Storytelling Festival: Remembrance and Renewal
The Process Series | Wednesday, Feb. 17 – Sunday, Feb. 21 | $5 suggested donation per show
All performances will be streamed as a webinar on Zoom. You can read Byron Wood’s feature on “Remembrance and Renewal” storytellers Kaya Littleturtle and Dovie Thomason here.
What We Keep Keeps Us
Jaki Shelton Green | 7:30 p.m., Wednesday, Feb. 17
The oddest things can become heirlooms: a sewing kit, a toolbox, a favored rolling pin. In the festival opener by the state’s poet laureate, a family artifact collects a host of different stories as it’s passed down over generations.
Tragedy + Time = Comedy
Samuel R. Gates | 4:00 p.m., Thursday, Feb. 20
Standup comedian (and professor) Gates probes the controversial history of Silent Sam, UNC’s Confederate soldier statue, in a comic inquiry into how public spaces are used to tell us who and what belong there—and how both can change with time.
Six Triple Eight
Charlotte Blake Alston | 7:30 p.m., Thursday, Feb. 20
Think the mail’s been a mess lately? It’s 1945, and millions of undelivered letters and packages for American soldiers sit in British and French military warehouses. Can the 855 Black women in the Women’s Army Corps’s 6888th Battalion fight social stigmas and dismal working conditions, clear the massive, three-year backlog, and create a functional communication system for the troops in Europe?
People Are NOT Disposable
Jasmin Cardenas | 8:30 p.m., Friday, Feb. 19
Cardenas, a Chicago-based activist and next-generation storyteller who’s the daughter of Colombian immigrants, brings tales from an array of pandemic frontline workers, from food industry employees to the factory workers making personal protective equipment.
Slanted
Simon Tam and Joe X. Jiang | 2 p.m., Sunday, Feb. 21
When Tam tried to reclaim an ethnic slur by naming his critically celebrated Asian American dance-rock band The Slants, his struggle to trademark the name went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. Jiang, the band’s guitarist, helps relive the 2017 legal odyssey.
I AM SAN FRANCISCO
Brenda Wong Aoki | 4:30 p.m., Sunday, Feb. 20
A mixed-race engineer isn’t the only one with complicated emotions about his fancy-schmancy tech-sector job. His antecedents—living and dead—from Chinatown and Japantown are having some feelings, too.
Comment on this story at arts@indyweek.com.
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