Powerful moments mark reopening arts events

It's Covid reopening week in Washington state. For many of us, that may conjure visions of opening nights and music festivals, opening galas, you name it. We've missed in-person events. We have to slow-walk our excitement for a little bit still, but live arts events are percolating.

Brendan Kiley writes about arts, culture, and travel for the Seattle Times. He told KUOW’s Kim Malcolm about some events in the works in the coming days.

Shabazz Palaces and Thaddillac at The Engine Room Residencies

Ishmael Butler from Shabazz Palaces and guitarist Thaddeus Turner (Thaddillac) will be live-streaming a concert from inside an art exhibition at the Henry Art Gallery. The musicians have been practicing in the space itself. It’s an art installation called The Engine Room by an LA-based artist named Gary Simmons. It's all about music and creation, including a garage, like the kind of garages that give birth to garage bands.

There's one piece called B Sides which is a giant chalkboard painting with the titles of B-sides from Jimi Hendrix 45s. These titles are then partly erased by Simmons. He paints the titles then rubs on them with his hands to blur them. It's a very haunting effect. He's said in interviews before that his work has a lot to do with Black history and the ways that it is distorted and erased.

The Wealth Walk by The Williams Project

It's a two-mile-long audio-guided tour around the Mount Baker neighborhood, put together by the excellent local theatre company, The Williams Project. They're all about making theater in non-traditional theater spaces, so this fits right into their groove.

There’s history. There’s music. It begins at the north entrance to Franklin High School. The audio-tour will take you two miles around the neighborhood. It will talk about very far back history before European colonial settlers showed up. It talks about the history of when a neighborhood association was trying to keep it an all-white neighborhood. It goes all the way up to the present, and there is an opportunity to have a lunch break at Emerald City Fish and Chips on Rainier Avenue.

Until the Flood, streaming via ACT Theatre

This is a streaming solo show about the aftermath of the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. It's by Pulitzer Prize finalist playwright Dael Orlandersmith, who interviewed all kinds of people in Ferguson in 2015. I think that the results of those interviews have grown even more powerful after the protests of 2020. It's a different way of thinking about some of the same problems that, unfortunately, are as relevant today as they were in 2018, 2015, and on back.

Listen to the interview by clicking the play button above.