Narrator: At the Crane House and Historic YWCA in Montclair, the moving architects tell powerful stories of the many women who lived there.

Norton: Independence, having rights -- It's been such a progression, and reading through the research of this house, I'm realizing that more and more that I'm part of a long history of women trying to be seen in society.

Narrator: At Luna Stage in West Orange, a play based on a true story from the life of Hannah Arendt.

In 1933, after she was arrested by the Nazis for her "illegal research," she made an unlikely escape.

Bader: She saw the basic humanity and kindness in this man who arrested her.

I think she could talk to a lot of different kinds of people, and I think that's partially how she survived.

Narrator: And the legendary, ever-evolving jazz bassist and leader Stanley Clarke on location at Wiggins Waterfront Park in Camden.

Clarke: I learned a long time ago that the trajectory of jazz, how it moves through time going forward, it's usually done with band leaders who are brave enough to get some young players.

Narrator: "State of the Arts" going on location with the most creative people in New Jersey.

Announcer: The New Jersey State Council on the Arts, encouraging excellence and engagement in the arts since 1966, is proud to co-produce "State of the Arts" with Stockton University.

Additional support is provided by the Pheasant Hill Foundation... ...and these friends of "State of the Arts."

[ Music plays ] [ Music plays ] Clarke: It always feels good coming back to Camden.

I mean, I grew up in Philadelphia, and, yeah, it's always nice to come back here.

This place, especially.

I like it because it's got an open air feel, obviously.

And it's a beautiful, beautiful scenery.

It's nice to play here.

[ Music plays ] Narrator: When a young Stanley Clarke left Philadelphia to play jazz gigs in New York, little did he know he was starting a journey that would revolutionize the electric bass.

Over his 50 year career, Stanley has won four Grammy Awards, playing both acoustic and electric bass in multiple bands and genres, as well as recording his own compositions.

He's still going strong, touring as The Stanley Clarke Band with a rotating crew of much younger musicians.

Clarke: Working with younger musicians is extremely important to me because that's kind of what happened with me.

When I came on the scene, 18, 19 was playing with Horace Silver, Art Blakey, Stan Getz.

Those guys were at least 15 years older than me.

And they were really, really, really nice to me.

Narrator: Moving to New York connected Stanley to jazz greats who became his mentors.

But he met contemporary innovators as well.

Working with Chick Corea laid the groundwork for their breakthrough jazz fusion band, Return to Forever, and a lifelong friendship.

Clarke: I was interested in being a composer.

That's why me and Chick gelled so well because he's a composer.

He plays piano, but what he really is, is a composer, and that's what I like to do.

[ Music plays ] I learned a long time ago that the trajectory of jazz, how it moves through time going forward, it's usually done with bandleaders who are brave enough to get some young players and kind of raise them a bit, a little bit.

If the player can actually technically play my music, like as the notes are written, that's kind of 40% of the game.

The two major components to successful instrumental music is technical expertise mixed with emotional impact.

And that's the kind of musicians I like, the young guys that get on and they're not afraid, and they really pump it out.

[ Music plays ] I kind of come out of the Miles Davis school, in that my hands are off.

Once they can play the notes and they can frame the tunes the way they should be framed, whatever happens, I'm cool.

[ Music plays ] You're kind of acknowledging the guy saying, "You know, you're a good player."

I grew up playing acoustic bass.

Even though I play electric bass, I am really in my heart, an acoustic bass player.

But I didn't understand why there were no books for the electric bass.

So I started writing songs for the electric bass.

Like, I wrote a tune "Lopsy Lu."

That is a tune that I wrote for kids.

I was at Tony Williams's house, the great drummer.

He says, "What are you doing?"

I says, "I'm putting together these songs for the bass, like educational things."

And I played him "Lopsy Lu," and he says, "Man, you gotta record that.

And I want to play on it."

So we recorded it, and that kind of started the whole thing.

And then even "School Days" was the same thing.

Things for the bass that only sound good on the bass, and you recognize the song from the bass.

Narrator: On his first album tours, Stanley literally took center stage, stepping out in front of the rest of the band where no bass player had gone before.

Clarke: And I'm standing in the middle of the stage in the front I got the guitar players back, the drummer, the horns are back, they're playing and the people are going crazy.

And I come off the stage and you think the promoter would say, "Hey, man, thanks for the sell out.

Great show."

You know what he said to me?

He says, "I don't believe this."

[ Laughs ] "I don't believe this."

He says, "This is weird.

You're a bass player.

You're standing out."

I said, "Man, thanks, man," you know?

You know, I had those kind of things.

I had quite a few, but after I did my second record, that all stopped.

[ Music plays ] [ Music plays ] I wouldn't call myself a liberator, but I will say the bass, especially the electric bass, is completely liberated.

And now there's thousands of bass players around the world that make records.

They're not all great, but they make records.

[ Music plays ] Narrator: In 2022, the National Endowment for the Arts named Stanley Clarke a jazz master based on his groundbreaking career and his work with other musical greats like Chick Corea, Lenny White, George Duke, Béla Fleck, and Jean-Luc Ponty.

Clarke: You know, every now and then I'll play with my old friends.

But when I play with those guys, there's nothing to do but play, [laughs] and that's cool.

And sometimes the music is really remarkable.

But, you know, whenever there's paradigm shifts in music, it's always driven by the youth.

Always.

[ Music plays ] It's a lot of fun.

You just got to be open.

If your willingness to accept change is high, it's all good.

[ Music plays ] [ Music plays ] [ Applause ] [ Music plays ] [ Cheers and applause ] Announcer: Next up, a conversation across a political divide becomes a path to freedom.

Narrator: After sold out runs off Broadway, "Mrs.

Stern Wanders the Prussian State Library," a play by Jenny Lyn Bader returns to the theater where it first premiered -- Luna Stage in West Orange, New Jersey.

Dershowitz: We started doing it almost exactly a year ago, and it really felt, at least to me, like a historical piece and like a piece where my Judaism and my character's Judaism were very important.

And now, as the world has changed and things are happening to all sorts of people based on their backgrounds of all different kinds, based on their, you know, intellectual beliefs and what they're writing.

It feels like such a more universal human story and such a more modern story.

Narrator: The setting is a jail cell at police headquarters in Alexanderplatz, Berlin, early spring 1933.

Stern: Let me think.

Karl: No, you don't have to think.

Let me help you.

You are in the Prussian State Library.

Stern: Sure.

Yes.

I go there all the time.

Sorry, I didn't realize that would be of interest to the police.

Karl: The political police, yes?

We monitor national security and what people read.

Stern: Do you?

Karl: Mm-hmm.

And the words spoken in political groups, social clubs, sermons.

Stern: You listen to sermons?

Karl: We have five divisions and one of them just takes care of churches.

Stern: There's that much work?

Karl: Even the Lutherans must be watched.

One of us must listen to every sermon... Kreith: She was accused of doing research for the Zionists in the Prussian State Library.

One of the things that we have discussed about the title is that it contains a mystery.

For some people who don't know what the play is about, there's a moment halfway through the play where they understand the title for the first time.

Karl: So your book of love... Stern: On love.

Karl: ...you published it under a different name.

Stern: My maiden name, Hannah Arendt.

Bader: Spoiler alert, Mrs.

Stern is an actual historical figure.

It's Hannah Arendt.

She was married to Gunther Stern, and so she would have been Mrs.

Stern.

She's one of the most influential political thinkers of the 20th century.

She coined the term totalitarianism in her book "The Origins of Totalitarianism," which has been in print for decades and became a bestseller again a few years ago.

She famously covered the trial of Adolf Eichmann for The New Yorker in a series of journalistic pieces she wrote which were then combined into a book called "Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil."

She wrote more than 30 books.

And you know her ideas continue to reverberate.

Erich: We were just concerned, as some of our people were also arrested when we heard about the charges against you.

Hirshfield: There's a few moments when Mrs.

Stern seems to try to get Erich the lawyer, to acknowledge the severity of -- of the political situation at hand.

And he doesn't -- he doesn't really cop to it.

Stern: The Nazis want chaos.

Erich: If they want chaos why would they create more laws?

Stern: Allow me to explain it to you.

Laws are like fences.

Erich: Exactly.

The law sits in a fixed spot.

You know where it is, and you can take refuge there.

Stern: Until it moves.

Terror begins when the law starts moving from place to place.

They are attacking the law itself.

Moving the fence.

Putting a few people outside of it until we reach a point where anyone can be put outside the fence, whether or not they are guilty.

Bader: Here's somebody being interrogated by the Gestapo.

She's in a Gestapo cellar.

She's been arrested by the secret police.

She's later going to write a book on the origins of totalitarianism.

What if she's figuring that out right now.

One thing she talks about in "The Origins of Totalitarianism" is in a classic dictatorship.

You know, there are these decrees, but in totalitarianism you change the law, you change it back, you change it again.

You start to make people question the whole idea of the law.

The idea of 1933 is something I really, really got much more immersed in over time working on this play, because it was a really a moment of transition.

Every week something new would happen.

Karl: I write the file, and there are so many things that you could be charged with, yet none seems exactly right.

Stern: So many things I could be charged with?

Dershowitz: I think there are a few moments, especially in our scene, where I feel like we're almost explicitly in conversation with the audience.

Like one of them is when I say the line, you know, you say-- Erich: We live in complicated times, Mrs.

Stern.

Stern: They are certainly unprecedented.

Isgitt: I think that that is a crisis we're seeing today, is where people are having to evaluate the difference between law and morality, maybe in a way they never have had to think about it.

And I saw the Nazi soldier struggling with that a lot, as he was very new at it.

That was the part that resonated with me the most, was his character.

Karl: What I liked best about the other job is that it was easy to avoid mistakes, but now I worry that if I make an error-- Stern: It's a lot of responsibility for you, the responsibility of judgment.

And right now you need to be careful.

It will not get easier.

Temple: He does find this conversation stimulating, and I don't think he's stimulated like this in his day-to-day job.

So, like, she shows like a certain kind of love that he, you know, did not expect to see.

Karl: It's hard to live with someone who is depressed.

Flores: He wanted to be loyal to to his party, but at the same time he had that fight, that inner battle where he wanted to say, "You know what?

I believe you."

Narrator: Mrs.

Stern, Hannah, finds herself with a choice whether to trust the rule of law or to escape the country by any means necessary.

Erich: Have you not been listening?

You need to leave Germany.

Stern: But you said you didn't believe in the forced emigration.

Erich: I'm not forcing you.

I'm advising you, as a friend would, to go for your own good, Hannah.

Narrator: It's a true story.

She did escape, and it was only possible because of the friendship she formed with her captor.

Hoffman: I would like to think that people can connect that way.

And maybe we will.

Maybe we will.

It's all about whether or not people can actually listen to each other.

Kreith: It is a footnote in history, but also a deeply relevant and to me, deeply inspiring footnote in history.

Because really, what it invites us to think about is how we forge relationships across seemingly unbridgeable divides.

Stern: I thank you.

[ Music plays ] Narrator: Last on the show, using dance to tell the many stories of a historic house.

Norton: Where She Once Stood is a site immersive dance project.

Woman 2: It's based around the Crane House, which is a historic home in Montclair.

Norton: It walks through history from the 1700s all the way through the 1960s.

The dance happens in a historical site.

It happens very close to the audience members.

Arters: The project revolves around the stories of the women who either lived there or passed through there as, like, a community center, and we get to interact with the history of the actual place and the architecture, so it's it's pretty special.

Norton: It's stepping into history and it feels very present and very alive.

[ Singing ] And listen as we sang in the evening by the moonlight.

Yeah, yeah.

Norton: My name is Erin Carlisle Norton, and I'm the artistic director of The Moving Architects.

The Moving Architects is a modern dance company, and I'd say the aesthetic is grounded in weighted movement and strength-based movement.

I love seeing the body make shapes in space.

And so from that movement aesthetic, I would say that I love also working collaboratively.

I love bringing in different types of props.

Modern dance does have a history of very strong women, and I like to think that I'm continuing the legacy of modern dance women with the work I do and the focus on the female voice.

The Moving Architects has evolved to become an all-female dance company, and this has happened over the years, mostly because I really enjoy working with women.

There's something about the female form of strength and possibly the unexpected strength that women have that I really like to highlight in my work.

So it's not about lightness and balletic sort of movement, but it it shows a range of vulnerability and authenticity.

And so coming from that background of working with women, the stories that are highlighted from the Crane House are the women's stories.

So it's not just the wealthy Crane woman who led the house, but it's also the enslaved people they had.

It was also the Irish servants they had, the boarders were all women, it turned into a place for Black women as a YWCA.

It is so entrenched in these female voices that often don't even have names.

And so there's something about bringing them up to the surface that feels very authentic to me.

Diggs: We're sitting in the Crane House, a historic YWCA museum.

We're also a research center and archives.

We do a lot of local history programming and events.

We're very passionate about spaces feeling immersive.

We almost in each room have specific things you can touch or pick up and look.

And we do that on purpose because we want history to feel like it is coming to life, not something static we're just looking at, but something you can engage with and really get a sense of it.

We have four rooms that tell a different time period and story in each of those spaces.

So the first is 1796 to 1830, which is the early part of the house's history from when it was first built, reflecting the Crane family, the children who lived here, and enslaved individuals in the household.

The Crane family were very wealthy and influential people in Montclair community and its development.

Eventually, one of the sons of the Cranes, James Crane, moves in here, and around 1840, so him and his wife Phoebe live here until 1900.

And we also see Irish servants who are part of the household during this period as well.

With the Great Migration in the early 1900s, you see a huge influx of black families moving north, looking for better opportunities, safer spaces to live and thrive.

Montclair saw a really professional population of Black families here who needed resources in the community because of segregation and discrimination.

So a number of women in the community, one of whom was Alice Huey Foster, saw this need and said, "You know what?

Let's establish a YWCA.

So we have a safe space for women and girls to come for clubs and programs, and to also live here."

The photograph behind me here is what we believe to be the founding members of the YWCA.

The women in the community who established the YWCA were very influential.

They really knew how to network, and they really took things upon themselves to establish what they needed.

I think Montclair is unique, and it's a very interesting story of race relations, because very early on, you're talking about in the 1920s, white women and Black women working together, which was not the case because of segregation discrimination laws that were happening across the country.

[ Music plays ] Norton: So each room is inspired by the women of that time period.

The movement starts more bound and refined.

To me, that was representing the women of the 17, 1800s.

And as it goes from room to room, as women get more independence, there is more freedom in the movement.

Music also matches the era, the costume matches the era.

I decided to have a combination of live music and also more recorded music, because that's what was available in those time periods.

And and the idea that live music, along with live dance, in this very intimate experience, would be a more visceral feeling for audience members and their whole body.

Woman: [ Singing ] Light to the lattice above her.

The maid creeps and leaps to the arms of her lover.

Norton: The special part of the project is that it was founded in a community, and it's there to bring the community together and also highlight the unique history of the area too.

I want these women's stories to be important and to know that really, the life that we all have today as women in society has taken a long time to happen.

Independence, having rights -- It's been such a progression and reading through the research of this house, I'm realizing that more and more that I'm part of a long history of women trying to be seen in society.

Arters: We are who we are here today because of everybody who came before us, specifically looking at the women who kind of tread the path before us so that we could have the rights that we do now and have the ability to even make art the way that we do now.

This wasn't always available to people, so I'm hoping that somebody walking out at the end of this show sees the marriage of these two things, of the history and the dancing, and that it brings it all more to life and helps them kind of feel tethered to the history that brought them and brought us to where we are now.

[ Music plays ] Narrator: That's it for this episode of "State of the Arts."

Explore more stories about the incredible artists working in New Jersey at stateoftheartsnj.com.

Thanks for watching.

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