- [Announcer] Production of "Applause" on Ideastream Public Media is made possible by the John P. Murphy Foundation, The Kulas Foundation, and by Cuyahoga County residents through Cuyahoga Arts and Culture.

(upbeat music) - [David] Coming up, the Spanish artistry of flamenco steps on stage in Northeast Ohio.

Plus, she's a pop-preneur you say.

Indeed, we meet the entrepreneur behind Pop Culture CLE who's chilling in Soland and the Cleveland Orchestra delivers the goods with a world premier written during the pandemic.

Hello, and welcome back to one of the artsiest shows out there, "Applause".

I'm Ideastream public media's David C. Barnett.

Artists turn to different mediums to tell their stories.

For Alice Blumenfeld, flamenco is the art form of choice.

She shares the language of flamenco with Northeast Ohio through her own company, Abrepaso.

Ideastream Public Media's Carrie Wise has the story.

- [Carrie] Flamenco is expressive.

It's percussive, and it's powerful both for the audience and the performer.

- One of the things that I think makes it so empowering and powerful and intense is the rhythms and in just the posture itself.

The chest is always lifted.

There's a sense of tension in the way, in the sort of the way we use our hands.

There's always this sense of resistance.

And then it's very much grounded into the earth, the way that we hits our feet on the floor.

- [Carrie] The dancing fuses with music, often singing, and guitar.

Performing here in Northeast Ohio, Blumenfeld says she's introducing many people to what it's all about.

- Flamenco, first of all, comes from Spain.

It comes from the southernmost region of Spain where there was a really interesting mix of cultures over the last several thousand years.

Flamenco itself is a very young art form.

So, it's roots are very old, but it's very young.

- [Carrie] She was drawn to flamenco in her youth, growing up in New Mexico where there's an annual flamenco festival and a national institute dedicated to the art form.

Blumenfeld ended up trading in her ballet slippers for flamenco heels.

- And I just became enraptured in the rhythm and had what, in flamenco, we call an experience of of duende, sort of an out of body experience.

And I just knew in that moment that this was it.

This is what I would dedicate my life to.

- [Carrie] She went on to tour with national companies and even studied flamenco in Spain for a little while, but as time went on, she says, she realized she wanted to find a way to tell her own stories through flamenco.

- I felt a lot of flamenco outside of Spain was just perpetuating the stereotype of those woman in a red dress.

And it's an image that sells.

It sells tickets to shows and there wasn't really a company that had space for the American artists to tell their stories.

So a lot of companies bring in artists from Spain to set repertory and I was just like, there's so many artists here that have so much to say, why isn't there a company that's emphasizing that.

And then it was like, well, duh, I can be the one to start that company.

- [Carrie] She started a small pre-professional company called Abrepaso, which means opening a pathway.

Abrepaso dancers performed flamenco recently at Cleveland Public Theater's annual community arts event, Station Hope.

- An explosion.

(foot bangs) (fingers snapping) Splash.

So the beginning and end of the piece is movement to a poem that I wrote as part of a project called the Solea Project.

So Solea is the flamenco form that comes from the word for solitude or loneliness in Spanish.

(feet tapping) Push me aside.

Dignity takes my hand and leads.

- [Carrie] This performance mixed poetry and choreography centered around dignity.

- I walk with dignity.

So I was thinking about that word and the way that flamenco allows for dignity and sort of re-empowers the individual to find dignity if they have been dehumanized in some way.

- [Carrie] The language of flamenco has helped Blumenfeld since she was first introduced back in middle school.

- I think every middle schooler is going through a lot and trying to figure out who they are and, you know, being inundated by society with lots of ideas and just trying to search for one's self.

And so flamenco really helped me in that moment of my life and has helped me in other challenging moments in my life to find an outlet and also to have community as well.

So, one of the really cool things about flamenco is it attracts people from all different walks of life, different economic backgrounds, different ethnic backgrounds.

And I think that's because flamenco is a hybrid form to begin with, it drew from many different cultures and histories so it still welcomes people from just so many different backgrounds and experiences.

And so I just wanna give people the opportunity to, when they need that expressive outlet, that flamenco is here for them.

- [Carrie] While some people in Northeast Ohio may just be learning about flamenco for the first time, Blumenfeld says she finds this to be a great arts community.

- And it takes a community of people to have flamenco.

So, that act of witnessing when you're expressing something very personal, I think is so important to healing and to building community.

(gentle music) - [David] Abrepaso performs in August, both in Cleveland and Akron.

From one woman's dream of dancing to another whose passion led her to a delicious dream of a dessert.

She's making it in Soland and making our mouths water at the same time.

Check it out.

- I never fixed an ice cream machine before or had to fix a dishwasher.

I sat behind a desk with a computer.

I was never in a kitchen.

So lots of challenges, things that I've never done before, but I love growing.

I like being challenged every day.

(upbeat music) Hi, my name's Nicole Dauria and I'm the owner and pop-preneur of Pop Culture CLE.

Pop Culture is a gourmet dessert shop with an emphasis on frozen desserts.

And we are known for our gourmet ice cream on a stick in the shape of a Popsicle.

I love running my own business.

I like being creative, just bein' in my jeans and come to find out my biological father also was an entrepreneur his whole life.

So it came full circle.

I was able to come up with some of my favorite desserts and create them into frozen desserts.

One of our best sellers is a s'mores popsicle.

It's a chocolate custard and then it's slathered with homemade marshmallow cream.

And we roast that as you would a marshmallow for a s'mores and then we roll it in graham cracker crumb.

The creme brulee, somebody nominated us in the Cleveland Magazine and we won best dessert on a stick and they did create a category for us.

When you're making the frozen desserts, you take a liquid base and we put it into a bucket and blend it.

Then you pour it into these molds.

And each mold has 28 cavities.

And then you take three molds, which is 84 put 'em into a machine that has glycol propylene and water mixed together.

It gets down to a negative 22 degree Celsius and it flash freezes so we could produce 168 popsicles every hour.

We came up with the word pop culture and my daughter at the time was 10 years old.

She's a budding artist.

So I thought it would be a really fun way to tie in art and the passion of the food together.

There's a piece of artwork, "Lady Liberty", which is a Keith Herring picture but we affectionately call it "Lady Lickerty".

We've got Peter Max's "Man in the Umbrella" but it's actually "Man in the Popsicle".

We have the Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein.

It's my happy place.

I wanna share my happy place with everybody.

- [David] And if you're way into entrepreneurs like Nicole, find more people who are making it in Northeast Ohio at arts.ideastream.org.

Mary Verdi-Fletcher is a dance icon and a long time advocate for those with disabilities.

In 1980, she founded her integrated company Dancing Wheels and has inspired audiences ever since.

And that inspiration travels from Cleveland to Cincinnati where the Vulcan's Forge Performing Arts Collaborative has offered even more artistic opportunities for disabled people since 2016.

(ethereal music) - There's something inside all of us that wants to create.

The arts helps bring us, brings that out.

It overcomes the, our limitations and it helps us fulfill ourselves getting past the disabilities and the little boxes we put one another in, the labels we put on one another.

Art kind of transcends all that.

My name is Juan Miller.

I'm the Executive Producer of Vulcan's Forge Performing Arts Collaborative and also Chairman of the Board.

Basically, we are a production company for people with disabilities in the region.

We serve challenged artists with the help of unchallenged artists.

Our idea is for total inclusion, we hope to bring the art of challenged artists to the Cincinnati public with both challenged and unchallenged artists alike.

- Push.

Pull.

Expand.

Retract.

Expand.

Retract.

Other side.

Push.

Pull.

- I'm a creative person.

I'm a creative soul.

I enjoyed the workshop.

It's also fun and inspiring for me because I'm seeing people with various types of disabilities and to watch them, the enthusiasm and they were living.

And that to me, was what it was all about, to enjoy life.

What caused me to work with Juan Miller and others to create Vulcan's Forge is very simple.

A recognition that I was not being valued for the talents and skills that I have, that my friend Juan was not being valued for his talent and skills that he has.

And that there are thousand and maybe even hundreds of thousand of people like us who are not being recognized, who are being overlooked for what they can bring to this world.

And Vulcan's Forge is working hard to open up those doors of opportunity.

♪ I want you to see me ♪ ♪ I want you to see me.

♪ ♪ I want you to see me ♪ ♪ Is it really see me now.

♪ - Wheels on Fire was kind of a brainchild of mine.

I'm not sure exactly where I had heard first about Dancing Wheels, but I thought their mission and our mission was so right on point with one another, I had to find a way to bring them to Cincinnati.

They had been performing for 40 years now.

I think this is their 40th anniversary and they are headed by Mary Fletcher.

I know her mother was a dancer and so she always wanted to be a dancer and didn't let her disability stop her.

("Spring" by Vivaldi) (audience cheers and applauds) - We see ourselves as an umbrella organization to try and bring together various groups that serve disabilities together into cohesive performance art.

We also would like to be able to teach people the arts and drama and writing and theatrical production and those kinds of things.

Maybe farther down the line is where we see as art ourselves going eventually.

Not even the sky is limited in that the possibilities for any and everybody, especially in the arts.

If you can believe it, you can create it.

There's an audience out there for it.

And we would like to take your art and bring it to that audience.

- [David] A forgotten vocal group from the 1960s finally gets its due in a new exhibition.

On the next "Applause", we spotlight these singing bus drivers known as The Transiteers.

And before Cleveland says goodbye to an historic theater, we take a tour of the old Cleveland Playhouse, built in 1927.

Plus we share a funky performance by Akron guitarist Dan Wilson, and a few other Tri-C Jazz Fest all stars.

All that and more on the next round of "Applause".

("Who Shot John?"

By Dan Wilson) Now it's time to head to the 614, where we find blue collar metal artist, Fred McMullen who just loves to combine his two passions, art and science.

(whimsical music) - I had several older brothers.

When we were little, of course I followed their path.

One of the things they did was they melted lead in the basement.

(whimsical music continues) My dad would come home with this box of tire weights, probably he figure he'd use the lead for something.

We would melt those down and pour 'em into molds.

I think one was called creepy crawlers or something like that.

They make great molds for the lead.

And so I'd pour those in there and it would be shaped like what the mold was.

I think that started my fascination with the metal.

I remember trying to melt nickels with a propane torch to see what it would do.

And that experimentation was just always something we did.

(whimsical music continues) I've worked a lot of different jobs, management positions, supervisory positions, and for someone who's creative that can become kind of a grind.

When I started doing the bronze, everything just kind of clicked.

It's something I enjoy doing.

(mellow music) I like the bronze process, 'cause it, there's so many steps in it.

It kind of uses all parts of your brain, you know, melting the metal to about 2100 degrees.

It's gotta be skimmed off The molds have to be designed so that the metal will flow in correctly.

The bronze will solidify quite quickly.

We've busted up molds, you know, within 10, 15 minutes.

I like to wait at least half an hour.

They're still extremely hot when you pull them out of the molds.

A lot of times we'll just have a bucket of water.

We'll dip it in there and that's exciting too.

Watch it pshhh.

And then that's when you get down to doing the fine finishing.

A lot of times people pour stuff and they just like it the way it is.

Other times people wanna sand it and buff it and polish it.

That's just a personal preference.

It's just a, it's a great process to play around with.

What I like about it is it's figuring things out using that part of the brain where you're figuring things out, you're solving problems.

I like the creativity.

I'll have an idea and I like solving the problem to get my idea to be made.

It's like solving a puzzle but three dimensionally, creatively.

With my sculptures where I have a found object, I really enjoy those because it'll sit around for a while until something kind of hits me and I'll figure out, oh, I'll make a figure doing this with that piece of found object.

And you know, it's very gratifying when it works.

And then when someone else likes it, that's even better.

So, this is my junk shelf and this is where I throw things that I'll find that have an interest to me, mostly machine parts, things like that.

And people will bring me things.

Someone brought me a couple of these which I haven't decided what to do with but they're great form, old cast iron fence part, I think.

This is somethin' I found in a barn that I had on a property.

You know, it's a hand forged hook.

It's just really interesting because it's not perfect.

It's not machine made and it has a lot of character.

I don't let any interesting metal thing go to waste.

(gentle music) So the series was called "Toil".

I like the human figures just because you know what is man's life, but kind of toil and getting through life.

So, I ended up making figures that climbed or were laboring over something.

People that work hard for a living, do their jobs well, I find that as an inspiration too.

And I think that's reflected in my "Toil" series, you know kind of as a tribute to them.

This is a figure I did recently.

I was thinking about solitude and so I wanted to make a, my representation of Rodin's "The Thinker".

I found a image of this older African American guy sitting on a bench contemplating mostly about the times we're in.

I'm curious what someone like that's perspective would be, who's seen so much through the last decades in America.

That's him.

That's my version of "The Thinker".

I love birds and find a lot of inspiration from those.

They are just amazing creatures.

We'll go to the park and we'll walk and I'll just see a branch that is really interesting.

Just the way it's formed.

That starts me with, you know, I'll make the branch out of metal and then I'll find a bird.

And so I'll add those to the branch.

I'm just stealing from God.

But I think it's cool.

When you find something and it comes together, it really scratches that itch of yeah, that's what I was after.

And then the best part of all is when someone else falls in love with it and they talk to you about it.

It spoke to you when you made it, it's spoken to them and that's worth more than any financial gain.

- [David] During the pandemic, the Cleveland Orchestra helped commission a new work by Danish composer, Hans Abrahamsen.

Written during the COVID 19 lockdown, the piece marks the composers return to writing new music for a full orchestra for the first time, since 1981.

The result received its world premier at Severance.

("Fast with passion, impetus with fire" by Hans Abrahamsen) In like a lion, out like a lamb.

The Cleveland Orchestra can do it all and you can enjoy more music from their Adella app.

And hey, we've got an app too, the PBS app.

That's where you can catch all of our "Applause" programs for free and on demand.

(symphonic music continues) Well, the door is closing on this week's show but when one door shuts another opens.

So with that in mind, please join us next week for another edition of "Applause".

I'm Ideastream Public Media's David C. Barnett.

(upbeat music) - [Announcer] Production of "Applause" on Ideastream Public Media is made possible by the John P. Murphy Foundation, The Kulas Foundation and by Cuyahoga County residents through Cuyahoga Arts and Culture.