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

Coming up.

Learn about the history of stamps from stamp collectors showing off their collections later get in step with a dance class at the National Choreography Center in Akron and enjoy these Yenisei Choir of Ladles performing a French Sonata.

Welcome back to another round of applause, everyone.

I'm your favorite host, Kabir Bhatia.

Here at the Ideas Center in Cleveland's Playhouse Square District.

First up flatly, it's the study and collection of postage stamps, which has a long history in northeast Ohio.

The Garfield Perry Stamp Clu started more than a century ago and keeps the hobby going with about 100 members.

Every March, the group welcomes folks from across the country to show off their philatelic collections.

My dad was a stamp collector, and it was a way for the two of us to spend time together.

They taught me geography.

It taught me foreign languages, the names of foreign countries in their language and so on.

And I was really interested in it.

It was great fun.

I got started in collecting through my mother.

She got me interested when I was a child.

And as a child I started coming to the Garfield Perry stamp shows.

The Garfield Perr Stamp Club is one of the oldest existing stamp club in the United States.

The club was formed in 1890 here in Cleveland, Ohio.

This year, the March part is our 135th consecutive show, which is held every marc since the founding of the club.

No, nothing in Cleveland picked March part to give the idea that we're fun.

We're having a good time here.

Yeah, it's a stamp show, but it's the March party.

So that's how the name came about.

It's an annual American philatelic Society show with dealer that sell philatelic material, and the exhibit displays stamp material which could include postage stamps, postcards or postal cards.

It would also include postal history.

The exhibits, when you go through, you learn a lot of history because people exhibi all kinds of different things.

Some may exhibit a particular stamp and they g for all the different variations and the postmark and the varieties on the stamps.

Some will pick a historical item and look for everything that deals with that historical item, which could include some ephemera.

In addition to the postal stamps.

So this is actually a unique exhibit in terms of combining picture postcards and advertising mail to tell the story of downtown Cleveland at the turn of the century.

All the material is from 1890 to 1910.

It's a 20 year period, and the exhibit is structured to take you to each area of Cleveland based on what the businesses were at the time, where there was a civic center or typical Main Street or the shopping area or the grocery area.

The structure of the exhibit is divided into geographical zones within downtown Cleveland.

You can see the buildings, you can see the businesses that were in the buildings, and you can get a fee for the products of that period that were made and marketed in Cleveland.

I tend to deal mainly Confederate postal history and stamps.

I got into it at an early age and I enjoy the history.

And that, of course led me to the personal history.

This is the very first of the general issues, which was a portrait of Jefferson Davis, who was the Confederate president.

There are many differen elements where there are errors or differences in the plate that collectors look and say, Where does this belong on the printing plate?

This is position number one in the upper left hand corner and so forth, and they identify different parts of the stamp to actually plate the same errors, freaks and oddities.

This is an area that's popular in other areas besides civil war, but it exists certainly in Confederates and obviously us as well.

If we think mostl about United States stamps, the the the classic design that ranked the most highly up to, let's say 50 years ago was a $1 trans Mississippi stamp issued in about 1900 western cattle in a storm.

It's a black stamp and it's a picture of a couple of cows out in a field with white snow, a blizzard blowing around them.

And that was considere the the best of American design when I was a kid a long time ago, and first collecting every stamp was engraved.

So the design was sharp and for years they were essentially one color, maybe two colors, because each color had to be separately engraved, separate plate and it was complicated to produce them.

Then they started doing different kinds of printing.

And now when you look at a modern stamp, almost all of them look like a page out of a magazine because it's the same printing process.

It's offse printing and no longer engraved.

So it just becomes interesting.

And of course, the more you know, the more you learn, the more you figure out what is scarce and what you go fin in the dealer's box that maybe you recognize something that somebody else doesn't.

It is a treasure hunt.

Certainly the hobby is evolving.

It is not going away.

Sometimes you hear Chicken Little stories, you know, the sky is falling and, you know, it's all old people, the younger ones.

They're not as visible.

So our challenge really is to get them to stamp shows like this and show them that there's something besides a computer screen.

And if we can get them into that, the social aspects of this are tremendous and we are really just caretakers, preserving it for a period of time.

And then it goes on to the next collector when we're gone as individual collectors and hopefully we've taken care of it so it'll go for generations to come.

If you two are excited about stamps, the Garfield Perry Stamp Club meets the first Thursday of every month from September through June at the Wyndham Hotel in Independence.

Wait until you see the work an the process of our next artist.

Janga Wang lives in Columbus, where she cuts intricate images out of paper.

Her 3-D art reall needs to be seen to be believed.

So take a look Sculptures made out of paper.

So really a sculpture we see on coins and maybe like stone on the wall.

But paper sculptures are a little different because paper is being shared.

And then you cut it and put layers and put them together.

But because they're so thin, this has a like floating effect from the wall.

It has more dimensional effects to it.

So it's like if you see a paper sculptur with live sculpture, you kind of have like a little illusio or like more three dimensional because it's really if there's a combination of two dimensional and three dimensional elements together now, so this is wh you're seeing all the picture.

But then there's like all depths to it or layers to textures to it.

That's what you're going to see.

I came here in the United States as a student associate and with my family, so we traveled a lot.

And then because I was in, I had a student visa.

I had to always be student to, you know, go to community colleges.

And I, I didn't even know I wanted to be an artist.

I mean, that's what I just drew in.

So I taking all classes, that was like more than 30 years ago in community college.

That's how I started, you know, doing our I mean, when I was in high school in Korea, I did like sculptures with like clay sculptures and also drawings.

Still, back then, I didn't want to be artists.

I just did it.

Well, yeah.

So and then I came here and settin up the studio and I found those.

And then, wow, like, so long I haven't done the sketches.

And that's the core is like, I know I love to do human figure papers.

So expressive material is especially when I did the human figure.

It's just all this muscle tones and like, even I can do the veins and the hair and all.

And so on.

And in the paper it's just like, perfect.

It captures that all that, like, love it.

I like the process of craft, the craftsmanship, like traditional, like the, you know, the craftsmanship from, like centuries ago.

They have like, rules and procedure and all the steps and, you know, certain things.

I wanted to kind of have that not like much emotion involved, but with hands and I don't know what is or this just like I have to imagine something and decide to make something and make of Scott sketches.

And then I skinned all that and then make patterns, separate the layers, and then cut all the paper.

And then from together, you know and then I frame and then, oh, yeah, a lot of steps.

Just I love paper.

The medium.

Um, I usually it's not my work actually it's, this is what paper can do and I just love paper papers.

Awesome is speaking beginning of everything is is the hope is isn't like big there's big is like the best architecture the ideal the somebody had I did this probably drawing on it on the her first on the napkin or whatever the best novel idea or the best mess mathematic formula whatever on the biggest the bank robbery heist, whatever, you know, a piece of napkin like it's just beginning of so many great things and it's just right.

I want people to realize whatever is like so common things laying around you or even people or whatever as a potential of like the what is that possibility?

It's the sky's the limit.

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Did you know there's a national center for choreography at the University of Akron?

It serves as an incubator for dance, offering a space for artists to experiment, develop, and create new work.

My name's Christy Bolingbroke.

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

NCC Akron, 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.

You know, the race for space, regardless where artists live, is real.

And any time 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 adap and provide that is tremendous.

Hi, my name is Wilfred Swilley and Aboriginality from Burkina Faso in West Africa and I'm currently an assistant professor in dance practic here at the University of Akron Choreography Center was on of the biggest attraction for me because in my work I like to constantly be creating something new.

The Choreographic center is one of the biggest asset of a department because it allows us to bring many choreographer who have like a different vision than what we are doing here in the department, and that allows the students to learn all the perspectives for 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, ins things that were worse before today.

And so that's where 21st centur 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 faculty.

I think dance should be evolving with time because people are ever 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 Sully had said, You know what?

I really want to 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 Erin 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 Erin Weaver.

I am the executive artistic director of Moldova Dance Collective.

Moldova Dance Collective exists to restore community wellness to validate the black narrative and to bring community throug sacred and cultural dance form.

So I've been teaching I'm a founder of the technique, which is an African contemporary technique that was develope and cultivated by the late Dr. Kageyam Welsh, out of Temple University.

She has written the books on African Dance the Site.

Okay, so we're walking through really hard to make an ankle here.

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 mor and trying to support 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 that factors of dancing as I feel that to me particularly dance shouldn't be jazzier.

It needs to be evolving.

And because our world is they one, they need to always try new things.

Experiment.

Oh my goodness, it is amazing.

I threw a lot at the 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 change.

And so that's what I try to inspire when I'm teaching classes to push you, challenge you to know that there is more we love and we will do it.

Okay, So in order to do that, we have to use our focus and they 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 really.

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 dad syndrome in the African diaspora.

So we have in rehearsal 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' what made that experience easy and brought that joy into them goes when you are moving with everybody in the community and then in communion with with the music, it's just a provides a lot.

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 thrille 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 that that can only feed the artists that are here.

I only see 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.

a National Center for Choreography.

Akron hosted a movie nigh screening of the acclaimed dance documentary Obsessed with Light at the Nightlight Cinema on Tuesday, April 15.

Next time on APPLAUSE we sit down with some stand ups.

We spotlight a trio of Cleveland comedians, each with a unique sense of humor.

Cleveland's got a very accessible comedy scene.

It's a very equitable comedy scene in the sense of like, you could get a lot of stag time without having to jump over a bunch of hurdles or drive super far.

Join us for a stand up standouts on the next round of applause made in collaboration with the Cleveland State University School of Film.

Well, it's time to close the show on a musical note.

I'm Ideastream Public Media's Kabir Bhatia leaving you with a splendid performance by Northeast Ohio perio Instrument Ensemble Lady Elise.

This is a French sonata from the Baroque era recorded at the Heights Theater in Cleveland Heights.

I.

Production of applause and ideastream.

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