Featuring work by LTAB all-stars, alumni, and co-creator Kevin Coval Friday, August 5 & 6, 2011 7:30pm Zacek McVay Theater
TWO NIGHTS ONLY!
This will be one of the most exciting nights at the Victory Gardens this summer!
Don’t miss out on ENGLISH CLASS HERETICS: LOUDER THAN A BOMB IN CONCERT! The stage artists from the largest and most explosive youth poetry slam in the world, Chicago’s own Louder Than A Bomb (LTAB) will take over Victory Gardens with an evening of great performances.
This exclusive concert presentation features the best LTAB performances from recent years as well as performances by LTAB staff, teaching artists and alumni (including poets from the critically acclaimed LTAB documentary.)
The Ladies Ring Shout as a Performance was born of a weekly workshop, dialoguing space, and “jam session” for women.
Participants talked, wrote and moved in the spirit of collaborative experimentation and explored what an urban feminine discourse looks and feels like. What are our notions of an Urban Feminine? What is her legacy to/for future women/humans? What defines the urban woman’s community?
LRS is comprised of three core members Felicia Holman, Abra Johnson and Meida McNeal, who proclaim:
Performance is our therapy, our catharsis, our way to community. Performance is the haven that welcomes us to rediscover our own value and worth. Performance and expression bring our dormant, unsaid emotions to the surface and urge us to work them out within a community that not only bears witness, but also empathizes through experience.
Visit us at Theaster Gates’ Dorchester Projects (recently featured in the Chicago Reader) this Friday Night (June 3rd from 7p-9p), as well as on Sunday, June 12th, from 3p-5p. Come with a story about how music has impacted your life….
About the Dorchester Projects:
Dorchester Projects seeks to explore the ways in which thoughtful spaces committed to art, public education, design, and advocacy can contribute to the cultural and economic redevelopment of a neighborhood.
“[Gates] says: I was always making art that was asking questions about the city, and why the city functioned the way it did. How does cultural and economic disparity happen? How can we fight it? I was trying to present these questions in the form of little abandoned ceramic houses and drawings or performances that spoke to the issue. And I just got tired of pointing a finger at it and wanted to actually do something about it, challenge it in a real way.” — Chicago Reader, June 2, 2011
Avery R. Young, local Chicago wordsmith, educator, personality, and friend of darkjive, is in the midst of publishing a series of thirty works (some poetry, some script treatments, and some more visual pieces) in the form of facebook notes. The work plays with notions of language, blackness, and the canon of African-American pop culture as only he can. Check it out a sample below, and jive on.
What do you get when you mix a maverick artist with strong community ties and an Urban Planner? For one thing, Theaster Gates. For another, the Dorchester Projects, pictured above. Theaster has been purchasing properties in the Woodlawn/Grand Crossing neighborhood for a few years now, and has quietly acquired the stock of the former Dr. Wax record store as well as the now defunct Prairie Avenue Bookstore (both businesses were revered in their respective collector communities). He created a home for glass lantern slides that depict the canon of Western Fine Art. Using reclaimed materials, he is turning his properties into cultural community hubs, featuring curators and programming that reflects the collections and the community.
In the spirit of full disclosure, I’ll be curating the record collection in May and June of 2011, culminating in a series of talks on Chicago Music History (details to follow) and a couple of good, old-fashioned dance parties starring local-born music.
Idris Goodwin is back home to Chicago tonight to celebrate the recent publication of his first book. It’s a collection of prose, poetry, and essays titled THESE ARE THE BREAKS. These Are The Breaks is the debut collection by NEA award-winning playwright, HBO Def Poet, and critically acclaimed “indie” rapper, Idris Goodwin. Diverse in scope and wickedly satirical, Goodwin’s poetic essays sample race, class, and culture, transcending the page with hip-hop musicality. Goodwin cross-fades past and present, personal and political: Motown’s last vinyl factory juxtaposes against Bronx rap legends battling in open-air arenas; Chicago’s Public School system contrasts against Santa Fe’s tourism industry; an Egyptian child drowns in the Dead Sea as Nat Turner sprints across Death Valley. These Are The Breaks is the literary mixtape of our cacophonous times.
It’s scheduled to hit shelves in March 2011, but he’ll be selling advance copies after the performance.
If you don’t live in Chicago…
If want to secure a copy sooner than later visit www.WriteBloody.com to place a preorder or just contact me www.idrisgoodwin.blogspot.com or if you use a Kindle you can purchase at Amazon.com.
NEW SCHOOL POETICS presents
THESE ARE THE BREAKS – CHICAGO BOOK LAUNCH
Hosted by Poet, Educator ,WBEZ Correspondent Kevin Coval
Featured Performers: Award Winning Playwright/Performer Tanya Saracho & Poet Lamar “the trufe” Jorden, star of the critically acclaimed documentary Louder Than A Bomb
Ayana Contreras (me) and Simeon Viltz (of The Primeridian) are the “Groove Conspiracy…”
In the land of 10 million grooves only a few can grab a hold of the people’s aural senses and captivate their shokras. Spinning cutting edge beats juxtaposed with gritty, get down gems from the cradle of soul. Their weapon of choice: vinyl.
Join us at The Morseland: 1218 West Morse. (I’m there most Second Thursdays, too!)
We will also be there Friday the 17th (this Friday).
ReMake Estate is a really cool project going on in Gary (Indiana) in which an abandoned house on 24th and Massachutsetts will be reborn as a meeting space and a community garden. The project is being organized in conjunction with interested local community groups and Australian-based artists Keg de Souza and Zanny Begg. The artists (from an Australian Collective calledYou Are Here) are heavily influenced by the aesthetics of The Wiz (yessssss!), in honor of Gary’s most famous son, Michael Jackson.
In other MJ related news, according to the Gary Post-Tribune, the City of Gary is moving forward with plans to build a Memorial/Museum dedicated to Michael Jackson. Rudy Clay, the Mayor of Gary, was quoted at saying the only thing that could come between the City and the Memorial is “it’s people”.
Wednesday nights this Summer, an Open mic for Open minds:
hosted by dimi d. & Fatimah
DJ talent & DJ Such N Such
Bring your poems, songs, videos, chants, interpretive dancing…etc.
JUST COME and bring your Positive Energy
FEATURED POETS= Kuumba Lynx
Darkjive has been on Summer Vacation, but always digging deeper… I’ve been really into swinging sixties jazz from Chicago, like “Coming to Atlantis” a hip mover produced by Monk Higgins and credited to Freddie “The Creeper” Robinson (on Lead Guitar). The Flip of this 45, called “Before Six” is wonderful, as well.
During the late 1960′s, there was, of course, lots of overlap between soul and jazz scenes in Chicago, and many instrumentals charted on Soul-formated radio (like “Burning Spear” by the Soulful Strings [a pet project of Charles Stepney and Richard Evans at Cadet], and “Soulful Strut” by Young-Holt Unlimited).
Below is from one of my treasured Dorothy Ashby albums (arranged by Richard Evans), “Come Live With Me” (originally featured in the film, Valley of the Dolls). Many of my favorite cuts, not surprisingly, are not on youtube. After all, the revolution wasn’t televised.
Jive on.
