♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ There's a sense of openness to Atlanta.

♪♪♪ Brewer: It's got this history.

It's southern and conservative, but it's got a progressive element.

♪♪♪ We have this world of possibilities.

The city gets to be what we make of it.

♪♪♪ Hammond: You can't help but draw from the people around you.

And everyone seems to be growing in several directions all at once.

There are so many dynamic and amazing artists who live and work here.

Lee: There's something about Atlanta's energy that always feels like it's just starting.

♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ My name is Tara Lee, and I've been a dancer with the Atlanta Ballet for 20 years.

♪♪♪ Typical day in a dancer's life, we always start with a company ballet class in the morning.

♪♪♪ That's just our routine every morning, how we warm up, how we get our mind and bodies kind of prepared for the day.

It's exercise after exercise.

We start at the bar.

We end up in the center of the floor, jumping and turning.

♪♪♪ In a way, it's the hardest part of the day because it's a technical, physical hour and a half and it's -- it's there to keep us in shape and for us to keep on pushing ourselves to improve our technique and our -- and our instrument.

And then we have up to six hours of rehearsal.

♪♪♪ It's intense.

It's intense.

♪♪♪ I've been choreographing for the last few years.

And this last summer I did a piece called "Under the Olive Tree" for New Orleans Ballet Theater.

♪♪♪ Another piece we did before that was called "Pavo," and we actually commissioned a new musical score for that one that was performed at the Woodruff Arts Center.

♪♪♪ I love the idea that you can dream up something in your mind and during the process of it being created, it changes and surprises you as it goes.

♪♪♪ It's also a process where it's creating itself and you get to kind of witness it.

So it's much of you discovering it as creating it.

♪♪♪ Ballet is very much a collaborative art form because not only is there choreography and dancers, but there's all the production elements that go in.

So it's very much always a collective effort when you see the finished product on stage.

♪♪♪ When you kind of conceive of an idea, you have to also think about the nuts and bolts of it.

So imagery translates into how is that going to interpret itself to become what it should look like on stage?

It's the choreography, lighting, it's the music chorus, it's the costume design.

♪♪♪ Kevin Anderson is director of our costuming.

We do a lot of building of costumes here.

♪♪♪ We are building, as you know, all of our company dancers brand-new rehearsal tutus.

There are over 133 yards of tulle in total in this.

And imagine going across to a football field, walking on your fingers a half an inch at a time.

That is what these amazing people are doing behind us.

♪♪♪ Just to see the state you're in right here is about three days of work.

So all this work is just for a rehearsal costume.

Just for the rehearsal costume.

♪♪♪ Classical ballet is so difficult because there is a standard of perfection that we all understand that no one can necessarily ever achieve.

The other side of the spectrum is creating new work and new language, and that's so important as well.

I mean, both sides are needed.

♪♪♪ One example of our city's eclectic mix of dance voices is Lauri Stallings and GLO.

Lauri Stallings is a good friend of mine.

I did a workshop with her the year after she got to Atlanta.

Lee: And she's an artist that represents really pushing the edge and furthering the language to things that challenge and provoke people to think of dance in a different way.

But the style is... it's so hard to explain.

♪♪♪ We are working in the outer limits, sometimes incredibly ambiguous places.

Four times.

And then the fourth time... Mind-heart spaces.

Most of all, it seems to be a very reactive dance to the ground or to the architecture of a space, which I find fascinating.

Stallings: These moments are also offering a different kind of time to live in -- stretching time, slowing it down.

Hence the reason the work could happen over six hours or it could happen 24 hours a day for 7 days.

So I'm saying that performance has a longevity and a different kind of potentiality with people and cities, and that's what we're constantly working with.

The moment where she finds you and starts getting closer and closer... ♪♪♪ ...that system happens very early in the installation.

Like really early, like almost out of the gate.

This is the first thing the horse does.

And Michelle, she's got so much intentionality into her work.

And it went on four or five minutes, and then it just vanished.

And -- And I use vanishing a lot.

We just vanish and we move on to another idea or another situation.

Creating new work is... has to happen all the time because that's what's relevant.

So there's no standard or there's no model to follow.

There's only something to create and to -- to discover.

♪♪♪ As the practice develops, I more and more consider this whole thing and it's very much an experiment, this hybrid form of social art.

I consider it a form of deejaying.

♪♪♪ Today, I was navigating in and out of the space and calling systems based upon... perhaps your needs or just how the space was constructed.

Most everyone was over there.

And so I just...

It's a form of deejaying.

Spano and I talk about this quite a bit.

It's also a form of conducting.

Maybe the most surprising... and fruitful collaboration I've had in Atlanta is with GLO.

We're an unlikely pairing in a way, because she's doing this, uh, this work in public spaces and her dancers do these incredibly extended, almost like installations, moving installations.

She calls them moving artists.

They are moving artists.

The incredible stuff they did in Central Park... Then later at the goat farm, she had me really quite involved in much of the movement aspect of the work we did together, which was such a great challenge for me to engage with these incredibly cultivated dancers.

♪♪♪ To me, that's what's so exhilarating is when you're on a voyage of discovery.

♪♪♪ I'm often asked, "What does it mean to be a conductor?

What are you doing up there?"

I often say first, if you ever get the chance, take it because it's the best place to hear an orchestra.

♪♪♪ When you're conducting, you also get to influence it and guide it and shape it.

♪♪♪ One of the marvelous things about being a conductor is you have all -- it's not just that wash of sound, but all of that creative energy that's coming from these individual musicians.

And so you're interacting with all of them in a sense.

And so there's also that rush of creative juice.

I mean, as a conductor, you're the musician who doesn't make any sounds, so you really don't make music as a conductor without other people.

Stallings: A conductor sometimes feels as if they're not doing their own music.

They're always interpreting others.

♪♪♪ [ Woman singing opera music ] Spano: I finished a project I've been working on for a very, very long time, which is solo piano music.

And I looked at the songs and thought Jessica Rivera should sing these.

These are perfect for Jessica.

[ Singing continues ] She is a tremendously inspiring singer.

And so I finished the set for her and -- and it all worked out beautifully.

So to have her sing them is also a great gift.

[ Singing continues ] There's the obvious collaborations when people have a certain kind of empathy or sympathy to begin with or share a certain kind of discipline.

That's beautiful.

But for me, what's even more exciting is when the intersection of the two circles is not so obvious until the work happens.

The first three years of my career, I was very much a conventional choreographer.

I spent a great deal of time in and out of Atlanta as a resident choreographer of the ballet.

And so I had the blessing of working really rigorously with Big Boi and the Dungeon Family.

♪♪♪ And we mixed.

And speaking of deejaying, we deejayed.

♪♪♪ And then you find that there's this whole other world that opens up because of what each party brought to the table.

Stallings: I fell in love with Atlanta during that process.

♪♪♪ [ Engine starts ] ♪♪♪ Yeah, this is what they call the "SWAT" -- Southwest Atlanta.

It's one of the many areas that freight trains exist in Atlanta.

Stallings: I grew up in the south.

I grew up on the "other side of the tracks," the dirt road, the projects.

I found a family through the hip hop community here.

Dr. Dax: My name is Dr. Dax.

I grew up in Atlanta, and I grew up with Outkast, Goodie Mob, the Dungeon Family.

And everybody I went to school with that I was friends with were creatives, which in Atlanta wasn't really a cool thing back in the day.

Everybody was into sports and street things.

Being in band and playing the clarinet or being in a drumline wasn't as cool as being a football player or even a drug dealer or whatever.

So growing up with those guys and just, you know, seeing their -- their method and, like, their strategies and the way they were approaching art and taking it dead serious influenced me and the direction I went into as far as doing graffiti.

So hopefully in a second here we'll see...

I can show you a little bit about what I'm talking about.

The guy who started Outkast and Dungeon Family who made that whole sound, his name is Ray Murray.

He's one third of Organized Noize, a production team here, which made the Atlanta sound.

He was a graffiti writer that wrote "Razz."

And when I first noticed graffiti, it was his.

So that -- that was the spark.

The circle of Dungeon Family, we never looked at it as like, okay, you guys do music and you guys are the artists.

We just looked at it as kind of like Southern hip hop.

We didn't even really know about the elements of hip hop.

But to later find out, you know, that these are the four elements of hip hop being deejaying, breakdancing, graffiti and emceeing.

And we just looked at it as one big creative movement.

While those guys were in the studio making music, I was painting trains behind the studio.

Sometimes those guys would watch out for me.

♪♪♪ We started just applying, you know, traditional, like, graffiti as known as it is today.

Started applying it to freight trains because they go all over North America, Canada, you know, Mexico.

Being in the south and not being seen as much, that was a good way for us to, like, you know, let the world know that we were here.

And it worked way better than we could ever imagine.

We were in Philadelphia, it was snowing, like, on tour with Outkast.

There was trains at our hotel, and I was like, "Man, I knew I should have bought some more paint."

And André 3000 was like, "Oh, I just happened to have some paint on my bus."

And, like, they all watched out for me and we painted trains before we went into our hotel with the tour busses sitting outside.

You know, painting the trains has always held a special place in my heart.

I spent my whole childhood doing it.

I get excited still when I see the trains and the engines running just I think as any kid would.

You know, I embrace my graffiti history.

You can see my graffiti in all my art.

It's pretty much just a bunch of graffiti style because graffiti, you know, isn't on canvas.

It's on trains and buildings.

But if it was to be on canvas, there it is.

I have a lot of murals here, like all over Ponce de Leon, East Atlanta Village, all the way up to Buckhead.

You know, turn of the century, all the way to the '90s, which a lot of factories and industry closed down here, so now we're left with a lot of abandoned tracks and stuff.

And people went to the streets and started street bombing.

HENSE I met back in the early '90s.

He's a little younger than me.

I found out he went to my high school and stuff, so I didn't necessarily take him under my wing, but we used to be really cool.

We did graffiti together.

So, everybody in Atlanta knows HENSE.

He wrote his name all over the city.

[ Rail cars clacking ] ♪♪♪ In Atlanta, the graffiti scene was -- was smaller than what you -- what we had in New York and LA and larger cities.

But we had something special, I think.

♪♪♪ The name HENSE was something that I just developed when I was -- I think I was 14 or 15.

I was looking for a cool name to write.

I was into skateboarding.

I was into graffiti.

He was a monster.

He was -- He was obsessed.

He was a graffiti bomber.

He bombed really hard.

Yeah.

♪♪♪ Brewer: I wanted to associate myself with -- with things that were not mainstream.

I wanted to be doing what Kurt Cobain was doing.

And, you know, something that -- that was -- that was considered cool but not like status quo.

And I think that's where the whole attraction to graffiti came from.

♪♪♪ Dr. Dax: I painted way longer than him, but once he got, you know, the bug, he went ballistic.

♪♪♪ HENSE developed a very eclectic style of graffiti on objects and on buildings.

Dr. Dax: So he painted a much shorter time, but in that short period of time, he did what I did in my 25-year career in probably like a 10-year period, which shocked people.

It was very shocking.

♪♪♪ I remember going down to these [indistinct] walls, and just the mystery behind it, I think, was what was really intriguing.

It's like, I didn't know -- I didn't know what, you know, where they were from.

I didn't know how old they were.

I didn't know if it was a male or a female.

And that was really captivating.

And it was also rebellious.

Dr. Dax: And he would paint his name hanging off rooftops.

If you look downtown, there's remnants of the era of HENSE.

When I met HENSE, I told him, I'm like, "HENSE, one day you're going to have to grow up, and so writing your name around is not going to be what you want to be best known for."

[ Car horns honking ] Brewer: Right now we are -- We just left Midtown West, and we're going to be headed over towards Piedmont Park.

And I've got a mural on a wall on the BeltLine that we're headed to.

[ Keys jangling ] ♪♪♪ I remember going to a gallery show here in Atlanta and thinking that I possibly could be arrested.

There was the moment where I was still painting, you know, outside and without permission and then also trying to show in galleries.

♪♪♪ I remember telling my wife, who was my girlfriend at the time, you know, "Will you go and tell me if the police are there?"

You know, like I don't -- I don't want to show my face.

When he transferred into art, I think people went buying into his name at first, but then he also holds his own on canvas.

So -- And murals.

♪♪♪ Brewer: This is a wall that was commissioned by the Atlanta BeltLine in 2014.

One thing you learn through graffiti is that you need to be clean.

And as soon as I could get that out of my head, I feel like that actually, like, gave me the ability to move into a different realm with my work.

And this is just an example of, you know, using brushes as opposed to spray cans and kind of treating it like I would treat a canvas in my studio, but -- but just in a public setting and on a bigger scale.

♪♪♪ You know, what I got from graffiti was -- that was like the inner rebellious kid that was wanting this notoriety in a different way.

And what I do now is more... it's just a different feeling of, you know, satisfaction.

♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ Russell Love: HENSE's reputation soared to where he is now in national locations and even internationally.

♪♪♪ HENSE was one of the first artists that we used during Elevate to actually create a mural.

Elevate is a festival that started because it was a way for us to reimagine downtown as a cultural hub.

For 10 days, we created art installations, performances, murals.

♪♪♪ I would say that there are a lot of really talented artists that have passed through Atlanta.

Russell Love: During our first year, I was introduced to a very young firebrand by the name of Courtney Hammond.

She came in and worked with us for about three years as we pushed Elevate to the limits.

Then she partnered up with Beth Malone to create Dashboard.

♪♪♪ Malone: We run a group called Dashboard, and we have been doing this work for seven years.

Dashboard goes around the city of Atlanta and produces art exhibitions and art experiences in vacant properties.

♪♪♪ We are a platform for non-traditional artwork, non-traditional artists... performance, sculpture, lighting, soundscape, and we use architectural elements to heighten that artwork.

Dashboard and what they do is hard to describe, but incredibly fun to experience.

Dashboard is one of those things where it's like, man, I wish I had thought of that.

Haverty: They find really unique spaces that seem to hold power in them or some sort of history in Atlanta that has been overlooked.

Let's keep this dark and that's going to shine.

Yeah.

Yep.

So we put artists in unique spaces to create even more unique artwork.

They are reimagining every space that they can get their hands on.

♪♪♪ Atlanta is a city of neighborhoods, all with individual identities.

And what we've always been excited about is trying to connect them, which is a huge conversation in Atlanta.

It's like, how do you connect all these neighborhoods?

People talk about that through the BeltLine, through our public transit system, through our roadways, and we wanted to connect it through exhibitions.

Our appetite's not just so small as to do it in one neighborhood and one gallery, in one space, which means that we're going to have to hit the road.

And so the thought is and has continued forever, naturally, we do most of our work in a car.

So often we're driving around the city looking for beautiful buildings that are vacant that we can use for our shows and our projects.

Dashboard has not only set a standard, you know, for what could happen, they've also... led the charge.

Several years ago we had discussed how do you produce artwork with no outside stimulation?

So we wanted to do an experiment.

♪♪♪ Malone: So, in 2013, we found this building that the people had been evicted.

And so we came in and decided that we wanted to use it for a show.

Hammond: We locked two artists in here for 22 days and told them that they had no other direction besides just to make artwork.

We wanted to see what people would do if they were removed from their normal environments.

When we opened the doors on the last day of the third week of their kind of imprisonment, we found this.

♪♪♪ And they had completely painted the walls in this dizzying pattern.

They found two pool tables in the basement.

They found a working Galaga machine.

They found a working jukebox.

They created a completely immersive environment.

♪♪♪ The energy is -- is just being born for the arts.

Things are happening, Things are growing.

Things are becoming something new every day.

♪♪♪ It is an ever-evolving work of art.

♪♪♪ It's like become this melting pot of creativity, and people are, I think, excited about Atlanta.

♪♪♪ So I feel like the potential will never be reached.

It's always something that we're aspiring to, and that's what's -- what's exciting about this city.

♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪