Key players: When relaunching the Charlottesville Players Guild at the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center, Executive Director Andrea Douglas told C-VILLE: “If you’re going to announce yourself as an institution that addresses the 20th-century African American experience in the most interdisciplinary way, there is no other artist that does it as completely and thoroughly as August Wilson does.” Set in the 1930s, The Piano Lesson is part of Wilson’s Pittsburgh Cycle, and his second play to win a Pulitzer Prize. Directed by David Vaughn Straughn and produced by Edwina Herring, it centers around a piano that’s entangled in a family’s history of slavery. As relatives quarrel over whether to keep the piano, they reflect on their own cultural heritage, and are challenged to embrace where they’ve come from in order to truly move forward.
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Landscape photographer Karen Duncan Pape turns her lens to the page in “De-Circulated,” an exhibition of reconstructed covers of banned books on display at McGuffey Art Center through January 28. “Growing up in Southwest Virginia, books were extremely important to me, as they exposed me to other worlds and broadened my perspective,” says Pape. “I […]
Black Fiddlers
Take a deep dive into the culture and legacy of African American violinists in director Eduardo Montes-Bradley’s Black Fiddlers. The 60-minute documentary shares the stories and sounds of Black men and women throughout American history, like the late old-time fiddler Joe Thompson (pictured) and 18th-century Richmond virtuoso Sy Gilliat, an enslaved man whose opera melodies […]
Maura Shawn Scanlin
Boston-based fiddler Maura Shawn Scanlin is putting her own inventive twist on traditional Celtic tunes. An award-winning musician, Scanlin incorporates classical chamber music and traditional sounds from the American South, along with Irish and Scottish fiddle playing into her fluid compositions. Scanlin is touring her new self-titled record with Conor Hearn on guitar, Adam Hendey […]
