Durham 150 Closing Ceremony

In case you haven’t noticed, the City of Durham has been celebrating its one-hundred-fiftieth birthday all year with a variety of arts, culture, and history events. But if you somehow slept on all that, the closing ceremony at DPAC is a fine crash course. The multimedia production opens with remarks from Mayor Steve Schewel and Occaneechi Tribal Chairman Tony Hayes, who represents the region’s first inhabitants. From there, it’s a Durham extravaganza: A visual history rolls forth on three large video walls, with text by historian Jim Wise read by WUNC’s Frank Stasio and music by the John Brown Little Big Band. Playwright Howard L. Craft wrote transitional scenes, which are directed by Black Ops Theatre Company’s JaMeeka Holloway-Burrell. And Durham middle and high school students worked with professional animators to make a video envisioning the city’s next fifty years.