Open mike storytelling competition sponsored by The Moth, the NYC-based nonprofit that also produces a weekly public radio show. Ten storytellers are selected at random to tell a 3-5 minute story–this month’s themes are “Delusions” (Feb. 5) & “Flight” (Feb 19)–judged by a 3-person team recruited from the audience. Monthly winners compete in a semiannual Grand Slam. Seating limited, so arrive early.
7:30-9 p.m. (doors open and sign-up begins at 6 p.m.), Greyline, 100 N. Ashley. General admission tickets $10 in advance only at themoth.org beginning a week before each event. 764-5118.
Literati is excited to host this special panel discussion with contributors from the new book Elemental: A Collection of Creative Nonfiction
About Elemental: A Collection of Creative Nonfiction:
Elemental: A Collection of Michigan Creative Nonfiction comes to us from twenty-three of Michigan’s most well-known essayists. A celebration of the elements, this collection is both the storm and the shelter. In her introduction, editor Anne-Marie Oomen recalls the “ritual dousing” of her storytelling group’s bonfire: “wind, earth, fire, water-all of it simultaneous in that one gesture. . . . In that moment we are bound together with these elements and with this place, the circle around the fire on the shores of a Great Lake closes, complete.”
The essays approach Michigan at the atomic level. This is a place where weather patterns and ecology matter. Farmers, miners, shippers, and loggers have built (or lost) their livelihood on Michigan’s nature-what could and could not be made out of our elements. From freshwater lakes that have shaped the ground beneath our feet to the industrial ebb and flow of iron ore and wind power-ours is a state of survival and transformation. In the first section of the book, “Earth,” Jerry Dennis remembers working construction in northern Michigan. “Water” includes a piece from Jessica Mesman, who writes of the appearance of snow in different iterations throughout her life. The section “Wind” houses essays about the ungraspable nature of death from Toi Dericotte and Keith Taylor. “Fire” includes a piece by Mardi Jo Link, who recollects the unfortunate series of circumstances surrounding one of her family members.
Elemental‘s strength lies in its ability to learn from the past in the hope of defining a wiser future. A lot of literature can make this claim, but not all of it comes together so organically. Fans of nonfiction that reads as beautifully as fiction will love this collection.
Anne-Marie Oomen is author of Love, Sex, and 4-H, House of Fields, Pulling Down the Barn, and Uncoded Woman, among others. She teaches at Solstice MFA at Pine Manor College, Interlochen’s College of Creative Arts, and at conferences throughout the country.
Feb. 14, 16, 22, & 23 (different programs). U-M students and faculty perform staged readings of works by this acclaimed English playwright in honor of her 80th birthday. Today: The 2006 play Drunk Enough to Say I Love You?, an allegory about U.S. foreign policy and international relations told through the story of a relationship between 2 men. Here We Go (2015) is a 3-part meditation on death, beginning with a funeral and continuing into the afterlife.
7:30 p.m., East Quad Keene Theater, 701 East University. Free. 647-4354
Feb. 14, 16, 22, & 23 (different programs). U-M students and faculty perform staged readings of works by this acclaimed English playwright in honor of her 80th birthday. Today: U-M drama students in 2 different Residential College drama classes direct and perform Love and Information, Churchill’s 2012 play about relationships in the digital age presented as an evolving mosaic of more than 50 fragmented and superficially unconnected scenes. The U-M theater department also performs Love and Information(see 21 Thursday listing).
7:30 p.m., Keene Theatre, East Quad, 701 East University. Free. 647-4354.
German actor Margit Stra�burger sings cabaret songs set to poetry by German Jewish poet Mascha Kaleko that longs for pre 1933-Berlin. In German with piano accompaniment by Toledo-based pianist Michelle Papenfuss. Q&A follows.
5-7 p.m., Keene Theatre, East Quad, 701 East University. Free. 647-4354
Open mike storytelling competition sponsored by The Moth, the NYC-based nonprofit that also produces a weekly public radio show. Ten storytellers are selected at random to tell a 3-5 minute story–this month’s themes are “Delusions” (Feb. 5) & “Flight” (Feb 19)–judged by a 3-person team recruited from the audience. Monthly winners compete in a semiannual Grand Slam. Seating limited, so arrive early.
7:30-9 p.m. (doors open and sign-up begins at 6 p.m.), Greyline, 100 N. Ashley. General admission tickets $10 in advance only at themoth.org beginning a week before each event. 764-5118.
Anishinaabe Theatre Exchange artists will be in residence at the University of Michigan campus from February 16-23, 2019, culminating in two performances of the new play by Carolyn Dunn, Three Sisters. The Anishinaabe Theatre Exchange uses theatre to activate networks with Native communities in the Great Lakes region. The group is a consortium of people from various backgrounds working to promote dialogue about Indigenous culture and issues.
In this brand new tragicomedy by Carolyn Dunn, three sisters, long estranged from family, community, and one another, return home to the Tunica-Biloxi Reservation lands in Louisiana at the behest of their dying aunt as she makes preparations for her final journey home. Family tensions, simmering secrets, death and grieving all intersect with the loss of tradition, culture, spiritual formation, and love. Poet, playwright, and scholar Carolyn Dunn was born in Southern California and is of Cherokee, Muscogee Creek, Seminole, Cajun, French Creole, and Tunica-Biloxi descent. Her scholarly work focuses on American Indian women’s literature and American Indian identity, and her play The Frybread Queen was produced by the Montana Repertory Theater in Missoula, Montana, and Native Voices at the Autry in Los Angeles. Her collections of poetry include Outfoxing Coyote (2001) and Echolocation: Poems and Stories from Indian Country L.A. (2013).
Thursday, February 21 at 7:30pm (doors at 7pm)
Three Sisters
Light Box Detroit | 8641 Linwood St
Friday, February 22 at 7:30pm (doors at 7pm)
Three Sisters
East Quad Keene Theater | 701 E. University Ave. Ann Arbor
All events are free and open to the public. Visit www.lsa.umich.edu/world-performance for more info.
If you are a person with a disability who requires an accommodation to participate in this event, please contact Center for World Performance Studies, at 734-936-2777, at least one week in advance of this event. Please be aware that advance notice is necessary as some accommodations may require more time for the University to arrange.
This residency is co-sponsored by the U-M Residential College, CEW+, Institute for Research on Women & Gender, SMTD Department of Theatre & Drama, Institute for Humanities, SMTD Office of Diversity, Equity & Inclusion and Department of American Culture.
Feb. 14, 16, 22, & 23 (different programs). U-M students and faculty perform staged readings of works by this acclaimed English playwright in honor of her 80th birthday. Tonight: Top Girls (7 p.m.), the groundbreaking 1982 indictment of Thatcherism and the idea that women’s professional success hinges on their mimicry of “masculine” behavior. Following the female head of a London employment agency, the play underlines the social and emotional costs women pay to move up the corporate ladder. Also, 1994 play The Skriker (9 p.m.), a 90-minute hallucinogenic fairy tale about a shapeshifting, doom-wreaking fairy who befriends, manipulates, seduces, and entraps 2 teen moms, one pregnant and one who’s killed her own baby.
7 & 9 p.m., U-M Walgreen Drama Center Newman Studio, 1226 Murfin. Free. 764-5350
Feb. 14, 16, 22, & 23 (different programs). U-M students and faculty perform staged readings of works by this acclaimed English playwright in honor of her 80th birthday. Today: the 2017 play Escaped Alone (3 p.m.),a brisk 55-minute surrealist set piece in which 4 British women share tea in a tranquil garden and discuss the end of the world. Also: The 1979 play Cloud Nine (7 p.m.), a racy, merrily merciless spoof of the moral pretensions of imperial Britain. Set in colonial Africa in 1880, the first act is a nonstop flurry of sexual liaisons involving a British functionary, his wife, his son and daughter, an explorer, a woman dressed in a riding habit, and an all-knowing black servant. The second act is set in 1980s London (though the characters have aged a mere 25 years) and blends farce and pathos in a surprising denouement. The 2009 play Seven Jewish Children (10:30 p.m.) is a 10-minute drama where 7 unnamed characters discuss how to teach their children about complex events in Jewish history, from the Holocaust to the creation of Israel to violence in Gaza. Also today, U-M theater studies professor Leigh Woods gives a lecture on “Caryl Churchill at 80” (5 p.m.) at Mendelssohn Theatre.
Various times, U-M Walgreen Drama Center Newman Studio, 1226 Murfin. Free.. 764-5350
Feb. 23 & 24 (different programs). Performances for adults (Sat.) & families (Sun.) by 3 top storytellers from around the country. Headliner is Hand Christian Andersen Storytelling Center (NYC) director Laura Simms, an internationally celebrated veteran storyteller whose repertoire includes both traditional tales and personal narratives. Also, playwright and performance artist Edgar Oliver, a celebrated NYC raconteur best known for his mesmerizing one-man show about his childhood in Savannah with his songster and his mentally ill mother, and Ivory D. Williams, a veteran Detroit storyteller known for his engaging, interactive renditions of traditional African and African American tales.
7:30 p.m. (Sat.) & 1 p.m. (Sun.), The Ark, 316 S. Main. Tickets $20 (Sat.) & $10 (Sun. family concert) in advance at the Michigan Union Ticket Office (mutotix.com) & theark.org, and at the door. To charge by phone, call 763-TKTS.
