- [Announcer] This is production of WEDU PBS, Tampa, St. Petersburg, Sarasota.

(soft music) - [Announcer] Funding for WEDU "Arts Plus" is provided by the Community Foundation Tampa Bay.

- [Dalia] In this edition of WEDU "Arts Plus", a devastating diagnosis leads to passion for art.

- I started predominantly with ink.

I can no longer dance the way I used to, so movement of that ink for me is almost like a new way of dancing.

- [Dalia] Decorative light displays.

- Art Griswold really helped create the fun side of the holidays and showcasing that you can be wild with your decorations and it's okay.

- [Dalia] The history of sheet music.

- Wherever you wanna look, you can really see what was going on in the people's minds at the time by looking at the kinds of songs that are being published.

- [Dalia] And a premier ballet company.

- The community expects really good culture here now and they're getting it.

- It's all coming up next on WEDU "Arts Plus".

(cheerful jazz music) Hello, I'm Dalia Colon, and this WEDU "Arts Plus."

Miriam Zimms was a busy career woman when cancer stopped her in her tracks.

Not once, but twice.

Miriams health journey led her to a new chapter as an artist.

Let's visit her home studio in Lutz.

(soft piano music) - I'm Miriam Zimms, and I'm an artist.

I was a consultant in the solid waste management industry on the conservation side, specifically recycling and composting.

I was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2010, went through treatment, chemotherapy, four surgeries, with a double mastectomy and reconstruction.

Then I found out that I needed to have my ovaries removed because I was BRCA1 diagnosed and had a genetic predisposition.

So I had those out, wasn't feeling good, had some scans, and they found out I had a second primary unrelated to the breast cancer called chondrosarcoma in my left pelvis and I had to have my left pelvis and my hip and a portion of my femur removed and rebuilt.

It was a big shock.

- This is a really, really big surgery, a really stress on people physically and emotionally, which translated into a lot of impactful physical disability for her.

- And it took me two years to learn how to walk again.

- That's a lot of downtime and a lot of time for your mind to go into different places, so you can get depressed.

- At the time, prior to breast cancer, my husband and I were trying to start a family.

And then with sarcoma, we were not able to continue that process because of the issues with my pelvis.

So yes, the cancer was both incredibly difficult, but for me, I had to work on the loss of family.

That was the bigger issue.

I knew I needed to lean into the loss, feel it, so I could move forward, and that is when art came into my life.

(soft music) The Arts In Medicine studio is on the third floor of the magnolia campus at Moffitt, and I walked in and they have a menu of items that you can choose from that are what they call the healing arts.

- When you have a cancer diagnosis, it's almost like you relinquish your life.

Okay?

Because you basically give it to your healthcare team, but you want some control, and I think the Arts In Medicine provides individuals that control.

- I started predominantly with ink.

I can no longer dance the way I used to, so movement of that ink for me is almost like a new way of dancing.

Then I moved into watercolor, mixed media, I started to do some 3D things.

And so, anything I can get my hands on now, I will put ink or color to it.

Most of the things when I draw, three circles end up appearing, and three circles, for me, represents multiple things.

They represent my globes, AKA my breasts, but I call them my globes since I was a tree hugger prior in my previous career.

And then the ovaries, and then how the ovaries and the fallopian tubes connect.

And so, those three circles represent for me those losses of my female body.

And Frida did that, and so she became my muse.

- She did a number of images, different images of Frida Kahlo, or used that as sort of a model.

And I just love those because Miriam empowers people and Frida Kahlo was a very empowering woman.

- Frida Kahlo is my inspiration.

Frida came to art to process after a devastating body, skeleton fracture from an accident.

And when I first saw Frida's work, before I became an artist, I was like, wow, I don't know if I can look at that.

That's pretty tough.

Now I totally understand.

A lot of people don't talk about body loss after cancer, body trauma, for men, women, and children, and it is a big deal because we see our bodies every day.

I have 17 scars on my body, one that's three feet long, the chondrosarcoma one, and I use a lot of that etching to signify and release that body trauma because I see it every day in the mirror.

It's just part of an art canvas on my body now, so the way to do that is through drawing it.

- It doesn't mitigate 100% of their pain that they're going through, but it certainly helps with it a lot.

It takes your mind off of the things that are ailing them and the disabilities that they have.

With relieving some of that stress, I do feel that it allows the body to heal itself.

- [Miriam] The arts came into my life to help me process all of it.

And therapy, I'm not some superhero, I had to have some therapy 'cause some very traumatic things happened, but the art played a role in the daily practice for me that changed my life.

- She started developing through art a whole new career.

- So my husband was the first person to tell me that my art is amazing and I thought, my husband loves me, so thank you so much.

And then a curator said to me, "Miriam, you're really talented," and then I started to think, hmm, maybe I am an artist.

There were opportunities that have come up for gallery shows though the library, through Arts For All Florida, which helps disabled artists have their art shown, and all of a sudden I have been in galleries throughout the state of Florida including the capital.

I am 12 years triple negative breast cancer free and nine years chondrosarcoma free.

So it's a miracle and I'm grateful every moment to be present and alive.

- [Dalia] You can see more of Miriam's work at encasawithm.com.

The annual Griswold Challenge is sure to get any Scrooge into the holiday spirit.

This festive contest encourages members of the community to come together and create dazzling holiday light displays for everyone to enjoy.

(cheerful music) - The Griswold Challenge started as a part of the 39 North Pole Village.

We created this challenge to bring the community together, both businesses and families, to have a little stake in the game of the North Pole Village.

It's all based on the infamous Mr. Clark Griswold, who overly decorated his home, and we just want to pay homage to him in our 39 North Pole Event.

Unfortunately, the pandemic has stopped that.

We just need to help do our part to keep the community safe.

So this year, what we've had to do is take a step back from the North Pole Village, and focus solely on the Griswold Challenge, allowing us to have a virtual event where people can enter their homes or their businesses for a donation of $20, or more if you would like, and that goes to the Community Food Pantry, which is local in Sparks.

(cheerful Christmas music) - The Community Food Pantry is here to serve those people who are having to make a decision between paying rent, buying medicine, putting shoes on their kids' feet, getting gas to get to work, we're here to help them fill that food gap that they are experiencing really, really hard right now.

- We do pick and choose what events that we like to benefit the community and we go whole-heartedly in.

- [Wendi] Especially this time of the year.

It's been a really hard year for many people and the proceeds go on towards helping the food pantry for Christmas, it's gonna be an excellent cause.

- [Barbara] Every dollar donated through the Griswold Challenge, through the entry fees, every dollar will buy three meals for someone in, you know, in the line in the pantry.

And that dollar is really stretching a long way.

(soft piano music) - [Angela] Your family decorate your home together, creating those memories, safely, your businesses can have a team-building exercise for the holidays, instead of going out to maybe a party or something, you get together and decorate your business.

- What we notice about the staff, they love to decorate just like we do, they have the same focus as us, and they wanna win.

- [Angela] The prizes that we are offering is first place is the Clark Griswold Award and you can win $500, whether you're a business or a resident, those are two different categories.

The second place is the Cousin Eddy Award and that is for $250.

The creativity we get to see from the individual contestants is really cool.

Obviously everybody's different and everybody brings something to the table, so seeing all the displays together really make it a unique experience because you're going from one, which might be beautiful and white and pretty, and then you're going to the next display, which is quirky and fun and super charismatic and crazy.

This year, it's gonna be cool because you could drive around to the residents and individual businesses and see that same effect, just on a much larger scale.

So that's gonna be fun to see how everybody's businesses do themes.

Or not do themes, just gaudy it up with lights, I mean, that's what Clark Griswold did.

- I'd say we're gonna channel our inner Griswold by bringing out Mr. Griswold himself.

We have a lot of lights up right now, and so this morning, we bought another 2,000 lights that's gonna be going back up on the building behind us, so.

- I would say close to about 10,000 lights are gonna go up.

- I think a lot of people can relate to "National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation" because it was kind of one of the main holiday funny movies that existed, actually, ever.

Clark Griswold really kind of helped create the fun side of the holidays and showcasing that you can be wild with your decorations and it's okay.

- [Dalia] To learn more, head to 39northdowntown.com.

Up next, learn about sheet music and its fascinating history.

With Professor Daniel Goldmark as our guide, we hear songs from the past, explore sheet music cover art, and discover more about the popular music industry.

(soft ukulele music) - [Daniel] Nowadays, if we want a song, we go online and we can buy it through whatever online stores we might use and we typically buy one song at a time.

Well, 120 years ago when sheet music is the big thing, that was the way you did things as well, you weren't buying a whole bunch of music all by one performer or one writer, you were buying one song at a time.

And if you're looking for songs and you're living in Cleveland at the turn of the century, you could go to a bunch of different places, you could come here to the Arcade because you had music stores and even music publishers based here and you could go straight in, buy what the latest songs were, maybe go look for something from their older catalog, something you've heard before, like, "Oh, do you have a copy of that song?"

And you could find just about anything.

(soft ukulele music) So in the late 19th century, the popular music industry was basically based in New York City and the area was referred to as Tin Pan Alley, this was on 28th street around Broadway and this is around where all the theaters were based before they started moving up toward Times Square.

Now, in Cleveland, a lot of the big publishers were actually based here at the Arcade.

If you think about the Arcade's proximity to Playhouse Square, it makes perfect sense 'cause you had a lot of shows coming into Cleveland, you had shows starting here in Cleveland, and those shows would need music.

And so, they would come to the publishers, ask for songs, the songs would be written, and they would put them right into the shows.

And that's the thing about shows back then, this is before Broadway gets really big, it's before "Oklahoma" and "Showboat" and before the songs are so identified with a particular show, the turn of the 20th century, if the song wasn't good, they'd chuck it out and you could write a new song next week.

They weren't looking at them as great art, it was a product, it was something they were selling to the public, it was something that was gonna get people into the theaters and hopefully into the stores to buy more and more music.

(soft ukulele music) ♪ Oh Nora Lee ♪ ♪ My Nora Lee ♪ ♪ Your name is the sweetest music to me ♪ ♪ Its siren song holds me completely ♪ ♪ Birds in the trees sing their songs more sweetly ♪ ♪ Just for Nora Lee ♪ Sheet music is certainly not a new invention in the late 19th century.

It's been around for a long time.

But there are a couple advances in technology that help the music industry explode by the late 1890s and one of those, of course, are advances in printing technology.

Printing things in four color, meaning where you have the full spectrum of the rainbow, advances in lithography, so you have really clear definition of images and layers upon layers upon layers.

That became a real boon to the printing industry, a lot of which was based in Cleveland.

(soft ukulele music) Music publishers at the time would basically glom onto any topic they could that they thought might sell.

So when the ragtime craze happens, everybody writes a rag on every theme from famous names to animals, fruits and vegetables, lobster rag, fruit and vegetable rag, pickled beets rag, you name it.

So every time something happens, the industry kind of contracts and tries to figure out which of those is gonna be a hit and usually they weren't, usually they were just trying to jump on the bandwagon.

(soft ukulele music) ♪ Cleveland I'm strong for you ♪ You also have publishers, of course, are gonna try and have songs about local interests, current events, even local boosters, so there's all kinds of songs about Cleveland, for instance, saying how wonderful a place Cleveland is, or saying how wonderful a place Ohio is.

The Ohio Centennial, the Cleveland Industrial Exposition in the 19-aughts, the Great Lakes Exposition in the late 1930s, all of these needed songs, they wanted songs, people bought the songs for these and it's just an impossible number to try and wrap your mind around how many songs were out there.

And so few of these songs actually became hits and that's what's fascinating about them is we get this entire history of the life of a city, Cleveland or Detroit or New York or Chicago, wherever you wanna look, you can really see what was going on in the people's minds at the time by looking at the kinds of songs that are being published.

♪ But I'm blue and broken-hearted ♪ ♪ Or good times and I have parted ♪ ♪ I know I'll be welcomed down in Cleveland ♪ Probably the most famous music publisher to ever come out of Cleveland was Sam Fox Music.

We're actually based directly above where I'm standing on the third floor in the Arcade.

Sam Fox sold, but also started writing a few songs of his own.

And within a couple years, he borrowed a couple hundred dollars and started his own music publishing company, again, based right here at the Arcade.

So very quickly, he kind of starts to corner the market on this kind of music and he makes a name for himself not just in Cleveland, but throughout the entire music publishing industry.

(soft ukulele music) ♪ I'm going back to Cleveland now ♪ ♪ To Cleveland go hi-ho ♪ ♪ Where I get three square meals a day ♪ ♪ And money for the show ♪ The sad thing about the art for sheet music covers is that a lot of these are unsigned, or even the ones that are signed, we know very, very little about the people who created them because these were craftspeople just like people who made furniture or built cars or had any other kind of nine to five job.

Nobody could have imagined that, you know, basically a century later, folks like me would be asking, oh, who is this person who did this amazing cover, or better yet, who is this person who did 300 covers over a period of several years with such great breadth and, you know, skill?

I wanna know about them, and unfortunately there's such little information about these folks.

So that's one of the great mysteries about the music and it's also one of the great joys because every time you find a new piece, you're like, oh, wow, another little piece of the puzzle slides into place.

You know, the 10% of music that was published in Cleveland that made it to the rest of the United States, there's that other 90% that's in people's attics, and basements, and in thrift stores, and on, you know, eBay and other places, just waiting to be found.

And so, I started just collecting, any time I would run into someone, I would say, you know, if you have any sheet music in the basement, if you know someone who's getting rid of it, please don't let them trash it, come find me, I'll take it off your hands, even if I have to, you know, find an eventual home for it 'cause it's not what I'm looking for, I'm more interested in seeing this stuff not be destroyed.

I think ultimately what I wanna do is be able to tell a story of how popular music was a part of life in Cleveland, particularly before rock and roll.

And visually, it's so rich.

I'm really looking forward to having the chance to help fill in this gap of what a strong part Cleveland had in the music industry and shaping musical tastes in the United States during the late 19th and, you know, through the 20th century.

(soft ukulele music) - [Dalia] Learn more about Professor Goldmark and his work by visiting music.case.edu/faculty and search Daniel Goldmark.

AVA Ballet Theatre is a ballet company dedicated to the art of dance.

Located in Reno, Nevada, the company presents memorable performances to audiences in the region.

- AVA Ballet Theatre is the resident ballet company of the Pioneer Center for the Performing Arts.

We hold open auditions for anybody in the community to come and audition for each one of our productions about two months before a production will happen and we select all the dancers at that time and then we begin rehearsing and we try to involve as many people as we possibly can into our productions and as many students as we can.

- [Inez] I've been dancing with AVA for 10 years and I have done around 20 ballets with AVA Ballet and the main one that I do every year is "The Nutcracker."

- [Alexander] I started to produce "The Nutcracker" in 1994 and "The Nutcracker" is very fun to do every year.

The community really looks forward to it and I really enjoy doing it.

- I am performing in the role of Clara in "The Nutcracker" this year, which is the lead role.

Each scene, she's a little bit different.

It's a range of emotions that you get to portray and show the audience and it's a lot of fun to be able to do that.

You also get to wear the costume, which is very pretty, and kind of how it would help me get into the mindset of what she might be thinking.

- [Alexander] Inez got selected because she's always been dedicated to the art form of ballet.

She has always been reliable and respectful on stage and in the studio as well.

She is confident enough to be in front of the entire Reno Philharmonic and a 1,500 seat house and pull it off.

In the rehearsals, it's very exhausting because, you know, the dancers have had pretty much a full day already and they're trying to accomplish things at, you know, 7:30, 8:30 at night, which when you're exhausted and tired, is kind of hard to do, but they do it because they love it.

It's an art form that you really have to churn and it keeps getting bigger and bigger and that's what makes dancers love to do ballet.

- [Inez] Rehearsals can be long and trying.

Pointe shoes are very tough on your feet, you get blisters and you can get overuse injuries if you're dancing too much.

Dancing on pointe is painful and difficult, but also extremely fun 'cause you're turning on maybe an inch diameter of your foot 'cause you're all the way up on your toes and you have to be able to balance there, you have to be able to turn, and I love doing it.

- [Alexander] It takes them a long time to actually perfect and get into the center and do pirouettes and do developpes on pointe and do grand renverses on pointe or just do a pique hold arabesque in a pointe shoe, your body weight is distributed completely differently from on flat when they just wear their flat shoes, and it's just a completely different experience for the dancer's body.

I think the artists in the community and the parents and the students really look forward to bringing their daughter or son to actually dance with a live production with an orchestra and I think that only enhances the experience of seeing a ballet production, because it brings the level of the company up, it brings the level of the dancers up because they really enjoy the orchestra as well, and I think it's a really wonderful thing for the community.

Since Reno has grown so much, my company has to grow as well and it has been growing every single year that I put on these productions.

It's just come to a whole different level now, it's far more professional than it was before, years ago.

A lot of more dedicated dancers and artists and volunteers, and Reno expects that.

The community expects really good culture here now and they're getting it.

So it's my job, as an artistic director, to give the community what they need to see on stage and have them be proud of being here in Reno, Nevada and proud to be part of the arts scene in Reno.

- [Dalia] For more information, go to avaballet.com.

And that wraps it up for this edition of WEDU "Arts Plus."

For more arts and culture, visit wedu.org/artsplus.

Until next time, I'm Dalia Colon, thanks for watching.

(exciting music) - [Announcer] Funding for WEDU "Arts Plus" is provided by the Community Foundation Tampa Bay.

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