JUST ADDED: Workshop/Lecture Series from JCAC
To better serve the community and in attempt to offer more varied programming, the Johnston County Arts Council is trying out a lecture/workshop series this spring. We have four events scheduled, covering artistic disciplines from modern dance and art history, to poetry and popular music. All lectures/workshops will be held on a Thursday evening at 6:30pm at the Public Library of Johnston County and Smithfield in Downtown Smithfield and are free to the public (except the Poetry Workshop with Kathryn Stripling Byer, which will begin at 6:00pm and is $10.00 per participant). Please mark these on your calendars:
Innovation Through Collaboration
Thursday, February 28th at 6:30pm
In this workshop, Even Exchange company members share the collaborative process that they use to create artistic work. In a comfortable environment, participants are given skills and vocabulary to contribute ideas. Questions and prompts inspire writings and dialogue from personal experience. These words, thoughts, and stories are translated to movement as dancers listen and watch. Discussion of choreographic methods enables groups to craft movement and words into artistic work that is shared in informal performances. “Time outs” are taken along the way to identify the steps in the collaborative process. Company members then lead a discussion of what just happened, what it means, and how we take it into our everyday lives.
Outside the Frame: The Astonishing Life of Whistler’s Mother
Thursday, March 6th at 6:30pm
This lecture/slide presentation focuses on Anna Whistler’s life in 19th Century America, Czarist Russia, and bohemian London, where she lived with her eccentric son, the brilliant and provocative artist James McNeill Whistler. The presenter, a relative of Anna, traces the history of the portrait from a nineteenth-century masterpiece to a twenty-first century American Icon and popular culture object of caricature. Behind Anna’s calm and serene countenance lies an amazing story- the story of a courageous woman born in Wilmington, NC, who raised two sons, lost three in infancy, sailed across the Atlantic at least five times, lived in luxury in the barbaric fairyland of Czarist Russia, survived the civil war and risked her life to run the Federal Blockade to be with James in London, where she managed his household and served as his representative and agent. Through extensive reading and research, Mr. McNeill has pieced together a portrait that contradicts the popular conception of Anna as a dour Puritan and stern matriarch. Instead, he shows her to be a devoutly religious but indulgent mother, an educated and cultivated woman whose life was full of adventure and paradox.
Poetry Workshop with North Carolina Poet Laureate Kathryn Stripling Byer
Thursday, April 17th at 6:00pm
In this two-hour poetry workshop, North Carolina Poet Laureate Kathryn Stripling Byer will share some of her own work with the participants and then lead the group in a discussion of personal history and utilizing poetry to find a literary voice. Poetry will be used to help participants find their own story, sing it forth, and move on into richer and more attentive lives. Participants will write, share their work, and talk about what it is calling out to them to heed, to preserve, and to celebrate. Space is limited to 25 participants and the fee is $10.00 per participant. To reserve your space, please call 919-553-1930.
Sincere Forms of Flattery: Blacks, Whites, and American Popular Music
Thursday, May 1st at 6:30pm
In this 45-minute lecture, Billy Stevens demonstrates how historic interactions between African-Americans and European-Americans shaped the evolution of American popular music. With its roots in slavery and the fusion of musical traditions brought from both Africa and Europe, American music is a natural outgrowth of the unique culture of the American South. From rap stars to rock ‘n’ rollers, gospel shouters to big band crooners, from Elvis Presley to Stephen Foster, a pattern of contact and conflict between white and black cultures fueled the creation of confluent musical forms recognized worldwide as distinctly American. Using musical instruments as well as rare recordings, Billy helps audiences understand the relationship between jazz and blues, ragtime and gospel, and how the first distinctly American musical genre, blackface minstrelsy, has influenced country musicians up to the present day. The result is a better understanding of how our music reflects America’s social fabric, affirming the contributions of performers both famous and forgotten while empowering minority communities often relegated to obscurity.
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