- [Jason] Next on "Curate."

- [Luisa] Poetry is my preferred way of processing things.

We can express our joys, our fears, our longings, our desires.

- [Daniel] We want the arts to help us reconnect with all the things we've missed and to celebrate and to participate and the arts provide a way to do that.

- [Collin] I proudly described the food as world-class, and really is this magnificent.

- [Heather] This is "Curate."

- Welcome I'm Jason Kypros.

- And I'm Heather Mazzoni, thanks for joining us for 85 years the Commonwealth of Virginia, has had a poet laureate who is officially tasked with serving as ambassador and chief promoter of Virginia poetry.

In these times when the idea that words matter perhaps more than ever, we look at this honorary position for inspiration.

- As Virginia's 20th Poet Laureate, Luisa Igloria and ODU professor of English and creative writing, brings that inspiration her unique perspective makes her this weeks 757 featured artist.

(upbeat music) - I come from a country where you can look at the sky and know what kinds of fish you'll find in the market.

I come from a country where one blind man, can lead another down the sidewalk, both of their canes tapping.

I come from a country where old newspapers can be exchanged for compost, which helps farmers grow their beans and cabbages.

I come from a country where hands are useful.

They plant and harvest rice.

They pick up steam mouthfuls, other hands fight for land and water.

I come from a country where the words save and salvage, can mean abduct and murder.

And assassinations take the place of drive by shootings.

I come from a country of long lines, long waves, long marches historically ending with death but it is the same country where the light of fireflies along the lens of an underground river, is brighter than stars.

(upbeat music) I like to think of my parents really as my first teachers by the time I was three years old, I was taught by them to read what led to my love for words and by extension my love for writing.

I was married at 18.

I finished college at 18, when I was 19 I had my first daughter.

One of my former college professor said, "Put a collection of your poems together and send them in to the Palanca Awards for literature."

And I was like, "What's that?"

As it turns out the Palanca Award, is one of the highest literary honors in the Philippines.

And to my great shock I won first prize and I said, "What do I do now?"

The 1990 embargo there were two earthquakes that's truck in quick succession.

We could hear the sound of breaking glass across the entire city.

We slept on plywood boards on the street with our neighbors.

We had to go look for water.

It was just this very chaotic time being an English major.

I looked at all of the destruction and all the change around me.

And I said, "What metaphors is the universe telling me?"

So I left in 92 and it was to do a PhD in English with creative writing as the focus.

Now I am professor at Old Dominion University.

This is going to be my 23rd year.

I look back and it seems like I just blinked and here we are, it's pretty amazing.

(upbeat music) Poetry is my preferred way of processing things.

We can express our joy, our fears, our longings, our desires, our anxieties, our hopes, ordinary daily transactional language.

Doesn't seem to be able to go into these places that poetry can.

When something suddenly pierces you in a place that you hadn't thought was there this is empathy.

And I think we need that so much in the world that we're seeing today especially.

Every time that I write a new book in hindsight, it's like, "There's a perfect thing to do."

And I wouldn't have known that if I hadn't made my way to these particular parts.

That's just the gift that poetry gives us.

- Thank you all so much for joining us this afternoon.

We're so excited to be able to come together for this swearing in of Virginia's next Poet Laureate.

- The Poet Laureate is the premier ambassador for poetry on the state level.

Their charge is to create more space for poetry in public life.

- I think of art as the universal language, often communicating in ways that transcend words.

Art tells us a story we can hear with our hearts, sometimes provocative and challenging and often helping us to see the world through another's eyes.

- It is wonderful to introduce to you all our newest Poet Laureate of Virginia, Luisa A. Igloria.

- I'm very overwhelmed still by the feeling of great honor and responsibility at the same time.

Everyone who is a poet laureate is not only an advocate for poetry, but also addresses the idea of what it means to live and write at their particular time and place in history.

I love the idea that it took an act of Congress to officialize this too.

So it sends the signal that things like the arts like poetry are important as a form of civic engagement.

We can manifest our relationship as citizens in a community.

- We're excited for all that you'll accomplish and look forward to seeing the great work that you're doing during your term as poet laureate.

(upbeat music) - Give thanks for the wobble of the wheel and the limp off the pulley, the tiny pop in the heart of a light bulb as it goes out.

Give thanks for the pause that loosens the noose around the rushing hours, for serifs of rain trickling down the blue gradations of a chain.

And give thanks for the call of a dove that has lost its mate, and so tinges your day with the blue of this reminder.

Forgive the stumble of the bow across the strings, the hair of one note that flies away from the score, give thanks for our common imperfection.

(upbeat music) - [Jason] You can learn more about all our 757 featured artists at our website, whro.org/curate - All season long we've been bringing you stories of perseverance.

Stories of how arts organizations in Hampton Roads have retooled and reinvented themselves in the time of COVID in order to carry on.

- This week, we bring you the story of Virginia Beaches Symphonic Orchestra, Symphonicity, the music director, Daniel Boothe, with the help of some amazing technology has managed to fill the void when live performances aren't always possible.

(orchestra music) - When pandemic began we had just started selling season subscription tickets and then we had to shut everything down.

That's really problematic because we need those season tickets.

It's also the revenue that's gonna get us through the year.

We had to inform all of our ticket holders that we would not be able to have a Symphonicity season in the conventional way.

And to our surprise nearly half of them kept their subscription with us.

So we had a lot of people to take care of that we appreciate.

And so in my mind, a lot of it was how much value can we give them?

What can we do for them?

That's our very best effort because they deserve that and no less, in order to address our real-time opportunities during the pandemic we examined what are the safest ways that we can still perform openness?

So we ended up deciding in August our strategy that we started looking right away to what are the things that we can do.

The plan that we knew we could deliver through the whole season.

We have all this great archived material that Todd Washburn our audio and video engineer, has created for us over the years.

We decided to take that and curated into a full Symphonicity season, just like you would experience in the Sandler Center, but now you're gonna experience it online.

We invited Raymond Jones from WHRO co-hosted with me and we were gonna create a virtual masterwork season.

We call it our Digital Ovation Series.

It's so great to have you here to join us and a very innovative season, of course, as a way for patrons to connect with us, to enjoy this music, but also to support us during this time.

So we can be supporting each other.

We had to work very quickly.

And then on top of that learning for me as a video editor that does it more on an amateur basis, I haven't had to produce so much content on a regular schedule.

Trailer for the upcoming concert, all of these little things and more, we get near the end I gotta be careful about watching this.

So there's been a learning curve there for me too.

I've had to expand on skills I already have.

We've been so separated through these times but the arts bring us together.

As we look to 2021 we're gonna take everything that we know that we can do but this time we're gonna build in a little bit more flexibility so that we would be able to export whatever we're doing either digitally or real-time or in our collaboration with the Museum of Contemporary Art, and export that say into the Sandler, when the door's open if we're able to get back there.

And that's gonna be the challenge how do we build a season and a program that are the one hand can do all the things we've been doing?

But on the other hand if the doors open and the green light is given we can bring that into our conventional space and share that with the community.

It also helps us translate the difficulties of these times into something that feels valuable to us in ways that are hard to describe that are intangible.

All of that is important because every bit of it is what gets us to the other side.

And when we get to the other side we want the arts to help us reconnect with all the things we've missed and to celebrate and to participate and the arts provide a dynamic and wonderful way to do that.

(audience applauding) - As Symphonicity moves forward in 2021, several events are planned, including a concert with our own Jay Senate, keep an eye on the Symphonicity website for all live and digital events, with updates as conditions warrant.

Dominic Moore-Dunson grew up in the same hometown as LeBron James, but he learned early on that his hopes and dreams were a little different than others in his community.

His stage show, "The Black Card Project," is a semi-autobiographical exploration of the African-American identity and finding yourself no matter who you are.

- In sixth grade, I'm sitting with the seven other black boys in my grade at the time, they were all sitting at the same lunchroom table.

And we're talking about what we wanted to be when we grew up.

And one of them says, I want to be in the NBA, I wanna play like LeBron.

And other ones were I wanna be in the NFL, will be like Michael Vick.

And it was my turn to say something I said, "Well, I wanna dance in Paris or play professional soccer in England," and there was deafening silence around the table.

And one of my friends looks at me and says, "Bruh, that ain't black."

And all the kids started laughing.

There's this overarching feeling that like, We'll, if I don't know what this about the black culture if I don't know this kind of music, I'm not black enough.

There's no program to learn how to be black.

And I kind of sat for a while and I was like, "What if there was a school?"

What if there was a school where you be like someone learned how to be black?

And that's where it started.

And I was like, what if there is this kind of weird interesting character?

And what if, he kind of went through all these classes and it kind of felt like a really weird version of "Wizard of Oz."

Kevin Parker when I asked him to elaborate on the show I didn't know really what the show was yet.

We sat down I was like, "So I have this idea.

I kind of wanna talk to you about like what it means to be black."

And we started just kind of like joking and laughing about all of these things that we knew about.

- I've never really seen a show quite like this.

This was completely different.

And realizing that it is a thing like, Oh, like there are things I don't know about that happened within my community.

- I would say the slight stereotypicalness of it it was pretty funny, like the little gangster walk and the stereotypical clothing.

- The problem with humor is it's actually the hardest thing to do on stage 'cause you have to think about your own biases as what you think is funny versus what other people think is funny.

So that's one of the first barriers, inside of this conversation we wanted to use humor because we wanted to pull people into our world and making people laugh always does that.

You wanna pull people into the show before you hit them with the really hard topics.

So you invite people in by making things funny by making them fun, playing their favorite music.

And all of a sudden they're willing to go on the journey with you no matter where you take them.

So it was also taken idea of like, we have these characters where the stereotypes, but what if we broke the stereotype and made you learn something about them that change you a little bit.

The part that was really difficult actually, was making sure every character had integrity.

And it wasn't my emotional feelings about that character that come out.

Because we can't be hypocrites.

We can't say, "There's no one way to be black."

And then say, "Well, the way the thug is doing is wrong."

(upbeat music) I knew I wanted to do something that had to do with black history, but I didn't know what.

So I was just going through clips and things like that.

And one day I had this dream that I was running.

And I was just like, "There's slave master we're gonna meet the rusty dog happened and all this stuff."

And then I had another dream about being in the Jim Crow South and what that felt like.

And then I had another dream right after that that was like the sixties Black Panther movement.

And then another dream that was kind of being this Trayvon Martin, Tamir Rice type character.

So the section is actually literally a dream I had.

- All you can really hear his whipping things and getting hit with batons and all of that.

And I would say that that kind of is really reflectful on our history.

I feel like, that was probably the part that made it most impactful, whether it's just like, the way they draw on in the audio with the dancing.

And I would say like that all just came in and made it so powerful.

- The show is built for the students also their families, it's really, really important mom, dad, grandma, grandpa, auntie uncle, see the show because what I would love to happen is everybody goes home that night and then they talk about it.

That's the point, right?

The mission of this project is to create conversation around the narrow aspects of the black identity.

- This is living proof that you can literally do whatever you want to do.

And even though you may get hate, you may get hurt and you may be at brung down a little you'll still be you and be able to go forward.

- The Born and Bread bakery in Lakeland Florida, is a delicious example of how art doesn't have to come on a canvas or a stage to be amazing.

The creations that come out of the oven here are delivered with impeccable taste and sumptuous soul.

(upbeat music) - We've been established since 2015 and we make our teasel European style pastries with flair.

I got married in 2014 and my husband and I had a very small, low budget wedding so that we could spend some time traveling through Europe.

It was something we had both wanted to do for so long.

And so we did it, but that was probably the first place that I spent falling in love with bread.

It was like irresistible.

There was something different about the way that they processed and the way that they baked.

And when I came back, I fell in love with figuring it out.

(upbeat music) In 2015, we started at the Farmer's Market, in 2017 we moved from the Farmer's Market to the space that we have next door.

In 2018, we knocked down a wall and created our first retail space with seats and booths and a couch and a neon sign that says American Dream.

It really transformed into something far bigger than who I am or that original intent.

It's a really beautiful business.

I love those thank you notes.

Since I started, I wanted to make sure that anything that we created was art forward.

And a lot of what we do has this European flare based off of the flavors or the vessel that we're using for a lot of our pastries, which is crescendo.

Everything that we do is like a skilled work.

So nothing is coming out of a canvas service that we make in-house.

So if you scale something, we're not using cups we use a metric system and you really have to be in tune as a baker with changes whether it be seasonally or something with the flour.

So there's no part of this that's easy.

Although bread baking and baking in general and our bakery is simple.

And simple doesn't always mean easy.

- I proudly described the food to anyone that will listen, as world-class it really is just magnificent and it is a work of art that I had not seen before in Lakeland or in my daily culinary endeavors.

(upbeat music) The care and the tack they put into making sure that this has pulled out at this time or this goes in there at that time.

It's amazing and is a work of art.

And just to see what they come up with next every week, it's something new or this new pastry that I'd never heard of that I loved and I can't get enough of it.

It really is a joy to be a part of it.

- We try to create seasonal menus.

So something that would play into summer is the Dole whip cruffin.

A cruffin is basically a croissant dough.

It's shaped into a cylinder form and then it's baked into a larger muffin tin and that makes it so where it comes out the layers are kind of going in this direction, they're kind of open.

We put a pastry cream inside this one's got a pineapple curd and then a vanilla pastry cream it's topped with whip.

And it's very reminiscent of a Florida trip to Disney World.

Bostock is something that we use with the remnants of our croissant dough when we're laminating, we put them in a large 10. so it's almost like a croissant loaf or a clove.

And we slice it, we syrup it and then seasonally we can create different ones.

This summer we've created two.

One is the peaches and cream.

And another one is a triple berry cobbler the menu is ever-changing.

And that is a really fun part of what we do.

And I think for a customer, knowing that every week they could get something different is exciting.

(upbeat music) An average day for one of our bakers is coming in pretty early.

I would say most days, someone is coming in between 6:30 or seven, which isn't wild.

But as we get closer to the weekend, which is currently the only time that we're open with the COVID pandemic, our first night baker would come in at 9:00 PM on Friday.

Then we have another night baker that comes in around 10 and then our shifts kind of vary.

But the last person's roughly coming in at 3:00 AM.

So that shift is very early.

During that time there's not a lot of time to stop or pause.

This puzzle piece fits here for a reason and we have a deadline and a goal but it is this organized chaos.

- So our kitchen is comprised of different tiers where everyone works together and honed their craft.

So everybody's gonna come in and they'll start scaling and start measuring.

And then as you grow in your confidence in the bakery you'll start shaping this or cutting that, it's a precision craft.

So it around about way everybody comes together to compliment each piece the best they can.

- There's a lot of purpose for the team members that we have and there's constant challenges of how to grow and adapt and become better.

And they do that with such incredible heart.

- [Collin] I love being a part of Born and Bread because I love the way it serves our community.

And I think that that's really important - The community of Lakeland I once said to a friend, is almost like when you have a bad day and you might go for a car ride and you put on one of those playlists that seem to make you happy.

There are one of those communities that it's that playlist over and over again on hard days, on rough weeks.

When you don't think that they're gonna show up if it rains there in ponchos and umbrellas if a pandemic hits, they find ways to support you.

I don't know that it would be the same in another city.

I hope that people through the story of Born and Bread understand that at any point in their life they could say, "I wanna just try to do something."

And it doesn't have to be big.

And it was never an intention to make something big but I am incredibly grateful even on the bad days for the support of the community and the opportunity to grow such an incredible team.

- You can find more "Curate" content on the web at whro.org/curate.

Our website features all previous episodes of the show.

- You can follow "Curate" on social media as well.

We're on Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube.

But we also want to mention and thank the TCC Perry Glass Wheel Arts Center in Norfolk which has been our virtual host all the season.

- We are going to leave you tonight with more from Symphonicity.

- [Jason] Thanks for joining us this evening, I'm Jason Kypros.

- [Heather] And I'm Heather Mazzoni, we'll see you next time on "Curate."

(orchestra music)