Arts Briefs: Theater in surprising places
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This week, Laura Brown completes a two-year artist residency with the North House Folk School in Grand Marais, Minn., which culminated with a tour of Scandinavia. Brown has long been an artist focused on printmaking, bookmaking, zines and textiles.
“I do make a lot of different kinds of things that are sort of connected to or hope to create a community and connection between people,” Brown said. “That's what I'm looking for as an artist and so, I'm trying to make the world I want to see.”
For the last two years, however, Brown has been pretty exclusively focused on traditional quilt-making.
She sees a lot of similarities between quilt-making and printmaking.
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“They are this sort of community practice and they both have really activist and social justice kinds of movements and histories,” she said.
At the North House Folk School studio, she has been making and researching quilts, particularly inspired by the 1996 book “Old Swedish Quilts” by Swedish author Åsa Wettre.
“Åsa Wettre did all of this research in the 1990s about quilting in Sweden. She tells the story about how it's this sort of under-the-radar, underrated, underappreciated form of art,” Brown said. “She went around and did all of these interviews and all this research about quilters in Sweden, women who make quilts as part of their daily lives.”
Wettre amassed a collection of 200 quilts and this spring Brown traveled to Sweden to see them.
“I've just been like poring over these books with these quilts in them and so to see them in person just answered so many questions like: This looks like a really puffy quilt. Is it soft? Is it firm? What's inside there?” Brown said. “So it was a really phenomenal experience to go to two different museums and see different quilts from this collection of hers."
An exhibition of Brown's quilts at the North House Folk School’s Green Building opens Friday, with a reception from 5 to 7 pm. The exhibition runs through July 1.
Harmonious transition
Joseph Jefferson is the new director of jazz ensembles at St. Olaf College in Northfield, Minn. He will also serve as an associate professor of music. Jefferson is a trained trombonist and an award-winning educator.
Jefferson says he hopes to increase the visibility of jazz at St. Olaf nationally.
The bull-jean chronicles continue
Pillsbury House + Theatre presents the world premiere of “bull-jean/we wake” by Sharon Bridgforth this weekend. It is a continuation of previous work featuring the character bull-dog-jean.
Earlier this year, the theater produced Bridgeforth’s “The bull-jean stories” and in 2022, “The bull-jean experience.” The series of shows centers on tales of a “woman-loving-woman" on her journey of love and healing. “bull-jean/we wake” grapples with themes of “loves and longings” according to a press release. The show runs through July 2.
Prideful paths
A collaboration between the Minnesota Historical Society and Twin Cities Pride has won a national award.
The Twin Cities LGBTQ+ History Tours project produced a collection of digital maps of Minneapolis and St. Paul.
The maps pinpoint locations that played a role in local LGBTQ+ history. A map of Loring Park shows the location of one of Minneapolis' oldest gay bars, along with the location of the annual Pride parade and festival.
The project won the 2023 Award of Excellence from the American Association for State and Local History.
Legal theatrics
The Jungle Theater’s current production of “The Courtroom” blurs the lines between theater and documentary. The play, featuring a cast of notable Twin Cities creatives, reenacts the court hearings of one woman’s deportation proceedings based on court transcripts.
While the first act contains a dense, seemingly word-for-word immigration court hearing, the second act features more levity, with the banter between the attorneys and judges of the Seventh Circuit full of clever one-liners and retorts.
At certain performances, local judges appear as themselves during the final scene of the show and deliver impassioned speeches about American citizenship and the immigration process that may touch citizens, both natural and foreign-born.
Audiences have the option to sit in the house of the theater, or on stage where the action takes place mere feet from them.
Post-show discussions with immigration attorneys are also hosted after certain performances. The show runs until July 2.
Other Briefs
The Midwest Independent Publishers Association announced winners for the Midwest Book Awards. Three of the winners are from Minnesota: Susan Thurston for “Sister of Grendel”, Margie Zats for “Stories Savory and Sweet” and Sigrid Brown for “The Girl in Duluth”.
Walking Shadow Theatre Company is currently staging Lucas Hnath's play “Red Speedo,” a play about a swimmer on the verge of Olympic trials, at Hamline University's six-lane competition pool in St. Paul. The play runs through July 1.
“The Buddha Prince” is a “walking play” celebrating the life of the 14th Dalai Lama. It combines physical theater, mask, puppetry, Tibetan music and dance. The play will be performed June 23-July 9 at Washburn Fair Oaks Park in Minneapolis.
Buddha Prince Tenzin and musiciansEric Melzer
Absolute Bleeding Edge
The MPR News arts team offers suggestions for the best in avant-garde, experimental and off-the-beaten-path arts and culture.
MUSIC: Gnome, “King”
Antwerp, Belgium’s Gnome has put out three albums in the past five years, all of them offering the same sort of thudding, riff-heavy stoner metal that sprung up in the 1970s. They do it very well and delightfully, their lyrics tend to be about the sorts of fantasy scenes that used to adorn the sides of conversion vans. As an example, here are lyrics from “The Bulls of Bravik” off “King,” which was released last year: “Here come the bulls of Bravik / You'd better run away / They smell your fear and magic / They come to eat your face.”
None of this would be enough to get the band coverage in Absolute Bleeding Edge, but they also have a gimmick.
It’s a small one, but it’s enough: the three band members perform wearing pointed red hats, as though they were actually gnomes.
Coupled with the high fantasy themes of their songs, we are given no choice but to assume that the band wants us to believe that they are, in fact, actual gnomes who somehow stumbled upon a cache of early Black Sabbath and Uriah Heep and decided this is the perfect format for telling tales from their world. In their video “Wenceslas” from “King” (content warning: some curse words), they even do little a gnomish dance, and if it's possible to be so silly as to be avant-garde, they’ve done it.
