Seattle Symphony Performs Work by Mary D. Watkins
In Free Online Concert This Saturday
Dear Friends,
WomenArts is thrilled to announce that the Seattle Symphony will be performing Mary D. Watkins' orchestral piece, Soul of Remembrance, as part of their Opening Night Reimagined on Saturday, September 19 at 7:30 p.m. PDT (10:30 p.m. EDT).
You can watch the concert online for free through the symphony's brand-new streaming service, Seattle Symphony Live. Soul of Remembrance is the second movement of Watkins' orchestral suite, Five Movements in Color, whichyou can hear onthe CD, Recorded Music of the African Diaspora or on YouTube.
Mary D. Watkins' Description of "Soul of Remembrance"
"Five Movements in Color is about the African-American experience. The first movement is about the Africans being captured, brought to America, and forced into slavery. The second movement, Soul of Remembrance, is the collective moan of a profound grief felt by the newly-arrived Africans, who found themselves in a strange land, dealing with the loss of the only life they had known and leaving behind the comforts of family and friends."
"A melody floats over a march in Soul of Remembrance. I saw my own people in their long march to express themselves as fully human. In spite of the trauma of enslavement, dehumanization, degradation, and oppression, they carried the ancestral wisdom and spiritual knowledge deep within their souls. Soul of Remembrance is my tribute to the way my ancestors found calm in the eye of the storm and held onto hope by remembering that deep knowledge of the soul."
Watch the free online concert on Saturday, September 19 at 7:30 p.m. PDT (10:30 p.m. EDT) on Seattle Symphony Live.
To learn more about Mary D. Watkins' work and to purchase copies of her sheet music, please visit her website and sign up for her monthly newsletters.
How to Fight Sexism and Racism By Providing Long-term Administrative Support to Artists
WomenArts has been working with Mary D. Watkins since 2011 when we selected her opera, Dark River: The Fannie Lou Hamer Story as one of the models for our two-year Harmony Project, which we did in collaboration with Arlene Goldbard and with support from the Nathan Cummings Foundation.
Since then we have produced Dark River twice - once at Mount Holyoke College in 2014 (conducted by Tianhui Ng) and again at Agnes Scott College in 2016 (conducted by Qiao Chen Solomon). This summer WomenArts co-sponsored two online Dark River Singalongs (organized and conducted by Tianhui Ng) featuring seven excerpts from Dark River accompanied by discussions of the life and times of Fannie Lou Hamer and an interview with Mary Watkins.
WomenArts believes that this kind of steady, long-term administrative commitment is one of the many things needed to help artists break through the systemic racism and sexism in the arts. The work is not glamorous - it involves the time-consuming and sometimes tedious nitty-gritty of writing grant proposals, maintaining mailing lists, composing newsletters, contacting potential donors, and bookkeeping. But WomenArts has been proud to do this work for Mary D. Watkins and many other women artists over the past 25 years.
WomenArts started by providing free grant-writing and other management services to four women-led companies in Western Massachusetts (where we were originally based) - Andrea Hairston’s Chrysalis Theatre, Priscilla Kane Hellweg’s Enchanted Circle Theater, Sheryl Stoodley’s Serious Play, and Sleeveless Theatre, which was a collective of Lisa Channer, Maureen Futtner, K.D. Halpin, and Kate Nugent.
We maintained our commitment to those companies for our first ten years and gradually added other artists and programs such as our "Theatre Roster Program", where we provided three years of intensive grant-writing and other services to five women theatre artists. The goal of the Theatre Roster program was to get a staged production of a work by each of the five artists by the end of the three years, and we succeeded in that goal.
We know that there are so many women artists, especially women and non-binary artists of color and artists with disabilities, who need this kind of consistent administrative help. If you enjoy administrative work, we encourage you to approach your favorite woman or non-binary artist and offer to help. Many artists will welcome help with simple tasks like building their email lists or social media presence. Bookkeeping, budgeting, and fundraising are other areas where artists often need help.
We encourage you to commit to helping the artist for at least two years. First of all, it will give you time to develop the trust which is essential for the most productive collaborations. Also, the work will get easier the second time around, and you will discover that you and the artist can both think differently about the potential for her work if you talk about long-term as well as short-term goals.
Check out the Word for Word Podcasts for Great Storytelling!
If you like good radio plays, WomenArts highly recommends the new podcast series by Word for Word Performing Arts Company. The company is doing a reading of E.M. Forster's science fiction short story, The Machine Stops, in three hour-long segments. Written in 1909, this is a dystopian look at the future, where everyone lives underground, is controlled by “The Machine,” and communicates with each other over vast distances through glowing blue plates.
Word for Word Performing Arts Company has been delighting audiences in the San Francisco Bay Area since 1993 with their lively renditions of classic and contemporary fiction. Founded by Susan Harloe and JoAnne Winter, the company does dramatic readings of short stories with ensembles of actors playing the narrators and all the characters.
E.M. Forster's story is eerily prophetic since the story shows a world where in-person interactions are rare and people live in isolated underground rooms full of buttons which they can push to satisfy any need. It really feels like he foresaw our current life in lockdown.
Looking for Theatre or Film Opportunities or Grants? Free Monthly #StageOpps and #ScreenOpps Newsletters Can Help!
Women in the Arts and Media Coalition in collaboration with WomenArts is publishing free newsletters for theatre and film/video artists listing submission opportunities, grants, auditions, residencies and more. You can follow #StageOpps and #ScreenOpps on Twitter or see the latest issues by visiting the Coalition's website.
Donate online or snail mail your gift to WomenArts, 1442A Walnut Street, Suite 67, Berkeley, CA 94709. Please contact us if you need instructions for gifts of stock.
