Live Culture | Seven Days | Vermont's Independent Voice
Tuesday, October 26, 2021

Posted By on Tue, Oct 26, 2021 at 3:47 PM

click to enlarge Flynn's Grand Reopening Celebration Starts the 2021-22 Season With Heart
Courtesy of Luke Awtry Photography
The Flynn marquee
I’ve attended many captivating performances at the Flynn Main Stage since the 1990s, but Saturday’s Grand Reopening Celebration was historic. The art deco theater was beautiful; the staff was friendly and well organized, as usual; and the performances were stellar. But Vermont storyteller Ferene Paris Meyer and Flynn executive director Jay Wahl moved me to tears. Their personal yet universal accounts of the past 19 months clarified the essential nature of gathering with neighbors in a beloved place for a live performance.

“Dear Flynn Theater!” were Paris Meyer’s opening words — the first spoken from the Flynn stage to an audience since mid-March 2020. Her story was part love letter to the theater, extolling its community-enriching capacity, and part memoir of her journey to develop her voice as a woman of color. She reminded us of the Black lives lost to violence and the requisite reckonings of the recent past.

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Friday, October 15, 2021

Posted By on Fri, Oct 15, 2021 at 6:30 PM

Charlotte Gallery Bauschaus VT Hosts Night of Ambient Music and Art Installations
courtesy of Caleb Kenna
Zach Pollakoff
Artist, musician and advertising professional Zach Pollakoff is throwing the second show at his Bauschaus VT gallery in Charlotte this Saturday, October 16. Six artists will display large-scale installations in Pollakoff's historic gallery and home, accompanied by a live soundtrack from Brooklyn's Elori Saxl, an Emmy-nominated composer and filmmaker, and Photay, an electronic producer, also from New York City.

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Wednesday, October 6, 2021

Posted By on Wed, Oct 6, 2021 at 2:16 PM

click to enlarge Montpelier Author Kekla Magoon Named National Book Award Finalist
Courtesy of Kekla Magoon
Kekla Magoon
Updated at 3:58 p.m.

Kekla Magoon had just picked up groceries to cook dinner on Monday evening when she saw that she had missed a phone call.

“I didn’t even hear the phone ring,” the Montpelier author said on Wednesday. She was in the grocery store parking lot when she noticed a voicemail from a 212 number.

“I figured that might be related to publishing, so I listened,” she said. “And it was the executive director of the National Book Foundation.”

Magoon is one of five finalists for the 2021 National Book Award for Young People’s Literature for her forthcoming nonfiction book Revolution in Our Time: The Black Panther Party's Promise to the People. “It’s pretty exciting,” she said. “A little surreal, also.”

She had known since September that she was on the long list for the prize, and she knew that the foundation planned to announce all 25 National Book Award finalists — five in each of five categories — on Tuesday, October 5, at 10 a.m. She hadn’t expected to hear anything until then. In a long “congratulatory voicemail with some logistics information,” foundation executive director Ruth Dickey asked Magoon to keep the news quiet and not to tell even her publisher.

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Friday, October 1, 2021

Posted By on Fri, Oct 1, 2021 at 11:52 AM

click to enlarge What Doth Life Festival Returns to Windsor
courtesy of Tom McNeill
Kiel Alarcon at the Windsor Exchange
Windsor music collective What Doth Life roars back to life this weekend. After a tough year with little to promote, the WDL crew is staging What Doth Life Fest II on Saturday, October 2, at the Windsor Exchange.

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