QUIETING CHAOS WITH THE POETRY SOCIETY
THE MAGIC ACT OF ART IS ITS capacity to achieve stillness in the midst of chaos. An appreciation of poetry likewise can calm the frenzy, or at least quiet it a little. Which is why, amid the current uncertainties, and on the occasion of its 100th anniversary, the Poetry Society of South Carolina (PSSC) is […]
AREA ARTS GROUPS STRIVING TO FILL THE GAPS
IF ANXIETY IS THE ESSENTIAL CONDITION of intellectual and artistic creation, we’ve had plenty of motivation. Nothing focuses awareness and artistic discipline like a crisis. And isolation, for all its impediments, can be a boon to creativity. At least that was the hope as we entered, and are beginning to emerge from, a time of […]
CHARLESTON AS A LIVING MUSEUM
IF BOOKS ARE HUMANITY IN PRINT, museums are humanity on display. Here reside beauty, curiosity, ingenuity, education, inspiration, hard realities, comforting truths, entertainment, a sense of wonder and community. Museums, together with travel, are where we go to expand our view of the world and to see ourselves with heightened clarity. As an avid traveler, […]
THE CONNOISSEUR AS SHEPHERD: NIGEL REDDEN AND SPOLETO
NIGEL REDDEN’S FIRST acquaintance with the Spoleto Festival was as a 19-year-old student volunteer in Italy in 1969, seven years before Charleston’s Spoleto Festival USA would realize founder Gian Carlo Menotti’s dream of a Festival of Two Worlds. Redden, born in Cyprus to an American diplomat father and an Australian mother, worked with Italy’s Spoleto Festival […]
ADVENTURE AND DARING IN CONTEMPORARY ART
ART, LIKE LIFE, THRIVES WHERE there is a sense of adventure, of extending one’s gaze beyond immediate perceptions. In the 25 years since Mark Sloan took the helm as director of the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art at the College of Charleston, the old maxim has been embraced wholeheartedly. The Halsey is both an enterprising […]
CONSTANT REINVENTION, CONSISTENT EXCELLENCE
THOUGH HE IS CERTAINLY not a French lyric poet, Carroll Brown embodies all the qualities of a classic troubadour, and then some. He is a traveling musician of rare gifts, whose compositions are as diverse in genre as they are soulful. One of the most enduring of South Carolina-based performers, Brown is equally at home […]
WHY ARTISTS DO WHAT THEY DO
ONCE WE CREATED CRAFTS out of necessity. The impulse was strictly utilitarian. But humans being humans, it was not long before the desire to decorate even the most prosaic objects became irresistible. The evolution of the fine arts took a similar if somewhat different path, but the motivation has been the same: to create, […]
ACTORS’ THEATRE AND THE ART OF COLLABORATION
STAGE ACTORS ARE SCULPTORS who carve in snow. And while it is true that nothing in the theater is imperishable, save great writing, Chris Weatherhead and Clarence Felder are working on a measure of immortality. As actors, writers, producers and directors, the couple worked steadily for more than 30 years in professional theater and […]
THE ODYSSEY OF A SACRED SONG
Herb Frazier was captivated by a centuries-old funeral song and its ancestral echo. He had gone to Africa in the spring of 1994 to report on efforts to collect hospital supplies for Rwanda, a drive in which the Medical University of South Carolina was involved. Writing for the Charleston Post and Courier, he covered the local medical community as well as an agonizing recovery from the Rwandan genocide.
CAN’T GO ON? YES, YOU CAN.
Rapid breathing and a racing pulse. Trembling hands and sweaty palms. Quaking knees and a halting voice. Butterflies bordering on nausea. Did Laurence Olivier ever have to deal with this? Does Cate Blanchett?
