Author: brian

The Spook Who Sat by the Door (1973) by Ivan Dixon

African-American Representation in Feature Films Series

Thursday, October 20
7:00 PM
Nonstop Institute
305 N. Walnut St., Yellow Springs
donation

From a 1966 novel by Sam Greenlee, the director Ivan Dixon sold The Spook Who Sat by the Door as a Blaxploitation shoot-em-up, masking the theme of urban-based warfare for African American liberation in urban communities. Upon release it provoked violent reaction in some parts of white America, and the FBI pressured the distributor to destroy all copies. The film was a bootleg classic in the African American community for years, but didn’t officially exist until it was digitally restored from the original camera negative, hidden in a Hollywood vault, in 2004.

About The African-American Representation in Feature Films series and workshop screenings on Thursdays at Nonstop October-November, 2011: Starting in mid-October and continuing every Thursday through November 3, Bob Devine will introduce screenings of a series of important and sometimes difficult-to-access narrative films dealing with African-American representation by African-American directors and by Hollywood (1964-1989). Future screenings include works by Haile Gerima, Charles Burnett, and Spike Lee. People are encouraged to attend these screenings/workshop discussions as a series, or to attend the individual screenings of specific films. To register for the workshop call 937-232-9906, or come to Nonstop the night of the film.

About the instructor: Bob Devine was one of the founding members of Antioch College’s critical Communications program, has been teaching courses in media and social change, film and communications theory for 40 years, and has been actively involved in the fields of community media, public access and participatory democratic media outside the academy. In 2005 Bob served as Interim Executive Director of Manhattan Neighborhood Network, and in 2008 he served an extended term as an Executive Consultant for O‘lelo Community Media in Honolulu, these organizations being the two largest community media centers in the country. At Antioch, Bob served as President of the College from 1996-2001, while continuing to teach in the field of communication and community media; most recently Bob taught courses and independent studies for Nonstop. Bob is the 1994 recipient of the Alliance for Community Media’s George Stoney Award, recognizing his national contributions to the field of community media, and the 2002 recipient of the Antioch College Alumni Association’s J.D. Dawson Award recognizing his contributions to the College. Bob is also the director of several dozen documentaries.

For further information contact: Bob Devine, 767-232-9906

Dispatch 9

INVIGORATING THE LOCAL – Part 1 – 3/25/11


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INVIGORATING THE LOCAL – Part 2 – 3/25/11


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INVIGORATING THE LOCAL with Brian Holmes & Claire Pentecost & the Compass Group

March 25, 2011

Chris Hill read the following introduction at this Nonstop event:

Welcome to the opening of Nonstop’s spring series Invigorating the Local: Conversations at the Intersection of Alternative Education, Open Media & Civic Participation.  Tonight is the first event in the series, and we expect there to be four more speakers in coming months, whose work converges around art making, open media practice and alternative education, and who will appear at Nonstop in person or via skype.

Tonight’s guests have all worked together as part of a cultural geography group called The Compass. All are also active as artists, critics, and teachers whose individual and collaborative work over the last decade has been about invigorating public space and accessible communications networks, addressing continental and global issues, and specifically engaging small communities in the American Midwest, drawing connections between the global and the local, the political and the poetic.  In his essay One World One Dream Brian Holmes suggests, following sociologist Ulrich Beck, that that “globalism is inseparable from a process of intensive individualism which is its other face, the flip side of the same basic currency.” The Compass Group has described their work as examining  “our collective existence on all the relevant scales: the intimate, the local, the national, the continental, and the global.” Nonstop’s Working Members and Board welcomes them in expanding their Midwest Radical Cultural Corridor project eastward by visiting us in Yellow Springs.

Our guests are a distinguished group. I want to just sketch briefly some of the projects with which they have been involved.

Perhaps it was my contact with Brian Holmes’ work in recent years that inspired this series. He has worked as a critic and editor on very important international media cultural projects such as serving as the English editor at Documenta X in 1997 in Kassel, Germany, and is a frequent contributor to nettime, an important international listserv that emerged out of a series of critical media conferences, the Next 5 Minutes, in the Netherlands in the mid-90s that cultivated important global conversations at the cusp of digital media and the emergence of the internet. His blog Continental Drift speaks in English, Spanish and French—he is a translator as well—and his recent publications such as Escape the Overcode: Activist Art in the Control Society (2009) are collections of essays that mostly appeared first in Continental Drift.  In projecting where we might think about going with Nonstop, and also thinking back upon the events of the last 3 years that are part of the fabric of Nonstop and Yellow Springs, I found the following statement about connections between the realms of the intimate and the institutional, the local and the national, in his introduction to Escape the Overcode to be particularly relevant.

In Escape the Overcode, Holmes writes in his introduction:
“And so finally we reach the scale of intimacy, of skin, of shared heartbeats and feelings, the scale that goes from families and lovers to people together on a street corner, in a sauna, a living room or a cafe. It would seem that intimacy is irretrievably weighted down in our time, burdened with data and surveillance and seduction, crushed with the determining influence of all the other scales. But intimacy is still an unpredictable force, a space of gestation and therefore a wellspring of gesture, the biological spring from which affect drinks. Only we can traverse all the scales, becoming other along the way. From the lovers’ bed to the wild embrace of the crowd to the alien touch of networks, it may be that intimacy and its artistic expressions are what will astonish the twenty-first century.”

Claire Pentecost teaches at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago where she recently served as chair of the Photography Department and the president of the local AAUP chapter. With Brian Holmes she contributes to Continental Drift blog and an ongoing seminar with the 16 Beaver Group in NYC. She hosts a blog, the Public Amateur, that seeks to broaden discussion about transgenic plants and other investigations into science and agriculture. She is a keyholder/member of Mess Hall, an interdisciplinary cultural center in Chicago. She has also worked closely with the  Critical Art Ensemble, that published an important text dealing with cultural actions in electronic territory, The Electronic Disturbance (1994)

Rozalinda Borcila was educated in Cluj, Romania, has taught Sculpture and Expanded Media at University of South Florida, and most recently served as Visiting Faculty in Participatory Platforms at the University of Geneva, Switzerland. I have admired her work with BLW, an artists-activists collective in which she collaborated with Sarah Lewison, also a member of The Compass Group, and Julie Wyman. The group re-performed challenging political and cultural documents, usually speeches and interviews videotaped the early 1970s, a practice BLW describes as “re-speaking.”  One of the their provocative texts that remarks on this practice was published in the Journal for Aesthetics and Protest (2007).  Rozalinda is also a keyholder at Mess Hall in Chicago. Over soup earlier tonight she described her recent involvement with an inspiring alternative education project that evolved out of a neighborhood action by mothers and their children and that led to the creation of a library, that perhaps we will hear more about later.

Ryan Griffis teaches New Media at University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana. His recent projects engage issues of migration and travel and include Temporary Travel Office. His site yougenics.net in informative and has links to other recent projects such as co-curating the exhibition Agriarts (2009) at George Mason University, and editing an issue of the Journal of Aesthetics and Protest #4.

Sarah Ross teaches as the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and at an Illinois state prison. She has been involved with the Urbana Books to Prisoners project and her website insecurespaces.net features a number of projects and articles. A recent video Experiments of Struggle profiles activists in small midwestern towns.

Nonstop Presents Local Stories

By Lauren Heaton, Yellow Springs News – go to their website

Everybody has a story, whose content is subject to interpretation by its teller. In the case of Nonstop Liberal Arts Institute’s newest project, the storytellers are four area artists who have created three installations for “Local Stories — An Oral Histories Project.” The stories they tell are of the residents who live here and form the essence of the local landscape. An opening reception for the artists and their work will take place at Nonstop on Saturday, Sept. 25, at 7 p.m.

In a multimedia installation, Nonstop photographer Dennie Eagleson tells the story of Milly Bell Wallace, who lived a self-sufficient life on a farm in Medway for the better half of a century. Columbus area painter Ryan Agnew interprets the identity of the village of Yellow Springs through a series of watercolors based on walks he took through the town this summer. Local residents Jonny No and John Hempfling initiated an interactive work that encourages people to dialogue about making space for local youth and the relationship between local youth and the police.

The Local Stories project reflects an era in which the availability of personalized digital tools allows people to tell their own stories. According to Chris Hill, a Nonstop faculty member and curator of the Local Stories project, the idea coincides with a national celebration of the stories of average people. One popular example is the national StoryCorps project, which since 2003 has collected local oral histories from citizens around the country for the Library of Congress archives. Another example is the National Public Radio program “This American Life,” Ira Glass’ in-depth weekly broadcast about the “true stories of everyday people.”

“In the culture at large, because the possibility of recording is available through cell phones and simple editing tools like iMovie and Quicktime, more and more people are investigating using media” to tell their own stories, Hill said. But the availability of the tools also begs the question of which is the best way to engage an audience in telling a particular story?, she said.

Eagleson’s piece, entitled “Threshing Day, Medway, Ohio, 1934,” came about through a connection with Nonstop and Antioch College board member Don Wallace, who is Milly’s son and who lives on his family’s historic farm. Eagleson became interested in Wallace’s life as a Depression-era female farmer who canned up to 1,800 jars in a given year and provided a model of the subsistence living Eagleson currently strives toward. After Wallace left the farm in 1986, she donated four generations worth of letters, photos, music and other forms of correspondence that documented the life of an Ohio farm family to the Wright State University archives.

In her installation, Eagleson documents the family’s life through archival material as well as interviews with family members, photographs and sound recordings of the farm. The result is a portrait of a woman that stretches Eagleson as an artist using new media to communicate a story, she said.

The collection of watercolors entitled “Wildflower Honey” by Columbus-based painter Ryan Agnew also tells a local story, but in a more abstract way. Agnew spent many days this summer walking through the downtown, the cemetery, the Glen, Antioch College campus, sometimes talking to people he met, intending to absorb the essence of Yellow Springs and its life cycles. During his visits he painted the natural world around him, including birdhouses of the Glen, gravestones in summer light, and the bees in a beehive, all of which, he said, communicated the uniqueness of a village that is a source of inspiration, healing and wholeness.

The third installation is an interactive work in progress entitled “Public Prohibited/Minor Infractions: The Control and Criminalization of Youth Culture in Yellow Springs, Ohio.” The work is a partial documentary about youth perspectives on their loss of public space and their relationship with the local and area bodies of law enforcement. The work is also meant to be an invitation to dialogue within the art space at Nonstop and online about the danger of accepting a historic pattern of disenfranchising certain groups of people, No said. The issues speak to artists No and Hempfling, both former Nonstop students and founding members of the Yellow Springs Community Youth Council, created to address the lack of opportunity for civic engagement among youth.

“The project is an attempt to make sure that as a community we’re being self reflective and paying attention to the way we treat one another, especially those who have historically been marginalized,” No said.

Local Stories, funded in part by the Yellow Springs Community Foundation, is an artist in residency project and a continuation of last winter’s artist in residency at Nonstop, Hill said. The artists were chosen by jury, and the intent was to get a diverse spectrum of approaches and to engage artists from both within and outside of Yellow Springs.

“In some ways the work has to speak for itself, but different ways of approaching the work draws different kinds of insights out of it,” Hill said.

After Saturday’s opening, the Nonstop gallery will host open hours on Saturdays 1–4 p.m. through October. Visitors may also check the Nonstop Web site for additional open hours or make an appointment to view the art by calling Nonstop at 319-1075.

Casting Notice_Oedipus Rex at Antioch College_The Faux Real Theatre Company

Also see workshop series and production

For Immediate Release

7/30/10

Antioch College presents a Faux-Real Theatre / Nonstop Institute Collaboration

CASTING NOTICE: THE FAUX-REAL THEATRE COMPANY, A NEW YORK BASED ENSEMBLE, IS SEEKING 6 MALE ACTORS FOR THEIR UPCOMING PRODUCTION OF OEDIPUS REX AT ANTIOCH COLLEGE
Rehearsals begin August 13th and the show runs from August 20th – August 22nd at the Antioch Amphitheater. If you are interested in being in the show please emai: fauxrealtheatre@aol.com or call 917-687-4998 as soon as possible.

The Faux-Real Theatre Company, a New York based ensemble is seeking six actors for their August, Yellow Springs production of Sophocles’ OEDIPUS REX (translation by Robert Fagles). Antioch College will be presenting the show which is a collaboration between the Faux-Real Theatre Company and the Nonstop Institute of Yellow Springs. The show will combine eight New York based actors from The Faux-Real Theatre Company with six local actors from Yellow Springs and the neighboring areas.
Rehearsals will be from Friday, August 13th – Thursday August 19th. Most of the rehearsals will be in the evening although there may be one or two daytime rehearsals. The performances will be on August 20th, 21st and 22nd, 6:00 PM at the Antioch College Amphitheater.

The Faux-Real Theatre Company is a not-for-profit ensemble that has been creating theatre in New York City and the neighboring areas since 1994. Shows created by Faux-Real have included William Shakespeare’s Haunted House (which ran seasonally in NYC for 10-years) FUNBOX (which ran throughout NYC for 2 years), The Tinderbox (which was performed in playgrounds throughout NYC over the course of two summers) and Htebcam (a backwards reincarnation of Macbeth). Faux-Real‘s style of performance is extremely physical and combines classic theatre techniques with elements of modern experimental theatre.

If you are interested in being in the show, please contact Mark Greenfield at fauxrealtheatre@aol.com or at 917.687.4998. We are interested in working with actors of all experience levels, so if you are excited by the prospect of trying something new, but don’t have a lot of experience, we are still interested in hearing from you. If possible, please email a photo of yourself along with either a resume or a short list of any theatrical experience you may have had. No payment or fees involved.

CALL FOR PROPOSALS – ORAL HISTORIES PROJECT

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:

A CALL FOR PROPOSALS – LOCAL STORIES—AN ORAL HISTORIES PROJECT
Nonstop Institute of Yellow Springs announces its second Artists Residency program

Application deadline: June 8, 2010 – Apply Now

Nonstop Institute seeks proposals for its upcoming residency program Local Stories—An Oral Histories Project. The selected projects will incorporate an oral history (or histories) grounded in the lived experience of Yellow Springs and neighboring locales and can be expressed in a range of art disciplines and presentation formats. The proposals can be focused through subjects including but not limited to a person, a neighborhood, a period of history, or any of a community’s shared natural, cultural and civic resources. Application deadline is June 8, 2010.

The final installations can be 2-d or 3-d work, media-based, text-based, performative, interactive or combinations of these ways of engaging subject matter and audiences. The four selected residency artists (can also include documentarians, writers, cultural geographers, others involved with oral histories) will have access to workspace at Nonstop for 7 weeks starting June 14. Opportunities for dialogue among residency artists and producers is an important component of this on-site residency project. The final projects will be installed and exhibited in Nonstop’s spaces in early August, using either a section of Nonstop’s 2000 sq ft exhibition space or its virtual website space. Components of the projects can also occur as a performance or screening in Nonstop’s main space.

Local Stories—An Oral Histories Project invites applications by artists and documentarians working the southwestern Ohio region and will consider proposals by producers at any stage of their careers. Project jurying will be based on both the specific proposal for Local Stories—An Oral Histories Project and examples of past work. Four proposals will be selected, and at least two of the four will be current residents of Yellow Springs. Each artist selected will receive up to $150 for supplies. Further information and application forms will be available starting May 13 at this webpage.

This project is made possible in part by the generous support of the Yellow Springs Community Foundation.

For further information please contact Chris Hill at 937- 767-2327 or chris.hill@nonstopinstitute.org .