Story/Time
World Premiere!
Montclair State University, New Jersey

All Tickets $15!

 The Company kicks off 2012 with the World Premiere of Story/Time, inspired by legendary artist and composer John Cage’s Indeterminacy (1958). Bill T. Jones returns to the stage with his celebrated dancers in an enticing and reflective new work that layers movement, music, and 70 one-minute short stories written and read live on-stage by Jones. Original music by Ted Coffey.

Peak Performances @ Montclair State (NJ)
Jan 21, 28 at 8pm
Jan 22, 29 at 3pm
Jan 26, 27 at 7:30pm
Info & tickets

Body Against Body
The Hague, Netherlands

Body Against Body premieres overseas! This program revives the challenging, groundbreaking works that launched the careers of Bill T. Jones and the late Arnie Zane. Some of the most significant examples of the postmodern aesthetic, these pieces redefined the duet form and changed the face of American dance.

Holland Dance Festival
Feb 1 – 2
info & tickets

Apply Here

The State Farm Companies Foundation believes all children deserve an education that helps them reach their potential and prepares them for life. The Foundation has established a scholarship program as part of ongoing efforts to address and raise awareness of the nation’s drop-out crisis – a student drops out of high school every 26 seconds. Students are encouraged to be more than a statistic and graduate high school as the first step to being ready to contribute to the 21st Century workforce.

Our support goes to programs that provide students the instruction, resources, and support they need to succeed. The State Farm Good Neighbor Scholarship Program was established to provide financial assistance to high school seniors who plan to attend college, technical, or vocational school, but may not be able to meet the expenses of a higher education without such aid and often do not qualify for other scholarships.

The program is administered by Scholarship Management Services, a division of Scholarship America.

Who is eligible?

Applicants to the State Farm Good Neighbor Scholarship Program must meet all of the following criteria:

• Must be a high school senior who will graduate at the end of the 2011-12 school year*
  *Children of employees, agents, and retirees of the State Farm Mutual Automobile Insurance Company (the “Company”) and children of employees of the Company’s subsidiaries and affiliates who are otherwise eligible may apply for scholarships, but they will not receive any preferences. Disqualified persons of the Foundation (within the meaning of Section 4946(a)(1) of the Code) will not be eligible for scholarships.
• Plan to enroll in full time undergraduate study at an accredited two or four year college, university or vocational-technical school for the entire 2012-2013 academic year
• Have a cumulative grade point average of 2.50 to 3.20 on a 4.00 scale (or its equivalent)
• Be a U.S. citizen
• Demonstrate financial need

What will be awarded?

• Up to twenty-six (26) selected recipients will receive a $2,500 award.
• Awards may be renewed up to one additional year based on maintaining satisfactory academic performance and full-time enrollment.
• Awards are for undergraduate study only.

Randall Kennedy | The Persistence of the Color Line: Racial Politics and the Obama Presidency (A)
When: Thursday, December 1, 2011 at 7:30PM
Where: Central Library
Cost: FREE
No tickets required. For Info: 215-567-4341.

One of America’s premier scholars on race and ethnicity, Randall Kennedy’s instant bestseller Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word sparked a firestorm of national debate across the pages of the New York Times, Newsweek, and TIME. Renowned for his well-reasoned approach in tackling sensitive racial issues, he has been called “admirable, courageous, and meticulously fair and honest” (New York Times Book Review). Following positions at the United States Court of Appeals and the Supreme Court, he joined the faculty at Harvard Law School. In The Persistence of the Color Line, Kennedy takes on the complex relationship between the first black president and his African American constituency, and the challenges posed by the dream of a post-racial  society.http://whyy.org/cms/radiotimes/2011/12/01/race-politics-and-the-president-with-harvard-professor-randall-kennedy/

The first film by a black filmmaker about the tragedy in Rwanda, Alrick Brown’s Sundance Award-winning “Kinyarwanda,” opens Dec. 2 in eight cities nationwide: Atlanta, Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Seattle and Washington.

In “Kinyarwanda,” a young Tutsi woman and a young Hutu man fall in love amidst chaos, a soldier struggles with being absent from her family to foster a greater good, and a priest grapples with his faith in the face of unspeakable horror.

The film will be playing at the following theaters:

Atlanta: AMC Phipps, 3500 Peachtree Road NE
Chicago: AMC River East, 322 East Illinois Street
Los Angeles: Laemmle Music Hall, 9036 Wilshire Boulevard
New York: AMC Empire 25, 234 West 42d Street (at 8th Avenue)
Philadelphia: AMC Franklin Mills, 1149 Franklin Mills Circle
Seattle: Uptown Theater, 511 Queen Anne Avenue North
Washington: AMC Hoffman, 206 Swamp Fox Road, Alexandria, VA

Tickets may be purchased at the African-American Film Festival Releasing Movement (AFFRM) website.

The Corcoran Gallery in Washington is currently displaying an exhibition that showcases the breadth and depth of the contemporary African-American art scene and at the same time erases the boundaries of identity. “30 Americans” features works by 31 established and emerging African-American artists, each of whom offer their own unique take on racial, sexual and historical identity in American culture. From openly gay artist Kehinde Wiley’s reinterpretations of the Old Masters (shown here: his “Napoleon Crossing the Alps”) to openly gay artist Glenn Ligon’s intertextual works to Leonardo Drew’s large-scale sculptures, the works on display in “30 Americans” reflect the complex dynamics of black and American identity today.

The exhibit runs through Feb. 12 at the Corcoran Gallery, 500 17th Street NW, Washington, D.C. Visit the exhibit website for more information. The Brothers’ Network will sponsor a docent-guided tour of this exhibit in January. For information and to participate, email comments@thebrothersnetwork.org.

Tchet Dereic Dorman

Director, Center for Social Justice and Multicultural Education

Office of Institutional Diversity, Equity, Advocacy and Leadership
Temple University

REELBLACK TO HOST THE PHILLY PREMIERE WEEKEND FOR KINYARWANDA (OPENS DECEMBER 2 AMC FRANKLIN MILLS)

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE–

Reelblack, Philly’s #1 promoter of Black film is pleased to announce the African-American Film Festival Releasing Movement’s (AFFRM) second feature of 2011, KINYARWANDA, will open this Friday December 2 for a limited run at the AMC Franklin Mills Theater, 1149 Franklin Mills Circle in Northeast Philadelphia.  

Kinyarwanda is the 2011 Sundance Audience Award winner for World Cinema Drama, and winner of the 2011 Philadelphia Cinefest Jury Prize for Best First Feature.  Reelblack is a proud member of AFFRM. Showtimes for opening day are 11:00,  1:45, 4:20, 7:10 and 10:00pm.  Tickets are $6.00 – $10.00. The film will continue its run throughout the week.

Writer/Director Alrick Brown and Producer Tommy Oliver will be on hand on Saturday December 3 to conduct post-film Q&As after the 4:20 and 7:10pm shows.  Additionally, Mr. Oliver, a Philadelphia native, will do a Q&A after the Friday 7:10pm screening.

Reelblack is also hosting a dinner with Alrick Brown and Tommy Oliver at the Hibachi Grill and Supreme Buffet, 103 Franklin Mills Blvd., from 6:30-8pm on Saturday December 3.  Admission to this event is $15 and includes drink and gratuity.  Giveaways will include a DVD of AFFRMs first release I Will Follow and Kinyarwanda posters signed by Brown and Oliver.  Visit www.reelblack.com for more details.

Promotional partners for this premiere weekend are Rolling Out Weekly, Philadelphia Sunday Sun, WURD-AM 900 Radio, Art Sanctuary, Painted Bride Art Center, Uptown Entertainment and Development Corporation, Philadelphia Cinema Alliance, Philadelphia Film Society, Philadelphia Independent Film and Video Association, We Do It Distribution, Monica Peters/GritsNCheese PR, Christopher Weaver/ Oracle PR.   *****  

ABOUT THE FILM In Alrick Brown’s Sundance Award winning debut feature,  A young Tutsi woman and a young Hutu man fall in love amidst chaos, a soldier struggles to foster a greater good while being absent from her family, an Imam saves countless lives and a priest grapples with his faith in the face of unspeakable horror.  Six intimate stories are interwoven to illustrate both tragedy and triumph.   During the 1994 Rwandan genocide, the Mufti of Rwanda, the most respected Muslim leader in the country, issued a fatwa forbidding Muslims from participating in the killing of the Tutsi. As the country became a slaughterhouse, mosques became places of refuge where Muslims and Christians, Hutus and Tutsis came together to protect each other. KINYARWANDA is based on true accounts from survivors who took refuge at the Grand Mosque of Kigali and the Imams who opened their doors to give refuge to the Tutsi and to those Hutu who refused to participate in the killing. Told from the perspective of six characters, we follow the young lovers, the child, the couple, the soldiers, the Imam, and the priest as they are swept up by the chaos of the world around them.   ALRICK BROWN BIO Alrick Brown has a MFA from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. A filmmaker and teacher, he has found his calling writing, directing and producing narrative films and documentaries often focusing on social issues affecting the world at large. For over two years he served as a Peace Corps volunteer in Cote d’Ivoire. The interactions with the people of his village and his overall experiences in West Africa have informed his creative expression; an expression first fostered by his birth in Kingston, Jamaica and migration to, and upbringing in Plainfield, New Jersey. A fluent French speaker, he graduated from Rutgers University with a BA in English and a Masters in Education. Since then he has devoted his energy to changing the world by giving a voice to the voiceless and telling stories that otherwise would not be told.   Alrick’s collective work has screened in over forty film festivals, national and international, and received numerous awards. He and his Co-roducer, received the HBO Life Through Your Lens Emerging Filmmaker Award to produce their critically acclaimed documentary DEATH OF TWO SONS. In 2004 he was one of four NYU students featured in the IFC Documentary series Film School, produced by Academy award nominee Nannette Burstein. In 2007 he addressed the Motion Picture Association of America on C-SPAN. KINYARWANDA marks Brown’s feature film directorial debut.   TOMMY OLIVER BIO Tommy Oliver is trying to make the world a better place, one film at a time.  Growing up in inner city Philadelphia, he quickly learned that “preaching at” his peers was not the way to go and that film was a much better medium to reach them.  Over the next fifteen years, he honed his craft through practice, training, education and experimentation.    As a graduate of Carnegie Mellon University, where he double-majored in Economics and Digital Media, and as a Microsoft alum, he developed a keen understanding for business as a whole. As a cinematographer and certified techie, he developed the technical skills to fill in any crew position and to be able to better communicate with team leaders and vendors. As a producer and writer, he’s faced innumerable challenges from crafting a coherent and marketable story to tackling the logistics of shooting in a foreign country and beyond. This combination of skills allows for outside the box thinking, creative problem solving and better communication.

For more info, contact Michael Dennis at 267-259-7372

The voice of the intelligence…is drowned out by the roar of fear. It is ignored by the voice of desire. It is contradicted by the voice of shame. It is biased by hate and extinguished by anger. Most of all, it is silenced by ignorance.

–Dr. Karl Menninger

December 2011

Here are some of the things we are doing and following this month, organized along the lines of the groups on our social networking website. If you have not joined our groups already, we encourage you to become a member and join the conversation.

“30 Americans” Exhibit Their Works at the Corcoran
The Corcoran Gallery in Washington is currently displaying an exhibition that serves as a fitting companion to Touré’s new book on “post-blackness” (see “Politics and Society” below). “30 Americans” features works by 31 established and emerging African-American artists, each of whom offer their own unique take on racial, sexual and historical identity in American culture. From openly gay artist Kehinde Wiley’s reinterpretations of the Old Masters (shown here: his “Napoleon Crossing the Alps”) to openly gay artist Glenn Ligon’s intertextual works to Leonardo Drew’s large-scale sculptures, the works on display in “30 Americans” reflect the complex dynamics of black and American identity today.

The exhibit runs through Feb. 12 at the Corcoran Gallery, 500 17th Street NW, Washington, D.C. Visit the exhibit website for more information. The Brothers’ Network will sponsor a docent-guided tour of this exhibit in January. For information and to participate, email comments@thebrothersnetwork.org.

“The Scottsboro Boys” Comes to Philadelphia Theatre Company

The Brothers’ Network continues its community partnership with the Philadelphia Theatre Company, now in its fourth year, and welcomes ”The Scottsboro Boys” to Philadelphia. The Philadelphia Theatre Company will present the controversial Tony Award-nominated musical by John Kander and Fred Ebb based on the wrongful convictions of nine young African-American boys in 1930s Alabama from Jan. 20 to Feb. 19, 2012. For information about TBN’s annual PTC Theater Night featuring “The Scottsboro Boys,” send email to comments@thebrothersnetwork.org.

Philadanco Founder Joan Myers Brown to Lead Discussion of Her Life and Legacy

Join us on January 14 for a conversation on African-Americans in dance led by Philadelphia Dance Company (PHILADANCO!) founder Joan Myers Brown, part of the release party for the new book “Joan Myers Brown & the Audacious Hope of the Black Ballerina: A Biohistory of American Performance” by Brenda Dixon Gottschild. In this book, Gottschild uses Brown’s life and career as a fulcrum to leverage an investigation of the interface between performance, cultural formation, and race politics as evidenced by the development of a dance community in Black Philadelphia and the rise and spread of its influence beyond community and regional borders to national and international distinction.

Joining Brown in the conversation will be Philadanco dancer Justin S.M. Bryant, who will discuss the growth and development of a community of black male dancers in Philadelphia.

Our January book discussion will take place on Saturday, Jan. 14, 2012, at 2 p.m. at the Moonstone Arts Center, 110A South 13th Street, Philadelphia. Copies of the book will be available for purchase and autographing at Moonstone.

Black Beyond Boundaries

Author and cultural commentator Touré argues in his new book “Who’s Afraid of Post-Blackness: What It Means to Be Black Now” that the monolithic notions of black identity promoted in the wake of the Black Power Movement have outlived their usefulness and that there are as many ways of being black as there are blacks in America.

Join us for our Black History Month discussion of this book on the third Saturday in February. In the meantime, check out Touré’s interview with Michelle Norris of NPR’s “All Things Considered.”

Special Program at Blockson Collection Celebrates Marcus Garvey

The Marcus Garvey Foundation, a non-profit educational foundation, is celebrating its 50th anniversary with a public event at the Charles L. Blockson Collection, Temple University Libraries, Saturday, December 10, 2011, at 12:30 pm. Alongside a special viewing of the historical exhibition, “Marcus Garvey and Global Black History,” the event will feature a number of honorees and guest speakers, including:

- Sonia Sanchez (Poet & Professor Emerita, Temple University)

- Rev. Dr. William Shaw (Pastor, White Rock Baptist Church)

- Barbara Mason (Recording Artist)

- Dr. Tommy Bogger (Historian, Norfolk State University)

- Jamaladeen Tacuma (Musician)

- Dr. Khalil Gibran Muhammad (Director, Schomburg Center)

- Grachan Moncur (Musician)

The event will also feature Sonia Sanchez presenting an original poem written for the occasion in honor of Amy Jacques Garvey and a special composition honoring Max Roach written and performed by Christopher Acree.

The event will take place on the first floor of Sullivan Hall at 1330 Pollet Walk on the Temple University campus.

“Kinyarwanda” Opens This Month

The first film by a black filmmaker about the tragedy in Rwanda, Alrick Brown’s Sundance Award-winning “Kinyarwanda,” opens Dec. 2 in eight cities nationwide: Atlanta, Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Seattle and Washington.

In “Kinyarwanda,” a young Tutsi woman and a young Hutu man fall in love amidst chaos, a soldier struggles with being absent from her family to foster a greater good, and a priest grapples with his faith in the face of unspeakable horror.

New Lorene Cary Novel Looks at The Ties that Bind

Lorene Cary’s new novel “If Sons, then Heirs” examines the complexity and tragedy of the historic ties between African-Americans and ancestral lands in the South. Its protagonist, a young African-American businessman on the rise in Philadelphia, is called to put his rapidly evolving life on hold in order to head to South Carolina to attempt to save his family’s farm. His trip plunges him into a complicated and troubling past that he must uncover and heal. Cary, author of “Black Ice” and “The Price of a Child,” writes with intimacy and compassion about the power of family secrets, the hard legacy of lynching and segregation, and the resilience of the human spirit.

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Joe Turner’s Come and Gone
Written by August Wilson
ON THE PLAYS & PLAYERS MAINSTAGE
1714 Delancey Place
Philadelphia, PA 19103
215.735.0630

January 19 – February 4

As emancipated slaves flood north in search of employment and a chance to start over, Seth and Bertha Holly’s boarding house in Pittsburgh, offers a new place to call home in this drama by the multiple Pulitzer prize-winning author of The Piano Lesson, Seven Guitars and Fences. When an angry and lost man arrives looking for his wife, forcibly removed from him years ago when he was captured and put in a chain gang by a man named Joe Turner, these once strangers are forced to confront their own demons and to come together to help him find his way. This is the first of two plays at P&P that look back at life 100 years ago in celebration of our 100^th Anniversary Season.  August Wilson is heralded as one of the greatest writers of the 20^th century to explore black consciousness and culture.

For Tickets: Joe Turner’s Come and Gone @ Plays & Players

Let’s C
a performance by
NICK CAVE

December 16, 2011 – 7pm
@ The Fabric Workshop
1214 Arch Street, Philadelphia, PA 19107
Performance: 7pm
Reception: 8pm

Born in Jefferson City, MO, 1959
Lives and works in Chicago, IL

While Nick Cave was finishing up his graduate degree at Kansas City Art Institute, he was also studying dance through an Alvin Ailey program in both Kansas City and in New York. Today, the performance artist, fabric sculptor, and dancer is best known for his elaborate, transformative “soundsuits.” When worn, these otherworldly garments give the wearer shaman-like characteristics as they completely overwhelm conventional human physiology. Cave’s constructs these works from unlikely found material such as twigs, bottle caps, and wires. These soundsuits enable Cave to bring about an interactive aspect to his work; that is, the garments produce sound when dancers perform in them.

Nick Cave Soundsuit Performance from Corcoran Gallery of Art on Vimeo.