David Grapes '77 MFA talks with actors during a rehearsal of his musical, “Simply Simone.”
“Simply Simone” turned out to be simply perfect as the inaugural performance for the newly renovated Brown Building Theatre. Created and co-authored by David Grapes '77 MFA, the world premiere musical featured a four-woman cast and a four-piece band suited for the intimate theatrical space.
The show, which ran Feb. 6-10, is a musical odyssey chronicling the life of African-American vocalist and activist Nina Simone. Four actresses play Simone at different stages of her life, sometimes singing together.
Born in Tryon, Simone was a classically trained pianist who studied at Julliard. Eventually she began to sing jazz and blues and her rich tenor voice became her trademark.
“She mixed her knowledge of classical music with whatever she played,” said Jeff West, the show's director.
David Grapes is writing a series of shows about musical icons. “My Way,” his show about Frank Sinatra has enjoyed great popular success across the country. He teaches directing and playwriting at the University of Northern Colorado, where he is Director of the School of Theatre Arts and Dance and is also executive producer for the school's professional summer stock company.
Logie Meachum, a UNCG doctoral student, performs in “Bone Creek.”
Take seven local blues musicians. Put them under lock and key in the Caswell County jail. Add one pretty ingénue photographer on a mission to preserve the rural South before bulldozers turn it into a strip mall. Mix in one crusty old moonshiner, a spirit woman, a guitar player on the lam from the law, revenuers and dramatis personae of assorted raffish characters.
The result is “Bone Creek,” a new feature film from broadcasting and cinema professor Dr. Emily Edwards that mixes music with drama and magical realism.
Ten UNCG students were involved in various aspects of production, from script supervision to costume design and acting. One of the stars of “Bone Creek” is noted folk artist and musician Lorenzo “Logie” Meachum, a doctoral student in the English Department.
The film will premier later this year.
“Untitled (From Vietnam to Hollywood)” by Dinh Q. Lê
How can memories be accurate if they evolve and fade? Can they ever be trusted? Or are they the most valuable thing you possess?
The Weatherspoon Art Museum's exhibition, “The Lining of Forgetting: Internal & External Memory in Art,” explores the ways we remember, both as individuals and collectively, and highlights how we often forget and alter our memory.
It features cutting-edge sculpture, photography, work on paper, installation, video and computer-generated works by 14 artists.
“The art works are perhaps not what you'd expect, but concepts that may help us think about these issues,” says Curator of Education Ann Grimaldi. In a world of Post-it notes, meeting reminders and memory cards filled with digital pictures — not to mention magazine covers promising to show aging baby boomers how to boost memory — it's a timely show.
Weatherspoon Curator Xandra Eden, who organized this exhibition, notes the rapid expansion in external memory due to technological advances. “Artists today are exploring the many ways personal and external memory intertwine,” she says.
The exhibition runs through May 25.
As David Roderick, a Plymouth, Mass., native, began to write in the “disguise” of his pilgrim forefathers, he discovered that the familiar stories we tell our children are more myth than fact.
“Plymouth has its own mythology that is local and national,” says Roderick, a UNCG professor of creative writing. “It just surprised me that I hadn't been aware of a more three-dimensional history. I was speaking to the myths but trying to debunk them.”
Seven years later, Roderick's first collection, “Blue Colonial,” melds his musings on the lives of the Plymouth pilgrims with more contemporary, more autobiographical poems. The book won him the 2007 Amy Lowell Traveling Scholarship — an honor that came with a $50,000 purse and required him to live overseas in Florence and Dublin for the next year.
Roderick welcomed the chance to work abroad. “This is the fantasy every writer has. It's like winning a lottery for poets or something. I'm very interested in challenging myself to write different types of poems. Certainly being away from my home turf will nudge me in that direction. The last thing any writer wants to do is repeat himself.”
Although Roderick is already looking ahead to a second collection of poems, tentatively called “North Wind,” he learned a great deal from probing the past for “Blue Colonial.”
The repression the pilgrims lived under in order to stay united and survive in the New World is almost beyond the modern American's understanding. “They lived with a very strict religious dogma,” Roderick says. “In retrospect, it seems almost cultish. It's difficult for me to imagine living under those conditions, subordinating the self to the greater community.”
Roderick spent the first 30 years of his life in Massachusetts and has always felt connected to the pilgrims. “I had to give them voices. Then I had to figure out why those voices were important to me.”
The autobiographical poems in the collection were much tougher to write and came later in the creative process, he says. “I realized I was hiding behind the masks of these pilgrims and I wanted to strip that off. And I knew I wanted a wider audience. I wanted more than two people, my parents, to read my book.”
Read Roderick's poem “Thanksgiving.”
As a journalist, Gene Roberts covered some of the most important events of the 20th century — the assassination of President Kennedy, the Civil Rights Movement and the Vietnam War.
On April 16, the Pulitzer Prize winning author will share some of his insights at the Friends of the UNCG Libraries Annual Dinner.
Roberts is co-author of “The Race Beat: The Press, The Civil Rights Struggle, and The Awakening of a Nation,” which won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for history. It tells the story of how the press helped America recognize its race problem after WWII: the indignities and injustices of segregation in the South, and the brutality used to enforce it.
Roberts and “Race Beat” co-author Hank Klibanoff drew on private correspondence, unpublished articles, notes from secret meetings, and interviews as well as examined the published editorials, news stories and photographs of the era.
Newsweek said, “‘The Race Beat’ has good characters, good yarns and good thinking. Just as important, though, it's got a good heart.” The Nation described it as “one of those remarkable works of history that make you see your own times more clearly.”
Born in Goldsboro, Roberts is now a journalism professor at the University of Maryland, College Park. He was an editor at The News & Observer and the Detroit Free Press before joining The New York Times in 1965, where until 1972 he served as chief Southern and Civil Rights correspondent, chief war correspondent in South Vietnam and national editor.
A reception, followed by a seated dinner in Elliott University Center's Cone Ballroom, will start at 6 p.m. The program, also in Cone Ballroom, will begin at 8 p.m. Following the program, Roberts will sign copies of his book, which will be available for purchase.
Tickets for the dinner and program are $35 for Friends of the UNCG Libraries and $45 for non-members. Dinner tickets must be reserved by April 9. Tickets for the program only are $10. Tickets are available from the UNCG Box Office, (336) 334-4849.
The students sat in a darkened classroom watching their DVDs play on big projection screen. One by one, the recorded voices floated through the room.
The retired soldier: “I was a small, itty-bitty guy in a big machine.”
A transgendered woman: “If it's right for you, you have no choice.”
Glenwood homeowner: “My mother heard a voice saying, ‘Go to Greensboro and keep boarders.’”
With film, the stories of these people transcended their moment in time. And that is what this course was all about.
“Doing Visual History” was a first-time course taught by Matt Barr of broadcasting and cinema and Chuck Bolton, head of the history department.
Their goal was to teach students how to capture personal narratives, both in audio and on film. “It's part documentary, part oral history,” Barr said. ”They’re learning about stories from the ground up.”
Bolton, who was director of an oral history center for 10 years before coming to UNCG, said capturing these types of stories is important. “In some ways it complicates things — memory becomes muddled. But it's the right thing to do.”
Students — graduate and undergraduate, history and BCN majors — paired up and selected their topics: blacksmiths, Greensboro musicians, retired soldiers who became students, women in the military, the Confederate flag, the future of transportation, immigrants, transgendered men and women, and families in an old Greensboro neighborhood.
Sarah Cunningham, a graduate student in history in the museum studies track, said she took the course because oral histories are becoming more common in her field.
“I thought this would be a good ice breaker course to take,” she said. “Making the DVD was really nerve wracking; it took more time than I expected. But it was great to see it evolve from a raw chunk.”
The results were something everyone applauded.
“I love how fresh and unmediated these voices are,” Barr told the class. “So many different stories. They’re all fascinating to me.”
And they will be preserved. The DVDs have been given to University Archives for others to see and hear.
View video clips from some of the students' work.
Mozart composed his first works for piano at 5. Had he been a high school student today, he might well have entered the Schiffman High School Composition Competition, a national competition sponsored by the School of Music that aims to find the most talented young composers from around the nation.
“There aren't a lot of venues for high school-age composers,” says Dr. Mark Engebretson, assistant professor of composition and electronic music, who is coordinating the competition. Students can let their compositional imaginations run wild. Past submissions have included full symphonies, solo violin sonatas and operas. The winning student, who will be announced April 15, receives a $500 scholarship to attend the School of Music.
The annual event is named in honor of Greensboro native Harold Schiffman, an internationally renowned composer whose repertoire includes close to 100 compositions, from full symphonies to string quartets. A retrospective of Schiffman’s work was performed at the School of Music in March. The event included the North Carolina premier of “Alma,” a piece whose lyrics were based on the book “Wildwood Flower” by North Carolina Poet Laureate Kathryn Stripling Byer '68 MFA.
- “The Boatloads,” poetry by
- “(Not that You Asked): Rants, Exploits, and Obsessions,” a collection of essays, and “The Evil B.B. Chow and Other Stories,” a collection of short stories, by
- “Compulsions of Silk Worms and Bees: Poems,” by
- “It Comes to Me Loosely Woven,” a collection of poetry by
- “Classroom Instruction from A to Z,” by
- “Ascension Days,” a collection of poetry by
- “The Far Side of the Loch: The Martha Years, Book Two,” “On Tide Mill Lane: The Charlotte Years, Book Two,” “Little House by Boston Bay,” “Little House in the Highlands” and “Across Puddingstone Dam,” all children's novels by
- “Death in North Carolina's Piedmont: Tales of Murder, Suicide and Causes Unknown,” by
- “Hazard and Prospect: New and Selected Poems,” by
- “Green and Helpless,” poems by
- “The Slow Moon,” a novel by
- “Records of the Moravians in North Carolina,” by
- “Stories from the Afterlife,” by
- “Lifelines,” a novel by
- “Short Skirts and Snappy Salutes,” a memoir by
- “A Medical Tourist's True Story of Life Saving Surgery in India,” by
- “Jacob's Ladder,” a mystery by
- “A Geography of Oysters: The Connoisseur's Guide to Oyster Eating in North America,” by
- “Math and Science Activities for Young Children,” by
- “Salvation Blues: One Hundred Poems 1985-2005,” by
- “Keep and Give Away,” a collection of poetry by
- “Boone: a Biography” and “Brave Enemies: A Novel of the American Revolution,” by
- “My Life From the Horse and Buggy to the Internet,” a memoir by
- “The Watered Garden,” by
- “Little Lives,” by
- “Piece Work,” poetry by
- “Harvest of Changelings,” a novel by
- “Jimi Hendrix Turns Eighty,” a novel by
- “The Quilt: Cultural Voices,” an anthology by
- “Workshirts for Madmen,” a novel by George Singleton '86 MFA
- “Deep Stall: The Turbulent Story of Boeing Commercial Airplanes,” co-authored by
- “Before John Was a Jazz Giant: A Song of John Coltrane,” a children's book by
- “On 'SEEING' & Painting (An Interdisciplinary Perspective)” and “Making Marines,” by
- “The Amputee's Guide to Sex,” a collection of poems by