttering that he would stick to Brahms. Modern listeners may choose from the considerable standard set by Pierre Boullée in his first recording with the Cleveland Orchestra, a passionate account from Leonard Bernstein, the precision of Igor Markovich, or the unbridled brutality of Valerie Gergiev. The choices are virtually limitless. Spano's relationship with the piece began in childhood with the influence of his clarinetist father, Tony Spano. My father is a wonderful musician, and he was also an audiophile, Spano recalls. He had a particular love for the early 20th century music. I had a compilation set of LPs, and the Rite of Spring was on it. It was a childhood favorite. He first conducted the work with the New Japan Philharmonic in Tokyo. I was doing my best Boullée impression, using minimalist gestures that weren't athletic at all, he laughed. But the closer we got to that final dance, I was drenched in sweat. I will never forget that feeling of abject terror. Abject terror notwithstanding, Stravinsky's seminal piece has played a key role in Spano's career. He has led the Rite with the ASO multiple times, in 2004, 2007, and 2010. He recently performed the piece in Detroit and Aspen, and in 2025 will revisit it with the Fort Worth Symphony, where he now serves as music director. Atlanta audiences also had the opportunity to hear excerpts from Stravinsky's four-hand piano version of the score when Spano shared the podium and a pair of dueling pianos, per Arts ATL reviewer Mark Gresham, with Donald Runicles in concert in 2014. There's something about playing the piano version, Spano reflects. With the thought that Stravinsky and Debussy were playing it that way for rehearsals, when you play it, it's clear that Stravinsky wrote at the piano. He was not one of those composers like Bach or Britten or Strauss who wrote at the desk. There's a tactile sense to the music when you do it on the keyboard. Spano particularly treasured his performances of the piano version at GLOW with choreographer Laurie Stallings, also in 2014. We did it with two pianos and two percussionists, he remembers. It was wonderful. The piano was on a platform with wheels. At moments, I would leave the platform and interact with the dancers. There was a startling effect when they put me and the piano in motion around the stage. The whole thing was incredible. He also played the piano version in a 2018 collaboration with Immerse ATL and Stabedance as part of the Emory Chamber Music Society of Atlanta's Emerson series. Spano's traversals of the piano version inevitably inform his readings of the full score, though he observes, I don't exactly know how. The piano version has a visceral excitement of its own. It's a totally different experience. Sometimes these things are not conscious design. They are more of a seeding of your understanding of a piece. I worked with a wonderful opera director at Oberlin, he continues. We did tremendous research on everything we did. Someone asked how that translated into her direction, and she said, I have no idea, but I'm tilling the soil, and I'm trusting it will affect the harvest. I thought that was so insightful. Stravinsky's Rite will be performed by the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, along with the premiere of composer Jonathan Leshnoff's oratorio, The Sacrifice of Isaac, which Spano feels is a particularly appropriate pairing. It's got a lot of lyricism and tenderness, he observes, but it also has these driving modal rhythms that stand up to that aspect of the Rite of Spring. Besides his current leadership in Fort Worth, Spano remains a force at the Aspen Music Festival and will seize the reins of Washington National Opera in 2025. For now, though, he is excited to come home to Atlanta and, of course, to the Rite of Spring. Leaving Atlanta was hard, he muses. This is my musical family. There are new people, a new principal clarinet and principal horn. I'm so excited to meet them and to see my old family. I can't wait. I'm just chomping at the bit. That was Spano and Stravinsky, How the Rite of Spring Shaped a Career by Mark Thomas Kederson. Next up, movement artist Jimmy Joiner evokes Lives Lost to AIDS by Kathleen Wessel. Through movement and fabric, sound and disco ball, a new site-specific work by Jimmy Joiner will tether today's queer awareness to lives lost to AIDS. In the early 1990s, when a person living with AIDS wore the now familiar red ribbon, it was a radical declaration, a demand to be seen, counted and humanized in the face of homophobic policies and little federal support for researchers working to find a cure. Beyond the political, red was a symbol of both love and blood, both life force and home of the deadly infection. The now iconic symbol of HIV-AIDS awareness first appeared in 1991 and catalyzed ribbon awareness campaigns for years to come. When worn pin on the shirt, the elegant shape reminiscent of a heart or a cursive eye was intended to signal solidarity with those affected as well as those living with the disease. Red Tethers, a series of solo dances created by multidisciplinary artist Jimmy Joiner that premieres May 17th through May 19th in Woodruff Park, draws on the red ribbon as a cultural symbol and builds on a four-decade legacy of artists responding to the devastating scourge of the disease. A textile artist, costume designer, choreographer and fly-on-the-wall team member, Joiner draws on a range of interests and skills to bring attention to the lives and stories of queer Atlantans lost to HIV-AIDS. With a 10-foot by 10-foot swath of sheer white fabric, six paracords, six pulleys, some carabiners and a red laser, Joiner will enact and build a temporary monument to the city's queer ancestors through improvisational movement and material manipulation. The installation will then remain in the park, a public art piece and performance archive. Joiner designed and constructed a disco ball dress which he will wear throughout Red Tethers. If queerness was to manifest itself, it's a disco ball on a dance floor, he says. Or rather, queerness is the effect disco balls create where light and sweat and spirit and joy and sorrow come together in this temporary space. And who doesn't like something sparkly and flashy? Joiner wanted to be that disco ball, the source of an outward trajectory of energy and love directed to all who join him in the park. But the disco ball, Joiner says, is also the eye that oversaw the site of infection. A native of West Tennessee, Joiner came out in high school and moved to New York City in 2003, a time when gay men, he says, weren't necessarily out of the woods. Despite the largely contained AIDS epidemic, he recalls that claiming a gay identity was synonymous with sickness and death. What should have been celebratory instead felt ominous. The number one narrative, he says, was, why come out as gay? You're just going to be lonely and you're going to die. A recorded interview with fellow Fly on a Wall team member and collaborator Nicholas Goodley will serve as the work's sound score. In their conversation, Goodley and Joiner talk extensively about shame, control, and self-compassion, things that are indescribable and understandable and resonate heavily with this queer identity. Initially, Joiner grappled with the idea of making another AIDS dance. It has been done so many times and with such emotional impact, especially during the height of the crisis when almost everyone in the New York City and San Francisco dance scenes knew someone who had died of the disease. I can't make an AIDS dance in 2024 that looks like an AIDS dance made in 1986 by Keith Hennessey, the San Francisco-based choreographer performance artist famous for his queer activist dancers, says Joiner. As part of the research process for Red Tethers, Joiner traveled to the Slippage Lab at Northwestern University to work with his mentor and thinking partner, Thomas F. de France, an esteemed dance scholar and visiting professor at University of the Arts, where Joiner recently earned a Master of Fine Arts in dance. Joiner credits de France with helping to unpack an uncomfortable sense of responsibility to pay honor to queer Atlantans lost to HIV-AIDS. Somehow honoring them felt inauthentic and too prescriptive, a sense that you need to do something in a certain way for someone else, closed doors that Joiner wanted to open. Initially, he intended to center Red Tethers on the stories of a few Atlantans who lost their lives to HIV-AIDS. But how does one tell or embody a story that is not their own? Let's shift the phrase telling a story to living a story, he says. Instead of telling someone else's story, an impossible task, Joiner says, through performance, research, and what he describes as spiritual practices, he can be with these people and open a portal, a tether and a connection to their presence. The tether, perhaps an extension of the red ribbon, reaches out. It connects and signals, I'm here, Joiner says. The tether also ties him to queer ghosts. I'm haunted, but I'm also trying to haunt. Through spontaneous movement, Joiner will tie himself to trees, move through and around the swath of fabric and hand cords to audience members. He intends to create an affirmation of belonging and aliveness felt by all who witness it. It's so important for queerness to have an aliveness and a visibility, and also for queer folks to affirm other queer folks and say that you're not alone. For Joiner, red tethers is a public ritual that allows him, allows us, to be with our queer ancestors, and that's enough. The tether is a bloodline and a lifeline that holds us together. That was Movement Artist Jimmy Joiner Evokes Lives Lost to AIDS by Kathleen Wessel. Next up, Theater Program Lets Audiences Talk Back in South Fulton by Luke Evans. Staged readings at various venues around South Fulton encourage audiences to connect to the themes of theater and to each other. The very reason South Fulton Arts exists is to bring attention to the artistry on display in South Fulton County. To that end, South Fulton Arts has been staging a reading of Tiny Beautiful Things on stage again May 17th and 18th as part of its Courageous Conversations series. Courageous Conversations was founded in 2022 in an effort to build an audience base for South Fulton Arts organizations. The organization stages approximately four readings per year, with Tiny Beautiful Things being its seventh since the program's inception. South Fulton County has historically been excluded from several resources, including the arts, says Executive Director Jennifer Bauer Lyons. That's not to say that there aren't great art nonprofit groups in South Fulton County, but they are geographically much more spread out than what we see in North Fulton County or in the city of Atlanta proper. The Courageous Conversations series remedies this by using four open forum discussions to encourage South Fulton audiences to connect with the arts. Multiple actors and directors are brought in for a bare-bones reading featuring no costumes that are props and minimal sound effects. Each reading is followed by a guided teach-back session around the themes of the play. It's not your typical talk-back. If the actors want to participate, they come off stage and they sit in the audience just like any other audience member. That's all the time we have for this article entitled Theater Program Lets Audiences Talk Back in South Fulton by Luke Evans. That concludes today's Metro Arts Program, which is brought to you by the Fulton County Board of Commissioners. This has been Kristen Moody for GARS, the Georgia Radio Reading Service. Thank you for listening to GARS.