- [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 & Culture.

(upbeat music) - [Announcer] Coming up, we step into a dance class at the National Center for Choreography in Akron.

Plus, walk along a historic suffragist trail in southern Ohio.

And enjoy the music of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, performed by the Cleveland Orchestra and led by a British legend.

Welcome it's time once again for Applause.

I'm Ideastream's, David C. Barnett.

Established in 2015, The National Center for Choreography at the University of Akron is an incubator for dance.

NCC Akron invites artists from across the country into the studios to create and to teach new steps to students.

(bouncy music) - My name's Christy Bolingbroke.

I'm the executive artistic director for the National Center for Choreography at the University of Akron.

NCCAkron for short, is the second National Center for choreography here in the country.

We are solely dedicated to research and development and don't produce shows.

So instead we're here to foster the creative process and enhance the national dance ecosystem.

There are seven studios.

The arrangement with the university is one, is dedicated for our use, 365 days a year.

That is so rare.

(chuckles) You know, the race for space regardless where artists live is real and anytime they come through the Rust Belt here, whether it's in Cleveland or in Akron we've hosted different groups, and they can't get over the beautiful and amazing facilities that we have around here.

And so the fact that we can adapt and provide that is tremendous.

(bouncy music) - Hi, my name is Wilfrid Souly and I'm originally from Burkina Faso in West Africa.

And I'm currently an assistant professor in dance practice here at the University of Akron.

Choreography Center was one of the biggest attraction for me because in my work I like to constantly be creating something new.

The choreography center is one of the biggest asset of the department because it allows us to bring many choreographers who have like a different vision than what we are doing here in the department.

And that allows the students to learn other perspectives or themselves in dancing.

- You know, a lot of dance programs in the country were built in the mid 20th century, mostly by white women, mostly taking over women's gymnasiums.

And now in the 21st century institutions are trying to open up.

- And so that's what we're shooting for today.

- [Christy] And so that's where 21st Century dance practices came up for us as a capsule series.

So we'll bring in six different teaching artists making work today.

Some of them building off of the knowledge in the 20th century, some of them making up their new practices today and working with the UA faculty.

- Don't wait the first time!

- I think dance should be evolving with time because people are evolving and our world is evolving therefore we need to always get inspiration from what's happening now in order to create new things for tomorrow.

- Willie Souly had said, you know what, "I really wanna highlight what we don't have in our core curriculum."

And a lot of that led from West African dance and that's some of his training coming out of Burkina Faso.

And Errin Weaver was one of those artists and happened to also be in our backyard which is very exciting for us to share with the students.

- My name is Errin Weaver.

I am the executive artistic director of Mojuba Dance Collective.

Mojuba Dance Collective exists to restore community wellness to validate the Black narrative and to bring community through sacred and cultural dance forms.

Since I've been teaching a fundula technique, which is an African contemporary technique that was developed and cultivated by the late Dr. Cariama Welsh out of Temple University.

She has written the books on African dance.

- All right, let's try it.

Okay, so we're walking through.

Really articulating the ankles here.

- [Errin] I'm so grateful to have shared in one of the modern classes for three mornings this week, Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.

And it's really been a joy.

- It's one of these forms when you look at it where you cannot really fake it or try to do like no, you have to really give yourself and once you give yourself it's pushing you more.

It's pushing you into doing more and trying to surpass yourself all the time.

And they find it in the repetitions of the movements.

Actually, I like it because it's kind of broadening our perspective, perspectives of dancing.

'Cause I feel that to me particularly, dance shouldn't be just here.

It needs to be evolving and yeah because our world is evolving, need to always try new things.

Experiment.

- Oh my goodness, it is amazing.

I threw a lot at these students at one time.

I mean, from day one you start to tap into the emotion because it's coming from a deeper place inside rather than just trying to create shapes.

And so that's what I try to inspire when I'm teaching classes to push you, challenge you to know that there's more.

- We wanna dance and we will dance.

Okay?

So in order to do that, we have to use our plie.

- I happen to be also a musician.

Because from my basic training, basically I learn a dance style where music and dance are always going together.

It's a great experience to see a dancer that can really move into the music.

- It was amazing to have and to work with Willie.

And what people don't often realize is that everything we're doing is on the spot.

It's a marriage when we're talking about dance syndrome in the African diaspora.

So we haven't rehearsed anything.

He has no idea what I'm going to do.

- I believe that the dancers were great and they really connected to the form, connected to the music.

And that made believe, that's what made that experience easy and brought that joy into them.

'Cause when you are moving with everybody in the community and then in communion with the music, it just provides a lot of joy.

- There's nothing like it.

There's nothing like it.

The excitement that you see in the classroom, excitement that you see in the students, it's coming from a natural place within me an authentic place within me.

I am so thrilled that they had here the foresight to put something like this together.

So what they're doing is allowing a little crack, a little door to open, so that there's new perspectives in the room, there's new voices on the stage, new voices in the room and then that can only feed the artists that are here, only feed the students that are here.

So I think there's a great vision and I'm excited to be a part of it.

- And I'm sure that in the future we will have like a lot of dancers from this department bringing change into the world of dancers.

(upbeat music and conga drum plays) (laughter of students) - [Narrator] Just two years ago was the commemoration of the centennial of the 19th Amendment, which gave women the right to vote.

Let's look back now on the role that art played in the women's suffrage movement.

As we travel the National Votes for Women Trail.

- [Narrator 2] Suffragists were instrumental in laying the groundwork for the human rights we have today.

Many of which go beyond a woman's right to vote.

- Women of the past can be models for us today.

Their words speak to so many of the events that are happening in the political arena in the United States right now.

When we think about art and the suffrage movement, we need to think about two different eras.

The era before we have the technologies that enable us to mass produce and mass distribute pictures and photograph and even to record and share music.

One of the more important artists for the woman's suffrage movement in Ohio was Cornelia Cassidy Davis.

Davis was a Cincinnati artist.

She was a member of the Cincinnati Woman's suffrage party.

She participated in a competition in 1912 for that year's campaign, when Ohio women were widely expected to succeed in getting the vote.

Davis created a work that was later reproduced in postcards and posters, let Ohio women vote.

It became iconic for the Ohio campaign.

It's modeled after the state seal and uses elements of that.

One of Davis's competitors in this campaign was Nina Allender.

Allender becomes perhaps one of the most influential suffrage cartoonists of the era through her work for the National Woman's Party publication, the Suffragist.

If I think of art in the woman's suffrage movement there are three stories about the impact of art that come to mind.

The first is from the early 1850s, and it actually has to do with a sculpture by Hiram Powers called, The Greek Slave.

This sculpture of The Greek Slave toured the country and Lucy Stone who became a national leader in woman's suffrage, saw the sculpture and was moved to spend more of her time focused on woman's rights.

A second story has to do with theatrical professional Hazel McKay and she's the mastermind behind many of the pageants that the National Woman's Party produced.

In connection with the famous 1913 Suffrage Parade, McKay created a pageant at the front of the treasury building called the Allegory.

A third story has to do with the Portrait monument which Suffragist commissioned and gave to the country in February of 1921.

It's a bust of Susan B. Anthony, Lucretia Mott, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton.

The thing about the portrait monument is it spent exactly one day in the rotunda and then was relegated to the basement for the next 75 years.

And it took an act of Congress to get it restored to the rotunda.

Women in history in general are overlooked.

Women's stories might at most be a footnote in standard history that you might study in school.

So it's important that these stories are told.

- In 2016, we started a volunteer grassroots effort and we populated a database with sites of importance to the women's suffrage story.

- [Katherine] There are more than 2,020 sites on the online map for the National Votes for Women Trail.

- Along the way, the William G. Pomeroy Foundation in Syracuse New York recognize the importance of this project and offered to fund over 200 historical roadside markers.

So that made our virtual trail into a physical trail.

The Sewah Studios has been really terrific to work with and we're so grateful for their expertise.

- Sewah Studios is America's premier cast aluminum historical marker manufacturer located here in Marriott, Ohio.

Sewah Studios was founded in 1927.

It was really a man's dream to mark the byways and the highways of America with cast aluminum historical markers.

Sewah is really the only known large manufacturer of historical markers in the nation and this is a niche business.

We make nothing but historical markers.

Sewah's process is really kind of locked in time.

There's really four really core processes.

First, we type set the patterns where we individually lay out every letter and then we glue them in place just long enough to make an impression in the sand which is our next process, which is the sand foundry.

And this process dates back all the way to the Egyptians.

The sand comes from the Ohio River.

The Ohio River has a perfect silt and clay mixture for the casting process.

We make two molds, put them together and then in the void we transfer the mold aluminum.

After the casting is made, we bring it into our finishing department where we work down any of the imperfections or the pouring gates, and we try to clean it up from a metal standpoint to get it ready for the painting process.

After that, we take it into our electrostatic powder coating process, puts a very hard durable finish on it.

Next, we then roll on a liquid enamel on all of the letters to get the contrasting view to where you can actually read them.

And then we do the beautiful hand painted seals.

The votes for women's trail markers design comes from the William G. Pomeroy Foundation and they're really kind of a neat combination of a white and the pink, and then some of the more delicate, more feminine looking colors.

And we really think it's a nice grouping of colors to go on our marker and they've been well received nationwide.

(crowd cheers) - The another mission of the National Votes through Women Trail was that we wanted to shine a light on underrepresented women.

We're telling the stories that we don't know about of women of color.

(crowd cheers) - [Narrator] One of those women was Julia Galloway Higgins, a highly influential woman in the Dayton community.

- Julia began going to the meetings of the Dayton Women's Suffrage Association.

It was a segregated organization.

She would be referred to within the minutes as "The colored woman was here today.

The colored woman was back again."

Well the colored woman built a booth and she took it to the Dayton Courthouse on Mondays and she began to give speeches on women's suffrage and the women's right to vote.

At that time, she invited women from the WCA, the Women's Christian Association, number two, she invited women from the Dayton Women's Suffrage Association to come and give speeches as well.

So what began as a segregated effort, it was through her efforts that it became an integrated effort.

And likely because of the amount of racism that was endured and faced during that time, she left that organization and it was very evident that her work for suffrage never stopped.

She was able to do that work through the WCA and it was later that we found within our family, handwritten archives that she organized the Montgomery County Equal Women's Suffrage Association.

Would the Dayton community be different had there been no Julia Higgins?

Absolutely it would be.

Voter's rights, the support of women's rights, the support of women's right to choose.

All of these were things that Julia worked with and towards within her lifetime.

And here we are again.

So we passed torches.

They are not extinguished.

What was done generations ago is relevant today.

Learn from it.

Augment it for today's world and society and keep up the fight.

(upbeat music) - [Announcer] On the next Applause, Beatlemania is back and we've got your ticket to ride.

Plus meet a couple of case grads who are making violins with a spool of plastic and a 3D laser printer.

And we explore gender identity with vocalist Kyle Kidd and guitarist Marcus Alen Ward.

All this and more on the next round of Applause.

♪ Body, ♪ ♪ Gain some self control ♪ ♪ Nothing's ♪ ♪ Like it was before ♪ - [Narrator] Columbus artist Casey Bradley likes to explore our relationship with the natural world through his surreal sculptures.

And by doing so, he aims to create a dialogue about the future of that tenuous relationship.

(soft music) - My inspiration for most of my work is derived from nature, found materials, but more deeply rooted in the textures and some of the relationships that we have with nature that I think you know, maybe go less recognized today than they used to, since we've distanced ourself.

(soft music) To do stuff with hands and feet.

With those, there's that interesting connection of like our feet and our hands are our interface with the world.

I mean, they're one of our most important body parts in that way.

So the dialogue between those and these architectural kind of elements that I juxtapose them with or hybridize them with in the sculpture kind of creates that.

Some of that surreal kind of airs.

I came to CCAD in the mid-nineties to study illustration.

I wanted to do comic books for fantasy art.

So that obviously changed.

(laughs) (intriguing music) I've always made three-dimensional objects, walking sticks, jewelry, I did all this kind of stuff and figured out how to do it before I even came to college I started doing 3D things.

So it's kind of the very beginning of me dabbling in making actual objects.

Some of 'em were functional too because that was a vehicle to get to the experience of the material, to learn about the material, to have that function as a driver.

I actually started casting metal.

I think that was one of the biggest impetuses to me studying sculpture.

Metal casting was what I was really, really excited about.

I basically never looked back after my first bronze cast.

I went to graduate school to cast iron because I wanted to make sculptures that would actually physically degrade.

They would rust, you could put them outside and do things with them that way.

But the thing about casting metal that kind of ties into where we are now with the work, the metal has always been my way to meet nature in the middle, to recreate a formal element to combine with the natural elements that I find or natural materials or objects that I find and help to bring that message or concept or idea out by partnering with those natural materials.

So bone collector comes from this idea of I've always found sycamore branches and their knot work that happens when they scar to be very bone like kind of like a femur.

(melancholic music) I've always thought of them as looking like bones.

So I just decided one day that I'm gonna start picking these up strictly to do a piece about collecting these tree bones and touch on the beauty of the natural weathering that they have and the process that got them there.

But also where I meet nature in the middle and basically have that material adopt another identity and vocabulary.

(melancholic music continues) I do think we're in conflict with nature quite a bit with our choices and we don't think long term and nature is long term.

I do think that sometimes we make choices without actually working on what the outcome will be and understanding what the outcome will be.

And a lot of the choices we make serve a means to an end.

Ever since, even my earliest work I was bringing nature into the gallery and I think there's a magic to that.

Going back to people who really live in the city and they're city dwellers and they, all their extracurriculars in their life are social or going to the restaurant or the bar or you know, another event around town.

It's like, get out of town, get into the woods get in nature and connect with that.

I think making work like this helps some people reconnect with nature in a different way.

And my job as the artist is to kind of recreate those materials and reassemble them and compose them in a way that speaks to that.

(melancholic music fades) - [Narrator] When it comes to the music of Mozart, Dame Jane Glover is a renowned specialist known for conducting from memory.

Here she leads the Cleveland Orchestra in Mozart's Prague Symphony.

(classical music) This is one of many Cleveland Orchestra concerts available in their entirety via the orchestra's app, AdelA.

And don't forget, you can watch past episodes of Applause on demand via the PBS app.

Okay, it's time to go.

Hope you enjoyed our show.

I'm Ideastream public media's David C. Barnett inviting you to tune in for the next round of Applause.

(classical music continues) - [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 & Culture.