Art Works Podcast

Jenny Koons is a director on the cutting edge of immersive theater. She specializes in bringing diverse artists together to create original cross-disciplinary work through a collaborative process.  Central to her ideas is work that’s both site-specific and in a reciprocal relationship with its audience.  It’s of a piece that Jenny Koons has been a facilitator and educator in creating anti-racist spaces and engaging in conversations around race and equity for over a decade. One of her primary interests in theater or as an educator is making and reaffirming community. As she says,” directing is community organizing… Because it's guiding a group of strangers towards something that doesn't exist. Something that's invisible. And that, to me, feels like such an important exercise in this moment where we're all kind of careening towards something we don't really know what it is.”  In this podcast, we talk about making site-specific theater during a pandemic, immersive theater as we emerge from a pandemic, the ways organizing and theater intersect, AAPI representation both on stage and behind the curtain, and the magic of collectively making the imagined visible.  

If you think opera is staid and calcified, then let me introduce you to the work of Heartbeat Opera—a small and radically innovative company. The brain-child of co-artistic directors Ethan Heard and Louisa Proske, Heartbeat Opera came into being about seven years ago. Heard and Proske loved the power and beauty of opera and wanted to create work that would speak to contemporary audiences, particularly younger listeners. To that, they focused on creating adaptations that spoke to the present, setting Carmen near a US/Mexico border-crossing, adapting Fidelio to tell a story of a Black Lives Matter activist, looking at Madama Butterfly through the eyes of her bi-racial son.  At the same time, Heartbeat presents opera in intimate spaces, so the audience can actually feel the vibration of the music which is frequently distilled into a smaller orchestra and  incorporates unusual instrumentation like electric guitar or jazz saxophone.  The results are stirring works and performances that are fresh, vital, and enlivening. In this podcast, Ethan Heard talks about Heartbeat Opera, its production of Fidelio and its incorporation of choruses of incarcerated men, the company’s online pivot during the pandemic, its deepening commitment to providing a space for social justice issues, and the glorious possibilities that opera contains.

Charles Yu’s novel (and National Book Award winner) Interior Chinatown is an insightful, searing, and inventive exploration of Asian-American identity and representation in popular culture. Written in the form of a television screenplay, Interior Chinatown tells the story of actor Willis Wu who is doomed to play various generic Asian characters in a TV procedural called “Black and White.”  But the series is a metauniverse, forever in production, dictating the roles of everyone in the book based on their race, gender and age.  Our hero Willis Wu wants more—he wants a story of a story of his own: he wants to be Kung Fu guy.  In this podcast, Charles Yu talks about writing Interior Chinatown as a screenplay, his desire to give a story to the “generic Asian man” we see in the background on TV series, the impact of Asian-American stereotypes in an omnipresent popular culture, and his own time spent in a writers’ room on a television series.

Painter Mequitta Ahuja has been re-visioning self-portraiture. While her large colorful canvasses have centrally positioned her own African-American and Indian-American identity, she also claims her own authority as the artist. She emphasizes the work of painting:  depicting multiple genres of painting in pictures within the paintings themselves. The result gestures to history, collapses time. and makes new meaning. Ahuja’s work has been widely exhibited in museums and galleries nationally and internationally,  including the Phillips Collection, the Brooklyn Museum,  Minneapolis Institute of Art, and the Baltimore Museum of Art.  Her many fellowships and awards include a 2009 residency to the Studio Museum in Harlem, a 2014 residency to the Siena Art Institute and a 2018 Guggenheim fellowship award.  If you like to learn about the process of making a work of art, this is the podcast for you: Ahuja walks us through the making of her spectacular painting “Portrait of her Mother,” as well as her own evolution within the genre of self-portraiture, and the importance of her mentor Kerry James Marshall.

Born in Panama and currently based in New York City, Darrel Alejandro Holnes   is equally at home in poetry and theater.  A former I Am Soul Resident Playwright at the Black National Theater, Holnes is known for his research-based work in theater, spending hours in interviews with people whose stories unfold on the stage. A celebrated poet, Holnes’s work has appeared in many publications including Poetry Magazine, The Caribbean Writer and Callaloo. He is the recipient of a 2019 National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in poetry and a judge in the semi-finals of the 2021 Poetry Out Loud Competition. His recently released chapbook Migrant Psalms has been awarded the 2021 Drinking Gourd Chapbook Poetry prize. His full-length collection of poetry Stepmotherland is due out in 2022. As the titles of both books indicate, Holnes poetry explores questions of belonging, bridging cultures, and building and rupturing communities. In this podcast, Holnes reflects on the different practices of writing poetry and of writing plays, the ethnographic research that inspires his work, the importance of acquiring the skill of listening both as a creator and as an agent for change, and the experience of judging the 2021 Poetry Out Loud semi-finals.  

Drummer, producer, educator and 2021 NEA Jazz Master Terri Lyne Carrington is not only a virtuoso musician, she’s also a strong advocate for social justice and gender equity. She has spent her life in jazz. Coming from a musical family, she had her first professional gig at the age of ten (with Clark Terry, no less!). By the time she 11, she was a part-time student of the Berklee College of Music. And her career took off from there. In the 1980s, she worked with jazz luminaries like Pharaoh Saunders and Frank West; in the 1990s, she toured with jazz greats like Wayne Shorter and Herbie Hancock. She went on the lead her own groups, and in 2014, she became the first woman to win a Grammy Award as a leader for Best Jazz Instrumental Album with Money Jungle: Provocative in Blue. She brought together women instrumentalists and vocalists for The Mosaic Project tours and recordings. Her recent album Waiting Game with her group Social Science is the definition of artistic intersectionality in terms of race, gender, age, and style. And Carrington is deeply committed to empowering the next generation of musicians--founding and serving as the artistic director of the Berklee Institute of Jazz and Gender Justice. In this podcast, we talk about her early mentors, her development as a drummer and as a bandleader, some of the great musicians she’s played with, and her advocacy for gender equity in jazz and society.  

Award-winning writer and two-time NEA Literature Fellow Camille T. Dungy is one of the significant voices in ecopoetry. Ecopoetry is a challenge to classic nature poetry, which was often written by poets who observed nature rather than seeing themselves as part of the natural world. Ecopoetry dispels this illusion: “outside of nature” doesn’t exist. Ecopoetry probes the complexities and interconnections of all parts of the natural world. In a genre long been dominated by white voices, Dungy explores these entangled connections between humans and nature from her position as a Black woman in the United States. She does so with precise detail, rhythmic lyricism, and a broad inclusiveness. The author of four collections of poetry, Dungy is also the editor of the 2009 path-breaking anthology, Black Nature: Four Hundred Years of African-American Nature Writing. The anthology insists that the place of Black nature poets be recognized on their own terms: as writers whose connection to nature is complicated by history. In other words, existing outside of history is as impossible as existing outside of nature. In this poetry-filled podcast, Dungy discusses the issues around the absence of Black voices in anthologies of environmental poetry, editing and organizing Black Nature, her own work as a poet, and the significance of environmental poetry.

The Heath Brothers are jazz legends—2002 NEA Jazz master Percy was a bassist, 2003 NEA Jazz Master Jimmy was saxophonist, composer, and arranger and now their youngest brother Albert, known to all as Tootie, a virtuosic percussionist, has now joined them as a 2021 NEA Jazz Master.  Tootie Heath’s talent was apparent a young age—he was still in high school when he performed with Thelonious Monk. In fact, the list of musicians who have sought him out reads like a who’s who in jazz: John Coltrane, Dexter Gordan, Yusef Lateef, Art Farmer, Anthony Braxton, Ethan Iverson. The list goes on and on; after all, Heath has performed on more than 100 recordings. But note the range of styles of these musicians. Heath is known for his extraordinary versatility as a drummer—eager to play various styles of jazz as well as immerse himself in the music and rhythms of other cultures. Yet, there’s never any mistaking Heath’s own distinctive musical voice. And it was a voice that was nurtured from an early age at his home in Philadelphia where he grew up surrounded by music. In this podcast, Tootie Heath talks about his musical roots, his talented brothers, some of the celebrated musicians he’s performed with, and his commitment to embracing different musical styles. He’s funny, irreverent, and a born story-teller with great stories to tell.

2021 A.B. Spellman NEA Jazz Masters Fellow for Jazz Advocacy Phil Schaap is an original—a legendary radio host since 1970 at WKCR, an award-winning audio engineer with a facility for remastering jazz classics, a renowned teacher of jazz, a virtuoso of jazz history in general and Charlie Parker in particular, and, as you will hear in this podcast, one of the great storytellers. Schaap has won six Grammy Awards for his liner notes, audio engineering, and production. He’s taught jazz at Columbia University, Princeton University, and Rutgers University, and currently teaches in the graduate school at Juilliard. In addition, he became curator at Jazz at Lincoln Center where he created Swing University--an educational program where he teaches classes that cultivate listening and a deeper appreciation for jazz.  From the mid-1970s until 1992, he booked musicians for Jazz at the West End a Manhattan club with nightly shows seven days a week. Phil Schaap literally grew up surrounded by jazz and in the company of extraordinary musicians who were close family friends—and he has funny, lovely, and appreciative stories about all of them.  This podcast is a great way to kick off Jazz Appreciation Month—it’s harder to find anyone who appreciates the music more than 2021 NEA Jazz Master Phil Schaap.  

Sally Wen Mao’s second collection of poetry Oculus has gotten a great deal of well-deserved attention. The word Oculus comes from the Latin; it means “eye.”  It can also refer to the lens of a camera, and architecturally, it’s a circular window or a circular opening at the top of a dome.  In her poetry, Sally Wen Mao uses these multiplicities of meanings as she examines the violence of spectacle. In Oculus, Mao presents the many ways in which Chinese people, most particularly women, have become spectacles for American audiences-- in life, in death, on film and online — objectified by a lens they don’t control.  Her poems excavate this history of spectacle beginning with Afong Moy the first Chinese woman to come to America and displayed to paying audiences as an oriental curio. In a series of persona poems starring Anna May Wong, Mao travels through time from silent films to the present day.  Mao also interrogates the culpability of current technology from an online suicide in 2014 to a murder that was a front page sensation and horror in 2012. Through them all, Sally Wen Mao makes clear the price these people paid and continue to pay as they hold the weight of our gaze, their visages a spectacle for others to consume, both visible and unknown. And the poet also intervenes—reanimating and resurrecting these women who have been flattened by history’s gaps and the narrowness of our stares.  Earlier this week, Sally Wen Mao spoke with me about Oculus, her attempt to create poetry that can speak through historical silences, the fluid line between image and spectacle, and the weight of representation.