Metro Arts Oct 20

This program is for a print-impaired audience and is brought to you by Georgia Radio Reading Service. In the first article, we learn about visual artist Anya M. Wallace and her Naked Church Ladies series. She uses watercolor to depict empowered black church ladies. The medium allows the figures to come alive and represent different forms of Christian religious expression in the South. The artwork challenges respectability politics and celebrates black women's sensuality and craftsmanship. In the second article, Renee M. Palmer, a former student at Clark Atlanta University, shares her experience during the merger with Atlanta University. The merger resulted in the formation of Clark Atlanta University and had a significant impact on the students' identity and campus culture. 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, October 20th. 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 Burn Away publication online for In the Studio with Anya M. Wallace by Logan Shanks. Anya M. Wallace is a visual artist and scholar born and raised in Florida. Currently her studio, the Laundry Building, is located in Belafonte, Pennsylvania. She is a Florence Levy Kay Postdoctoral Fellow in Black Feminist Studies at Brandeis University. Wallace currently defines herself as a multidisciplinary artist. At the moment, my art practice is making in a constant state of displacement, mobile, transportable, and modular art making. I see with a photographer's eye, yet I still love the paintbrush. Right now, I'm working with watercolor and ink, mostly because of their modular nature. I also enjoy the use of collage as a medium to work with my own photography, painting, textiles, and calligraphy. In the studio, we discuss Wallace's Naked Church Ladies series, which includes water paintings of translucent, faceless figures of black church ladies in empowered sexual posture. Logan Shanks, if the Naked Church Ladies was another medium, how would the piece change? Anya M. Wallace, well, I kind of have examples of that because I tried. I wouldn't call it critique, but the critique has been go larger. Can you go large? Can you go larger? And the hard part about doing that in watercolor is that the life that watercolor takes on is hard to just scale up. So then I was like, well, I'll just use acrylic, and I'll make them in acrylic, but it's not the same. It's not the same movement, and it's not the same outcome and product. You're not making watercolor church ladies in acrylic on a large scale. It's something else. L.S., so you think the watercolor medium is where the church ladies are able to be most free? A.W., I think so. It's kind of like they come out of the page in watercolor. You know, I am helping guide them out. L.S., how do the Naked Church Ladies bring representation to different forms of Christian religious expression, particularly Afro-American religious expression in the South? A.W., when I was really, really young, my family attended a black Catholic church or parish, St. George's. I didn't hear hollering in church. I didn't hear clapping in church. We would occasionally clap along to an upbeat song or applaud after a special presentation or performance. When I was about seven or nine, my family went to my stepdad's family reunion in Vienna, Europe, one summer. And for the very first time, I witnessed people clapping, shouting, and catching the Holy Ghost. These expressions that happen when you're overwhelmed with the spirits and the flow of life, the energy of life, you know, speaking tongues, that kind of thing. I think that the South is all over and through the Naked Church Ladies. Church hats and black women's aesthetic lexicon is a whole world unto itself, yet there is a relationship with aesthetics, beauty, and sensuality that is specific to the South, to the heat, to the tastes and flavors, sounds, and even violences of Southern living. These elements are conveyed through elements of the church ladies' body types, flirtatious struts, rhythmic sways, and command of the church house. Their roles in the pulpit from choir master to usherette, deaconess, minister, and freedom fighter. These women are leaders in the church as well as patrons. They clean it. They are its keepers, and they feed and tend to those who enter in need. To me, this is what the South is all about. My memories from childhood are always with me. The women falling out and catching the Holy Ghost frightened me at first, and then I was intrigued by them. And then those experiences in my childhood turned into this work. L.S., how do you think the Naked Church Ladies respond to culture of dissemblance and respectability politics? A.W., I don't want it to simply be a response. I would like to say it's a whole other metaverse, but it absolutely can be a response. When I took them to Italy, black portraiture, embodied body, and restaging histories, I was surprised by the response from mature black women, academics, and non-academics in the audience. What I remember is how much these women embraced the church ladies and expressed feeling seen. There's something very exquisite about the church ladies, even though they're naked. They're not pornography. We can bring Audre Lorde's The Uses of the Erotic in here, too. They evoke the erotic, but they are not here to serve as pornography. Having taken someone like my mentor, Dr. Grace Hampton's advice on beefing up the hats on these stunning ladies prior to adding to the series, the intricacy thus became an indicator of not only black southern women's sensual desires, but also the extreme care and precision and craftsmanship that many black women put into their presentation, clothed or unclothed. This can be for church. This can be for work, the school and city bus driver, the postal worker, the secretary. They are going to smell good, and they are going to look good, and that's the point in making these pieces. What surprised me about how they were received in their debut at Black Portraitures by successful and mature black women was that these women saw what I saw. They got what I was going for. They felt seen, and they liked what was being reflected back at them. Somehow, that initial reception quelled any anxieties I might have been carrying around this work and respectability politics. There didn't seem to be room for respectability standards in the space. That in a way confirmed for me that they were exactly what they needed to be, medium-sized politics and all, because you know black women. Our grandmothers like when you go out there and make them proud. You know you make them look good. And I did it in a creative, innovative way. It's kind of sexy and thrilling, too. L.S. I'm thinking about these two extremes of danger and then pleasure, and then the work being in the middle, balancing those contradictions. That's kind of how I see it. A.W. Yes, there is that, and there's also discipline, but you know it is an important thing in my work. There's this discipline of dressing and preparing the body for church, so the hat is an indicator of that in the paintings. It's evoking the spirit of the church house. It's a reminder of what you do on Sunday mornings to prepare to get there. That's a process, preparing for church and looking good, you know. There's a discipline in that. So we're also playing with profane and sacred here, like the nakedness and then the church hats are juxtaposed to bring out all of those polarities. Profane and sacred, free and disciplined, free and constrained, pleasure and pain. L.S. It is reconciling with all those things at the same time, so it makes the piece balanced. I was going to ask if each individual church lady has a personality and a story, but I feel like that's not necessarily where your work lands. A.W. It's more about the movement that comes out of her. Then she becomes a church lady. The movement or the action that she's doing happens on the page first, and then the portrait is indicated through the hat being placed, because that's going to indicate where the head is. In a lot of them, they don't actually have a head, like a visible head with eyes, so they have personalities through their actions or their roles in the church or service. It is not so much about the traditional linear story here, but more so about the action that comes out of the paper. The sexual violence of black women haunts the soil of American South. Black women mediate this tragic history through black feminist theory and art. It is difficult to imagine a world where black women can evade pain, injury, and violence and transcend into a portal where their beauty and care ethics serve as erotic, freedom-making rituals. This series honors the legacy of black women working in constrained labor conditions, yet still striving to express creative subjectivity. Through mediating a site of black respectability politics, the Black Church, Wallace's Naked Church Ladies series celebrates black femme creative sexual expression, adornment, pleasure, and play by displaying black femme flesh and sexuality in its most free form. That was In the Studio with Anya M. Wallace by Logan Shanks. Next, we move to the Atlanta Magazine Online for Celebrating Atlanta's HBCU's How Historically Black Colleges and Universities Have Shaped the Fabric of the City, edited by Mike Jordan and Camille D. Whitaker. Remember when? Renee M. Palmer, Clark Atlanta University, class of 1997, business administration major, real estate minor. I had the privilege of having two parents who had matriculated at HBCU. My mother attended Tuskegee and my father, David Palmer, attended Clark College in the 60s. I was legacy. I was in the last freshman class of Clark College, so we were there through the merger with Atlanta University, which happened July 1 of 1988. Because we were 17 at the time, I don't think that we realized the magnitude of the merger. We still wore our infamous Clark College visors that got passed out during freshman orientation week. We still crisscrossed our hands in disease to symbolize Clark College, and all the signage still had Clark College on it. The signs started changing to Clark Atlanta University, spring semester. I took a personal sabbatical. When I went back for spring semester five years later, I had the opportunity to matriculate with the Olympic class because the Olympics happened in 1996. Ten Clark Atlanta University students from the business school were hired to work for the Olympics, and I happened to be at work-study answering the dean's phones, so I got one of those ten slots. You can tell the different generations and eras because those of us who attended Clark still say, dear old Clark, that still sticks with us. In fact, when I started applying to schools, my father told me, well, you can go wherever you want, but I'm sending my money to Clark. Remember when? Brock Mayers, Morehouse College, class of 1999, psychology major. In 1996, we started to see flyers everywhere saying, Suji's groove theory, and some dude we'd never heard of, Maxwell, were coming to Morehouse to perform. We went to the concert, excited to see the Sujis, thinking everyone else had already performed. That was not the case. Maxwell comes out with this big, crazy hair in a skinny suit. He was, to most people unknown, on stage gyrating and singing something something in falsetto. Pretty much from the time he hit the stage, booze rained down on his head. The AUC came together at Morehouse and booed Maxwell. It wasn't his fault. The circumstances of the night just didn't allow us to give him a chance. To his credit, he kept going, and later we found appreciation. What's crazy is now, as dean of students, I'm the one who puts on concerts. It would be dope to have him come back for a reunion show. Remember when? Marletta Brinson, Spelman College, class of 1974, psychology major, counseling minor. I am a legacy graduate of Spelman. My mother was in the class of 1946. I graduated in 1974, so that means in 2024, I will be a golden girl. In 1970, one of the things that we were seriously saying was, say it loud, I'm black and I'm proud, and talking about unity across the Atlanta University Center. I think about the political campaigns. We worked on Maynard Jackson's campaigns and some of Andy Young's campaigns. They had the students from the AUC involved in everything, from passing out literature and working the telephone banks to standing outside with placards. In fact, I just gave my godchild a Maynard T-shirt from one of his first campaigns. There was just a whole sense of political awareness and involvement and understanding that you had to give back to your community. That was the through line. That was Celebrating Atlanta's HBCUs, How Historically Black Colleges and Universities Have Shaped the Fabric of the City, edited by Mike Jordan and Camille D. Whitaker. Next, Long Live the Atlanta University Center, by Mike Jordan. The Atlanta University Center has shaped generations of leaders for the nation and for their home city. Atlanta would be nothing like it is today without it. The first time I stood on the grounds of the Atlanta University Center was 1989. I was visiting my older half-brother, Ken, who was finishing his degree at Morehouse College after transferring from Vanderbilt University. Tall, handsome, and 11 years older than me, Ken was my childhood hero, especially during middle school. Back then, I was a chubby, nerdy 11-year-old, and being in Atlanta was, by itself, an escape from the endless boredom of my hometown, Huntsville, Alabama. Ken gave me a walking tour through the campus, ending at The Yard, a flat plot of land connecting Morehouse and Clark Atlanta University, with both Spelman College and Morris Brown College just steps away. As he pointed out the different schools, knowing I would likely do whatever he thought was cool, he said the sentence that cemented my decision to attend college at the AUC. This is where they filmed School Days. In case you've never seen the movie, there's a scene where go-go band, E.U., plays its classic song, Da Bud, in front of a jubilant crowd of black students, all dressed in late 80s swim attire and dancing their physical, mental, and spiritual freedom into existence. If anything had a vibe, it was that, and I was sold. But without dwelling on my personal undergraduate experience too long, you just had to be there. That cinematic scene, created by proud Morehouse grad, Spike Lee, was just a taste of what collegiate life was like at the AUC, the world's largest and oldest group of associated private institutions specifically existing for the higher education of black students. Atlanta itself, the A, would be nothing like it is today in the most essential way without this collective of historically black colleges and universities. Most HBCUs in America, including Spelman, Morris Brown, Clark Atlanta, and Morehouse, were founded after the Emancipation Proclamation, during or after Reconstruction. They were created by the Freedman's Bureau, the American Missionary Association, the Methodist Church, and philanthropic abolitionists as a means of upward mobility for formerly enslaved Africans. Almost 90% of these schools are in the southeast, and without them, education for blacks in the U.S. would look very different. For context, after the 1831 revolt of enslaved Africans famously led by Nat Turner in Virginia, anti-literacy laws were passed in all but three southern states. In Georgia, Governor George Gilmer had signed a law in 1829 prohibiting blacks from reading. Violations were punishable by fines and imprisonment. Four years later, Governor Wilson Lumpkin outlawed blacks not only from learning to read or write, but from working in jobs that required those skills. Had this very essay been published then, I might have been whipped for disobedience. HBCUs, and specifically the AUC, are immensely vital to black excellence. The consortium has played a major role in the history of this city, and their notable alumni prove their impact. If you drive along the now heavily gentrified Hosea L. Williams Drive, you can thank its namesake, Morris Brown Alumnus, for helping inspire the city's unbought and unbossed spirit. The only AUC school founded by black Americans, his alma mater also produced Beverly Harvard, the first black female police chief of a major American city, ours, and James Allen McPherson, the first black writer to win the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. There's also Dr. Rashad Sanford, a prominent chiropractor and co-owner of one of Atlanta's hottest restaurants, Breakfast at Barney's. Maynard Jackson, the first black mayor of Atlanta who launched MARTA's rapid rail system and ensured at least 25% of airport contracts went to minority-owned businesses, was a Morehouse man. So was his grandfather, John Wesley Dobbs, who registered more than 20,000 black voters in the 1940s, transforming city government and forcing the Atlanta Police Department to hire its first black officers. And of course, the Martin Luther King, Jr. statue in front of Morehouse's chapel stands as a timeless reminder of the school's most famous graduate. Clark Atlanta University began as two separate institutions that merged in 1988. Institutions include some of the biggest names in entertainment, including Tony Award-winning director Kenny Leon, blackish creator Kenya Barris, and various music industry leaders such as DJ Drama and Shaka Zulu. In addition, the Atlanta University-educated James Weldon Johnson wrote the poem that became Lift Every Voice and Sing, widely known as the Black National Anthem. Frankie Cole of Sletty Vegan is a graduate, and the Reverend Ralph David Abernathy received an MA in Sociology from CAU before becoming one of Dr. King's mentors and a fellow leader of the Civil Rights Movement. Next door at Spelman, you'll find a lineage of brilliant literary stars, from Alice Walker in Pearl Clej to Tayari Jones and of course, Stacey Abrams, with whom you might be familiar due to her notable political influence. Other high-profile grads are Ambassador Ruth A. Davis, the first black American director of the U.S. Foreign Service, and the late Major General Marcellite J. Harris, the first black American female general officer of the United States Air Force. Walgreens CEO Rosalind Brewer, class of 84, holds rank in corporate America. There is an ongoing conversation about the future of HBCUs. Some wonder if they are still necessary as more black undergraduates enroll in PWIs, primarily white institutions, often in search of specialized programs not available at liberal arts schools. Many HBCUs are private and expensive, which also threatens their long-term viability. For example, undergraduate tuition and fees are now nearly $29,000 at Spelman, though the average is closer to $43,000 at academically comparable schools, according to College Tuition Compare. In 2021, the Biden administration announced it was providing $5.8 billion to HBCUs through the cumulative effects of the American Rescue Plan, debt relief, and grants. But black schools, which traditionally serve more students from lower-income families than PWIs, are still not swimming in endowments and scholarship money. Long-time funding inequities mean that HBCUs are catching up rather than keeping up. In 2022, Morris Brown returned from the brink of permanent closure after suffering from a corruption scandal and loss of accreditation from the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools in 2002. With its unique history, Morris Brown is critical to the AUC's legacy, even though the now re-accredited school is not currently part of the Atlanta University Center Consortium. Finally, from states banning books that deal with America's often-uncomfortable racial truths to U.S. Supreme Court striking down affirmative action, we are still dealing with the question of who gets to learn what in the greatest nation in the world. Three terrorist bomb threats were aimed at Spelman College in 2022. But without HBCUs, which produce almost 20 percent of all black American college graduates and 25 percent of black STEM degree recipients, the situation would be far more dire. Once again, Atlanta influences everything. The Atlanta University Center continues to excel, producing some of our nation's and our city's greatest citizens. I knew it at 11 years old. As Spike Lee said during an on-campus interview in 2019, I never left Morehouse. I know there are many Atlanta residents who have never visited any of the AUC schools, which is a shame. Even as a freshman at Morehouse, I visited Georgia Tech, Emory, Agnes Scott, Georgia State, UGA, and Kennesaw State, thanks to my dusty red Toyota Tercel, which was against the rules for first-year students to have, but made me quite popular back in 1995. I'll always appreciate my English teacher, Cindy Lutenbacher, who encouraged me to debate literature passionately with some of my bougier Morehouse brethren, who would show up to class in full suits carrying briefcases. I was doing well to have arrived in my PJs, but I knew my stuff, and I could defend my love and comprehension of language, which is partly why you're reading this right now. Long live the Atlanta University Center. Long live HBCUs. And long live the spirit of black brilliance and upward mobility that exists throughout this country, whose light shines especially bright from the West End. That was Long Live the Atlanta University Center, by Mike Jordan, from the Atlanta Magazine Online. Next up, we move to the Arts ATL Publication 4. Young rising double bassist Nina Burnett comes home for chamber concert, by Jordan Owen. At just 23, former DeKalb County resident and double bass phenom Nina Burnett has already amassed the kind of accolades that most dedicated players accrue over the course of decades. She is a decorated veteran of the competition circuit and a regular touring performer, while still plowing away at her studies at the Juilliard School. That rigorous performance schedule includes a homecoming of sorts. Burnett will take the stage at Morningside Presbyterian Church on Saturday at 7 p.m. The performance, a presentation of the Nancy Frampton Rising Arts Series, will see Burnett take the spotlight with minimal accompaniment. The double bass entered Burnett's life naturally. Her father is Mark Burnett, a double bassist and former member of the Israel Philharmonic. I got started at around six or seven, which is pretty young for a bass player, she says. At that point, my brother had already started taking piano lessons, so I was surrounded by music from a pretty young age. Some fifteen years later, Burnett is in her seventh year at Juilliard, pursuing an artist diploma, a two-year postgraduate program for pre-professional musicians. I have another year left of this program, and then I'm off to be a professional freelancer, chamber musician, and soloist around New York City, she says. She describes her exciting future with a youthful, blase tone that belies the magnitude of the road ahead. 2024 will see her join the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center's prestigious Bowers Program, a rigorous training to nourish an elite few in the new generation of up-and-coming chamber musicians. At the same time, she will continue to tour and perform in New York City. It's a far cry from growing up just down the road from Lakeside High School in DeKalb County. Burnett is quick to admit that her memories of the area are dim. She and her family moved there when she was just two and stayed there for up to eight years so her parents could work at Emory University, her father teaching bass and her mother neuroscience. It was here that she began her musical journey. I started out playing piano, which was just because my brother was playing piano already, and I would have to go and wait at the piano teacher's house, she says. The piano might have been a foot in the door, but it would be at her father's presence that she naturally transitioned to the double bass. My dad encouraged it a little bit, but I was pretty interested in and excited about music from an early age, she says. My dad was a professional, so it wasn't super weird for me to think of a career in music as plausible. The fatherly influence would help shape Burnett's journey with her instrument. Mark Burnett is known for transferring the works of Johann Sebastian Bach to the double bass. His work has informed Burnett's own focus within her development. With bass, there's not so many pieces that are written originally for us, she says, so a lot of music that I'm interested in was originally written for the violin, the cello, or the voice. One of my passions, like my dad, is transcribing music for other instruments so that they can be played on the bass. Burnett will perform some of those transposed pieces at the Morningside Concert with Brahms Cello Sonata in E minor, as well as music by Sergei Prokofiev. The latter is Burnett's own transcription. Chamber music has become a passion for Burnett. She was initially interested in being part of an orchestra and even appeared as a guest principal bassist with the Israel Symphony Orchestra in 2019. I realized how much music there is to be explored in the chamber music world, she says. It's a very stable job to be in an orchestra, but being around other young musicians that have started careers and been successful just playing chamber music made me realize that it is possible. She further notes that the more intimate format of chamber music affords the players greater opportunities for personal expression. It's a much closer and more personal collaboration, she says. You can bring your personality and musicianship to the table in a way you can't necessarily do in an orchestra, where you have to be part of the group. That intimacy will be at the forefront of Burnett's Saturday performance, where she will perform with Morningside organist and choir master Jonathan Crutchfield, providing the sole accompaniment on piano. I've never played with him before, so we're going to do a crash rehearsal in the couple days preceding. Hopefully everything will work out, she smiles with a hint of worry in her voice. There can be little doubt that such an expression of concern is perfunctory. Such a young player, Burnett is remarkably cool and collected, an assuredness that transcends her years and, like the playing itself, places her among the modern chamber music world's brightest stars. That was a young, rising-level bassist, Amina Burnett, coming home from a chamber concert by Gordon Owen. Next up, autism representation on stage increases challenging stereotypes by Luke Evans. If I asked you to list five major plays featuring one or more major characters with autism, could you do it? Perhaps The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time or The Pillow Man come to mind, but I'll make it harder and ask for five plays that feature an autistic main character who isn't a child and who is explicitly stated to be autistic. I'm willing to bet that most who have not spent their careers championing neurodiverse stories would have trouble coming up with one, and they could hardly be blamed. For the autistic community, a paucity of meaningful representation is not new. Sure, we appear in the odd prestige piece, but these are usually riddled with stereotypes and inaccuracies, and often are written to appeal to a neurotypical audience, and that's when we're not being exploited for laugh. However, in the last few years, things have begun to look up with TV offerings like Heartbreak High, Everything's Going to be OK, Not Dead Yet, and Extraordinary Attorney Woo, allowing autistic people to occupy leading roles within various narratives. Now the shift is starting to extend to the theater. This December, the Broadway musical How to Dance in Ohio will break ground as the first major musical to feature a large cast of autistic characters played by openly autistic actors. Representation is on the rise, and the shift is manifesting right here in Atlanta. In January of this year, the Alliance debuted a new show for the Kathy and Ken Bernhard Theater for the very young series called All Smiles. Created in partnership with the Marcus Autism Center, it showcased how different people express emotion by focusing on smiles. Director Samantha Provozzano worked with Tinashe Kajiji-Bolden to produce the show. Our collaboration with the Marcus Autism Center and Coralwood School allowed us to shape All Smiles, tailoring the play to meet the unique needs and interests of zero to five-year-olds, said Provozzano. There's no right or wrong way to engage with theater for the very young. By involving young individuals on the autism spectrum, we could create a play that encourages even mere forms of engagement. Often little attention is paid to the internal lives of autistic people, and the ways we express emotions are frequently invalidated in favor of more traditional ways. It's refreshing to see a show that directly challenges these ideas and uplifts our differences rather than stigmatizing them. More recently, at the end of the play, playwright and actor Daryl Lisa Fazio held a reading of her new play, I'm Right Here, at the Horizon Theater. This reading starred Fazio as Lori Ackerman, a woman struggling with a chronic ailment that doctors have failed to diagnose, and Rachel Butram as Dr. Pamela Slorsoski, a passionate, committed physician who realizes that her lifelong struggle with social situations is due to undiagnosed autism. Pamela's gender is not inconsequential here, as studies continue to show that autistic women are far less likely to be diagnosed due to systemic biases. Even when sharing her realization with her doctor, Pamela is told she cannot be autistic because she can hold a conversation and make eye contact, sentiments that even I, a diagnosed autistic man, have received but which are far more common for autistic women. Fazio did not set out to serve the autistic community. Her goal of critiquing gender inequity within the healthcare system led her to a UK organization specifically for autistic doctors, which is where she drew her inspiration. So now I knew, the character Dr. Pamela Slorsoski would be on the autism spectrum, and she would be diagnosed during the play itself, she said. That way, the audience could see her in action and then experience in real time her finally understanding why she is who she is, that she's not broken, she's neurodivergent. Fazio's work challenges numerous stereotypes, letting the audience in on the drastically underrepresented experience of late diagnosis. Fazio's works stand in contrast to previous efforts, most of which relied on the established autistic classics, by which I mean The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime. Written for stage in 2012 by Simon Stevens and based on the 2003 novel by Mark Haddon, the play stood alone for years in what we might call the autistic theatrical canon, and it deserves its place. I recently served as a dramaturg for a production at Merely Players Presents, and it was co-produced by Horizon and Aurora back in 2019. It is a well-written, well-constructed show, but a canon of one is hardly a canon at all. The spectrum is too wide to be encapsulated by one 15-year-old boy, no matter how excellent the production. So what do we as autistic artists want to see? I can't speak for the whole community, but I can certainly speak for myself. I want to see autistic characters portrayed not only with empathy, but respect and dignity. I want to see us take center stage instead of being objects for audience sympathy. I want us to tell our own stories, and I want a diverse array of autistic voices, not just white, cisgendered, heterosexual men. I want new plays, not just a different theater doing Curious Incident every few years. My hope is that in uplifting works such as All Smiles and I'm Right Here, we can build momentum and witness more autistic voices gracing the stage. That was Autism Representation on Stage Increases Challenging Stereotypes by Luke Evans. Next up, Bill Sheffield dives into his blues music to find his own redemption song by Shannon Marie Tovey. Bill Sheffield has been a fixture on the Atlanta music scene for over 50 years. With ties to such blues regality as Muddy Waters, B.B. King, and Big Mama Thornton, and a solid reputation as a performer and songwriter in his own right, he is regarded as one of Atlanta's premier blues musicians. He's released eight albums so far, and Stomp and Stammer critic Tony Paris once wrote that Sheffield has a voice that immediately grabs you by the heart and holds you close. After a long absence from the stage due to health issues, Sheffield is back. He will perform with Spencer Kirkpatrick at the Common Grounds Coffee House at the Unitarian Universalist Congregation Metro Atlanta North in Roswell Saturday at 7.30 p.m. He also hosts the weekly Sunset Jam at Cajun Blues in Chamblee on Thursdays at 7.30 p.m. Sheffield 72 may be best known for his ability to play acoustic Piedmont blues, a subgenre characterized by a complex method of using the thumb to play the bass line and the fingers to play the melody. Songs played in this style generally tell a story, and Sheffield's music has told a very personal tale. My Father's Son. Before Sheffield played the blues, he heard the blues. As a child who was born at Georgia Baptist Hospital in Atlanta, he was deeply disturbed at the rampant racism in the mid-century segregated city. He remembers witnessing overt acts of cruelty, inequitable working conditions, and imprinted on his mind all these years later, billboards using racial slurs to remind black men to stay inside after dark or else. His father, however, refused to treat black men the way other white men did. He paid them fairly and treated them with dignity and respect. That's been the biggest influence of my life, really, to follow that, Sheffield says. He was a flawed man, but a great man in my estimation. His song, My Father's Son, reflects the complicated relationship he had with his father. When his father died, his black employees called to ask permission to attend his funeral. Both the fact that they wanted to pay respect to his father and that they had to ask permission to do so greatly impacted Sheffield. Deeply disturbed at the racial and other injustices around him and feeling helpless to remedy them, he began a lifelong battle with depression, which was coupled with alcohol and other addictions. But he also discovered blues music. That was what drew me to the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, Sheffield explains, referring to the seminal blues band of the early 60s. He had two black guys in his band. That was unheard of when I was a kid, you know, it just didn't happen. From there, Sheffield started to dig into the influences of white musicians, like Butterfield, and discovered the roots of the music they were playing. The first song he remembers really making an impression on him was Blind Willie Johnson's Dark Was the Night, Cold was the Ground. Johnson's cries of impending gloom seemed to express the horrors of the racism he saw around him. Sheffield also noted that while this song reflected great sorrow, it also somehow provided a little comfort. Intrigued, he kept digging and discovered Robert Johnson, Big Bill Broonzy, Blind Blake, Mississippi John Hurt, Skip James, Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf, and more. He then began to realize that the British music that he thought was the blues wasn't the authentic stuff. It was guys trying to cover the blues, he says. Once you hear Muddy and Robert Johnson, the sound of those voices has something sad about them. Even if it's happy, there's something sad about it. It's got a blue tone to it, and I've always had a sad nature, so it fit me nicely. Sheffield notes that to play the blues right, a musician has to have experienced pain. You've got to have the pain, he says. You've got to have it. But there's going to be a counter to it, you know? It made me aware that blues came really out of the church. It came out of those people in church laying it down, and that opened this way for what led the blues as the way it sounds. Sheffield learned to play guitar by listening to records over and over, and relentlessly trying to duplicate the sounds he heard. Once you've got Robert Johnson and Big Bill Broonzy, you've heard the best of it, you know, he says. It's unnatural for a long time, until you find your space in it, and then you find a natural way to do it. He felt that in a small way, he was making a difference. We're white guys playing their music, and that mattered back then, because most white people didn't like black people very much, he says. Seeing white kids playing their music, well, it mattered. Life-changing experience. Sheffield began to perform regularly in Atlanta in the early 70s, and he eventually caught the attention of B.B. King, who asked him to open a concert for him at Lake Spivey. It was a life-changing experience. He was very kind. He dug me, and he said, you're good. You're good at what you're doing. Stay with it. He was really encouraging, says Sheffield. Sheffield stayed with it, and rubbed shoulders with the legends. He opened for T-Bone Walker, Big Joe Turner, Eddie Vincent, and John Lee Hooker at the Municipal Auditorium, Muddy Waters at Richard's, Bonnie Raitt, Stevie Ray Vaughan, and Junior Walker and the All-Stars at the Moonshadow Saloon, Buddy Moss, the Reverend Pearlie Brown, Big Mama Thornton, and George Smith at the Twelfth Gate, and Brownie McGee at the Great Southeast Music Hall. Stevie Ray Vaughan once opened for him at the Roxy. But despite the success he found, he still spent the next several decades of his life running from the internal pain that had plagued him since he was a child. Addictions of all kind were rampant in his life. At the same time, music provided an outlet that helped him heal. Whatever that angst was in what you hear in my voice, he says, and that's cathartic, always has been for me. He believes that pain is the essence of the soul. The worst thing you can possibly do is numb your pain, he says. You've got to live your pain. If you lumb it, you lose out on the whole idea, man. Sheffield shies away from genre labels for his music. I never called myself a blues man, he says. That was something that was put on me. Blues was Muddy and Howlin' Wolf. Blues was those guys who lived it and made it, and everything else is a copy. You're not going to find someone who does better blues than Muddy Waters. Muddy was the blues, you know? I didn't live Muddy Waters' life, and I can't pretend that I did. In fact, Sheffield's au voir has strayed into folk, rock, gospel, and country territory, and his original songs draw from all four. You just got to take it from there, he says, regarding his blues roots. You can't just sit there. That's where you want to be, where you've got your own genre. He points to the bouncy, country-folk leanings of his song Cherry Blossom Time. Although he was inspired by Big Bill Broonzy while writing it, he says, it's me naturally being myself. Redemption Song. Sheffield remains deeply concerned with social injustices and heavily invested in writing and singing about the truths he's learned the hard way. He believes that one of his best songs is his latest, called Forgive and Forget. The last verse of the song is, stay beware of unkind words you can never unsay. It's powerful for me, he says. I've had a lot of anger in myself from different things, and I relate to confusion and turmoil, and I've created a bunch of both in my life, you know. This song will be on his ninth album, currently in the works. He has been in recovery from his addictions for several years now, and is in a romantic relationship unlike any that he's been in before. We're very much in love, he says of his life partner, drummer, Sandra Sen. I need her, and she needs me, and that matters. She's given me a reason to continue to live, and I'm happier than I've ever been. Sheffield plans to continue playing and performing as long as he can. It's important to do it, he says, regarding his life's work. It's what's left of me. Everything else is just getting through. I'm proud that I've written some stuff, stuff that matters to some people. It feels good to know that I've had an influence, even if it's a small one. To influence people here locally, that means a lot to me. The courage to see and to feel, to sing and to heal, has been a consistent theme in Sheffield's life and his work. As long as the world needs changing, Sheffield will be there to call out injustices, remind us that mistakes do not define us, and cheer us with whatever music needs to be written, played, and sung. So I guess I am a blues guy. At the start of it, at the guts of it, he says, you have to aspire to be something higher. That's what blues is about, aspiring above this life. I can be jubilant in the midst of this madness, you know? That was Bill Sheffield digs into his blues music to find his own redemption song by Shannon Marie Tovey. Next, review, Strong Monica Hogan Dance Work Program Presents Fresh Perspectives by Robin Horton. In an interview with Arts ATL last year, Monica Hogan Seisel said the two to three year plan for her company, Monica Hogan Dance Works, includes introducing the company's dancers and Atlanta audiences to different choreographic styles and perspectives. This season, Seisel, who relocated to the company to Atlanta in 2021, after eight years in New York, revealed the next step in that plan, launching an initiative to support new and emerging Atlanta-based dance makers. Last Sunday at the Emory Performing Arts Studio, Seisel and company presented four works from participating choreographers, along with Seisel's latest premiere. It was a strong program that featured some emotionally resonant moments, promising range from the emerging choreographers, Juliana Farrakata, Michaela Bristow, Dom Kinsey, and Megan Novoa, and exciting, expressive performances from several company members and guest artists. Farrakata's From Within and Kinsey's nostalgia, What Is, delivered particularly well on Seisel's premise of fresh perspectives and innovative movement vocabularies. From Within, a reworking of a 2018 solo, opened the show. Farrakata began center stage, back toward the audience. As she slapped her arms frenetically up and down, she alternated between bending her elbows sharply and almost touching her hands to her shoulders and extending her arms so that her hands slapped her hips and thighs on the downward swing. The sharply defined muscles in her back moved almost like piano strings, limbed against her backdrop and above her long black skirt by strong directional lighting. As a percussive beat joined the ambient drone of the music, Farrakata left off what looked like a desperate attempt at flight. Turning to face the audience, she twined her skirt around her arms and neck. Then it became a binding at her wrists, and then a noose. Moving again, her movements explored the ways in which arms are as unlike legs as they are unlike wings. Folding forward at the waist to put her palms against the ground, she tested walking on hands and feet while the stark lighting again brought her musculature into sharp relief. Finally, she recycled the movement, keeping the same gestures, but changing the impulse and intent by releasing tension, redistributing weight, and smoothing out transitions. The ambient music rippled into a recognizable melody, harmony, and rhythm. Frantic flapping settled into lovely upper body work. Her costume transformed from a hindrance into a prop. She abandoned mimicry for metaphor, letting meaning emanate from her body rather than imposing meaning on it. The melody's nostalgia, what is, sent an ensemble of eight guest artists on a journey through time and memory. The dancers, dressed in white, flowed across the stage through athletic sequences that included jumps and floor work, flocking like birds from one seemingly spontaneous grouping to the next. A leader would emerge for several moments, only to be subsumed within the crowd and replaced by a new center of attention. In the flow, the dancers occasionally snagged or stuck against a particular phrase. The ensemble would grind to a stop, and their reiterative movements, while still synchronized, deconstructed big fluid movements of whole limbs and torsos into smaller, mechanical ticks of individual joints and body parts. Then one dancer would break free of the inertia, flowing past the obstruction into a new phrase or to a new location on the stage, and the rest would follow. Throughout, Pearlisbeth de Leon and Walter Apps often led the group, and their presence and technical skill drew the eye even when they were part of a collective. Over the course of the piece, a repeated gesture in which the dancers held and gazed into imagined scrying instruments gained authenticity as the dancers let their bodies feel the weight and their gaze into the depths of the imagined object. Bicell's counterpoint closed the show with a glowing spectacle of colorful surfaces that occasionally parted to reveal moments of tender intimacy and humor. Divided into eight sections, each named after a relationship phase or aspect, counterpoint's movement featured slightly turned out feet and opened hips that nodded to ballet and blurred the lines between neoclassical ballet and contemporary dance. The most striking quality of Bicell's choreography, however, was the way it seemed to transport the dancers into an alternate plane of lower gravity. Their heads, hands, and feet were weighted, but their bodies seemed to fall in slow motion, subject to centrifugal forces that pulled legs and arms taut and hands and feet to the extreme edges of arcs and circles in sweeping kicks and port de bras. The full company was costumed to accentuate their individuality in a range of saturated jewel tones and soft pastels, and they projected joyful ease through technically challenging phrase work. Ariana Allen, particularly in her solo, Two, the Longing, and a pas de deux with Brittany Leland, Five, the Falling, stole the show with her grace. In one memorably repeated phrase from Five, the Falling, Allen and Leland mirrored one another through a series of melting falls that took them from kneeling through a fetal position and back up to their knees, over and over and over, until it finally took them off stage. Similar to those two sections was a duet between Audrey Crabtree and Emily Hogan, Six, the Argument, and a trio that included Allen, Farrakata, and Leland, Seven, the Letting Go. Each had distinctive emotional and gestural signatures that were reinforced by Thysel's choice of music and David Rheingold's lighting design. The other four sections lacked that very clear thematic differentiation. Consequently, Counterpoint's narrative structure was ultimately circular or recursive, at odds with the progression or evolution implied by the section titles. The company's cohesion and technical accomplishment in Sunday's performance showcased Thysel's strengths as a company director. In its second season, this looks like a group that has been dancing for several years. The diversity and strength of the dance artists brought together by DanceWorks' Emerging Choreographers Initiative demonstrated Thysel's commitment to Atlanta as the company's new home. That was Review, Strong Monica Hogan DanceWorks Program Presents Fresh Perspectives by Robin Horton. That concludes today's MetroArts 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.