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Public media is made possible by funding by Cuyahoga County residents through Cuyahoga Arts and Culture.

Coming up, learn how Cleveland and New York City are putting it together.

Bit by bit.

A photographer brings a bit of Mexico to Beachwood I think conspiracies and a young clarinetist is on the move in Oberlin.

Hello, and welcome to applause, everyone.

I'm your friendly neighborhood PBS pal, Kabir Bhatia.

If you don't know this already, I'm coming to you from Playhouse Square.

See this Playhouse Square in downtown Cleveland, where theater is King.

So let's explore our theatrical connection to the bright lights of Broadway.

There's a whole ecosystem of Broadway.

So Broadway people think of as Broadway, the place which is not just the street, but a whole neighborhood in New York where lots of shows take place.

And then there's the what's called the road.

And the road is the touring part of the ecosystem.

I guess the way to think about it, it's a bit like a sort of Paris fashion show.

You know, the the Broadway season of a show is often like the the Paris fashion Show for a big, a big brand.

And then that brand rolls out things all across the world in department stores in a way where, like the department stores, a lot of shows have have started and will start their life on the road in Cleveland.

We had the notebook and soon Hell's Kitchen will open international tour here, Spamalot.

And then next season Death Becomes There as well.

So it suggests that producers are keen on this idea and are following through.

Not only is Cleveland just a wonderful city, it's a great place to launch a show.

When you come to Cleveland, you have a three week run.

So a show gets to really settle here.

We get to know our audiences.

People tell their friends they come over the course of three weeks.

We really feel like that.

We have been immersed in the city.

The cast gets to eat it all the wonderful restaurants and gets to know the city, which is rare on a tour.

So it's really nice to launch a show here.

I really enjoy it, and it's also pretty wonderful to come here to these beautiful theaters, to work every day.

I feel like everyone's spirit is elevated, knowing that these are such beautiful buildings, and knowing that there's such an incredibly supportive community here in this city to come and see all of these shows from Broadway.

So beginning the show here feels exactly right.

I'm really thrilled about people coming to see The Notebook.

It's a beautiful intergenerational story.

I think the through line is really all about enduring love.

But what I love about it is that you get to see the challenges of that love at three very different moments in this couple's lives.

A lot of cities around the country bid to be the first port of call for a tour, and the reason they do that is because if you're the place where tour starts, you receive more profile in the press and the media, social media, but also you're creating more business for your local economy because the show will take for a number of weeks before it opens, which is great for local hotels, apartments, taxi drivers, restaurants, bars and all sorts.

So if you lobby the producer successfully to have the tour start in your city, you're doing very well.

Now, Cleveland is now able to lobby a lot harder for that because we successfully negotiated tax credits for Broadway.

And what that means is if you start a tour in Cleveland or in Ohio, which for us effectively means Cleveland, if you start a tour here, then 30% of any money spent in the state of Ohio is rebated to the producer, which is hugely helpful to the producer in the Broadway market, we are quite important because we're probably the largest market outside Broadway for Broadway touring shows, and that means as part of the ecosystem, we're rather important to the touring matrix.

So when a show decides to tour, if the show tours to Cleveland, that it helps the tour immensely.

And if the tour doesn't come here, it makes it to a more challenging, not impossible, but more challenging on a national basis.

So I didn't realize that when I came to Cleveland.

Now that I'm here, you know, I've learned that we have the highest number of season ticket holders in the country.

Again, that was surprising almost 40,000 people.

The two main theaters we use are Broadway, and we have about 13 theaters.

The two largest.

It is the KeyBank state.

And the kind of palace are enormous for Broadway.

So the KeyBank State Theater is 3200 seats and the Palace is 2700 seats.

And most Broadway theaters are about 800 or 1000 seats.

So we have a really great inventory of seats and happily, a really strong audience base as well.

It's because of Broadway tours that I saw many musicals growing up.

I'm from Dayton, Ohio and National tours were my introduction to Broadway.

I feel enormous pride as an Ohio gal to have the show here and have lots of family and friends that are going to be coming.

Honestly, I think every director and producer's goal is to be exactly here.

Yes, and to be launching a national tour.

You know, there's there's so much advantage to being able to bring the show out of New York as well.

So there's nothing sort of second banana about the tour.

In a lot of ways, the tour is the real prize.

So starting the tour here is a wonderful addition to the prize.

I'm also directing Hell's Kitchen here, which launches in Cleveland, so I'm excited after learning all the things we've learned, the fact that we've lived from The Notebook to be able to continue my pursuit of everything wonderful.

Cleveland, the subscribers here see a lot of theater.

So what's really beautiful is they know theater.

They love theater.

They come with an open heart.

The notebook is on stage at Playhouse Square through Saturday, September 27th.

Hell's kitchen arrives October 10th until November 1st.

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Toothpaste, hair combs, stuffed animals, crucifixes, even bottles of perfume.

These are the personal items left behind by those who dared across the US Mexican border without documentation.

Photographer Tom Kiefer tells their stories through his camera lens in the exhibit El sono Americano.

The largest ever presentation in the ten year history of this exhibition is on view now at the Art Museum in Beachwood.

We spoke with Kiefer in 2020.

My name is Tom Keefer.

I am an artist, photographer.

The project that I've been working on since 2007 is called El Sueno Americano The American Dream.

Aho is about 40 miles from the Mexico border and 100 miles from the California border.

So it's in the southwest corner of the state of Arizona.

It's high desert elevation of about 1800.

It's very hot.

It's blisteringly hot and deadly in the sense that if you're attempting to cross the desert, you're risking your life.

So after living here for about a year and a half, I had to get some type of job to have some money come in and in our local newspaper was this ad part time janitor at a US customs border patrol station?

I ended up working there for 11 years, and it was about my fourth year working there.

That I started becoming kind of angry and upset, seeing all the food that the migrants and asylum seekers brought with them, that that food that was in their backpack, that was just being thrown away.

So one day I mustered up the courage, went to the supervisor on duty, and I said, hey, can I bring this food to the food bank?

And his exact words to me were to ask you.

When I went in to retrieve the food, I would see a Bible, a rosary, group of photographs, family photographs, wallets with identification still inside the wallet.

Deeply personal belongings.

And it wasn't right.

I mean, these items were being taken away from the people that were apprehended and just callously thrown in the trash.

It was not right to let them go to the landfill.

And it was probably within a year.

I kind of accepted the fact that I was an artist, a photographer, and that these items needed to be photographed.

I took a bunch of black combs and brushes and placed them on a black background.

Just set it up and took a shot.

And I was kind of amazed by, wow, this is kind of the way forward.

And so I resigned on August 11th, 2014 so I could work on this full time.

So the way that I photograph these personal belongings is I come from a place of deep respect and care, and I want the person looking at the photograph to think about what they're seeing and not how I constructed the photograph.

The items that people selected to bring with them, I mean, there's the very limited space in their backpack.

So their great thought would go into what they would bring along with them.

You know, something that had a personal meaning to them.

You know, little toys that a child would carry with them, or perhaps the parent is bringing with them an item that they could remember their child from.

I mean, I find Cologne.

My first reaction was like, this is kind of silly.

I thought that this person wasn't taking this journey crossing the desert seriously.

Like, why would you bring a bottle of Cologne?

So in talking with other people, it became a parent.

This bottle of Cologne represented a future.

You know, whether they were going to be seeing a loved one that they hadn't seen in months or years, getting ready for their first job interview.

So putting their best foot forward.

I found this small notebook.

It was a diary.

And this person was professing their love to Blanca and how they were mesmerized, hypnotized by the beauty of her eyes.

I mean, I would even find little notebooks and kind of like a last will and testament, like God.

Please give us hope on our journey.

And that myself and my three fellow travelers make it safely to the US.

I mean, people have no idea.

They're shocked.

You know, they ask me, why would a rosary be taken away or why would they take away a Bible?

Why would they take away a woman's birth control pills?

So it's been a very educational experience for people seeing this.

What this is about is to foster a dialog, you know, have a very frank and honest conversation about, is this how we want to treat the most vulnerable?

This is not limited just to the people entering crossing the border.

We're talking about the 10 million plus people living in fear of ice, knocking on their door and taking away mom or dad and leaving behind the children.

What will become of them?

You know, is this how we want to be as a nation?

Is this how we want to treat people?

El Sueno Americano is on view at the Maltz Museum through February 16th.

Let's turn our attention now to hair as an art form.

Here's a group of black artists from Cincinnati who are a cut above.

In black and African pop culture and media, because that's like a hundred years worth of history that you can make.

And what does hair represent in black, black culture and popular media?

I think what's really important to keep in mind is that, hair has an incredibly rich and complicated presence in the black experience in America.

It's rooted in a history of pain, dispossession, and necessary change.

And I think it's this is why I'm saying that hair is incredibly complicated in black communities.

It's not just something that grows on our head right?

So to some of my clients, they're therapists for some of my clients.

They're busy for some of my clients.

They're herbalist because I'm a natural girly.

It's a some of my clients.

Everybody.

They love me.

Zippered and just the brand.

My brand is known throughout the city to Tri-State.

But the behavior that my brand brings.

That's what influence people to come to me.

I started doing hair.

It's a little girl.

I taught myself how to braid, how to do a lot of things at the young age of nine years old.

I would be doing my doll baby's hair and my mother would be like, well, where's my gel?

Where's my grease?

And then she'll turn around and then Barbie's, I dunno.

I'm a visual learner, so I'm visual.

If I can see something, I can remake it.

I feel like the artistry of doing hair comes from being able to look at something or see us fail, and recreating it and making it your own.

That's the true artistry.

Right now I feel like my niche is extensions.

I love the art of extensions.

I love creating the illusion of natural hair.

A leaf is a damn pizza.

Some people will call it mesh, but the right terminology for it is Danielle's lace and it has small little knots in there.

And when you apply it to the hair, it gives a natural illusion of scalp.

I specialize in natural hair, which would be dreadlocks and braids.

People assume that if you have dreadlocks, you're unkept person.

I'm not so clean person that you don't put in enough time with your hair, and that's totally incorrect.

Black hairdressers like barbers, they had this level of economic and social independence and freedom because they're depending not on white society.

So.

Right.

They're not dependent upon that.

They're dependent upon black communities.

And so what happens is that, like barbershops and hair salons, they become the locus of political conversation of, people hanging out, catching up on the gossip, on trading ideas.

Okay.

So.

Mostly everybody can get a haircut.

That's where the common bond between.

I don't care if you white, black Spanish without racism.

Everybody is welcome.

How I got into cutting hair.

When I was like a second grade, the teacher asked me something.

What would you like to do when you grow up?

I said, a basketball player before.

That's my first answer.

My mom also said it was like you should always pick something more realistic.

And my first answer was a barber.

Taper is like the cousin of a fade.

If you could say that the taper has everything a fade does, it's just like a fade is more all around the hair.

So like taper is more of a section of the hair.

So like it's like the temple a temp taper, high taper or low taper to where I say a fade a high fade low Fay is like all around your hair.

So a lot of people will go with the line up.

The line up is probably the most like part.

It's like that gives you the pop, but I think it's the fade because the fade is like every day that someone else can't do because it's a switch.

Or I see somebody be like, how can you say like that?

I can't teach, it is like I your eyes can't see what my eyes do.

You can learn from somebody without even knowing.

You learn for somebody.

Just the words, just a conversation you have is day.

Like you won't even know that you taken from.

I'm like cutting kids too sometimes.

Because, like, I wouldn't even know that I'm feeding the youth just by just doing my everyday thing.

Favorite part about being a barber in general is like running my own shop.

They say like if you do something you love, you never work a day in your life.

Like, I live by that because it's like I don't see it as work, but like I still like I said, this is a business to me, but I like to still stay with the business mind aspect of it.

If I ever do gets out of the car, I want to see about a school.

So I can for the next generation, all that's what I like to do.

Even if you don't have the linguistic skills, you can sit down and like point and look and they'll be like, yeah, I got you.

I got you, right?

I mean, I've had plenty of those moments in South Africa when, when I wanted something or needed something, and if I didn't have the word in Zulu or Khoza, you know, I could just point and say or point to a picture and I felt assured, even if that person had never done my hair, I knew I was a lot safer than walking into some salon that was perhaps owned by Europeans.

In certain tribes, like the Maasai, the women shave their hair, the men grow their hair and styled each other's hair.

And so that completely flips people's brains inside out.

In a society such as ours, where we are just so conditioned.

One of the reasons why I created the Heritage series was to get black people to love themselves again, because I feel like, how can we expect other people to love and respect us if we don't really fully grasp that concept for ourselves in the way that we appreciate our hair, the way it is?

I was inspired by my Aunt Deidre in Columbus, who, you know, spent much of her life with flowing, long hair and now has accepted alopecia as a way of life.

And so I thought, I wonder if she'll see herself the way I see yourself.

If she allows me to paint.

So I painted her.

But before I painted her, I painted my mother.

The personal relationship with the subject matter definitely adds more to the life of the painting.

Well, especially if you are actually drawing them from life.

Because no matter how awesome a camera is, is never going to capture the way the human eye is.

The idea that black hair has not had some artistic space.

It probably hasn't been at the met or at the gala.

Right?

Like, you know, MoMA hasn't done an exhibit on black hair.

It's not history, right?

It's it's everything, right?

It's about economic dependance.

It's about survival.

It's about I mean, it is the good old American dream, you know, in a certain extent, the idea that the harder that you work, that we've got a lot of foundational myths as Americans write, the harder that you work and the more that you can achieve if you pull yourself up by bootstraps, like all these myths, always pull yourself up by your bootstraps.

And meanwhile, while most of black America is saying, I don't have any bootstraps, right in this particular niche, right?

It's of hair.

Hair is one of those places where, you know, individuals can have that American dream.

They can have that ability to be independent from, you know, mainstream, i.e.

white economic forces.

They can be in service to the black community.

They can live a life of purpose.

Right.

And so it's it's it's freedom, right, on so many different levels.

It is not something that should that that should be seen as constricts individuals when it has a function.

Right.

It's not just something that grows out of our heads.

It has a function in our community.

There's a function in the culture.

And a lot of people who do here today, they are true culture bearers.

Whether you know they know it or not or whether you recognize it or not, passing those skills down, generation by generation, no matter how long you have to wait at the hair salon, no matter how long you sit sitting there at the barbershop.

Again, as I said earlier, it is a coming of age and it's incredibly important.

It's an incredibly important cultural institution of black America.

So what is hair?

Well, hair is the fibrous stuff that grows on the tops of our heads and a few other places.

Our hair is like that of other animals, except that the hair on the tops of our heads can grow and grow and grow.

We're off to the Steel Valley on the next.

Applause, a proud Youngstown our takes us on a tour of the Butler Institute of American Art.

Sometimes it's not just to look at the art is just to be around it.

work.

Ginsburg I like, that aspiration as well.

Meet award winning artist Autumn Joy Ellis.

And then we spotlight Akron band and porch rocker favorite, Annandale.

All that and more on the next round of applause.

I know I learned of the slow burn I need your love.

Thanks for watching this round of applause, my friends.

I'm Ideo streams Kabir Bhatia sending you off with a classical clip unlike anything you've ever seen.

Oberlin Conservatory student Ian MC Edwards recently took on the demanding Concerto P cocktails at Finney Chapel.

He pulls double duty on stage, playing his clarinet and also dancing.

Till next time.

Oh.

You have to.

Come.

Production of applause and ideastream.

Public media is made possible by funding by Cuyahoga County residents through Cuyahoga Arts and Culture.