Meet New Jersey’s Arts Leaders: A Conversation with Samuel Pott, Founding Artistic Director, Nimbus Dance
Through his company Nimbus Dance, Samuel Pott choreographs new work, such as the recent premiere of “Falling Sky” at NJPAC, and provides dance education to 4,000 students in Jersey City. As the founder and artistic director of Nimbus, Pott has also choreographed a bold new move: the creation of a permanent home for the company at The Lively in Jersey City’s Powerhouse Arts District. Located on the ground floors of a new luxury apartment complex, the Nimbus Arts Center at The Lively includes studio and rehearsal space, a 150-seat theater, and administrative offices. The center will also house new partnerships focusing on arts education and the visual arts with St. Peter’s University and Pro Arts Jersey City.
published on 04/13/2020
PODCAST: Songwriters by the Sea
Songwriters by the Sea started in Asbury Park at a coffee shop in 2008, with a tip jar passed around. Since then, it’s grown to a ticketed event, but with an informal vibe. Top name performers play alongside local favorites. It was founded by singer/songwriters Joe D’Urso and Joe Rapolla. Rapolla is also a former music industry executive, and the chair of Monmouth University’s Music & Theatre Arts Department.
published on 03/26/2020
PODCAST: Sara Holdren's "Twelfth Night" at Two River Theater
It’s been called the perfect romantic comedy. Shakespeare’s “Twelfth Night" begins with sister-brother twins losing each other in a shipwreck, leading to a high-spirited tale of gender-bending and mixed-up love affairs.
published on 01/17/2020
"Dreaming of Utopia: Roosevelt, NJ" at Morven Museum & Garden
In the 1930s, America was in the midst of the Great Depression, but those dark days spurred a period of reinvention and reinvigoration. President Roosevelt’s New Deal created programs that reached out to workers and new immigrants. Artists were employed to document America and its people, and to ornament the new bridges, parks and buildings that were being constructed.
published on 12/18/2019
A Play for Our Times at Luna Stage
Hannah Arendt is a philosopher for our times, and the unlikely title character in a new play “Mrs. Stern Wanders the Prussian State Library.” Jenny Lyn Bader
published on 11/07/2019
"Gloria: A Life" Headlines Emily Mann's Last Season at the McCarter
In this special edition of the Jersey Arts Podcast, producer Susan Wallner talks with Mann about her career, her future projects, and her final season, which begins with her play “Gloria: A Life” starring Mary McDonnell (“Dances with Wolves,” “Battlestar Galactica”).
published on 09/05/2019
Songwriter Rose Marie McCoy featured in "40s to 60s, A Musical Journey" at Puffin Cultural Forum
During the era of Jim Crow, black singers were played on black radio stations, and white singers on white ones. Famously, Elvis Presley adopted the bluesy style and songs of black performers, shocking white audiences. Rose Marie McCoy wanted to be a singer, but became one of the best songwriters of the time, working on both sides of the color barrier with hits by Ike and Tina Turner, Elvis Presley, James Taylor, and Sarah Vaughn, among others.
published on 07/24/2019
Arts Luminaries at Workshop on African American History
Connecting with history through the arts can be a powerful experience. In the late 1970s, the dramatic miniseries “Roots” brought the legacy of the slave trade home to a record number of Americans. In 2018, the Princeton & Slavery Project went beyond academics by commissioning short plays and original artwork to address the roles played by slaves and slave owners in the university’s early history.
published on 05/30/2019
"The Shared Meal" at Artworks
In the age of Instagram, food is a visual obsession. “The Shared Meal,” an exhibition at Artworks in Trenton, dives deeper, exploring the meaning of food through the work of nine visual artists. Two paintings by renowned Trenton painter Mel Leipzig are included. The first pictures his family around the kitchen table in 1975, the second, his daughter’s family around her own kitchen table over 30 years later.
published on 05/19/2019
Toshiko Takaezu’s Legacy featured in “Collective Identity” Exhibition
“You know, there is always such as thing as timing. And if you let yourself, allow yourself to work on timing, you really get it.” Toshiko Takaezu, the great ceramic artist who lived and worked in New Jersey for most of her life, was full of wise observations such as this. It was one of the reasons why so many people were deeply drawn to and influenced by her. I count myself among them. A documentary about her was my first big project as a producer
published on 04/30/2019
Sound Garden: Installations by John Morton and Jacqueline Shatz At The Morris Museum
Composer John Morton has created interactive installations using sound in Central Park, Governors Island and now the Morris Museum, where two of his pieces can be “played” through February 24. “Fever Songs” uses audio gathered from different religious traditions, and “The Voyage Out” is a collaboration with figurative artist Jacqueline Shatz.
published on 01/25/2019
PODCAST: Grammy Winner Terri Lyne Carrington At TD James Moody Jazz Festival
Drummer, leader, and composer Terri Lyne Carrington made history as the first woman to win a Grammy for Best Instrumental Jazz for her album “Money Jungle: Provocative in Blue.” Now, she brings her interpretation of Duke Ellington’s “Money Jungle” to the TD James Moody Jazz Festival at NJPAC on November 11, 2018, as part of a program called “Jazz Vinyl Revisited.” Producer Susan Wallner talks to Carrington about her connections to the jazz greats Clark Terry and Max Roach; her newest project, the Berklee Institute of Jazz and Gender Justice; and why she thinks drummers make natural leaders.
published on 11/09/2018
PODCAST: Maria Mazziotti Gillan At The Dodge Poetry Festival
(NEWARK, NJ) -- The Dodge Poetry Festival is the largest poetry event in North America. Paterson-based poet Maria Mazziotti Gillan will be reading on Thursday and Friday of the four-day festival taking place October 18-21 in Newark. Maria is the force behind the Poetry Center at Passaic County Community College, and the author of more than 20 books of and about poetry. Her poems are about her life, including her strong memories of childhood in Paterson’s Italian immigrant community. She likes to talk about the “cave,” that place of memories and feelings inside us all that the best poetry takes us back to. Producer Susan Wallner spoke to Maria Mazziotti Gillan at her home in Hawthorne, a suburb of Paterson.
published on 10/17/2018
Kevin Sampson: Solo Exhibitions In New Jersey and Beyond
“I’m a Civil Rights baby. I grew up laying across picket lines and blocking traffic.”
Artist Kevin Sampson’s father, Stephen, was a well-known Civil Rights leader in New Jersey, and he instilled a commitment to community that his son still honors.
published on 10/10/2018
Good Friends Bring "Turning Off The Morning News" To The Stage
Mark Twain once observed, “The secret source of humor itself is not joy but sorrow.”
One of America’s funniest playwrights, Christopher Durang, is proof. His plays are absurd, comical, and, almost always, very dark.
published on 05/23/2018
PODCAST: "Caged" at Passage Theatre
“Caged” is a play based on the experiences of incarcerated men in New Jersey. It’s written by the New Jersey Prison Cooperative, a group of men who met in a drama class in prison taught by Chris Hedges, an author and Princeton University professor. Hedges had heard a story about a man being jailed that had affected him, and he offered it to the class as a starting point. From that beginning, the men created “Caged,” a transformative play based on their own, similar experiences of incarceration.
published on 05/03/2018
The Legacy of Hope: Carolyn Dorfman Dance at Monmouth University
“I didn’t intend to make work about my Jewish legacy. It just kind of percolated,” says Carolyn Dorfman, choreographer and artistic director of Carolyn Dorfman Dance. Now in its 35th season, Carolyn Dorfman Dance explores a wide range of subjects, including the changing nature of love, the power of the natural world, even the meaning and attraction of tattoos.
published on 02/21/2018
Sharyn Rothstein's "A Good Farmer" Raises Emotional Issues
Two women are talking, a small farmer and one of her employees. They’re also friends. Immigration officers have just raided a nearby farm, and they’re scared. Sharyn Rothstein’s play “A Good Farmer” is set in a small town in upstate New York. It’s a study in friendship, paranoia and competing loyalties that’s looking for the human experience behind the kind of big issues that fill our daily news feed.
published on 02/01/2018
PODCAST: Express Newark
Producer Susan Wallner spoke to the co-directors of Express Newark, Anne Schaper Englot and Victor Davson. They call it a “third space” – where public scholarship and community engagement are opening up an exciting new chapter in Newark’s cultural history.
published on 11/30/2017
"Sea Of Vulnerability" - An Exhibition By Scientist-Artist Brandon Ballengee At Rowan University Art Gallery
“I’m a frog guy working in a fish lab.”
That’s the truth, but a bit of an understatement, when describing Brandon Ballengée. He’s a scientist – a post-doc fellow at Louisiana State University conducting research on fish and their survival in the aftermath of the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. He’s also an internationally acclaimed artist who’s been featured in The New York Times, the New Yorker, ARTnews, and is represented by Ronald Feldman Fine Arts.
published on 09/22/2017
Fairies Transform Trash In "A Midsummer Night's Dream"
When the days are longest, the world can magically transform. In a new production of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” the fairies Moth, Cobweb, Mustardseed, Peaseblossom, Puck, Oberon and Titania transform items most of us casually throw away. Old keys, straws, plastic membership and transit cards, wine corks and CDs, all combine in costumes and sets that evoke a magical world. Director and designer Bonnie Monte – a self-proclaimed collector and recycler – describes her vision of “Midsummer” to producer Susan Wallner. The Shakespeare Theatre of New Jerseyperforms “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” at their outdoor stage at the College of St. Elizabeth in Morris Township through July 30th.
published on 07/07/2017
PODCAST: A Tribute to Louis Armstrong at January Thaw Music Fest
Hot music for a cold month – that’s the idea behind Centenary Stage‘s January Thaw Music Fest in Hackettstown, NJ. Producer Susan Wallner talks with Eddie Allen, leader of 3hree for Louis, a six-piece ensemble playing the music of the great Louis Armstrong.
published on 01/16/2017
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