Where are you going, where have you been?

It’s a Friday night in Oberlin, and like most arts articles that begin with lines such as “it’s a Friday night in Oberlin,” this one doesn’t take place in any atmosphere where college students are doing the things that college students on MTV Spring Break seem typically to do. Such an opening is getting to be cliché. Someone should stop trying to surprise us and instead run something like this: “it’s a Friday night in Oberlin, and as you’d expect, everyone is f**d up and dancing with their pants off to ‘99 Problems’.” But most of those things just don’t fit into this tame little article.

Actually, the dancing with no pants kind of does fit—one Friday a month, in the Conservatory Orchestra Room or Wilder Main, as many men as women are likely to trade their Levis for audaciously-patterned gypsy skirts and prance barefoot to the sounds of the Black River Ironworks, Oberlin’s newest contra dance band. Made up of Corey Walters ’07 on flute, Jonah Sidman ’09 on fiddle, Michael Berkowitz ’07 on guitar and Elyse Underhill ’09 on piano and accordion, the band has enjoyed a steady stream of gigs in Oberlin, Columbus, and as far away as Michigan lately. How does a traditional music band go on the road? Well, says Walters, with a lot of getting caught in traffic. But otherwise, a little differently than everyone else.

After playing a dance or two “by accident,” some version of the band, at the time without the Oberlin-evocative name, went on what Walters describes as a tour “down the Mid-Atlantic part of the East Coast” over Winter Term, stopping in Princeton, Harrisburg, Frederick, and Glen Echo Park, near D.C. Much of the tour was booked through sheer luck. “David Giusti [who was a caller with the band during January] and I were working on a farm together last summer,” says Walters, “so we had countless hours to talk about contra dancing. We got to thinking, we got hired at one place, why don’t we just see if we can email dances and say ‘let’s play these places too’? And surprisingly a lot of them were like yeah, come play for us, having never heard us before.”

Regular contra dances, some of which can happen as often as weekly, are usually surrounded by strong and loyal communities of dancers, callers, musicians, and the occasional bake-sale organizer. It’s not unusual, in some areas, to see an entire family at a dance together. This focus on continuity extends to how dances hire their live musicians, say the BRI. It makes the series of gigs the group booked through email all the more amazing. “[There’s one band], Yankee Ingenuity, [who plays in Cleveland.]” noted Walters. “They’ve been playing that dance for like 25 years. We’re not really playing anywhere in the Cleveland area these days because you can’t really get hired.”

At the same time, though, a lot of dances are impressed with new blood. Contra “is not exactly part of the popular culture,” said Sidman. “For the most part [dance organizers] are very eager to have new and young people play.” At most of the dances they play these days, BRI encounters a mix of ages, but it depends on location—in a college town, says Underhill, you’re obviously going to see a lot more college-age dancers. There are probably more now than there were even a few years ago. In lots of cities, home-schooling communities have also gotten involved with contra or other types of folk dancing. Is contra dancing hip now? Maybe, said Walters.

“Hip” may mean that more young, classically trained musicians are gravitating toward traditional music, and becoming quite successful. In the world of folk festivals, this is definitely a trend—neo-traditional bands like Crooked Still, which boasts the first string player admitted to the Berklee College of Music on a full scholarship, headlines festivals in upstate New York and clubs in New York City. Some take a stab at it from the classical side of things as well. Béla Fleck’s 2001 album Perpetual Motion, on which he collaborated with such mainstream classical giants as Edgar Meyer and Joshua Bell, was a quiet reminder that he wasn’t just a good “banjo picker,” but a “virtuoso.”

Two out of the four BRI members, Underhill and Berkowitz, are Conservatory students, and Walters has some classical flute training. Sidman agreed that classically-trained musicians playing folk music is a trend, but not a new one. At the same time, says Underhill, who is a music composition major and also plays classical piano, it’s not necessarily popular to play traditional music as a classical musician.

“It’s not something people at the Con would encourage,” she said.

Another issue, she noted, is the “different energy” it takes to play in either tradition. Walters put in that many traditional music communities frown on markers of classical training. “When I started going to [trad. music] sessions in Baltimore, I only had my classical silver flute,” he said, “and people really looked down on that...[There’s the idea that] you should either play classical or traditional, because switching back and forth leads to a lot of complications in the method.”

Whatever those complications, the BRI are not the only musicians to straddle the crossover line. “One of the fiddlers we’re bringing to the Dandelion Romp actually teaches violin at the New England Conservatory,” says Walters. But don’t think the transition is seamless at the professional level, either—“You can really hear it in her playing [that she’s a classical musician].”

At Oberlin, the Conservatory may overpower the traditional music scene, even while contra dancers frolic among the kettledrums once a month—but events like the upcoming Dandelion Romp dance weekend make room for contra dancing at Oberlin to form a sustained, larger community. The college student dancers and players may be just passing through, but “[Other] people know about Oberlin,” said Underhill. “At the dances we play in Columbus or Cleveland there are always people who have been to Oberlin dances.”

The Ironworks will continue the year with a serious gigging schedule, traveling next to Lansing, Michigan. Endless untypical, fiddle-filled Friday nights await them, and you, gentle Reader. Just take off your skinny jeans and put on this flowy skirt I found in the free box. No, I can’t see your underwear, I promise.

Oh Give Me a Home

Lack of accessible rehearsal space in big cities is what spawned garage bands, choir practice in the cafeteria, and probably a lot of site-specific theatre. At small, private liberal arts colleges where the price of real estate is some absurd fraction of that in The City, though, you'd imagine students would have their pick of comfortable practice rooms, or at least regular, reliable access to the existing ones. At Oberlin College, though, a group of students has just in the last week managed to punch through the fourth wall of administrative reticence with the inauguration of two new rehearsal studios.

The students, who make up the SPACE committee, have been fighting for these studios for the last year.

Don't ask me what I'm doing with MY creative writing major

Can institutions that promote art production and innovation cope when an artist creates outside the barriers of their expectations? How interdisciplinary are undergraduate art programs prepared to get to meet student demands? And how much support can an artist actually get from his small liberal arts college after he graduates?
Since graduating from Oberlin College in May of 2006, Baraka Noel, a 22-year old hip-hop artist, has managed to breathe life into a barely-existent hip-hop performance scene in a tiny Ohio town. He’s co-organized a poetry slam in the basement of a college dorm and staged a one-man show based on his own album, The Mixtape Philosophies of Mushroom Black. Last week Baraka talked with me about performing off the cuff, how far literate hip-hop can go in a small town, and the monkey on every young (or old) artist’s back: sponsorship.

Q: You graduated from Oberlin with a degree in Creative Writing and a minor in Theatre, and now you’re working mostly in hip-hop. Do you ever go back and forth between different kinds of writing?

Baraka: Um, the furthest I would get away from writing poetry in a hip-hop aesthetic would be more of a spoken-word thing, but still probably intended to be performed. One thing I really want to do is more play writing. I really like dramatic writing and writing voices for people—and I don’t think hip-hop writing works if you’re forcing actors to perform who aren’t part of the aesthetic. I don’t really want to write for another MC.

So continuity between the writer and performer is essential to what you’re doing now?

Baraka: Oh yeah, definitely. In January this book of hip-hop plays came out…it’s like you can take this play and perform it. And theoretically someone could take Mushroom Black and perform it, but I think if it’s a person who’s not really connected to hip-hop…there’s a danger in it. It’s like if you take an American actor and stick them into Kabuki theatre, it’s like well you don’t know what you’re doing. You can’t do it the same way.

Do you think there’s support for performance that has that kind of writer-performer continuity in other kinds of theatre and writing?

Baraka: Well, I think it’s easier. If you are the writer and the performer, it gives so you so much more power, as opposed to in a lot of scenarios where writers sort of get shuffled off and lose all control over what they’re doing. It does make collaboration a very different thing because it’s not the writer and the director and the actor…it’s kinda like, these people have to have a joint vision from the beginning and then build it up.

Do you find there’s support in Oberlin for what you’re doing? Would, say, the college theatre or creative writing department like to have a hand in something like that, or would they be more likely to distance themselves from it because it’s a different aesthetic from what they’re used to producing?

Baraka: I wonder…I do know—and this is mad controversial shit—that [the student theatre association], I’ve gone to them for multiple projects and gotten some sponsorship and stuff—but in my experience they are much more willing to sponsor pieces that are written by professionals, accepted work. The idea of writing your own thing, and now you're going to perform it, is kind of like what? But it seems like the theatre department is collaborating more with students. And the creative writing department, I mean they let me do my thing, but in my experience a lot of people don’t have the same chance to go off and do random shit and get credit for it.

What’s your method of working now? What kinds of things do you do every day?

Baraka: Well, I used to just write in my classes…now that I have these couple shows I want to try to take them somewhere. I kind of have needed an excuse…I haven’t been doing a lot of writing on my own. And there’s a couple shows coming up, and because of the shows, I have to figure out something to do on stage for a certain period of time. So it’s very opportunity specific.

That makes sense…someone gives you some structure.

Baraka: There are so many things that need to happen…a lot of art has become almost bureaucratic for me because I have to find a place to do a show and find a place to record. But I’ve been trying to freestyle everyday. I have a phone appointment with my friend, we’re supposed to call each other every day.

I was going to ask you about your connections to Oberlin specifically as a community to do art, and it sounds like you have some pretty strong connections to artists and writers from Oberlin college. How about people from outside the Oberlin college community?

Baraka: I have, actually. A guy I know who does freestyle storytelling, he’s named Ink, and I met him actually through Oberlin high school. I did this program that I pretty much consider a failure, cause I was trying to start a writing group that didn’t really happen, but I did meet him, and we started meeting every so often and we write together. We formed a group called collective genius, and we’re going to do a show at the Grog Shop [in Cleveland], which I have no idea what we’re going to do.

How likely do you think it is that people in small towns and big cities are interested in being involved in writing, theatre, storytelling, but don’t get a chance to because they don’t have a source of institutional support?

Baraka: Well…this sounds mean. It might just be that a lot of people don’t have a vision of doing a new kind of art. Which isn’t to say that they couldn’t do it….people look at Andre 3000 and crazy artistic geniuses, and people are like, wow, that person is wild! But it seems like most people are just trying to fulfill what they already see existing. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. But I guess that provides in theory a path to follow, even though maybe that path is really crowded. So I guess I would say, there’s artists everywhere...I think that everyone is interested in art, everyone wants to experience art in some way, right, and maybe some people will write off a particular kind of art because it’s like, I’ve seen it before.

Or “I’ve never seen it before.” If you’re interested in doing something totally new, you might reach people fairly easily who are always looking for something good and new, but the people who aren’t looking for something new, do you even try to reach them, or do you just say, forget them?

Baraka: I don’t know, it might be harder to reach those people through familiar channels. But if you just set up what you’re doing in front of a store…I heard about a kind of guerrilla art piece where it was set in a Starbucks and it was just people doing a prescribed series of actions for like five minutes at a time. I think that’s a really interesting way of bringing art to people who may not perceive it as art. But I think there needs to be more community…people coming together and trying to support each other’s work mutually, trying to collaborate and trade audiences.

"The Mixtape Philosophies of Mushroom Black" is available from CDBaby. Check it out
here.

Poems on the Radio

As a segue into actual content for this blog, I'd like to celebrate my rediscovery (and the continuing existence) of Prosody, a Pittsburgh radio program devoted to work by contemporary poets and writers. Hosts Ellen Placey Wadey and Jan Beatty are both Pittsburgh area writers, with some of Beatty's poetry in particular focusing on local neighborhoods, people, and images. The show is the only one of its kind in Western Pennsylvania to allow poets and writers air time for their own work. Wadey and Beatty (heh) follow up the readings with interviews.

Poetry and prose on the radio! It would be nice to see more of this kind of thing, as a way of side-stepping the page-held-in-front-of-face debacle at readings. And conveniently for us shy (?) writers, there's no need to change out of pajamas to spark the spoken-literature revolution. Both Wadey and Beatty have done their fair share of teaching writing in the Pittsburgh area, as well, and not just at the university level. Wadey has taught at the Young Writers Workshop, a summer program for teenagers hosted by the University of Pittsburgh, and Beatty, in addition to having taught all over the United States, has given workshops on poetry and spoken-word at local high schools and the Pennsylvania Governor's School for the Arts. (I was lucky enough to have both of them as teachers in these capacities.)

Prosody airs at 7 pm EST on Tuesdays, on NPR-member station WYEP-FM. You can access WYEP's live webstream here:
http://www.wyep.org/stream/

Mission Statement (of sorts)

The idea behind this blog is to integrate some interests of mine, namely poetry reading and writing, theatre, other arts, and teaching. I'm interested in how writers and artists can draw on their communities (local and global) to make their work more cosmopolitan on a variety of levels. I'll also be looking at ways that artists who have been associated with large institutions for most of their careers (i.e. universities) can turn back to their communities for work, inspiration, and interdisciplinary projects, even if they continue to be associated with those institutions.

Expect links to interesting articles and projects, and some of my own ideas.