Author: Kimberly Kim

Dance Fever

Post author By Kimberly Kim
Post date March 19, 2009

Clusters of people — some dancing choreographed routines together, pirouetting and jumping in sync — lined downtown sidewalks Monday from the Cadre Building to AutoZone Park. The hundreds of people were waiting for one thing: their chance to try out for the fifth season of So You Think You Can Dance.

Memphis was one of five cities holding auditions this month, along with Denver, Los Angeles, Miami, and Seattle. On Monday, dancers performed free-style in front of the show’s producers.

“We’re looking for a dancer who is unique, memorable, and entertaining to watch,” executive producer Jeff Thacker said, “and we are looking for anything and everything.”

Dancers auditioning ranged from ages 18 to 35 and came from all over the United States for 30 seconds in front of the judges and a chance at fame.

“Dancers don’t think, we just flow,” said Justin Thomas, an 18-year-old from New Jersey who brought his mother along for support.

Natasha Payne, 30, Melody Benford, 28, and Terrika Mitchell, 27, all journeyed from St. Louis to audition. Friends since meeting on a dance team in college, they say they challenge and push one another to do better as performers.

Though that trio has known each other for years, other dancers were making new friends while waiting to audition.

Nick Ramey, a 25-year-old from Boston, was sitting with Joi Chen and Jessica Lin, two cousins from Little Rock. As they waited, they listened to pop music and chatted about why they like to dance.

“It’s the performing,” Chen said.

“The gratification,” Ramey added.

Callbacks were held Tuesday and Wednesday at the Orpheum, where dancers performed in front of judges Nigel Lythgoe, Mary Murphy, and Tyce Diorio.

So You Think You Can Dance begins with a two-hour premiere May 21st.

News The Fly-By

A Mural for the Ages

Post author By Kimberly Kim
Post date February 26, 2009

CREDIT: by Simone Wilson | dreamstime.com

When senior citizens, University of Memphis students, and students from BRIDGES-PeaceJam youth conference recently painted a mural of Nobel Peace Prize recipients, the group included 1997 Nobel winner Jody Williams.

The Hope Mural, painted on a wall at the Davis Community Center in the university area, began with a series of postcards.

In January, the U of M art department asked members of Creative Aging, the Mason YMCA, and BRIDGES to design postcards that communicated individual and collective visions of hope. The multi-generational participants also exchanged the postcards with one another.

After the postcards were completed, a design team then worked with muralist and guest artist John Jota Leanos to integrate the postcards into a mural design. The team also decided to include portraits of Nobel Peace Prize winners.

“We should honor those who have come before us,” says Leanos, an assistant professor at California College of the Arts. “We should strive to be as wise and as productive as [the Nobel Peace Prize winners] have become.”

The mural also is an opportunity to focus on hopes and dreams, individually and collectively, says U of M Art Education Program coordinator Donalyn Heise: “We have much to learn from each other. By linking young and old across socioeconomic status, we learn and get a sense of who we are in relation to others. We can see things from multiple perspectives.”

The mural was a joint project between the U of M and the 2009 BRIDGES-PeaceJam Mid-South Youth Conference at Rhodes College. The conference, held February 21- 22, focused on Williams’ work on the international treaty to ban the use of land mines, as well as 11 other Nobel Peace laureates.

News

MCA’s Rust Hall Turns 50

Post author By Kimberly Kim
Post date February 5, 2009

Award-winning architect Roy Harrover was honored Monday at a reception for the 50th anniversary of Memphis College of Art’s Rust Hall.

During the reception, Harrover, who designed the building in 1956 as part of a local architecture competition, also donated an original model of Rust Hall to the school.

“I put the Fine Arts Center and the Art School together in one building, instead of putting it in several separate buildings,” Harrover says. “That’s probably why I won.”

One of the first examples of modern architecture in Memphis, the building includes exterior screens that shade the building but still allow lots of natural light to stream in.

Once called the “Taj Mahal of Memphis,” Rust Hall opened its doors in 1959 and won the national Progressive Architecture award the following year. It was also named the “Building of the Decade” for the 1950s by the American Institute of Architects (AIA).

“The first part of the building was the north end,” Harrover said. “Several years later, the art school had grown, and with more students, they needed more space. Than the south block of the building was built.”

The building was a result of a public-private partnership between the City of Memphis and the college’s Board of Trustees.

“[The partnership was] an alliance that envisioned a great and growing city as the home of a unique institution focused on developing creativity at the highest level,” MCA president Jeffrey Nesin said in a released statement.

Harrover, an AIA fellow, has designed other local buildings, such as the Memphis International Airport and the Mississippi River Museum on Mud Island.

He and his wife, Stephanie, live across the street from Rust Hall, but she says that’s just a coincidence. — by Kimberly Kim

News

Program Plans for Better Health Care for African Americans

Post author By Kimberly Kim
Post date January 30, 2009

An Ounce of Prevention

Program plans to improve health care among area African Americans.

Two days after Barack Obama became the nation’s first black president — widely cited as making Martin Luther King’s dream a reality — a local initiative announced a plan to address continued disparities in health care for African Americans.

The Community Health Partnership’s In Our Hands initiative, a program led by pharmaceutical company Sanofi-aventis, hopes to improve patient care in the African-American community by linking patients to health care professionals and resources.

In Memphis, African Americans are 2 1/2 times more likely to die from diabetes than their white counterparts. They are also more than 1 1/2 times more likely to die from a stroke. Deep vein thrombosis and hypertension are also common within the African-American community.

Cevette Hall, a member of the Healthy Memphis Common Table, says that many African Americans will attempt to “self-treat” before going to a health-care professional.

“There is a large unmet need in the African-American community for better access to care and improved health outcomes,” Hall says. “To address this, we engaged in dialogue with both national and local community organizations to build our understanding of the African-American community’s needs and to identify how the partnership can help bridge health disparities.”

The partnership’s Community Health Resource Guide, a pocket-sized booklet, contains information about low-cost and free health insurance, prescription assistance, drug treatment programs, food and nutrition services, and contact information for local and state health departments.

“Although a range of health resources are often available to patients in major cities and urban environments, there often is not enough awareness about available programs, treatments, or access to proper care,” says LaDorris Knowles, local liaison with the Community Health Partnership. “Consequently, these resources often go underutilized and the patients that need them most remain undeserved.”

The guide will be available at local churches, libraries, community organizations and doctors’ offices.

The Community Health Partnership also plans to host several special events. Much of the focus will be on prevention and getting patients help while their health problems are in the early stages.

For more information about the Community Health Partnership, please call 866-61-HANDS (866-614-2637).

By Kimberly Kim

News The Fly-By

Downtown Downturn?

Post author By Kimberly Kim
Post date January 15, 2009

Even in the face of a national foreclosure crisis, downtown’s dependence on residential development might help it weather the current recession.

Due to the economic downturn, commercial vacancies are rising rapidly across the country. Most major cities have commercial vacancy rates of 10 percent or greater, and the Urban Land Institute predicts that 2009 will be the worst year for commercial real estate markets since the early ’90s.

But Center City Commission head Jeff Sanford says that downtown Memphis, which has a commercial vacancy rate of about 15 percent, is “in a good position to ride out the economic storm.”

“[Downtown] is one of the fastest-growing residential neighborhoods in Memphis, and it is not only the center for sports and entertainment in the city but also in the region,” Sanford says.

Downtown currently houses businesses with about 65,000 employees. Sanford also notes that there are $3 billion worth of construction projects currently under way, including the Beale Street landing, Hotel Indigo on Jefferson, and the University of Tennessee Baptist Research Park.

When those projects are completed, “we will only have done about 40 percent of what needs to be done to complete the downtown turnaround,” Sanford says.

Already, however, downtown has changed. Downtown resident and blogger Paul Ryburn moved into the area seven years ago.

“When I first moved here, most of Main Street was vacant,” he says.

But Ryburn is optimistic about the effect of the economic downturn on downtown.

“People [who live downtown] are generally doctors, lawyers, and those who have corporate jobs at FedEx,” Ryburn says. “Not a lot of teachers, artists, and musicians [can] afford to live in the downtown core and South Main area.”

He speculates that the economy will eventually produce lower rents for downtown apartments.

“It’s making downtown more diverse,” he says.