The Binghampton neighborhood is named for its founder and first mayor, W.H. Bingham. He was an immigrant who came to America from Ireland and settled in the Memphis area, where he became a businessman and politician. The neighborhood has changed many times in the ensuing years, but in the modern era it has become a haven for immigrants, and the Binghampton International Festival celebrates the community’s global diversity with musical performances, dancing, and a bike parade.
The Binghampton International Festival came about as the result of work being done through the Center for Transforming Communities. “We go to neighborhoods and work alongside people to fulfill their dreams, passions, and aspirations,” says community organizer and festival spokesperson Kate Kananura, recounting work the center has previously done in North Memphis, South Memphis, and Highland Heights. “Binghampton is one of the most culturally diverse neighborhoods in Memphis, and it is one of the most diverse neighborhoods in the entire state of Tennessee,” she adds. “There are few other neighborhoods like Binghampton, where there are people from Africa, Mexico, Nepal, and Asia. It’s just a wonderful mix of people who have lived together for a long time and who want to know more about each other’s culture.”
According to Kananura, the Binghampton International Festival was created so, “one very beautiful neighborhood” filled with immigrants and the families of immigrants could “tell its story to Memphis and to the world.”
Sorry, folks, no monologue jokes this week. Instead, FOTW is checking back in with Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY), who continues to engage with Alden Global Media, the media-gobbling hedge fund angling to acquire, or otherwise determine, the fate of The Commercial Appeal‘s corporate owner, Gannett Co.
As the Flyer reported in the March cover story “Going to Pieces,” Schumer sent a sternly worded letter to Alden, expressing concern about what might happen if the company, infamous for slashing its way to double-digit profits with no regard for communities, acquired another newspaper chain.
He’d already weighed in on the Senate floor, noting that Gannett was a troubled example of newspaper consolidation, plagued by layoffs and delocalization. Hedge fund-backed owners like MNG/Digital First depend on deep layoffs and cost-cutting, including the outsourcing of back office, sales, and certain editorial duties to central hubs, far removed from the places where news is gathered and where the paper is circulated and primarily read. They sell a newspaper’s real estate holdings and sell or shutter poorly performing properties with nothing left to squeeze.
In response to Schumer, the Alden-owned MNG enterprises said it would “right-size overhead costs,” more or less as predicted. MNG Chairman R. Joseph Fuchs wrote, “With respect to real estate, strategic steps might include, where feasible, consolidating print sites, editorial production hubs, advertising production hubs, and financial services.”
The response was deemed unsatisfactory and triggered a second letter from Schumer announcing intentions to involve the Department of Justice and the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corp., in a process of exploring potential regulatory issues.
“It’s fair to warn all parties,” 1984 director Courtney Oliver says. “If you have a squirmy thing about blood, teeth, fingers, electrocution, children holding guns, or rats, then you may be triggered.” But it’s not the blood or the rats or any specific threat of mortal harm that make George Orwell’s dystopian novel such an effective horror story. Ever prescient, it stalks us like the killer in a slasher film, and has for the better part of the last century.
“What makes 1984 frightening is the idea that a government can have psychological power over its people,” Oliver says. “The relevance to today is in the power of our current technology. How does everyone know where we are? Because we tell them! How do ads know what we like? Because we tell them! The terror is more about how much we’re setting ourselves up.”
2+2=5
Orwell also introduced us to “doublethink,” an example of peer-pressure regulated “newspeak.” It’s the word for holding mutually contradictory beliefs without dissonance. Under doublethink, the citizens of Oceania are inured to perpetual war and shifting alliances. They live in a crumbling, but busy world of what POTUS counselor Kellyanne Conway calls “alternative facts.”
Orwell’s two-way telescreens predict the black mirror of modern digital media, as he writes of a culture that helps make and spread the propaganda that traps it.
Oliver cast veteran actor and university professor Gregory Boller as 1984‘s villain O’Brien. Boller teaches an unusual ethics class using theater to get his students to see the world through the eyes of a villain. Preparing for the role, he found PTSD and suicide levels for military people who conduct torture are high. “It really messes with guys, but O’Brien doesn’t seemed messed with,” Boller says. “He seems mentally healthy. What kind of person could do torture and not suffer ill effects? I looked into sadism and some pretty disturbing literature, actually.”
Dead. “I’m dead.” It’s a thing we say now, on the internet, when things strike us as being uniquely funny. “I’m so dead,” we say. Maybe we don’t laugh, but it slays us nonetheless, as jokes have slain people throughout the ages in spite of laughter’s reputation for being “the best medicine.” “Dying of laughter” is an old idiom and the language of comedy is largely borrowed from the world of violence,mayhem, and harm. Comics “knock us dead.” Audiences “bust a gut,” and so on. And while I can’t say Theatre Memphis’ production of Sarah Ruhl’s The Clean House “kills,” exactly, it may stab you in the heart repeatedly with a scalpel.
There’s a moment near the top of The Clean House when Lane, a nondescript white doctor in white clothes in her nondescript white-on white-home, tells Matilde the Brazilian maid in her black livery, she’s an “interesting person.” It’s not a complement. The nondescript white doctor, sympathetically revealed by Tamara Wright, didn’t hire an interesting person, she hired a cleaning lady who needs to get to work whitening up the grubby space or get another job. Ruhl’s heart has never seemed larger than it does in this compassionate piece from 2006, but her metaphors have seldom been more ham-fisted either. Appropriating the kind of magical realism associated with certain strains of South American literature The Clean House essays the relative merits of tidying up. It’s themes are Buddhist adjacent, showing how the noblest desire to order a chaotic world results in sadness. It’s a sly and deceptively poetic play about embracing the messes we make in the hallway between love and death, and maybe a little self-serving in that regard. It’s the kind of work that will likely divide audiences, leaving them delighted and warm on the inside or bored and baffled.
What shouldn’t divide audiences is the solid vision put forward by director Leslie Barker’s creative team, and a remarkable collection of thoughtful, lived-in performances
Ruhl’s work and influence has grown so familiar that her trademark idiosyncrasies barely feel like idiosyncrasies at all. Still, time and quickly evolving perspectives may also make one of the play’s more elegantly prepared storylines, a little hard for some to swallow. Lane’s husband Charles, who’s also a doctor, falls in love with Ana, an older, exotic mastectomy patient. He subsequently undertakes a brutal hero’s quest into the arctic to save Ana’s life and show the purity of his intentions. Although he’s not Jewish, Charles claims personal exoneration from any wrongdoing due to an esoteric Hebrew law regarding soulmates he heard about on NPR, and sincerely wants his jilted (and not having it) wife to rejoice and share in his newfound happiness. Sweetly portrayed by Chris Cotton, Charles is helpless — swept up in an overwhelming love spell he can’t understand or control. It suits the play’s tone, but tangos at the edge of current sensibilities regarding masculine misbehavior.
The show revolves around Matilde, the cleaning lady who’s depressed by cleaning. She’s also in mourning for her parents, whose perfect love ended badly. Dad was the funniest man in his village in Brazil, and mom was his equal. When she died laughing at one of his jokes he took his own life. Now Matilde wants to be a comedian, and Ruhl’s play functions like a preview of some future network sitcom she’ll star in. Jaclyn Suffel’s formidable in the role, leading us through the dreamy script like a modern day Sabina, the maid, and most memorable character from Thornton Wilder’s Skin of Our Teeth. It’s a mature, effortlessly commanding turn in a role that often demands the impossible. I’ll get back to this in a minute.
A lot of The Clean House reminds me of Wilder and Skin of Our Teeth. No dinosaurs come tromping through the theater, but the story’s no less magically weird or mythological in its depiction of family, or its focus on origins and eschatology. Only this time, for Ruhl, it’s all personal.
Matilde’s inability to clean is balanced by Virginia’s compulsion to straighten, dust, vacuum and organize. Virginia is Lane’s sister. She’s a damaged soul made of right-sized expectations, and she wants a relationship with her busy, distant sibling so badly enters into a bargain with Matilde to do the depressed maid’s work, just to get a toe in the door. Virginia’s tragic cheerfulness is stretched to the point of psychopathy, and Aliza Moran walks a tightrope in presenting a deeply silly character who’s just a little too fragile to laugh at. It’s the show’s dilemma in a nutshell.
The Clean House‘s narrative strategy also reminds me, at times, of some of the more vexing routines devised by stand up comic Andy Kaufman who was always more prankster and performance artist than gag-man. It’s a show about the power of jokes where all the jokes are whispered or spoken in a language most English speakers won’t understand. “It doesn’t work in translation,” Matilde explains at one point. Honest laughs happen throughout, but the literary force of dangling the play’s jokes just beyond reach doesn’t translate — and that’s okay. Like Kaufman, Ruhl sometimes tests an audience’s patience while she’s resetting their expectations. This is why Suffel’s performance is so key. As the show’s narrator, she frames the important stuff, and ushers us through the rough spots even though she’s sometimes armed with nothing but a brow crinkle or a little weaponized side-eye.
I’ve got to say, it’s nice to see Christina Welford Scott set free, both as Matilde’s mother who dies laughing, and as Ana, the “home wrecker,” who thinks that sounds like a marvelous way to go. I sometimes think Scott — a local treasure if there ever was one — gets cast in some shows because directors see her in great roles, not because they see great roles in her. That’s not to say she doesn’t deliver in serious leading parts that call for lots of seriousness and crying. But Scott’s capacity for real greatness is most evident when the challenges are physical and fun. Get this woman laughing or clowning or dancing lighter than air and she’ll rip your goddamn guts out. Here she’s cast as a classic “mysterious” femme fatale, but with a variety of subtle, deeply satisfying twists. Her death (not a spoiler) is full of life, and hung all around with joy and agony.
I have a mixed relationship with The Clean House. I get tired of both its sense and its nonsense for long stretches. But the more I think about its individual parts, the more I find to recommend about the whole complicated dust bunny of a play — this morbid joke built on sixes not threes. So, I’m throwing caution away, embracing my messy feelings, and calling it a win for everybody involved. Well, everybody except for the poor guy snoozing on the front row.
Carlene Carter was sitting on her porch when the call came in. Even if she hadn’t said so, I might have guessed because I could hear the sound of geese and turkeys coming through the phone. She said there were parakeets inside the house too, as more avian sounds intruded, like Martin Denny was producing our interview, or Jerry Byrd.
I knew I was going to enjoy talking to Carter when, first thing, she told me she was touring with Chris Casello on guitar. Casello’s a telecaster wizard and compulsive entertainer. His band The Sabres has been on heavy rotation in my car for the past year, at least. So, like others in her famously musical family, she has a knack for surrounding herself with great players. I’m starting with these images, because it’s all present tense. And when you’re talking to Country music royalty, it’s too easy to get hung up on the past.
We talked about her band, life, and what it means to be part of the First Family of Country Music, as well as the ongoing challenges of being an independent female artist.
For Carlene Carter Where She Comes Is Where She’s Bound (2)
Memphis Flyer: Tell me about the show you’re bringing to The Halloran Centre.
Carlene Carter: I’m coming as a trio. I’m bringing my keyboard player who also plays harmonica and guitar, Al Hill. And Chris Casello.
I’m going to stop you already to geek out. Casello’s just a tremendous player, I met him at the Ameripolitan Awards a few years back. I know some great surf and rockabilly players and still — if it’s the same guy — he just makes you step back and rethink everything you know.
He was probably at Ameripolitan. He’s kind of a big deal. I met him when I came back from California in 2005. I did a musical based on my mom and the Carter family called Wildwood Flower. And Chris was in the house band and played Faron Young. We’ve been playing together on and off since then and he’s my go-to guy. I met Al Hill through Chris. We have a full band too. But I’d been out doing a lot of these shows by myself, and just wanted to add a little energy. Otherwise, it’s all kinda the same. I tell a lot of stories about life and growing up the way I did and what influenced me. I even tell about my mom saying the first record I listened to was when she danced with me to “Mystery Train.” I try to let people know a little more about what it was like on the inside, being a young Carter girl.
That sounds great. And a good group for playing all the traditional stuff and your own songs.
Obviously, I’ve had a long career and a lot of different kinds of music has come out of me. But I’ve always returned to the music I grew up with and that was Carter Family Music. People can say it’s country music, and yeah it is. But it’s timeless to me. And I have a certain amount of energy that I still have at the age of 63, so I can still rock a little bit. It drives the guys all crazy because I never have a set list until right before a show. Sometimes I go, “You know, I’m just going to wing it.” I think it keeps us on our toes. It keeps me really fresh instead of being where I have just one show that I do.
I’m going to play this recording for my band the next time they’re pressing me for a set list.
It keeps you really fresh. Keeps everybody on their toes. It’s good to have a set list when you’re playing with a full band. But in the situation we have, we can just jam like we want to. I’m really fortunate that I have a good duet partner in Al Hill. You never know what’s going to happen. It’s fun.
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I remember seeing an interview with you when you were just starting out, maybe. People would assume you knew everything about country music, but you didn’t because you were just inside this musical world. It was just your family and your life. It was a kind of disconnect.
Yeah. I didn’t listen to country radio except for the Grand Ole Opry. And that’s because I want to go see my mom and my aunts and my grandma on there. People I grew up with like Minnie Pearl, who would babysit me on the side of the stage sometime at the Ryman. It was just a conglomeration of all these folks I just knew. So, because of that, I don’t think I really understood the extent of the stardom they had. Even my father Carl Smith. And Johnny Cash. You know, he just did Johnny Cash. That’s one of the things I inherited. I was encouraged to not pay so much attention to a lot of stuff, and to do what makes you feel right and do what’s real.
That seems in the family spirit. Cash always introduced new sounds and artists. A.P. wandered the countryside asking people about the songs their families sang. Looking back and forward at the same time.
Gathering. Gathering information. Gathering stories. So much of what I do is about my life. A lot of my songs are autobiographical. They’re not necessarily story songs, but I can fill in the blanks.
Exactly.
I’m really looking forward to coming to Memphis because it is a place I’ve always felt connected to. It’s down the road from Nashville and now that I live in Nashville, I’m so happy to be coming there. I can just get my car in the morning and drive on down then play. To me that’s what it’s all about. That’s how I grew up — “Let’s go pick a show!” And you drive and get there and play and get in the car and drive back. That’s just how I roll. Although I’ll probably spend the night, I’m thinking.
Obviously, there are a lot of advantages to growing up in this world where music is woven into everything, but was there also obligation? Sometimes it’s hard to grow in the shade. June Carter, Carl Smith, Johnny Cash — these are some pretty long shadows.
I know what you’re saying. I get this question quite a lot, really. And I never considered it either until people start asking me about it since, pretty much back at the beginning of my career. When your parents are iconic performers, you don’t really know. They were all four of them — Goldie, Carl, Johnny, and Mom — very down-to-earth people. We had a normal kind of life in a lot of ways. We swam and we fished and we’d work in the garden and we did things that other people did. And then we picked a show. I learned a lot from that. And I’ve got so much respect for my grandma. What I learned from her was a great work ethic, and a great balance between being a person and not a superstar. I never really got to the point where I had to handle that though.
But you’ve had hits, and a career.
And I feel responsibility for a lot of it now particularly since my mom passed away. I was told very early on, “when we’re all gone you’ll have to carry on the music, keep it alive to the best of your ability, and add to it.” I took that very seriously. I always try to tip my hat to my heritage. Also whenever I didn’t know what to do musically, I went back to Carter Family music. I’d sing it, and play it, and get back in touch with what is in my DNA. Because I really do believe there’s DNA involved here. So when I got around to doing Carter Girl in 2014, it’s a record I always knew I was going to make someday.
I don’t know how you pick a record’s worth of songs out of a catalog of so many songs.
The songs would change drastically from week to week. It would change all the time. And I’m trying to write. I kept thinking I could do that for the rest of my life. And that’s kind of what I am doing. And I want to pass it down to my daughter and my granddaughters. I don’t know if the boys want to be Carter boys, but the girls are leaning that way. If I can only get them singing. There’s an age where they don’t really want to sing. They want to play, which is great.
I don’t want to focus too much on the past.
One of the things I accepted a long time ago was anytime anybody wrote about me there was going to be a full paragraph about who I was related to — “And now, Carlene!”
I’m sure. And you get it from all sides having been married to Nick Lowe.
And the huge influence he had on me. Howie Epstein too. I just had good teachers. I did. And I soaked up everything I could from people who really knew how to make records. Nick would always tell me, just remember to always practice your craft. He’s coming to Nashville in May and I’m going to see him because he still inspires me.
For Carlene Carter Where She Comes Is Where She’s Bound
You talked about how picking shows is just in your DNA. But — and I might be wrong about this. But when Carl Smith finally retired, didn’t he basically give up being Mr. Country Music and decide to just be a regular guy?
He had a long career. It was like 30 years. He burned up the road, and burned up the charts, and everything he touched turned gold. And by that point, he’d done it all. At that point in his life he said, “I want to concentrate on being home and working with horses.” He wanted to focus on horses and he did. A lot of people who had the success my daddy had would never dream of walking away from it, but he did. A lot of people say they’re retiring from the road, but then they come back because they can’t stay away from the action, or the feeling they get when they’re performing, or the music. Daddy was happy on his horse whistling and singing his heart out in a field counting cows. In the last couple years of his life, I spent more one-on-one time with my dad than I ever had. I always saw him, of course, and my stepmother was very much a part of that. She made sure she was the one who would call and say, “Does Carlene want to come out this weekend?” Daddy wasn’t one of those kinds of dads, but he was always glad to see me. And I had my sister and brothers out there and that was really a much more normal life than I had, particularly after Mom married John.
Oh, I’m sure.
After mom married John, things changed for us in terms of being in a fishbowl and being seen, and being on the cover of The National Enquirer, as a kid.
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National Enquirer — yeah, that’s got to be completely surreal.
Daddy gave it up the year I started making records, 1978. So he never took us on the road like the Carters did or Cash did. That was a traveling family. But Daddy, he went to work. Even so much so that my brother, when he was little, they asked him in school what his dad did for a living, and my brother Carl said, “Oh, he works at the airport.” Because he was always going off to the airport! I never got to see him perform very much. I saw him one time in Las Vegas when I was about 16. So he retired in 1978, and that was the same year my grandmother passed away. So it was the start of something for me, but the end of Daddy’s musical career, and the end of Grandma’s musical career. And her not being there for advice I counted on. I counted on her for a lot of that stuff. She always had time for all of her grandkids. She’d teach about anything, and she loved playing with us no matter what, whether we were good or not. Though, she’d give you the evil eye if you were on stage and messed up. I’ve tried to carry the best of everything with me. Sometimes I show my ass on stage and made big sweeping statements I wish I never said. But I love playing to a live audience and the engagement I have with them. It’s very personal for me. By the end of the show, I think people know me.
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You’ve said some things about how women who wanted to do their own thing and didn’t fit a package got labeled difficult.
I remember going to my label in the nineties, and they said, “You need to realize that you can’t have the kind of record sales men have.” Like 80 percent of the market is women and women don’t buy women’s records.I just thought that was insane. It made no sense to me. I bought women’s records most of my life. I love Etta James. I love Janis Joplin. Linda Ronstadt was a huge influence. It made no sense to me. And that you might get 20% of sales because you’re a woman made no sense to me. So I decided early on, I’m not going to let them get me down. I’m going to be the highest energy female act, and I’m going to make people happy.
I know this is an impossible question, but is there any one image or anecdote that really illustrates what it was like growing up in the Carter Family?
Probably the biggest thing in my mind that I always go back to, is being a young girl who wants to be a songwriter, and sitting in our music room on the lake in Hendersonville, and looking around the room and seeing Roy Orbison and Paul McCartney sit down at the piano and play “Lady Madonna.” And Kris Kristofferson was there. And Mickey Newbury. And George and Tammy are there. And we have this real thing of having people just eating together. And then sharing together in such an intimate way. It’s such a reminder of why we make music.
Carlene Carter celebrates her family tradition Saturday, April 13th at The Halloran Centre.
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WATN and WLMT will be sold to Tegna Inc., according to a co-announcement by Nexstar and Tribune Media. Last December, WREG owner Tribune entered into an acquisition agreement with WLMT/WATN owner Nexstar.
Planning to stay just below the FCC ownership cap for station ownership, Nexstar announced they would be divesting in 13 markets. Nexstar chose to keep WREG when the $6.4-billion merger finally closes.
Neverending Elvis
Forbes ran a story last week titled “Lisa Marie & The Rise and Fall of the Elvis Estate.” Lisa Marie Presley filed a lawsuit against Siegel and Provident Financial Management for allegedly “hiding the trust’s true financial condition.”
“The deal brought in only $40 million after taxes, plus $25 million worth of stock in the future holding company of American Idol,” the article says of the 2005 deal to sell 85 percent of Lisa Marie’s interests in Elvis Presley Enterprises. “Sadly, between 2005 and 2015, nearly all of this money was gone, and Lisa Marie was left deeply in debt.”
According to Forbes‘ report, Lisa Marie spent $39 million in four years.
Smell-ementary
Caldwell-Guthrie Elementary was evacuated last week because of a weird smell. MLGW crews investigated and found nothing out of the ordinary.
When Kelby Auten moved to Memphis, she drove straight from Louisville, Kentucky, to an audition for Memphis’ rhythmic tap dance troupe, the Hot Foot Honeys.
“Being new to Memphis, finding this group of girls has been one of the best things that happened,” she says. Auten’s been tap dancing since she was two-and-a-half, starting out as Broadway-style hoofer before gravitating to rhythmic tap. Between, she studied all the usual stuff — jazz and modern.
“I got an offer to teach for Children’s Ballet Theatre in Memphis,” she says. “It was another full time ballet teaching gig. But I found out the Honeys were in Memphis, and that was a big draw. … As long as I’ve got tap shoes on my feet, I’m a happy girl.”
Hot Foot Honeys
Auten is a featured solo performer in “Time Stepping,” an anthology of original tap performances inspired by the idea of time.
Auten’s performance was developed in collaboration with Hot Foot Honeys founder Marianne Bell. It’s a jazzy run through “Some Day My Prince Will Come,” but with a twist. “It has a playful side where we take my ballet training and mix it with rhythm tap,” she says. “It’s not so hard-hitting all the time, and more graceful.
“If the prince shows up, great, but I’m not going to wait around,” she says.”It’s about choosing to still be a princess because I want to,” she says. “Not because I need to be rescued.”
Take a strange old castle-like building with a long, weird history that occasionally involved space aliens and copious amounts of alcohol. Add to that a troupe of fairies and satyrs, and a creative team that wants to “abandon the ordinary and step into another realm,” while also showing off the newly restored interiors of Ashlar Hall.
“Rites of Spring” is a different show every night, with a different musical performer kicking things off. Local favorites Star & Micey play opening night. After that, different performers will play a short set each night with styles ranging from musical theater diva Annie Freres to guitar picking Memphis songwriter Mark Edgar Stuart.
“Rites of Spring”
“Then, after the music, we have these magical creatures doing the rites,” director Julia Hinson says, trying to describe events that will unfold across rooms that have been turned into temporary art installations. “We sort of have this idea that the house has been taken over by these magical creatures. They are kind of rebirthing it into the present. And the magical creatures will invoke the ballet dancers for a ballet that weaves through the house.”
The magical creatures don’t fade away after the ballet ends. “They’ll interact with guests and live their lives in the enchanted castle,” Hinson says.
Ashlar Hall was built in 1896 for Memphis real estate developer Robert Brinkley Snowden. It has since been a restaurant, a nightclub, and a sad abandoned space. It was purchased in 2017 by Memphis area real estate investor Juan Montoya, who’s been steadily restoring the mansion.
“With an immersive show, you just don’t know what people will do,” Hinson says. So the performance repeats itself, giving audiences an opportunity to explore things they may have missed the first time.
Kaisha S. Johnson drops a reminder: “Memphis is a unique city with a unique history, but there are many cities and communities grappling with the same issues.”
The issues being grappled with begin with implicit bias that inhibits inclusiveness and equity in the arts. These problems plague other industries too, obviously, but as the co-founder, and founding director of Women of Color in the Arts (WOCA), this is where Johnson’s efforts are focused. She’s coming to Memphis April 5-7, to facilitate conversations for the inaugural Memphis Performing Arts Summit, an event created by Memphis Performing Arts Coalition (MPAC).
“MPAC along with a lot of other organizations around the country, are all looking for change, right?,” Johnson says, laying the groundwork for subverted expectations. “The first step— We need to be on the same page in terms of language and how we think about things and how we express ourselves, right?” Right!
“So the first thing everybody thinks is, ‘We need some kind of training,’ Johnson says. But that’s not where her story ends. “As an organization, my organization doesn’t think ‘training’ hits it on the head. Because we can’t ‘train away’ bias. We can’t train you ‘how to be’
in the world. What we do is facilitate conversations. We instigate dialogue so people can begin to think differently about how they work. To think differently about impact — the impact direct and indirect actions have on their colleagues. On their fellow humans. That’s the work we’re immersed in.
“A lot of people jump on the ‘We want to fix it,’ bandwagon, but maybe the fixes aren’t well thought out,” Johnson says regarding issues like equity and inclusiveness where ”fixes” can be just another expression of bias. “Our job is just getting everybody in the room that actually wants to be there. It’s the first critical step in initiating change.”
MPAC is a, “coalition of Memphis performing artists working in a collaborative way to engage our community to promote equitable and safe practices.”
Women of Color in the Arts Co-Founder Kaisha S. Johnson Visits Memphis For Performing Arts Summit
The Memphis Performing Arts Summit kicks off Friday April 5th, 5:30-8:00 with an introductory “meet and greet.”
Via MPAC:
Saturday April 6th or Sunday April 7th, 9am-4pm: Pick either day. We will be providing the same facilitated dialogue on both days, to reach as many people as possible. Limited to 40 attendees per day. On both days, we will have a delicious lunch at Caritas Village (not included; lunch prices range from $5-$10).
How do we create safer and more equitable spaces in our small companies, artists studios, as well as the major institutions in this city? With the right tools, artists can leverage their collective power to institute new practices that dismantle systems of inequities.Together we can harness our energy and engender a community of learning and sharing with a weekend of community action and professional development at Caritas Village.
Kaisha S. Johnson is Co-Founder and Founding Director of Women of Color in the Arts (WOCA), a national service organization dedicated to creating racial and cultural equity in the performing arts field. Johnson, who recently received the Sidney R. Yates Award for Outstanding Advocacy on Behalf of the Performing Arts from APAP, will guide our community through an anti-oppression and implicit bias dialogue as well as facilitate next steps on helping us implement fair practices in the community.
For more information about the Memphis Performing Arts Summit click here.
Theatre Memphis’ 100th anniversary is on the horizon and big changes are afoot. But first, a somewhat smaller 2019-20 season. When TM hosts its grand re-opening in August, 2020, patrons will enjoy expanded restrooms and common areas, additional service areas, and more.
And if the new season is somewhat abbreviated by the renovations, it’s also crowd-pleasing. Mamma Mia! AND Cats back to back on the main stage with only A Few Good Men in between? That should fill seats and make people very thankful for the expanded bathroom facilities to come.
August 16 – September 8, 2019
Set on a Greek island and to the music of the international pop group ABBA, a young girl plans her wedding while trying to discover who of three men may be her father … all to the distress and ultimate joy of her mother.
Cats
October 11 – November 3, 2019
Based on the book Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats by T.S. Eliot, will follow in the season line up with striking choreography and memorable tunes by Andrew Lloyd Webber. In this most-loved musical the scene is set in a large rubbish area which, after dark, becomes alive with cats of all types, shapes and sizes gathering for the Jellicle Ball, during which one cat will be allotted an extra precious life. Cats is heralded as one of the longest running shows on Broadway and includes the remarkable tune, “Memory”.
A Christmas Carol
December 6 – 23, 2019
A special holiday offering in December for the 42nd consecutive year at Theatre Memphis. ————————— Little Women
Returning to the Next Stage
July 10 – 21, 2019
A sold out run during the 2018-19 season prompted the return of the classic which has been adapted and directed by Jason Spitzer. Though not part of the season membership, members will be afforded discounts on the adult full price ticket.
A Few Good Men.
September 13 – 29
Next Stage
An apathetic military lawyer is assigned to the case of two Marines charged with the murder of a fellow squadron member at the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base. An Internal Affairs legal ace thinks there is something amiss and pursues justice as the defendants refuse a plea bargain. The facts come out and lead to a court martial courtroom showdown that exposes the truth.
Ruthless! The Musical November 8 – 23, 2019
Next Stage
[Ruthless!] satirize[s] old movie classics like The Bad Seed and All About Eve. The plot reveals a talented eight-year-old, Tina, who declares her show biz ambition. Enter Sylvia St. Croix, an overbearing, sleazy talent agent with a secret who encourages her to audition for the school play. Tina “accidentally” hangs her major rival to get the part … only to be sent up the river and swept aside by her mother, Judy Denmark, who finds her own voice and soars to stardom. Once Tina is released from incarceration, she returns for her own revenge with dreams of a comeback and more murderous
