“This stage is for you. You don’t have to be an artist to share a story.”
This is Ty Cooper’s message to anyone attending his One Mic Stand shows, a live series staged for more than 10 years at Piedmont Virginia Community College. “We just wanted to provide a platform for artists to express themselves and do what they do,” says the veteran promoter, comedian, writer, and filmmaker.
Having found success with the United Nations of Comedy tour in the early 2000s, Cooper was considering a new project. He noticed there were occasional open mic nights in the Charlottesville area, but they weren’t happening on a regularly scheduled basis.
“We didn’t want to oversaturate the market, but we did want to do something,” Cooper says. “So, we started doing two shows per semester.”
One Mic Stand is free and open to the public: You don’t have to be a PVCC student or faculty member to attend or to participate. There’s no time limit on sets. Cooper says participants are typically able “to read the room and respect the time” to determine when to wrap it up. Usually, people perform for about five minutes.
The showcase attracts musicians, storytellers, poets, and sometimes comedians. “That’s a special treat,” says the founder. “I lean toward comedy. I’m a comedy writer, I teach comedy-writing workshops, and I’ve been promoting comedy shows for years.”
Cooper couldn’t attend the February show—he was attending a conference in Florida—but he would be pleased to know there were plenty of jokes.
Guest host Brad Stoller, PVCC associate professor of theater arts, reminisced about his time working as a waiter in a French restaurant. He confessed he did not know the language and tried to compensate by memorizing the menu items. The tactic worked—at least until patrons tried to strike up conversations with him in French.
PVCC student Alex Laheb did an edgy set about questionable proposed recipe changes at Panera Bread. A stand-up routine from David Heins of Charlottesville reflected on his accident-prone childhood and adolescence (“I might have been the original Burning Man”).
Inside humor for theater people? Stoller had that covered. “How many actors does it take to change a lightbulb?” he asked. “One hundred. One to climb up the ladder and change the bulb, and 99 to stand around, saying, ‘That should be me up there!’”
Even audience members got into the act, supplying some intentionally cheesy humor: “How do you wake up Lady Gaga from a nap? Poke her face.”
Beyond the laughs, One Mic Stand veteran Serell Blakey from Ruckersville brought intensity and gravitas to his dramatic readings of two poems, “A Colored Stock” and “Letter from a Runaway.” Similarly, Stoller gave an emotionally charged recitation of Jane Hirshfield’s “For What Binds Us.”
There was music, a loose and lively sampling of songs from Colombia, Argentina, Puerto Rico and other countries, provided by guitarist/singer Argenis Torres, who was born in Venezuela. By the time he visited Cuba (“Guantanamera”) and Mexico (“La Bamba”), Torres had the audience singing and clapping along.
“On Earth, we are all immigrants,” Torres told the audience. “The only passport should be love.” Following through on that theme, he wrapped up his set with a completely out-of-left-field surprise: Announcing he would sing in English in public for the first time, he closed with the very American “Summer Nights” from Grease.
According to Cooper, One Mic Stand becomes poignant at times, when artists perform material drawn from first-hand experience.
“These people come up with stories about their lives, and sometimes it gets really, really deep, you know?” he says. “Sometimes people become really vulnerable and they leave that on the stage. When it’s something from deep within and they’re willing to share it, that’s always a special moment. That means that we provide a safe space for them to do that. … I get real joy out of it, every time that happens.”
Registration opens one hour before showtime, and the format is flexible. Cooper says even attendees who don’t plan to step into the spotlight at the beginning of the evening sometimes end up sharing their insights or their work.
“I know people who come into this space, this small black-box space, and they’ve got something,” he says, with a grin. So, he tells them, “‘Hey, no pressure, but this is a safe space if you have something—I know you weren’t planning on being on the stage.’ Quite often, it works. I gotta pull, but when the pulling is successful, they get up there, man, and they bring that.”
The next One Mic Stand is scheduled for April 10 in the Maxwell Black Box Theater. A word of advice: Show up early if you want a seat in the audience! Photo: Tristan Williams.
