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Coming up, the Notorious RBG is the focus of a new play in South Euclid.

And the city of Akron honors Sojourner Truth with a new statue in her likeness.

Plus, retired Cleveland Orchestra clarinetist Franklin Cohen heats things up with a Latin dance.

Welcome, folks.

Come on in for another round of applause.

I'm Ideastream Public Media's Kabir Bhatia.

I won't have a Harvard degree, although Northeast Ohio's Ensemble Theater has been performing for over 40 years.

Most recently out of the soon to be closed Notre Dame College in South Euclid.

But they have one more production to stage their first go behind the scenes of their first commissioned play about the life of late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

I don't know.

I don't I don't know that his statements are facts or where he obtains them.

There should be due process, a real investigation, and then awaiting the facts.

I actually was raised by ensemble, so my mom started ensemble theater in the spring of 79 and I was born in the fall of 78.

So we're kind of siblings in that way.

And my mom ran it until about 2008, and I stepped in as artistic director and have been running the theater ever since.

So she had a love affair with Eugene O'Neill, Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, all of the American classics.

And then since then, ensemble has been really kind of that place for American classics.

Now, again, you're not drawing it out like dramatic slow with the but the pace changes a little teeny bit.

And, you know, I am the playwright for the prospect of equality, which is a piece of rehearsing behind me here.

And it's been it's been a great joy.

This is Ensemble Theater's first commission in all their years as a theater, so it's pretty exciting all around.

This is our first commission in that this show is part of what we call our mainstage season.

So the whole kind of resource of a mainstage production, this is different than a new play in that we reached out to a playwright to write a play about a certain topic, and in 20 I think it was our 2015 2016 season, we did a one man show called Thurgood, which was written by George Stevens Junior, and this was a play that was focused on the life and work of Thurgood Marshall.

And I think after seeing and producing that show, there being some type of story similar about Ruth Bader Ginsburg is what kind of inspired this idea.

And so I want to say for almost like two or three years, Rachel and I were talking about this play and Ruth is that she gave me a lot of artistic freedom, which was really nice.

We discussed it together how how the play would be written and performed, but she really left it to me.

So she said, You know, I want to tell about her life.

And that was really open.

And I researched and found there were a number of plays about her professional successes in addition to the movie that was created.

But I wanted to focus on her personal life.

I play Young Ruth, which ranges between the ages of 17 and I want to say forties.

So a lot has happened in that time.

She experiences a lot of loss, but she also meets a lot of people who support her in the perfect way.

Her husband, her husband's father, her parents supported her while they could.

And then, you know, she had friends that kind of led her in the right direction and kept her kept it in her mind that she was capable of moving forward with a career in law and that she was passionate and that that shouldn't her passion shouldn't be wasted.

And we are actually starting at her mother's funeral, which happened just days before she was to give a speech at her high school graduation.

And we have older Ruth coming to visit her.

And so we're seeing younger Ruth at this really pivotal moment.

She's about to go off to Cornell, and her mother has passed away.

Her mother, who really pushed for education.

That was that was something that was so important to her family, but in particular to her because her mother wasn't able to go to college.

It's definitely a conversation about gender equality, for sure.

I mean, and it's very interesting to the way Rachel wrote the script.

So it's not just talking about, you know, the bigger picture, but it also kind of focuses on individual cases and how we tend to get lost.

I think in the macro, I think to women, I mean, again, thinking of the powerful kind of story, I think I'm one of very few artistic directors who are women in an industry that is still very dominated by men.

I don't know if that's necessarily something that my mother focused on.

Ensemble was very much a family, you know, I mean, everybody who joined us was part of that theater family.

You know, I was very influenced by ensemble in particular.

I literally was in the audience when I was a little kid watching rehearsal.

It was pretty amazing.

And so kind of understanding that that legacy, she I think Ruth also manifests that in a lot of ways, that, you know, she created a legacy that not necessarily her family might follow, but that other women, you know, she paved the way for, you know, that connection of legacy and doesn't always necessarily have to be family.

But I like to do theater that actually has those content that creates those kind of conversations so that you're actually talking about what's happening in the community around you.

Why we're talking about Ruth Bader Ginsburg is simply this.

She handled every challenge with grace.

She handled it with sophistication and with diplomacy.

And we never really saw her put anyone else down.

In our 44 year history, we've performed in various locations.

We were at the Civic on Mayfield for about 20 years, and then we went downtown to the former Cleveland Playhouse, and then we were at Coventry for quite some time and then we came here.

Our next season will most likely be itinerant, meaning will travel and we'll do multiple locations.

So there will be a future ensembles not going anywhere.

And then the idea that, you know, again, we might look to going back to Cleveland Heights where we were kind of spending this next season, finding that long term partnership, which again, we were hoping was Notre Dame.

And I think Notre Dame was hoping the same thing.

And just kind of the way things are going with small colleges and, you know, there is not much they could do when the writing's on the wall, the writing's on the wall.

It's just been a really wonderful experience to bring Ruth Bader Ginsburg story to life along with her husband and Antonin Scalia and Elena Kagan and all these people who have been named that we all know that we can see in a different artistic light.

There's a lot of inequality in our world, but it's not what's best for the American public.

See the prospect of equality now through June 9th at Ensemble Theater on the campus of Notre Dame College.

A major project years in the making pays tribute to the legacy of Sojourner Truth in Akron.

Meet the people behind the creation of a statue in her honor, set to be unveiled May 29th.

Idea Streams Kari Wise has the story.

In 1851, Sojourner Truth spoke in Akron at a women's rights convention held at the Universalist Stone Church on High Street.

There, she delivered a famous speech challenging preconceived ideas about gender and race.

She is one of the greatest orders who was able somehow to articulate, you know, when it came to the intersection of relationships, of race, class, gender, why we should have equity, why women should have a right to the ballot box.

And so the legacy for Sojourner continues today.

There are many instances where we still have challenges when it comes to the right to vote.

And so that is why we honor her and the work that we're doing today.

Akron's own Woodrow Nash designed the Truth statue, which is a departure from his typical work internationally collected and notably featured in a Beyoncé music video.

My art style is African Nouveau.

I wanted to draw from my experiences.

And being a black artist in America, my heritage and everything came from the continent, from Africa.

But the influence, concepts of beauty and everything like that was European.

I wanted to draw from those two influences.

Work that I do is more stylized.

The Sojourner Peace is more realistic.

Working on the design with the help of Jef Willis, Nash, Drew inspiration from old music and speeches range on on.

I listen to music from the Library of Congress work.

Songs by these men were on chain gangs and old sermons from uneducated but inspired preachers.

It put me in a position where I could experience timelessness, and it almost took me back to my where she might have been and what she was doing.

I have as much muscle as any man in making the case for equality.

Truth, a former slave, told a crowd in Akron she could work as much or more than a man.

I have plowed and reaped and has and tact and mode.

And can any man do more than that?

She bragged about how she without work, a man and now eating.

And you know, all these things.

And I tried to put all that in the work.

Do you had a way of presenting that was humorous?

And that's a side that people don't think about.

And so she really was engaging to her crowd.

So she used materials that were familiar to them, like Bible quotes, and related it then to humankind about eating and about raising children and about the role of women in the community.

Her Akron speech has long been referred to as Ain't I a Woman?

But historians have found those likely weren't her actual words.

The words that, you know, anti-woman question mark in that speech, which has a Southern dialect, was actually penned by Frances, Dana Gage and Gage was the head of the second Ohio Women's Rights Convention here in Akron.

So she was actually there.

So in reading that, people believed that that is exactly what Sojourner Truth said.

But Gages version of the speech was written 12 years after it was given.

Further study provides more context.

Sojourner Truth, born Isabella Bohm, Free was a native Dutch speaker, so English was not her native language and she was not Southern.

So you have to then look at the time period.

And so it's during the Civil War.

And Gage is actually appealing to the time period and trying to gather interest and sympathy, putting her in the place of a southern slave woman, when in actuality she was born into slavery in New York.

A version of this speech, published weeks after the conference in the Anti-Slavery Bugle, carries a similar message.

But without the Southern dialect, historians believe Truth worked on this version with the writers.

The women are coming up.

Blessed be God.

Akron's tribute to truth can help people make connections with this history.

More than 150 years later.

It's complicated, but it's simple.

Place matters.

You matter.

You have what you need to succeed where you are.

And you can go and help others.

This history has inspired the people working on the statue as well.

It's going to become my legacy.

Very happy that I had this opportunity to create something that would live long after I'm gone.

Nash's design of the statue was cast in bronze here in northeast Ohio at Studio Foundry in Cleveland.

In this particular case, I knew was a daughter Truth.

I know Woodrow from other pieces that we've done with them.

I love the project and the justice of it all.

And so I'm happy to be part of it.

Foundry workers created molds from Nash's design, and then they buried them in a six foot deep pit.

The team then poured bronze, heated to nearly 2000 degrees into the molds to form the statue.

We're doing it the old school style, so it's a combination of plaster and sand.

Actually, we use our third ground up molds.

It's essentially contaminating our mix.

And what that does is make it more porous and more breathable, which is what we want.

And we tried to make this as weak as possible so that the poor are as well as we can.

Having said that, is we enough that if we try to do it out of the ground, there's not enough strength.

So we ramp it up and stand as a fortress against the pressures of the molten bronze.

After everything cooled.

Workers opened up the molds with axes and sledgehammers before moving on to the finishing work.

The completed statue will reside in a park plaza, steps from where Truth once stood in 1851, inviting people to reflect upon her legacy for years to come.

I wanted to spark empowerment.

I wanted to spark a sense of I may not be like others or trying to.

Truth was, and she was that speaking out of New York.

I wanted to spark that.

It's okay to be different and unique.

I wanted to spark that.

You can always speak up like truth, always living your truth.

You are good enough.

The Sojourner Truth statue will be unveiled in Akron on May 29th at a community celebration that kicks off at 530 outside of the United Way of Summit and Medina on North High Street.

When the Cleveland Cavaliers decided to reimagine their look on the court, the team turned to internationally renowned artist Daniel Arsham.

On the next applause, meet this Cleveland born artist who celebrates his passion for basketball through art and design.

Plus, discover why folks in Columbus are doing the dance known as Zouk and the Cleveland Orchestra performs a new work inspired by our national anthem.

All this and more on the next round of applause.

It's time to make a move to Columbus, where artist Virginia Kistler investigates the intersection of nature and science in her art.

Let's head inside her studio in Gahanna, where she works with a multitude of media.

I have studio work and I have public art work, and the studio work is about kind of a continuous idea that I am exploring.

But my public art work is very project specific.

However, I do think that there is a lot of crossover between the two.

Certainly you can look at the style of my studio work and you see it in my public art work.

Also, some of the projects I've been awarded are more science based and I do think that that's because my studio work has kind of a nature science connection.

A lot of my work is about the intersection of science and technology, and I focus a lot on space.

And so a lot of it has to do with kind of habitat loss expansion of suburbs, the transformation of space around us.

And so I think it's something that I think a lot about.

Chiaroscuro is one of my first pieces that is based on a light map of Columbus, Ohio.

The inspiration came from photographs taken from the International Space Station.

There was an astronaut who photographed cities at night and and so I wanted to use a light map of Columbus.

And so I dug through all of NASA's photography.

And of course, the one image of Columbus or there were probably several, they were blurry.

And so I created my own light map of Columbus.

And in a way, it's almost kind of a green space map, because if you look at Columbus from an aerial perspective, I used Google Maps, I went in and I made line work and I went around to the green spaces.

And so I was trying to make these judgments about which areas would be illuminated in which areas would be dark.

And so I created the vector line work, and then that was all cut out on a C and C router.

So individual sheets that were hung.

And then I expanded on that idea and I started to make light maps of my neighborhood.

And again, they really are kind of green space maps.

So I was tracing green space in my neighborhood.

Public art is important because it has the opportunity to reach people who do not visit galleries or art museums.

That's my favorite thing about public art.

I think a lot about children.

Not all children are taken to art museums and galleries.

I was one of those children, so I think a lot about that.

When doing public art, you have to think about things.

You have to think about material that will last for a long time.

So thinking about materials that are UV resistant, that will withstand some potential abuse and that will be there in 30 years and still look good.

So that's a big, big part of the public art process.

A lot of times I'll start out doing some just kind of thumbnail sketches, trying to work through ideas.

Pretty quickly, though, I'll start 3D modeling some ideas.

For 20 years I designed interactives for children's museums and science centers, and so my process as a professional designer is very similar to my process as an artist who creates sculpture.

And so I use modeling software that is also CAD software.

So I'll start out using it for the ideation process, but then I'll go back and add in a lot of detail that then can be used for laser cutting or C and C, router cutting, etc..

This project is a suspended sculpture or will be a suspended sculpture for a hospital in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

The piece is really based on the idea of rippling water.

The entire hospital is inspired by nature and biophilia, and so I wanted to do something that was based on water because Pittsburgh has, you know, the rivers.

That's a huge part of the geography of of the city.

And so as you as you kind of move under the piece, you get kind of this ripple effect and then as you move around the piece, it kind of changes depending upon your vantage point.

And then the piece itself will be fabric shaded from this kind of metal chain that is anodized and there will be different shades of blue.

So this is a sample Zoetrope of life in Italian Village is about the community of Italian village.

And so the inspiration really came from the history of the neighborhood.

And so the lines originated from the architecture in Italian village.

It speaks to the history, but I wanted the piece to feel inclusive of the people that who live there today because that that area has changed so much.

The idea of motion and color.

I was really thinking about the transformation of the neighborhood and the activity there today and the kind of the vibrancy and the life of that neighborhood.

I really like to make things.

And so just starting with an idea and then, you know, following through with that idea and turning it into something that exists in real life, I think is very rewarding.

It's always fun to see how things turn out because sometimes they don't turn out exactly like you imagined them.

And sometimes that is good and sometimes that is bad because sometimes things you think will be amazing and then you make it and it's not.

And then sometimes you're surprised by something you make and it turns out better than you expected.

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Okay, time's up.

Got to go.

Thanks for joining in on this round of applause.

I'm Ideastream Public Media's Kabir Bhatia.

But before we sign off, as promised, the incomparable Franklin Cohen on clarinet.

Here's the former Cleveland Orchestra stalwart performing at the music festival he co-founded with his daughter, Diana.

Chamber Fest Cleveland.

Check out this year's festival in June.

Production of applause and ideastream.

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