The three artists behind “All Weather Ballads” may look like a trio of folk singers on a reunion tour, but make no mistake, they’re internationally known puppetry pros who have been working together since 1982. Eric Bass, Ines Bass, and Nick Kell aren’t invisible (as some puppeteers prefer to be); in a low-key way, they inject their personalities into the productions. And, riffing on the vagueries of weather and its emotional resonances, they manage to construct a quintet of inventive and thought-provoking stories.

This short (one hour) production moves slowly but surely into gear. The opening skit, “Ballad of the Ice Shanty” involves a little conflict and internecine warfare among ice fishermen. The ice itself seems to be the dominating character, its illusory shield from reality. “The Ballad of the Muddy Road,” involves a stringy young man whose four wheel drive has gotten stuck in the muck. From the texture of mud, we move on to “The Ballad of the Apple Ladder“, where we explored the texture a magical apple, dangling from the tree turns into a naked woman.

But as the seasons pile on, with attendant variations in weather, with their various problems, the actors and the weather patterns, along with the wood, the pigs, the apples, and the mud all seem to worm their way into a story which gains in texture and style as the story progresses. In a country where billions of dollars get poured annually in pursuit “controlling the narrative”, it’s a lot of fun, and inspiring, to watching this tight group of Vermonters work with what they’ve got.

And it’s easy to watch: the extended, folk-ballad musings of Eric Bass as performed by guitarist/singer Nick Kell have a pleasantly hypnotic effect, while offering a narrative account to grab on to. It’s magical, thought provoking, and, unless you have a problem with apples turning into naked women, you can bring the kids.

So it’s well worth seeing, and it’s going to be here for one more weekend. But there’s one thing I can’t help saying. And then I’ll shut up.

Maybe it’s that I’m a writer, but I don’t get it when the program notes say, and I quote, that the essential meaning of visual theatre transpires through the visual vernacular. Does this already-splintered world of provincial theatre need to define itself by saying we’ll understand better if we just plug our ears? I’m sorry. The QuestFest is definitely worth seeing — it’s one of the best things to come to Baltimore in a long time. But calling it “visual theatre”  can obscure the essential point: that groups like Sandglass Theatre are, plain and simple, revitalizing the art of storytelling. In a world where stories are used as coat hangers for 200 million dollar action movies, we need them badly. And leave out the part about written language being artificial. Especially when it’s written in the program notes.

“To put unwanted books into the hands of those who want them” is the mission of The Book Thing of Baltimore, a free book warehouse that encourages you to be greedy and fill your arms- or one of the cardboard boxes that they usually have on hand- with used books. The warehouse is organized into sections, packed with books ranging in subject from cookbooks to children’s books to novels to atlases, as well as stacks of magazines (including an impressive collection of National Geographics). The covers are worn and many of the titles are dated, but the Book Thing is full of treasures- if you’re willing to spend some time perusing the shelves. It’s open on Saturdays and Sundays from 9 to 6; get there early before all the good one’s get snatched up.

The Book Thing of Baltimore, Inc.
3001 Vineyard Lane
Baltimore, MD 21218
www.bookthing.org

Red Emma’s Bookstore Coffeehouse is a worker-owned, collectively run shop at 800 St. Paul Street in Mt. Vernon. It offers free public talks and events, vegetarian food, and a wide array of books and magazines with a focus on anarchist theory, sustainability, politics and radical culture. It offers free internet access through wifi or through the three in-store computers. Red Emma’s is involved in the wider Baltimore community as well; it runs the 2640 space at 2640 St. Paul Street as well as the Baltimore Free School at 1323 North Calvert Street. www.redemmas.org

Dichotomies present potentially powerful subject matter in contemporary art. A tension between two opposing artistic points of view is on display in Blood Weather, a new installation at the Creative Alliance by Becky Alprin and Lauren Boilini.

Bolini’s works are massive paintings of explosive expression in bodily tones of pink and yellow. The artist has covered all 2000 square feet of the gallery’s walls with a mural painting that feels like an echo of both Picasso’s Rose period and Pollock’s drips. In the manner of her Abstract Expressionist inspirations, she has created an all-encompassing paint environment that surrounds the viewer.

In contrast to the bodily expression of Boilini’s work, Alprin’s presents a cool, removed look at humanity. It is the cultural body in a larger, anthropological sense, which concerns her. This contrast is described by the wall label as if the two artists are looking at humanity “through opposite end of the telescope.” Alprin’s multi-media installation includes a literal excavation of the gallery space – cut out pieces of the gallery wall are reconstructed as an architectural model of a city on the gallery floor. The viewer is invited to walk up to and onto a low pyramid form that has been constructed in the center of the space. At the peak of this form, a small screen shows a stop-motion video of the architectural detritus and geo forms that constitutes her sculptures. Whereas Boilini’s piece surrounds the viewer, Alprin’s work puts the viewer outside of the work, looking in.

The installation’s title, Blood Weather, is at first unsettling. That is, until you consider what brings these two artists together and why this collaborative installation provides a cohesive experience. Boilini provides the viewer with an environmental surrounding, as if they are looking at human form from the inside out. It is a close examination of the passions and anxieties that make up the human soul.  Alprin, on the other hand, takes a step back from the individual body to consider the outside forces of geography and culture that influence human experience. In the end, it is this tension between subjective expression and objective situation that defines what it means to be alive.

Video courtesy of the Creative Alliance at the Patterson

Blood Weather @ the Creative Alliance
Becky Alprin and Lauren Boilini
On view: February 26^th- March 27^th
Gallery Talk: Wednesday, March 24^th 7pm

Creative Alliance at the Patterson
3134 Eastern Avenue
Baltimore, MD 21224-3964
(410) 276-1651

After work on Saturday, my roommate and I passed the time watching the snow fall out the window as if it were a TV show (this is partially because we don’t have actual TV yet; or internet for that matter and are still waiting for Comcast to be able to make it out to our house). After watching the snow come down in droves for awhile and getting a bit restless, my roommate texted a friend of hers who lives a few blocks away. We got ready, bundled up, and set out to her house. It was at this time that I was first taken by (pleasant) surprise.
Right outside our house, were a couple of kind, dedicated, neighbors plowing out a walkway on our small, one-way street, to the entire street’s benefit. We were now able to walk the one hundred feet or so out to 36th street (“The Avenue”).

When we reached the avenue the sight was other-worldly, but again, lovely. Not only was everything just covered in mounds of white, but people of all ages and families were happily meandering in what would have been the middle of the road. Kids were running around, groups of friends were laughing, and people were taking pictures or asking you to take their picture right and left. The spirit and wonder of it all was definitely not just something that only I noticed. As we neared the end of 36th St, a local news reporter and her camera man bounded up to us, and asked us a few predictable questions, the most memorable of which went something like this, “You must be the tenth person we’ve seen taking pictures..Why take so many? Is it really such a big deal?” To which we responded, “To us this isn’t just a memory of 2010’s huge snow storm.. We just moved in to the neighborhood, and seeing nearly the entire community out and about and in such wonderful spirits is truly a beautiful sight to see, and one that we’re not too used to seeing, having always lived in and around larger suburbs where neighborhoods were never too closely knit”.

We were elated to be able to share our thoughts to the “watching world”. Needless to say, that night and the entire next day, I got an influx of texts, calls, and even points, from everyone who saw me on WBAL’s 11:00 news (apparently they replayed the clip multiple times).
Our time at our friend’s house was a blast playing Taboo and drinking bottles of wine. It was time to make the trek home. As we rounded the bend to 36th and began walking, we were shocked at the amount of restaurants still open, and bustling! What would have ordinarily been a dark and quiet walk home, was interrupted by people laughing and chatting, and glasses and silverware clinging merrily, whenever a restaurant door would swing open. It was such a wonderful and amusing sight to see. We couldn’t get over it.

As I was curled up in bed that night, I thought about how the rest of the suburban world was stuck inside bored to tears, and then felt luckier than ever to be among a friendly neighborhood of people who used Snowmagedon 2010 as an excuse to relax, eat, drink, and be merry with the people around them; we were truly all in it together.

First, his daughter Gemma actually is, at first glimpse, a little bit of a whiner. That’s not the same as being a pussy hole, but she’s a second generation rebel who can’t wait for her dad to sell the house and, maybe, uh, buy her a flat. As a man who immigrated to London from Grenada years ago and struggled to bring up his two daughters alone, after his wife left, he should probably expect a little more.

So, yes, her dad, Alfred (Avery Brooks) has some reason to chase her out of his castle with his cane. And she has every right to call a Polish caretaker to nurse her cantankerous dad. And he has every right to tell the Polish caretaker to get the hell out. And then, he has every right to, well, warm up to her.

But what most keeps us on Alfred’s side is Kwei-Armah’s script, which transforms a fairly grumpy old man into a walking celebration of a West Indies/London vernacular that much of this Baltimore audience probably associates with cab drivers.

Kwei-Armah politely reminds us that we should listen a little more carefully. Let There Be Love is a drawing room comedy in the best sense. It draws us into a living room that we wouldn’t know otherwise. And it teaches us a new language, a brilliantly constructed bastardization of caustic English wit and West Indies bluntness.

And to be honest, offering a few scribbled samples won‘t do it justice. You’ll have to listen to it courtesy of Avery Brooks, one of those big name actors who occasionally parachutes into Charm City. People criticize Center Stage Artistic Director Irene Lewis for being a little Apple-centric, but here it pays off. Some actors wind up on Broadway (and in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine) because they’re, how do I put this, good. Mr. Brooks, to put it simply, owns the stage, even with a bum leg.

But he doesn’t hog it. And actors Pascale Armand, as his daughter Gemma, and Gretchen Hall, as the Polish maid Maria, both perform admirably. Gemma is an underachiever, but she’s no slouch. And Armand (and director Jeremy Cohen) have cautiously limned the subtleties of second generation immigrants. She’s picked up a big of the English working-class accent, and even though she hasn’t inherited her dad’s work ethic, she has inherited his fighting spirit.

Kwei-Armah has an eagle eye for the foibles and graces of West Indies immigrants, but less of one for East Europeans. The Polish Maria is, essentially, a foil (and not a very strong one) for Albert’s isolationist tendencies, and her own status as a cultural outsider is generally defined by jokey malapropisms.

Okay. Now for the less-than-remarkable plot.  After a couple of brief spats, the bitter old loner falls in love with the cleaning lady. But before doing that, he pours out his bitterness at his wife (now living in their homeland of Grenada), his two daughters (whom he brought up) and even his friends (if he has any).

At the play’s best, there’s a dark Beckettian humor to this older man, who is caustically and crankily playing out his own endgame. But while he’s ready to end it all because of his terminal illness, he seems unwilling to give up the language itself, and its unabridged vernacular of complaints which he has molded through decades with precision and clarity. This is his show, and Kwei-Armah’s ear and Brooks’ presence lend him the right mix of force and vulnerability to outlast the predictable and somewhat drawn-out finale.

The evening’s other highlight? When Ms. Hall interrupted the now-obligatory Opening Night Standing Ovation with an eloquent plea on behalf of Haiti, where her family still lives.

An important experiential part of an exhibit is the first and last view of it.  On entering Maryland Art Place’s three-room gallery, one is greeted cheerfully by No Place, a multi-media installation by Saya Woolfalk. The installation consists of video, textile, and sculptural work that completely fill the space with the artist’s utopian vision of the future.   Though the altar-like sculpture in the center of the room is slightly underwhelming, Woolfalk’s work  is cohesive conceptually and  offers the viewer a lively entrance into the show. It provides a preview into the variety of mediums and reoccurring themes that makes Losing Yourself in the 21st Century a comprehensive and well-organized exhibit.  Echoes of the struggle between reality and virtual reality, perceived identity and self-evaluation, and what it means to be a woman of the 21st century could be found throughout the space.

In the second room, along the left wall, I was one is immediately drawn to Stacia Yeapanis’ Everybody Hurts. In this work, Yeapanis has created —a series of medium sized embroidered portraits depicting television screen captures, or still photographs taken from the television screen. By using a slow manual process to appropriate an image from such a fast-paced, time-based medium , the artist invites her audience to question their own investment in these characters. One piece, Buffy Summers #2, shows a surprised Sara Michelle Geller in the popular series, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, with the phrase “ it seams like the birds shouldn’t be singing anymore but they are” embroidered in small black lettering beneath it. This work demonstrates more than a simple re-appropriation of TV imagery; Yeapanis has re-claimed the tradition female past-time of embroidery in order to explore the role of these images in the formation of our 21st century female identity.

A lot of the artwork in this exhibit portrays the search for personal growth and self-realization through both constructive and destructive means. Two chairs with plastic seat covers sat in front of a TV showing new work from well-known video and performance artist Shana Moulton. The video, part of Moulton’s Whispering Pines series, is an interesting, dreamlike portrayal of woman’s search for self-improvement made in an approachably low-tech format. The seats and the kitschy plastic decorations placed around the TV lunge the viewer directly into the satirical, lonely, and intriguingly mundane world of Moulton’s alter ego, Cynthia. Though the video itself did does not disappoint, I found that the low quality of the sound was distracting.

With the exception of Yeapanis’s embroidery and Milana Braslavsky’s distorted-yet-figurative photographs, artists who are engaged with digital process, video and performance art dominate the show. In some cases, such as Amber Hawk Swanson’s To Have, To Hold, To Violate, the video serves as a mere documentation of a greater art performance. The seven-minute video shows Swanson, accompanied by life-sized sex doll modeled after her, at a variety of events, ranging from a wedding reception to an adult industry convention. The subject of this piece becomes the other people that the artist and her doll encounter throughout the video; the viewer retains a spectator’s distance as they consider their own role in the sexual- objectification of women.

Conversely, Noelle Mason’s Lan Party or National Take your Daughter to Work Day is a multi-media installation with video components. Mason directly engages the viewer with her work. Drawn to it at first though the shock of seeing a sniper rifle set up in an art gallery, the viewer is then asked to sit behind the gun which points at a small, ornately framed video screen on the far wall. Mason’s work proves to be a politically charged, aesthetically interesting and complex view of participation and spectatorship.

Ultimately, it is this relationship between artist and spectator, projected truth and inner truth, them and you that this exhibit is calling into question. From Woolfalk’s installation on, visitors are asked to see themselves in the work.  The introduction of 21st century media into the gallery space helps solidify the importance of our surroundings in shaping an individual identity. The artists of Losing Yourself in the 21st Century have captured what it means to be a person living and working in this age of virtual reproduction.

Maryland Art Place
Losing Yourself in the 21^st Century
Curated by:  Cathy Byrd, Jillian Hernandez,  and Susan Richmond
February 4^th- March 27^th, 2010

In his “Broom Broom” series, he combines parts of brooms to create different scenarios. In one, a single push-broom head has two opposing handles, as if two people might try to push it in two opposite directions at once. In another, a single handle has a push-broom head at each end. These are simple objects, complicated so that they no longer make sense. These pieces are executed so cleanly that we can almost believe (and we’re suspending disbelief, remember!) that they were manufactured that way. What’s more, unlike the mop that leans against the wall, like mops naturally do, these brooms are poised upright, away from the wall– they are standing in the room with you.

In addition to Terms of Use at Gallery Four, two other shows opened at the H&H building at 405 W. Franklin Street last Friday: Nudashank presented a two-person show of paintings, while The Whole Gallery presented works from a large group of Baltimore artists, thematically connected by the representation of animals in contemporary art.

Downstairs at Nudashank, the narratives are more contained, inscribed within the art-historical tradition of painting. “Proscenium on TV” by Tatiana Berg is a brightly colored painting with heavy impasto that shows a curtain and a stage. The title helps us think about the similarities between the picture plane, the television screen and the theater. It’s a great example of painting that examines the genre of painting itself and its place in a wider cultural context. In the next room her paintings have moved off the wall—canvas stretched over pyramidal structures which are then mounted on casters– little nomadic tent paintings. Tatiana employs the vernacular of painting while pushing its limits.

Colin’s mop actually inspires emotion in me. It makes me think about anatomical irregularities or failures of character. Tatiana’s work, meanwhile, excites me, but only because I really like following the esoteric dialog in which she’s taking part. Her work is more academic, I suppose, whereas Colin’s work, insofar as it employs materials that are not art specific, is a little more accessible.

Tatiana spoke to me of a possible future show in which she would put casters on the backs of traditionally shaped paintings so the viewers could kick them about the gallery floor. She admits there is a humor to her work. She calls it silliness. I wondered if her trajectory away from traditional painting would take her into more sculptural work. She expressed her loyalty to her medium.

New Paintings: Tatiana Berg/Ted Gahl
Nudashank
H&H Arts Building
405 W. Franklin St.
3rd Floor
Baltimore, MD 21201
http://nudashank.blogspot.com/
Nudashankgallery@gmail.com
February 12 – March 12

Terms of Use
Gallery Four
H&H Arts Building
405 W. Franklin St.
4rd Floor
Baltimore, MD 21201
http://www.galleryfour.net
February 12 – March 27

Animal Attraction
The Whole Gallery
H&H Arts Building
405 W. Franklin St.
3rd Floor
Baltimore, MD 21201
http://wholegallery.blogspot.com/
wholeyrollers@gmail.com
February 12 – March 27