POETRY, MOVEMENT & MUSIC
Thursday, June 28, 7:30 p.m.
$7 / $5 for BMCM+AC members + students w/ID
The Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center in downtown Asheville invites the community to join us on Thursday, June 28th for an interdisciplinary evening of poetry, dance and music with Asheville-based poets Katherine Soniat and Tracey Schmidt and dancer Claire Elizabeth Barratt. Musician Elisa Faires will also participate. All four women have developed strong reputations for their deeply original work. Come see what happens at the intersection of word and dance!
Collaborative evenings like this are inspired by the groundbreaking interdisciplinary work that took place at Black Mountain College during its heyday. When artists open themselves and their processes up to the possibilities of failure (and success) through collaboration, it brings an edge to a performance. Balancing on that edge, with the known on one side and the unknown on the other can be as thrilling for the audience as it is for the performers. Legendary collaborations between Merce Cunningham, John Cage, Robert Rauschenberg, M.C. Richards, Katherine Litz and many others at BMC laid the groundwork for collaborative experiments across all disciplines.
Biographical information:
Katherine Soniat’s fifth collection of poems, The Swing Girl, published by Louisiana State University Press, was selected as Best Collection of 2011 by The Poetry Council of North Carolina (Arnold Oscar Young Prize). A sixth collection, A Raft, A Boat, A Bridge, is forthcoming from Dream Horse Press in fall, 2012. Other publications include The Fire Setters (On-line Chapbook Series, WebDelSol), and Alluvial (Bucknell University Press). A Shared Life (University of Iowa Press) was awarded the Iowa Poetry Prize and a Virginia Prize for Poetry, selected by Mary Oliver. Other collections include Cracking Eggs (University Presses of Florida) and Notes of Departure that received the Camden Poetry Prize (Walt Whitman Center for the Arts and Humanities, selected by Sonia Sanchez). The chapbook, Winter Toys, was published by Green Tower Press. She teaches workshops in the Great Smokies Writers Program at UNCA
Tracey Schmidt is a local photographer and a poet. Her museum exhibit about native people opened in Atlanta for the Olympics, where it won Regional Designation Award in the Humanities. The Awakening of Turtle Island: Portraits of Native Americans has toured over 16 museums in the southeast, including the Cherokee Museum of the American Indian. It will begin a national tour in 2012. She attended Georgia State University and the Portfolio Center, where she studied literature and photography. At the age of 19, she moved to Japan to live in a Buddhist monastery. Her spiritual practices there awakened a desire to return to American in search of a tradition that was as authentic and indigenous in America as Buddhism has been for her in Japan. The Awakening of Turtle Island is the result of that search. In 2000 she was invited to teach creativity at Julia Cameron’s, (author of The Artists Way), Taos Creativity Camp. She continues to teach creativity and poetry in the area.
Claire Elizabeth Barratt was raised with the classical British institutions of the Royal Academy of Dance and the Royal School of Music examinations. She studied at The Laban Center For Dance and The London Studio Center For Performing Arts. On coming to the USA in 1990, she performed in “Unto these Hills” on the Cherokee Indian reservation in NC, was a Founding Director of Circle Modern Dance in Knoxville TN and a member of Asheville Contemporary Dance Theater, as well as choreographing for Opera and Musical Theater productions. In 2002, while based in NYC, she founded her own company “Cilla Vee Life Arts” – an inter-disciplinary arts organization as well as serving an apprenticeship with The Isadora Duncan Dance Foundation. Now based in both Asheville and NY, she has worked extensively through the Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center and has recently established The Mountain to Sky Artist Exchange to promote collaborations between NYC & Asheville artists.
Elisa Faires is an improviser as well as a composer of modern classical, electronic music, experimental cabaret, quirky pop music, twelve-tone composition and avant-garde art songs. She was classically trained in music as well as opera and studied gamelan in Bali. She has been working with video for the past six years and has made several experimental films with musical scores. For more information about Ms. Faires please visit : http://soundcloud.com/elisa-faires or http://vimeo.com/user5927933
The Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center preserves and continues the unique legacy of educational and artistic innovation of Black Mountain College for public study and enjoyment. We achieve our mission through collection, conservation, and educational activities including exhibitions, publications, and public programs.
