Handprints

One of the special treats of Greta Oglesby’s autobiographical show, “Handprints,” at The History Theatre, comes in the second half, when she’s sharing her experiences as a performer. As she brings the audience along on a journey through her career, she gives little tastes of the iconic characters she’s played on stages like The Goodman Theatre in Chicago and The Guthrie Theater. In some cases, it’s been years since she’s performed in some of the plays, like “Gem of the Ocean,” by August Wilson, which she originated in 2003, and “Caroline, Or Change,” which won her an Ivey award in 2009. And yet at the History Theatre, she transforms in the characters so completely as if no time has passed, and the characters she played are still a part of her.

Beginning with her childhood experiences, Oglesby outlines the people and experiences that informed her both as a person and as an artist. In a lot of ways, “Handprints” is a very intimate work. It’s a rather unique look at the artist’s process, by illustrating how the moments in one person’s life shape their artistry. Thursday, Feb. 8 at 10 a.m. and 7:30 p.m., Friday, Feb. 9 at 7:30 p.m., Saturday, Feb. 10 at 2 p.m., and Sun, Feb. 11 at 2 p.m., through February 18 at The History Theatre. ($25-$64). More information here. 

Phantom of the Opera

Local composer Philip Shorey takes on the 1925 silent film version of “The Phantom of the Opera” with a new score performed live by Curse of the Vampire Orchestra.  In the last 5 years, the group has accompanied other silver screen classics like “Nosferatu,” and Charlie Chaplin’s “The Kids,” performing across the country and internationally, including Minneapolis. 

For Shorey’s new composition, he focuses on the story of Christine in his adaption of the Universal Pictures film, itself based on Gaston Leroux’s novel from 1910 (all predating Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Broadway version). This weekend’s three screenings/live performances will mark the new music’s world premiere. Friday, Feb. 9 at 7 p.m., Saturday, Feb. 10 at 2 p.m. & 7 p.m., at the Granada Theater, ($25-$150). More information here.

Andrea Carlson: Perpetual Sarah 

Andrea Carlson returns to Bockley Gallery for the artist’s fifth exhibition at the space, showing new works on paper from three different series. A former Twin Cities resident, Carlson has been making waves in Chicago as of late, earning a Creative Capital fellowship in 2023 and a United States Artist Visual Art Fellowship in 2022. She helped co-found the new Center for Native Futures, and she’s been engaged in big public artwork projects, including one on the High Line in New York, co-commissioned by The Whitney Museum of Art, and one on Chicago’s Riverwalk, called “You are on Potawatomi Land.” In the next couple of years, she’ll be featured in solo exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art in 2024 and The Denver Art Museum in 2025. 

At Bockley, Carlson shares work from “VORE,” “L’Assomption Sash for Carrying Things that No Longer Exist,” and “Perpetual Sarah.” Deeply intellectual, dizzyingly detailed, and engaging with everything from power and mainstream culture to Indigenous sovereignty, Carlson’s artworks pop with energy and ideas. It’s on view through March 16, with an artist walk through Saturday, Feb. 10 at 4 p.m. and a public reception Saturday, Feb. 10 from 5 p.m. to 7 p.m. (free). More information here.

Zorongo Flamenco Dance Theatre: The Conference of the Birds

Less than 15 years after the Cowles Center opened as a flagship center for dance and performing arts in the heart of downtown Minneapolis, the venue announced that it will be closing at the end of March. It’s still operating this month, however, and this weekend is a chance to experience the beautiful building (renovated out of the old Schubert Theater) as Zorongo Flamenco Dance Theatre performs its adaptation of the ancient Sufi poem, “The Conference of the Birds.” Zorongo’s artistic director Susana di Palma collaborated with local choreographer Darrius Strong for the work, set to original music performed by flamenco composer and guitarist Juanito Pascual. Saturday night’s performance also features a performance by young dancers from the FAIR school for the arts. Saturday, Feb. 10 at 7:30 p.m. and Sun., Feb. 11 at 2 p.m. at The Cowles Center ($35, Pay as you are Sunday). More information here. 

The Cedar Commissions 

Aerial silk performance set to country songs, hip hop infused R&B and jazz, folk songs set to Yiddish poems, Afro-Indigenous instruments paired with experimental jazz and blues, Viet-punk jams and Ukrainian resilience are all on the docket for this year’s Cedar Commissions. It’s two evenings filled with brand new music created by The Cedar Cultural Center’s commissioned artists. The cohort of artists have been developing their work and collaborations in the rigorous program, presenting the world premieres at the Cedar this weekend. Friday will see works by RZ Shahid, McKain Lakey, and YEV. Then on Saturday night, take in what Sarah Larsson, Lady Xøk, and Tri Vo have been putting together. Feb 9, and Saturday, Feb. 10 at 7:30 p.m. at The Cedar. ($15, $25 two show pass.) More information here.

The Kills 

There’s a certain retro sound to The Kills’ latest album, “God Games” released in 2023. There are echoes in the music of The White Stripes and similar bands of the early 2000s, and you can also hear a bit of Sonic Youth in the gutsy voice of Alison “VV” Mossheart. She plays with co-founder Jamie “Hotel” Hince, a British guitarist (who, as a side note, was married to Kate Moss), who had to re-learn how to make music after he lost one of his fingers in an accident. They got back together in 2022 after a 6 year hiatus, and will make a stop in Minneapolis as part of their album tour. The Paranoyds open for them Monday, Feb. 12 at 8 p.m. at First Ave. ($42.50). More information here.

“I have this dream, and I see the whole exhibition in my dream— with my paintings and Tomas’ art,” Folkebrant explained at a panel discussion last Saturday at the American Swedish Institute. “I woke up Saturday morning, I just made a sketch. And I called Thomas. We met, and we decided to make this exhibition.” 

Folkebrant grew up in the Southern part of Sweden. Brought up in a Communist household, she didn’t have religion growing up, and would often escape into the forest where she found connection and meaning. “The older I got, I went deeper and deeper into the forest and to the creek and the river and so on,” she said. “Slowly it became my church. So I kind of created my own connection with the spirit of nature, and that has been healing for me as a person as an individual growing up without any religion or belonging.” 

In her work, Folkebrant often paints animals moving through natural environments, using a grayscale palette and watery acrylic paint.

Colbengtson, meanwhile, grew up in a Sámi community in the Arctic circle of Sweden. Much like practices in the United States, the Swedish government had boarding schools and other policies designed to take language and culture away from Sámi people. The church, also, was a part of this cultural violence, he told me. 

“The church has been really suppressing,” he said in an interview. “They were like the hit men of the politicians. They even dug up human remains, and sold them. We were forbidden to speak Sámi language in school up to  the late 1960s.” 

Even after that time, Folkebrant said in our conversation, a guilt remained for wearing Sámi clothes, and singing cultural songs. “It’s kind of a shame,” he said. “It’s kind of hard to turn it off.” 

In his career as an artist, Colbengtson has engaged in re-learning cultural heritage. That’s even through a kind of silence he’s perceived around the traumatic experiences of Sámi people.

The installation Colbengtson and Folkebrant created together features eight of Folkebrant’s large scale paintings of reindeer, an animal tied culturally to the Sámi people in Northern Scandinavia and Russia. Each of the eight gray-scaled paintings represent a different season, including pre-summer, summer, pre-autumn, autumn, pre-winter, winter, pre-spring, and spring. Interacting with these paintings are archival photographs of Sámi who immigrated to Alaska in 1894 and 1898, which are transformed into primary colored monochrome screen-prints on polycarbonate glass, which also act as mirrors. 

Before her dream about the show, Folkebrant had watched a documentary about the migration journey of the Sámi herders who were paid by the U.S. government to travel to Alaska in order to train tribal groups on how to herd reindeer. In two separate journeys, the Sámi traveled by ship with their herds to the East coast of the United States, took a train to San Francisco, and then a boat for the rest of the journey. The journey was fraught, and many Sámi dispersed to join the Yukon Gold rush or moved to other parts of North America. By 1937, they were banned from owning reindeer throughout Alaska. 

Folkebrant and Colbengtson’s installation— which you can view in part at the American Swedish Institute and in part at All My Relations Arts, brings that history into three dimensions. The immersive work makes you feel as if you are surrounded by reindeer, with the presence of the Sámi in the room with you. At AMRA, the installation can be seen as part of “Okizi (To Heal).” The companion traveling exhibition at ASI, “Arctic Highways: Unbounded Indigenous People,” is co-curated by Colbengtson along with Gunvor Guttorm, Dan Jåma and Britta Marakatt-Labba, and featuring 12 Indigenous artists from Sápmi and North America. 

Besides his collaboration with Folkebrant, Colbengtson shows a number of his other individual works at both ASI and AMRA. One is a giant Saemie drum called “Children of the Sun,” covered with gold leaf, and screen printed with archival photographs of Sámi people. The ASI exhibition also features two of Colbengtson’s oil paintings on aluminum. One references the boarding school experience and the other investigates notions of identity. Employing archival imagery, Colbengtson takes a textured approach to the work, evoking stark emotion and trauma in the works.

Meanwhile, each of the two exhibitions at the two institutions features artists from Indigenous cultures across continents. The work ranges from pieces that highlight Indigenous artistry and craft— like a gorgeous arctic fox fur with floral beadwork by Teresa McDowell at All My Relations, to work that addresses Indigenous histories, storytelling and contemporary issues. 

Often, artists grapple with their own relationship to animals and nature— like St. Olaf assistant professor Courtney M. Leonard’s “BREACH: Scrimshaw Studies,” (2014), on view at AMRA. That clay sculpture evokes the image of a whale tooth, inspired by Leonard’s experience of encountering a beached whale on the coast of New York state. The Shinnecock artist addresses her community’s kinship with nature and whales in particular, as she grapples with ways in which Native groups aren’t given access to conversations around water issues and the environment. 

“When I think of ‘Breach,’ I think of it as this learning journey,” she said at the panel talk.  “Who gets to say what other nations get to have access to, and who gets to tell us how we should sustain ourselves and how we should remain resilient?”

The connections between the different Indigenous cultures represented in the two exhibitions illustrate similarities in artistic practices, connection to nature and animals, and in historical suppression. The two shows illuminate hidden histories while also celebrating a terrific group of artists working in contemporary practices buoyed by cultural knowledge and exploration.

“Arctic Highways: Unbounded Indigenous People,” is on view through May 26 at the American Swedish Institute ($13). More information here. “Okizi (To Heal)” is on view at All My Relations Gallery through April 13 (free). More information here. 

The NAACP was an outgrowth of the Niagara Movement, a civil rights organization founded several years earlier by prominent black leaders including W. E. B. Du Bois and St. Paul attorney Fredrick McGhee. On March 12, 1912, McGhee, physician Valdo Turner, and several other members of St. Paul’s African American community met to create a new organization called the Twin City Protective League. Despite opposition from members who objected to the activist policies of Du Bois and his allies, the new group voted to affiliate with the NAACP.

McGhee died several months later, but his colleagues carried on his cause. In the fall of 1913, the St. Paul group applied for and received its NAACP charter, officially becoming a branch of the national organization. A few months later, another group of prominent black leaders including attorney Gale P. Hilyer established a separate NAACP branch in Minneapolis.

Both NAACP branches struggled to build membership and raise funds during their early years. But they still managed to mount several high profile campaigns on behalf of the cities’ African Americans. Most notably, they fought to prevent public showings of the groundbreaking but blatantly racist motion picture “The Birth of a Nation,” in 1915. Gale Hilyer, for one, objected to the movie’s demeaning depictions of African Americans, calling it “prejudiced and unfair.”

The two branches failed to stop the exhibition of the movie. They did, however, gain several concessions. In St. Paul, exhibitors agreed to cut two particularly offensive scenes from the film. In Minneapolis, Mayor Wallace Nye set up a board of censors to consider the Black community’s objections. Other campaigns conducted by the two NAACP branches included an attempt to gain the release from prison of a Black teenager convicted of forging a seventeen-dollar check, and a successful effort to reinstate an African American public school teacher in St. Paul.

The two branches’ focus shifted with the United States’ entry into World War I. Although labor shortages on the home front forced employers to open positions that had previously been closed to African Americans, NAACP leaders feared hiring discrimination would return once the war ended.

Minneapolis NAACP Secretary R. Augustine Skinner was among several Twin Cities Black leaders who believed African Americans could best protect their wartime gains by demonstrating patriotism. He called for them to unite in support of the NAACP as an advocate for their rights.

The Twin Cities NAACP branches played what may have been their most urgent early role in the aftermath of racial violence 150 miles north, in Duluth. On June 15, 1920, a mob broke into the Duluth city jail and lynched three Black circus workers who were being held there as suspects in an alleged rape. In the days that followed, seven other black men were indicted in the rape, despite a lack of physical evidence. The NAACP branches in St. Paul and Minneapolis mobilized to defend them. The branches solicited donations and hired attorneys to represent the accused.

In the end, the lawyers secured by the NAACP succeeded in getting charges against five of the men dropped. Of the two defendants who went to trial, one was acquitted and one was convicted. The Twin Cities branches’ efforts on behalf of the accused helped overcome skepticism about the NAACP in Duluth’s African American community and led to the establishment of that city’s NAACP branch in 1920.

For more information on this topic, check out the original entry on MNopedia.

At the Capri Theater, the Legends Series returns with “Souled Out,” though not sold out, featuring a newly formed trio of singers called Co-Mingl that will have you tapping your feet. Over at the University of Minnesota, 29 artists are featured in an exhibition at the Katherine E. Nash Gallery, marking the newly formed George Morrison Center for Indigenous Arts. Also this week, the Minnesota Opera’s production of “The Elixir of Love,” is a tasty treat, and at David Petersen Gallery, Kramer Hegenbarth shares his whimsical ceramic rock monsters. Finally, Minneapolis artist seangarrison gives a talk over in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, sharing about his recent works.

‘The Elixir of Love’ 

A sweet cast, a darling set design, and a silly but endearing story offer a dose of rom com for your viewing pleasure over at the Ordway for Minnesota Opera’s production of “The Elixir of Love” by Gaetano Donizetti.

If you are a fan of plots where something bad almost happens but crisis is quickly averted, this is the story for you. Vanessa Becerra, who played the titular “Daughter of the Regiment” with the Minnesota Opera last year with plucky humor and powerful high notes, returns as Adina, a rich young woman courted by two men – a lowly farm worker and a soldier. Minnesota Opera’s production sets the story in 1916 in Southern California, in a moment when an enterprising “drink an orange” campaign was popularizing the fruit. Andrew Stenson plays Nemorino, a farmworker at Adina’s estate, who pays a traveling salesman a fee for an elixir that, when he drinks it, is supposed to make his love fall for him. Turns out, the elixir is simply Bordeaux and orange juice, but this is a plot where anything can happen when it comes to love. Stenson is a lovable goof in this truly ridiculous and yet delightful story, and both of the leads sound terrific together, as does the large cast. Jaime Mejia’s set, centered around a Spanish Colonial Revival mansion surrounded by orange trees, pleases in this charming production directed by Daniel Ellis. Thursday, Feb. 1 at 7:30 p.m., Saturday, Feb. 3 at 7:30 p.m., Sunday, Feb. 4 at 2 p.m. at the Ordway ($31-$233). More information here.

‘A Room Full of Overcaffeinated Technicolor Kindergarten Children’

A mini road trip might be in order this week to see the first solo exhibition of artist seangarrison (the artist spells it all one word with no capitalizations) at the Pablo Center at the Confluence in Eau Claire, Wisconsin. Originally from Detroit, the artist has been based in Minneapolis from an early age, and began his career a bit by accident in 2010. At the time, he worked for the Council on Crime and Justice and was asked by a colleague to contribute a piece of art for a fundraiser. He had done art as a young person, and was involved with creative writing projects as an adult, but hadn’t been involved in making visual arts for many years. The fundraiser sparked seangarrison’s journey into art making and since then, he has immersed himself in his practice, taking on social issues like police brutality and gun violence in his abstract paintings and sculpture as well as performance-based live painting events. With a studio in Northrop King building, he’s worked with the Minnesota African Heritage Museum and Gallery and other local venues, and has been complimented by MSNBC host Chris Hayes. In “A Room Full of Overcaffeinated Technicolor Kindergarten Children,” the artist shares work that brings his clear eyed vision of the world to the surface. With bright colors, bold brush strokes and patterns, and incorporated symbols, the work stirs emotion as it addresses issues. The artist talk takes place Friday, Feb. 2 from 5 p.m. to 7 p.m. at the Pablo Center at the Confluence in Eau Claire, Wisconsin. The exhibition runs through March 3 (free). More information here.

‘Dreaming Our Futures: Ojibwe and Očhéthi Šakówiŋ Artists and Knowledge Keepers’

The University of Minnesota launches the George Morrison Center for Indigenous Arts – a new study center devoted to Indigenous art and artists – with an exhibition called “Dreaming Our Futures: Ojibwe and Očhéthi Šakówiŋ Artists and Knowledge Keepers.” Named after former University of Minnesota faculty member George Morrison, an important American abstract painter and sculptor who was a member of the Grand Portage Band of the Minnesota Chippewa Tribe, the new center will foster research around the arts, “informed by Indigenous knowledge and perspectives,” according to Northrop Professor of American Studies Brenda J. Child, quoted on the University’s website.

The inaugural show, curated by Child and Howard Oransky with Christopher Pexa, is currently on view at the Katherine E. Nash Gallery, and will eventually travel to the Rochester Art Center and the Tweed Museum of Art. It features work by Morrison as well as other national 20th figures, including Patrick DesJarlait and Oscar Howe, who, along with Morrison, as well as nationally recognized living Ojibwe artists, including Andrea Carlson, Dyani White Hawk, and Rabbett Before Horses Strickland. A number of beautiful and dream-like works are featured by Joe Geshick in the show, and Fern Cloud’s untitled buffalo hide painting made in 2023 is a real stunner. The exhibition also features work by a number of recently passed celebrated Minnesota artists, including Jim Denomie, Waŋblí Mayášleča (Francis J. Yellow, Jr.) and Sam English.

The opening event for the exhibition takes place this Saturday, beginning at 4 p.m. (free). A panel of Native artists, writers and scholars (including Kate Beane, Louise Erdrich, Diane Wilson, and Christopher Pexa) will discuss the artworks in the exhibition with Brenda J. Child. The panel is followed by a reception, and it’s also a chance to pick up the gorgeous accompanying catalog. The exhibition will be on view at Nash through March 16. Additional related events can be found on here.

Legends presents: ‘Souled Out’

The Legends @ The Capri concert series pays tribute to American soul music with a performance by a new group of soul/R&B singers called Co-Mingl, featuring vocalists g’Beau, Will Wesley and Kelz, accompanied by a live band. The group will perform legends like The Temptations, Otis Redding, James Brown, Sam Cooke and more, 7 p.m. Saturday, Feb. 3 and 3 p.m. Sunday, Feb 4, ($25 or $30 at the door, Buy online at capri.simplextix). More information here.

‘Flowering in the Dark’

Kramer Hegenbarth’s ceramic “rock monsters” feature sharp teeth, oversized tongues, plant-like adornments and hyper colored patterns. The artist has commented that the giant mouth sculptures were inspired both by nature and rocks and the 1986 film, “Little Shop of Horrors.” Since 2017, Hegenbarth has been an artist at Interact Center for Visual and Performing Arts, an organization that focuses on radical inclusion highlighting the creative talents of people with disabilities, and he’s also shown work at the Minnesota Museum of American Art and Gamut Gallery. This week, David Petersen Gallery opens a solo exhibition of Hegenbarth’s work called “Flowering in the Dark,” featuring artworks with titles like “Punk Rock,” and “The Creep.” Dog Eye Press will be on hand at the opening, releasing three new artist-created books by John Fleischer, Tom Bubul, as well as a catalogue of Hegenbarth’s work. The opening takes place Saturday, Feb. 3 from 6 p.m.-8 p.m., with the exhibition running through March 3 (free). More information here.

It turns out he’s also got musical talents. In 2010, his band Corporal put out an album and, more recently, he has been collaborating with guitarist Jason Narducy, who has played with Bob Mould, Liz Phair and Superchunk, along with his solo work with Split Single.

The two met 10 years ago when another musician, Robbie Fulks, recruited them both to perform a show at the Hideout in Chicago centered around Lou Reed’s 1982 album “Blue Mask.” Since then, Narducy and Shannon have teamed up on numerous other concerts celebrating iconic albums, featuring the likes of Neil Young, Bob Dylan, The Smiths, and more.

In July of 2023, they performed REM’s “Murmur” at Chicago’s Metro. It was the 40th anniversary of the club, which happened to have presented REM playing that album as its first concert. REM’s Mike Mills even attended the show and joined them on stage. Now, the two are taking the show on tour, coming to First Avenue this week. The following is an interview with Shannon and Narducy about the collaboration.

The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

MinnPost: Thanks for doing this. I’m excited for you to come here.

Michael Shannon: We are too. Holy crap. The First Avenue club. I’ve never been there.

MP: Oh, really?

MS: I’ve never been to Minneapolis.

MP: Are you guys a cover band, or how would you describe what you are doing?

Jason Narducy: It’s really not planned out very much. I guess, technically, we’re a cover band. We put together shows and then after, we ask the venue if they’ll have us. Then we’ll think of a record that we want to play, and I’ll assemble Chicago musicians, and we kind of do all the homework on our own and come together the night before the show, do a quick practice and then do the show.

Mike and I were talking about it earlier. I called it a pop up band, because it’s just a really quickly assembled group of people. And there’s an excitement to that. We’ve been doing this for 10 years, but this is the first time we’re taking it to other cities.MP: Had you guys met before your first gig at the Hideout 10 years ago?

MS: I don’t think so.

JN: We had mutual friends through our friend Ben Byer. I lived with a guy that I went to high school with in the early 1990s. At the time he was playing cards with Mike — which I didn’t know. Wasn’t it you and Tracy Letts?

MS: Yeah. He was a hell of a poker player. I wrote a song about him, actually.

JN: It’s a beautiful song.

MS: And how great he was at poker.

MP: Do you ever want to just do music instead of acting, Michael?

MS: Yeah, music was what I started doing when I was a kid. I started music before I started acting. At a certain point, I was at a fork in the road. Honestly, there’s something about acting — and, trust me, it’s not an easy profession by any stretch of imagination, particularly to have any success at it. But it’s easier I think than music. You audition, you try and get other people to give you an opportunity to spread your proverbial wings, but you don’t have to do all the hard stuff. Someone else writes it and directs it and produces it. You just have to show up, learn your lines and say them.

But with music, I have so much respect for these bands — taking a band like REM, and the journey that they went on as people starting with this tiny little record, “Chronic Town,” which is five songs, and going out on the road, playing every little venue they could find and then to go from that to being what they became. It takes so much work.

When I play these gigs with Jason, they really give me a newfound respect for the music that I’m listening to and enjoying. You don’t know how brilliant it was until you try to actually frickin’ play the damn thing.

MP: Jason, is it different for you to do this work — bringing these iconic albums to life —  and your other other work as a musician?

JN: It is different. Mostly because I think Mike’s chosen 90% of the stuff we’ve done. And it’s often things that I like. I have the utmost respect for Bob Dylan, but I never really put a Bob Dylan record on. So when we learned “Highway 61,” and I’m getting so deep into the songs, it’s like taking a college course or something. I always learn from it.

That’s one of my favorite things about this. Mike and I are so fortunate to be really busy with our other stuff. This is a great way to celebrate music that we love. I’ve learned so much from this, to get together with other great musicians and kind of have these little parties in Chicago where there’s all these great venues and these people who are real curious about the Modern Lovers or Neil Young or whatever artists we are presenting for that particular night. But, yeah, it’s very different, in a good way.

MP: Did you choose “Murmur” because that was the particular album they were touring at the time when the Metro opened, or was there another reason why you chose that particular album?

JN: It was the 40th anniversary. When I presented that idea to Mike, he really wanted to play at Metro, so I called Joe Shanahan over at Metro and he said, it’s our 40th anniversary, too. And I was like, well, there’s some historical gravity to that. And then I said, ‘No, wait a minute, wasn’t REM the first band to play at Metro? I think we need to do this.’ And he agreed. We put the tickets on sale just 30 days before the show, which is extremely late. But it still did well. It was a really special night.

MP: In your interview with Seth Meyers, you said the touring version is going to be shorter. How else will it be different? What did you learn from the first performance that you’re bringing on the tour? What are you letting go?

MS: That’s an interesting question that I’m not sure that I have a fully formed answer, because it hasn’t happened yet. We’re gonna show up when we get together on the 30th or the 31st. We’re gonna practice like we usually do, but instead of going and doing a gig the next day, we’re gonna get on a plane and fly to San Francisco. We do have a different guitar player. We have one personnel change in the lineup. We have a brilliant guitar player joining us — Dag Juhlin, from Poi Dog Pondering.

JN: Dag Juhlin had a band in Chicago called The Slugs when I was 16 years old. I opened for them in 1987. I’ve known him for a long time.

MS: So I’m looking forward to playing with him. When you have a one-off gig, I spend a lot of the evening being somewhat terrified. Jason can attest to this. In the greenroom beforehand, it seems like I’m on death row or something. But I’m looking forward to maybe, I don’t want to say getting comfortable, but maybe being able to relax a little bit.

I’ve never gone on tour, so I’m not sure what to expect. But yeah, the songs merit more than just one go at them. They’re monumental pieces of music. What makes a live performance great, is very mysterious, and kind of left to chance. Things just kind of happen in the moment that you can’t really you can’t plan for so much.

MP: How is it different from acting on stage in a play?

MS: It’s totally different for me. Particularly music like REM — it’s not so narrative driven. It’s not like I’m trying to tell a story or convince people that I’m somebody else, or any of that. It’s just expressing yourself in the moment through this extraordinary music we have the luxury of piggybacking on.

JN: I think Mike’s instinct is right. We’re going to kind of be making it up as we go. We’ll play a show and we’ll go, this is fun. Maybe tonight we do this, just kind of shake things up a little bit.

MP: What was it like when you were performing at the Metro and all of a sudden you see everyone applauding and there’s Mike Mills wanting to come on stage?

MS: It was very moving. It’s just not something you anticipate in your life. When I was walking around when I was a teenager listening to REM, it wasn’t even like a daydream or a fantasy. I’ll be on stage with a member of REM singing one of their songs. The very notion of it was so ridiculous. But there it is happening.

It’s kind of hard to wrap your head around really. But you know, Mike is such a sweet, sweet human being and I was just doing a play here in New York, and he came to see it. I couldn’t believe it, like it was one thing for him to show up at a gig of us playing his music, but for him to just see this weird play I was doing … I think all the members of the band are actually very kind people.

MP: Are you guys gonna do another one after this? What’s the next band? What’s the next album?

MS: I don’t know. I mean, one of my all time favorite bands is Talking Heads. So I’ve been kind of poking around and asking Jason about that. But it might be a minute before we do this again, frankly, after the tour. My union was on strike so now there’s a lot of stuff coming up so I’m not sure how much free time I’m gonna have for a while. But yeah, I would like to do that eventually if Jason was up to do it.

MP: Do you have a favorite song from the “Murmur” album?

MS: That’d be hard to pick one, but probably “Shaking Through.” What about you Jason?

JN: “Moral Kiosk.”

MS: “Moral Kiosk” is fun, yeah.

JN: That one snuck up on me. I was familiar with it, but once I started playing it, I was like, this is so much fun. It’s physically just fun to play. I love the energy on that one.

MP: Do you ever feel like you’re channeling REM?

JN: It’s more like celebrating for me.

MS: Yeah, I concur. There’s a reason that REM is REM. Because there’s only one edition of those four gentlemen. And they made the music they made together. It wouldn’t even make any sense that other people would be able to do that. So, yeah, you just celebrate it, you study it, you try and find all the nuances and details that you can in the music, which I feel like we’re pretty successful at.

Michael Shannon & Jason Narducy and friends play R.E.M.’s “Murmur” at 8 p.m. on Sunday, Feb. 4, at First Avenue ($25). More information here.

Finns first came to Cokato in 1865, looking for available farmland. Three Finnish families — the Barbergs (also known as the Barbas), Selväläs, and Salmonsons — were among the town’s earliest settlers, moving onto their adjoining homesteads by 1868. That year, the families agreed to build a shared savusauna along the property line between the Barberg and Selvälä farms.

Traditionally, sauna occurred at least once a week, often on Saturday nights, throughout the year. The simple savusauna was a wood building with a hearth inside. The hearth was covered with rocks that could be heated to great temperatures. Also inside was a wooden platform for bathers to sit or lie on, near the roof to maximize the savusauna’s heat. Steps and a lower bench were available for those who did not want the maximum temperature. A fire burned in the savusauna’s hearth during the day and then was put out, allowing the smoke in the sauna to dissipate before bathing. The hearth’s heated rocks kept the sauna warm for hours after the fire was put out and provided heat for the bathing that followed.

Sauna users like the Barbergs, Selväläs, and Salmonsons sat in the structure long enough to sweat and then cooled off by going outside or rinsing with cold water or snow, if available. They would repeat the process as needed. Bathers also used whisks made of flexible birch branches to beat and stimulate the skin, which caused cleansing through exfoliation.

Non-Finns in Cokato and elsewhere were unfamiliar with sauna. They did not know what their Finnish neighbors were doing in sauna buildings, which looked to them like strange little huts, and there was great speculation. Adding to the controversy was the standard practice of taking sauna and cooling off naked, often outside in the air if the sauna did not have a separate dressing room, which many early Minnesota savusaunas did not. The Barberg-Selvälä-Salmonson sauna was one of these, so the families cooled themselves in the fresh air, naked. This was fine when their property was remote, but it caused quite a stir as Cokato grew and one of the major town roads was laid out along the Barberg-Selvala property line, right next to the sauna.

In 1885, the controversy over the Barberg-Selvälä-Salmonson sauna went to court. Members of the community accused the Selvälä family, who had bought the Barberg and Salmonson families out of their shares of the sauna by then, of strange religious or other practices related to their sauna use. The Selvalas proved to the court that they were upstanding citizens and good Lutherans, and that they were just using the sauna to get clean; they won thirty dollars in damages for the accusations made against them. However, the Selvalas were ordered by the court to move their sauna to a more private location on their property, away from the road. They were given an additional $40 to do so. Nils Selvala moved the sauna, but used it from then on as a shed, taking the money his family had won in court to build a bigger, nicer sauna elsewhere on their property.

In 1979, the original 1868 savusauna, which had been moved a number of times since the 1880s, was moved one last time to Cokato’s Temperance Corner, named for the social hall that has stood there since 1896. The original savusauna became one of a group of buildings celebrating the Finnish heritage of many in the region, and now, it is cared for by the Cokato Finnish-American Historical Society. In 2008, the savusauna was repaired and fully restored to its original appearance.

For more information on this topic, check out the original entry on MNopedia.

Freshwater at the Minnesota Marine Art Museum 

The Minnesota Marine Art Museum pushes forward with its bold new direction that re-envisions our relationship with water and highlights underrepresented voices. The museum has long been a “hidden gem” in the Midwest for its collection of Marine Art. In recent years, the leadership of the organization has shifted its focus toward contemporary and diverse artists, and is opening four new exhibitions this week that align with that attention.

The first is “Water,” featuring work by New York and Berlin-based photographer Mustafah Abdulaziz. Abdulaziz documents the impact of climate change, investigates water access, and reveals environmental concerns in places as far reaching as Somalia, Brazil, Pakistan, China, and California. 

Another MMAM exhibition, “Across a Wide Ocean: Remarkable Stories about the Origins of Identity” takes two picture books as its source material, including “The 1619 Project: Born on the Water” by Nikole Hannah-Jones and Renée Watson, illustrated by Nikkolas Smith, and The Most Beautiful Thing by Kao Kalia Yang, illustrated by Khoa Le. Finally, MMAM also opens “Reflective Impressions: The American Society of Marine Artists 19th National Exhibition,” featuring work by more than 100 members of the American Society of Marine Artists. 

The First Look Preview party includes drinks, music, a DJ, and an artist talk, and takes place Friday, January 26 from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ($20). The weekend festivities continue on Saturday, Jan. 27 and Sunday, Jan 28 with painting demonstrations, lectures, artist tours, and more. ($10 general admission, additional costs for some activities). More information here. 

The Healing Aqal

Ifrah Mansour has been developing her project “The Healing Aqal,” over a number of years, often in collaboration with Somali community members and community organizations. Now, the interactive project is getting its first formal exhibition. The work speaks to a longing felt by being part of a diasporic culture, as it creates space for nurturing, intimacy, and communion in the form of huts found in Somalia. The exhibition runs Monday, Jan. 29 through Wednesday, Feb. 28, with an artist reception on Thursday, Feb. 1, 6 p.m. at Gorecki Art Gallery, at The College of St. Benedict from 5 p.m. to 7 p.m. (Free). More information here.

Nathanael Flink: Falling into Place 

For his first solo exhibition with Veronique Wantz Gallery, Nathanael Flink explores the art of the fragment in works that utilize formal assemblage of textile pieces. The works evoke emotion and sense through the careful selection of fabrics. Through sewing, dying, appliqué and even paint and marker, Flink evokes the expressions of the human experience, treated with abstraction and subtle sensitivity. Saturday, January 27 from 5 p.m. to 8 p.m. at Veronique Wantz Gallery (free). More information here.

Ariana Kim & Steve Heitzeg: light/see + dark/hear

Add a bit of Hygge to your week with a cozy musical performance in the dark. As part of The Great Northern Festival and co-presented with The Minneapolis Institute of Art, composer Steve Heitzeg and violinist/improvisor Ariana Kim plan an event that intersects music and the senses. Visitors will move through the exhibitions surrounding the Minneapolis Institute of Art’s black box theater, Gallery 370, before entering the performance space. There, you’ll be invited to choose a pillow or cushion with which to curl up while you listen to world premiere music. The score includes seven movements that explore time, space, the night sky, and more, in a commission by Dr. Thomas von Sternberg and Eve Parker. Friday, Jan. 26 through Sunday, Jan. 28 at 10:15 a.m. and 2:15 p.m. ($40). More information here. 

Creative Changemakers series – Book Launch and Exhibit Premier

Photographer John Noltner is on a mission to find the commonality of our society. He’s traveled all around the country, mining stories from all sorts of different communities of people as he asks what peace means to each person. This week, Noltner launches the fourth book in his “A Peace of Mind” series, called “Lessons on the Road to Peace.” An event on Thursday features a pop-up exhibition where you can see some of the images in the book, and hear from Noltner about his ongoing work. Thursday, Jan. 25 from 7 p.m. to 9:30 p.m. at Saint Paul Neighborhood Network (SPNN) (free). More information here.

Víkingur Ólafsson

Back in 2022, Icelandic pianist Víkingur Ólafsson gave a delicious concert at the former event space Aria featuring his bold interpretations of music by Bach and Philip Glass, in addition to a performance of “Mozart & Contemporaries” at the Ordway Concert Hall. Lucky for us, the Schubert Club International Artist Series is bringing him back this weekend for two performances as part of Ólafsson’s international world tour performing “The Goldberg Variations,” by Johann Sebastian Bach. It’s part of The Great Northern Festival. Tuesday, Jan 30 at 3:30 p.m. and Wednesday, January 31 at 10:30 a.m. at the Ordway Concert Hall ($36-$85). More information here. 

“FETAL was a great kind of trial run for us,” says artistic director Wendy Knox. “It was a great play for us to come back with because it was just like a punch in your face. You know, this is fucking important, damn it.” 

The run went so well that Frank is bringing the show back, but first, they’ve got a different play, “Ironbound,” by Martyna Majok, running at Gremlin Theater. It opened last weekend. Both plays fall in line with the work Frank tends to produce: gritty, meaty scripts that intersect with social and political issues. 

Knox has been at it for 35 years, producing the first Frank Theatre play, Franz X. Kroetz’s “Farmyard” at the Lil’ Pony Theatre in Saint Paul, in 1989. That same year, Knox directed “Mud,” by María Irine Fornés, with At the Foot of the Mountain, a significant feminist theater that would close two years later. 

Knox tells me in the early years of Frank, people would ask her if the new theater would take the place of ATFOM as a feminist company. While Knox says she considers herself a feminist personally, she was hesitant to use the term as a defining element of the organization. “We consciously made a decision when we did our mission statement to not put something in there about feminism because at that point, we just didn’t want it to be marginalized,” she says. 

Still, Frank often produces work by female playwrights, and that engages with feminist issues. 

Knox came upon “Ironbound,” when she was searching for new material for the season. Majok’s play, “The Cost of Living,” about the relationships between disabled and abled characters, won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 2018. Majok also wrote “Sanctuary City,” a play about two best friends who are immigrants, who marry so that the undocumented friend can become a citizen through his naturalized friend. 

With “Ironbound,” Majok draws on her own mother’s experiences in a play about a Polish immigrant woman struggling to survive. Jumping back and forth through time, it depicts Darja’s tenacity, her shortcomings, and also her capacity to care. 

Much of the action takes place in front of bus stops— a symbol in the world of a play for the underclass and its lack of access to the ultimate American possession: a car. In Frank’s production, Joseph Stanley’s set makes the bus stop a dilapidated, trash-ridden corner. 

Darja, played by Brittany D. Parker, works a series of low-wage jobs, first at a factory that eventually closes, and then as a house cleaner. Her first husband, played by Benjamin Dutcher, leaves her and her child for a music career, her second husband (unseen in the play) abuses her, and then she finds a boyfriend, played by Carl Schoenborn, who is serially unfaithful.

Majok paints a grim picture of America and of capitalism, where hard work doesn’t equal prosperity or even the ability to live. In Parker’s portrayal, Darja faces her lot with both resignation and practicality, and often engages with her relationships transactionally. That’s in part because she has to. She does what she must to survive, and to care for her son— another unseen character who we understand to have his own battles with mental illness and addiction. 

Besides Parker, Schoenborn gets the most stage time. He gives Tommy a vulnerability to the point where you almost forgive him for being such a doofus. 

Meanwhile, Dutcher’s Maks is sweet, even if he fails Darja, too. An experienced performer in opera and musical theater, “Ironbound” is Dutcher’s first non-musical drama. Knox says at the audition she was hesitant to cast him at first given his lack of experience doing this kind of theater. She changed her mind at callbacks, though. 

“In the callbacks, he had to do this thing where it refers to him singing a Polish blues song and playing the harmonica,” she says. “Ben came in, he had researched the song, and sang it in Polish.” 

He got the part. 

As the lead, Brittany D. Parker also brings experience different than scripted plays. Much of Parker’s career has been in theater improvisation, comedy and film. Parker adds lightness, even a fight, to the character, and is able to tap into the often tamped down emotion as well. 

In total, three of the four cast members of the show have never done a show with Frank (Schoenborn has worked with the company previously.) Knox says that’s in part because the acting pool has changed in the Twin Cities. “People got tired,” she says. “They pivoted and got a new job.” 

Frank has also lost longtime collaborators to death, adding an element of grief to the work of carrying the work forward. Meanwhile, union rules have changed, audiences have changed, and altogether, the landscape for theater is still evolving, Knox says. 

But she’s not ready to be done any time soon. At 67, “I’m still game,” she says.

You can catch “Ironbound” through February 11 at the Gremlin Theatre in Saint Paul ($30). Meanwhile, “Fetal” returns to Frank Theatre’s rehearsal space in the Ivy Arts Building  February 22- March 10. More information here. 

The first published, though uncredited, account of Paul Bunyan appeared in a Duluth News Tribune article from 1904 that told the story of “the decline of the great American Lumber Jack.” This article references a “series of imaginative tales about the year Paul Bunyan lumbered in North Dakota,” during the year of the “blue snow.”

Then, in 1914, William B. Laughead popularized Paul Bunyan through a promotional pamphlet for the Red River Lumber Company. This pamphlet was reproduced as a second edition in 1916 and as a third edition in 1922, expanding Bunyan’s reach. This first pictorial representation of the Bunyan character, as a corporate mascot of sorts, promoted the company’s move from the Northwoods of Minnesota to Westwood, California.

Only a decade later, in 1925, James Stevens published his best-selling collection of Paul Bunyan tales. The book detailed how Bunyan had rescued a giant blue ox calf (Babe) from a frozen bay and adopted it as a companion. Babe, Bunyan, and a lumberjack crew then traveled around the U.S., felling trees across an “empty” landscape. Another volume described them creating the Great Lakes (Babe’s footprints), the Mississippi River (water from Bunyan’s tank), and the Red River (tinted by their spilled ketchup). These myths imagined that Minnesota’s waterways were new, and created by immigrants. They displaced Native creation stories, which said that Gichi Manitou (Ojibwe) and Wakaŋ Taŋka (Dakota) had made the rivers and lakes.

By the late 1900s, Paul Bunyan’s legendary figure was marked on the landscape of Minnesota: the 115-mile long Paul Bunyan Trail; the Paul Bunyan State Forest in Hubbard and Cass Counties; Paul Bunyan Land in Brainerd and Paul Bunyan Mall in Bemidji. Roadside stands, statues, murals and eateries used his image. As his myth spread, however, it overshadowed the ongoing cost of logging to Minnesota’s people and environment.

Paul Bunyan is credited with logging the “Northwoods,” a vast geography that spans the international border with Canada from New England to the Great Lakes, and west to the Pacific coast. In Minnesota, it was the state’s vast stands of white pine that drew loggers near, far, and fictional. The state’s first sawmill, the Marine Lumber Company, opened on the St. Croix River in 1839, and it was not long before logging made its way north. The “golden days” of logging began.

The loggers who came to northern Minnesota in the mid-1800s found not the empty forests of Bunyan myths but a network of established Ojibwe communities. Lumber companies were able to build their camps only after a series of treaties (1837, 1854, and 1855) transferred prime pinelands away from Ojibwe nations and into the hands of the federal government. Bunyan stories also leave out the destruction that followed. The state’s vast pine forests were depleted by 1930, and lumber companies moved out of the state. Clearcutting left woodlands vulnerable to uncontrolled burning, leading to disasters like the Cloquet Fire of 1918. And dams created by loggers destroyed so many wild rice beds in north-central Minnesota that the Bois Forte Ojibwe had to abandon their homes.

The Native people who shaped the state’s logging history — as workers, residents, and land stewards — are missing from Bunyan lore. While Bunyan’s fictional crew is European American, Native men also labored in logging camps. Logging was exhausting and dangerous work. Yet it allowed many Native workers to enter the wage economy and remain close to their homelands. Other Native people, meanwhile, created Paul Bunyan tales of their own. By the late 1900s, Ojibwe storytellers explained the preservation of forests at Red Lake by saying that Bunyan had lost a fight with Nanabozho, the mythical Ojibwe trickster hero who predated him.

For more information on this topic, check out the original entry on MNopedia.

There is an interior density to his sound and style that confers he is a dynamo, but what he can withhold serves as a vital complement to what he unfurls. Even in the midst of his most effusive bursts or serpentine passages, nothing seems ornate.

The 52-year-old son of Indian Tamil immigrants to the United States, Iyer has amassed a resume that is ridiculously impressive. Ivy League degrees in mathematics and physics, a masters in physics from the University of California, Berkeley, then a Ph.D. program he assembled himself at Berkeley on technology and the arts, focusing on music cognition.

Then the music recordings.

Iyer’s initial albums blended jazz and some of his classical training with his Indian musical heritage. As he evolved, his renown as a composer has prompted commissions from classical ensembles and multidisciplinary projects in film, dance and spoken word. But the jazz realm of twining composition and improvisation is rightfully his most celebrated métier.

Between 2012 and 2018, he was voted Jazz Artist of the Year four times in the Downbeat magazine international critics’ polls. He was awarded a MacArthur Fellow “genius grant” in 2013 and a year later received a lifetime appointment to teach at Harvard in the departments of Music and African American Studies.

I have seen Iyer perform many times, most frequently at the Walker Art Center, but was especially dazzled by his show at the Detroit Jazz Festival over Labor Day weekend in 2022. The nearly hour-long set was a continuous swirl or recognizable songs and daring spontaneous interplay, melting the distinctions both within and between set compositions. The trio format has generally fostered his most memorable performances and recordings, and his launching pad at the festival were compositions from the album “Uneasy,” recorded in 2019 with bassist Linda May Oh and drummer Tyshawn Sorey (replaced by Jeremy Dutton in Detroit) and released after a COVID-related delay in April 2021.

Iyer was scheduled to play in Minneapolis at the Dakota just a couple of months later, in November 2022, again in a trio with Dutton but with Matt Brewer replacing Oh on the contrabass. In a late October phone interview prepping for a feature preview of that show he replied to my raves about the Detroit gig with an acknowledgment of his growth.

“I think over the years the trio consciousness has evolved into this very dynamic dance where I don’t plan the sets; we just have the repertoire and manage these portals from one thing to the next,” said Iyer. “I don’t even have to be looking at anybody, just listening as carefully as I can and tracking the energy. That determines the decisions we make about when and where we should go.”

Not long after we’d talked, Iyer contracted COVID, forcing the postponement of the Dakota show for more than a year – until tonight. In the interim, Iyer came to the Walker with a very different trio – with vocalist Arooj Aftab and Shahzad Ismaily on bass and various electronics. As with their recently released album, “Love in Exile,” their Walker show was an ethereal, experimental excursion into live composition.

More to the point, Iyer is set to release his second trio album with Oh and Sorey on Feb. 2. Entitled, “Compassion,” its dozen compositions – including nine Iyer originals – will certainly be among the swirling repertoire Iyer will invoke alongside Dutton on drums and another longtime Iyer cohort, Harish Raghavan, on bass.

“Compassion” has a spiritual hue, cast by its frequent homages to those now deceased, who inspire compassion. A cover version of Stevie Wonder’s ballad “Overjoyed,” arose out of Iyer being loaned a piano that once belonged to the late Chick Corea, who played the song on the same instrument during his final livestream before succumbing to cancer. Iyer calls his version, “a celebratory variation, as if refracted by the piano’s aura.”

Elsewhere, “Arch” is dedicated to the South African archbishop and anti-apartheid leader Desmond Tutu, who passed in December 2021. Three other Iyer songs are taken from “Tempest,” written for a project dedicated to victims of the pandemic that premiered in Brooklyn in 2021. “Prelude: Orison” takes its theme from the Iyer composition, “For My Father,” dedicated to his dad, who he describes as “the most compassionate man I have ever known.” The song, “It Goes,” originally was set to verses that imagined Emmett Till still among us at age 82 rather than the victim of a racist murder in Mississippi at age 14.

During another phone call with Iyer last week, I mentioned how frequently death shadows the new album’s inspiration.

“Yeah,” he replied, and paused. “Maybe the threshold of the living and the dead is somehow closer to us and a conversation across that threshold is made a little more explicitly. Certainly over the last four years the proximity of death has become more evident and operative in our lives.

“Also, this music we call ‘jazz’ has always had a reverence for what is called ‘The Tradition.’ It is a shared language, an inheritance, I guess. In the creative act of covering a song by somebody, you are thinking of them in a way that transcends life, that is more immortal, you know?”

Later on in the conversation, Iyer spoke about the final track on “Compassion,” a cover of the John Stubblefield composition, “Free Spirits,” which inspired Iyer via the cover version by the late pianist Mary Lou Williams. At the end of “Free Spirits,” the trio suddenly shifts into a refrain from “Drummer’s Songs,” by another deceased female pianist and Iyer mentor, Geri Allen. The trio had already covered “Drummer’s Songs” on the “Uneasy” album.

“The last track is an example of how it occasionally felt like something else was taking over,” during the recording process, Iyer said. “It’s this homage to Mary Lou Williams through the Stubblefield piece, and then that fragment of Geri’s piece; the way we ended up engaging it was a ritual space – empty and yet full. You know – and I almost kept this on the record – when we were finished, Tyshawn (yelled) ‘Hell yes!’ It was a feeling we all had, to inhabit a space that was inherited and allow ourselves the freedom to move in it.”

The first time I ever spoke with Iyer, back in 2012, before he performed two full nights of music at the Walker with six different musical configurations, he spoke about wanting to create an “arc of experience” during the course of a live performance. More than a decade later, he repeated the same desire with slightly different phrases, but the realization of that goal has crystallized and become much more apparent.

“When you have a continuous arc, it has more of a cinematic sprawl to it and people can engage it whenever and however they want. I think music sounds best when it is in motion, when we are alive to it without habits,” Iyer said. In that respect, “the repertoire becomes an occasion for this process, which is about discovery and connection”

Iyer noted other elements that likewise might tweak the way the music is presented at the Dakota. He has recently begun working on a project involving the rugged music of the late pianist Andrew Hill, who he says, “is up there with (Thelonious) Monk as a direct impact on me as a player, as a composer and just my whole outlook on music. So it is possible we might bring in one or two of his pieces.”

There are also geographical connections. “I grew up with Prince; he is one of my all-time heroes so any time I go to Minneapolis I think of that. Also of close collaborators (pianist) Craig Taborn and (percussionist) Douglas Ewart. So this is more than a ‘drop by” gig.

In the intimate confines of the Dakota, no less. Buttressed by a rhythm section that has been groomed via experience to be both intuitive and telepathic, Iyer will be coiled, spring-loaded for the arc of experience.

Vijay Iyer Trio feat. Harish Raghavan & Jeremy Dutton, Friday, Jan. 19 7 p.m. Tickets are $30-$40. More information here.