(upbeat music) - In this edition of WLIW Artsbeat, expressing oneself through movement.

- I feel that dance is a synthesis between mind, body, and spirit.

And so when I dance, I am sharing my deepest truth.

(upbeat music) - The impressive career of an opera singer.

- I feel like my whole life has been a completed circle at this point because I started out teaching, wanted to perform.

I've always done both.

(upbeat music) - A poet who finds meaning in the everyday.

- Poetry really does allow me to think expansively.

Just in the manner of the mundane things that happen every day in life, you can see the universe in them.

- It's all ahead in this edition of WLIW Artsbeat.

Funding for WLIW Artsbeat is made possible by viewers like you.

Thank you.

Welcome to WLIW ArtsBeat.

I'm Diane Masciale.

From being a soloist with the Rod Rogers Dance Company to teaching the next generation to writing her memoir.

Dancer, choreographer and scholar, Halifu Osumare embraces movement.

We visit the artist in California to learn more about her life's journey.

[Music] Well, I think I kind of stumbled into dance.

It wasn't that I always felt like I was going to be a dancer.

As an African-American, I loved to dance to the latest social dance music and would go to parties on Saturday nights as a teenager.

But it wasn't until I started taking modern dance in high school that I realized that dance could actually be a profession.

I had to get better technically and in all styles of dance, ballet, modern, Caribbean, and I started also studying African dance and the Dunham technique.

With a career that spans over 40 years, Halifu Osumare is an internationally renowned dancer, choreographer, scholar, and researcher whose work and contributions are noted as defining moments in dance history.

I think my dance career reflects my sense of independence and rebelliousness because I actually left the United States as a young 21 year old in the late 60s and lived in Europe for three years all on my own.

My mother thought I was crazy but through dance I was able to move through Spain, France and then ended up in in Scandinavia for a year in Copenhagen where I started one of the first modern dance companies and then ending up also in Stockholm, Sweden where I taught in one of the main ballet academies, jazz dance.

Halifu's world travels would set the tone as she returned to California with a broader portfolio of experiences, including dancing with the Rod Rogers Dance Company where she performed at some of the top venues in New York.

Please have your tickets ready.

Let me read them and you read.

Starting in four minutes, folks.

Please take your seats.

So I had all of that wealth of experience, but I still felt like there was something missing.

And it was my self-funded trip to West Africa, particularly Ghana, West Africa, in 1976, that kind of really solidified my path.

So when you put the idea of how Blackness has been perceived with the dancing body, you know, you're talking about layers of marginalization, but also layers of a kind of knowledge base that we are just beginning to understand.

The idea that I'm in search of a kind of truth about culture and society because I've experienced it in the act of dancing, that I am sharing knowledge.

And for me, that is a part of how African Americans in particular have survived our experience here in the United States, is through the dance and the music as a survival tool.

I feel that dance is a synthesis between mind, body, and spirit.

And so when I dance, I am sharing my deepest truth, my deepest knowledge base.

So my first memoir, Dancing in Blackness, published in 2018, and the current one, Dancing the Afro Future, in 2024, I'm trying to look at my life as a microcosm in relationship to the larger macrocosm of the constantly shifting, churning social, political, and historical scene.

As Halifu looks back over her extensive career, her many books, her teachings as a professor, her work as a choreographer, she hopes that through the power, or the language of dance, that she can give people a solid blueprint for the future.

The young people who have studied with me and who are going to pass on what I gave to them.

And I found in through doing my book tours that a lot of my past students come to those tours and that is so fulfilling.

So fulfilling.

And I'm hoping that my legacy also lasts just through personal memory and people teaching their kids what I gave them.

Not just about me, but about the principles that I have tried to inculcate.

I find that artists are in the vanguard of where we're going, you know, in terms of humanity and its development and evolution.

Artists are always, you know, like maybe one step ahead of everybody else, letting us see the possibilities of what we can grow into as human beings.

Dance has brought me to myself and who I am as a human being on this planet.

And so for my limited time here, I feel like I have found my true self through dance and I have been able to embody that wisdom.

For more information go to hosumare.com.

>> And now, the artist quote of the week.

>> Opera singer Margaret Chalker has had a decades-long career that has taken her around the world.

Up next, we head to the Crane School of Music in Potsdam, New York, where Chalker is an educator to meet the artist and hear her perform.

My name is Margaret Chalker and I am an assistant professor of voice at Crane School of Music in Potsdam, New York.

I went to college to be a music educator, coming from a family of music educators, but while there I had a very good teacher and my voice developed each year so that by my junior year I got a very good role, the Countess in The Marriage of Figaro, which has been one of the most important operas in my whole life.

And really liked the Hollywood stories.

There was an agent in the audience on opening night and he said, you know, "Come to New York.

I'll make you a star."

And my parents said, "You can go for the weekend."

But I got the bug.

I loved being on stage and I was very fortunate.

Everything really fell into place.

I had quite a winding career because I was so expecting to be what a girl from the 50s is supposed to be, married, children, and I was going to be a teacher.

After singing in venues across the United States, Margaret decided she needed a more stable life for her family.

So I went to Europe and was extremely fortunate and got into one of the best companies right off.

And in Germany, I was able to have my daughter and all the performances were in that city.

And I could sing and go home, kiss her goodnight, and it was a very nice life.

And after that, two years in Germany, I went to Switzerland and I stayed there 25 years.

I was singing opera with the Opera House of Zurich.

It was a fabulous, fabulous place to be.

It's one of the top opera houses in the world.

And I sang with people who are famous now, Piotr Beczala, who's singing Rigoletto at the Met, Thomas Hampson, and I stood on stage.

Oh, the experience was heavenly.

I mean, a world-class orchestra, world-class colleagues, world-class chorus.

It's really like being carried on hands, really, because we had coaches and people that make sure the part is ready before the directors arrive.

The directors, the conductors that I got there were world-class.

As an opera singer, Margaret has performed in a variety of different languages.

The typical ones are German, French, Italian, of course, and then I did get to sing in Russian and I've sung in Czech, I've sung in Hebrew, and so far that's about all for me.

At age 62, Margaret retired from the Zurich Opera House.

She moved to the North Country of New York to be closer to her daughter, who teaches first grade in Messina and to her granddaughters.

I love the North Country and St.

Lawrence River and I live on the Grass River.

I stayed in Messina the first four years, I was just being grandmother.

I drove my granddaughters around to their dance lessons in school and I was at their concerts and then an opening came up here and it's offered me a brand new life.

I was able to take this job and I'm in my fifth year now and there's been a lot for me to learn to be in academia but I wouldn't trade it I wouldn't trade it for the world I feel like my whole life has been a completed circle at this point because I started out teaching wanted to perform I've always done both and I'm lucky I'm very very fortunate.

Margaret is an assistant professor at the Crane School of Music at the State University of New York at Potsdam, where she teaches voice to approximately 24 students.

We have to teach the voice because it's very easy for people to sing in a way that, after a while, may ruin their voice or not allow it to bloom as much as it should.

And of course, the thing about opera singing or classically, people don't like these terms so much anymore, but what we consider classical music for voice is very demanding with louds, with softs, with highs and lows and fast coloratura, which is fast moving notes or long sustained notes.

Those don't happen without training.

With singing opera, you're on stage with an orchestra of about a hundred, often, in the pit, and you sing without any microphone.

So a lot of the study is to get the voice so that it projects freely, equally if you're singing pianissimo or forte, soft or loud, so that it carries to the last seat in the house.

And that takes instruction.

You have to know what you really want.

When I was 22 and got married, I remember saying to my husband, "Well, I have to sing."

I made no more instruction on that than that, but I have to sing.

And when I finished my master's, I said, "I want to be as good a singer as I can be, in as good a house, with as good an orchestra as possible."

And that happened.

So if you can be clear about your goals and know who you are, I think that will get you a long way.

[ Music ] ♪ No one here to guide you ♪ ♪ Now you're on your own ♪ ♪ Only me beside you ♪ ♪ Still, you're not alone ♪ ♪ No one is alone.

Truly ♪ ♪ No one is alone ♪ [ Music ] ♪ Sometimes people leave you ♪ ♪ Halfway through the wood ♪ ♪ Others may deceive you ♪ ♪ You decide what's good ♪ ♪ You decide alone ♪ ♪ But no one is alone ♪ ♪ People make mistakes ♪ ♪ Fathers, Mothers ♪ ♪ People make mistakes, ♪ ♪ Holding to their own, ♪ ♪ Thinking they're alone ♪ ♪ Honor their mistakes ♪ ♪ Everybody makes ♪ ♪ One another's terrible mistakes ♪ ♪ Witches can be right ♪ ♪ Giants can be good ♪ ♪ You decide what's right ♪ ♪ You decide what's good ♪ ♪ Just remember, someone is on your side ♪ ♪ Someone else is not ♪ ♪ While you're seeing your side, maybe you forgot, ♪ ♪ they are not alone ♪ ♪ No one is alone ♪ [ Music ] ♪ Hard to see the light now ♪ ♪ Just don't let it go ♪ ♪ Things will come out right now ♪ ♪ We can make it so ♪ ♪ Someone is on your side ♪ ♪ No one is alone ♪ Now here's a look at this month's fun fact.

(upbeat music) Up next, we take a trip to Wisconsin to meet author, poet, and musician, Brian Cherry.

Born and raised in Milwaukee, he finds inspiration in his city and sees the beauty in the mundane.

Here's his story.

For inspiration, I tend to be pulled to the lake.

We have some beautiful lakefront areas in the city where you can sit and write and be lost for hours and let the waves come back over you, let your writing go back over them.

It's kind of a symbiotic relationship in a way.

I write poetry mainly because it's an outlet for me to speak my philosophies in life.

One big one, overarching one, being that we're in this together.

This is all a collective thing that's happening and we have to find ways to work with each other and struggle with the good and the bad things that happen to, you know, make the best of it and keep walking forward.

You know, just as everybody's a unique individual, anybody that sits down to write a poem is going to be different than me, which is a really cool aspect about it.

I write every day.

It just kind of helps me center myself.

My main forms of art are music and poetry.

They both kind of have pieces of storytelling in them, in a way, is direct to people you're trying to reach and direct within yourself as well.

(guitar music) - We are at Woodland Pattern.

It is the epicenter of poetry in Milwaukee, maybe even the state.

They do so much for the poets in the city and around the country.

It's had a huge impact on me as far as them supporting my art and just helping me along and teaching me so many things.

You can take different programs here to learn about writing poetry and stuff like that.

So I've been able to do that a bunch.

So yeah, it's a great place.

Just a couple of influences that have had a big impact on my life.

Firstly, Frank O'Hara, his book "Lunch Poems" kind of changed the way that I thought about poetry because I found it right about the time that I found "Woodland Patterns" and it just made me see that you can just walk into the world and have wonder in your life and write about that.

And he does that very beautifully.

Also, Roberto Harrison, who's a poet from Milwaukee, actually.

He's been kind of a mentor to me in a lot of ways, just by showing me different authors that I would have never heard of and stuff that he thought I might be into.

And by reading his poems and seeing his beautiful artwork has influenced me tremendously.

Lastly, today I brought a book by Bob Kaufman, who's a poet from San Francisco back in the '60s, generally termed a beat poet.

Bob Kaufman's ideas do leap across the page.

And it's kind of like in music, when you have a singer, they say they leap across the speakers to you.

He meets you where you're at, but it's in such a weird tangle of phrases and ideas that you're just left with the feeling of, wow, I don't really know what that was, but that was really exciting.

Let's do that again, you know?

You can feel everything in them, and they're just vibrant pieces of art, and they make me aspire to be able to someday write something like that.

What drove me to write "Death Moan" was some of the associated traumas with what happened in Minneapolis.

The first poem in the book came the day after that started.

Shoe store is burning, I'm flexing out front.

This convenient circus crawls.

It lets them keep cozy gentrification, chimera perch.

Minnesota nice upside your head.

And that is one that just came absolutely fast.

And I knew that there was something happening.

Sometimes you can just feel like a manuscript is being formed in some way.

I am the reverent friction of the ghost.

The one who convinced me to burn.

The one chained to my clammy comfort.

And so like I tried to keep myself in that mind frame for a while and force myself kind of look at it, not turn away from it.

Death Moan is what came out of that.

Some of the motifs in my poetry rely on juxtaposition.

Existence relying the false natures, her holding on always like double knots, banded across the expanse until it is time to let go.

Some of it now is going towards, I had this idea, this thought that words are just hunks of sound and we just kind of put them together and sometimes they sound different ways with other sounds that you're putting there.

You will foresee the moon in burst blood, then you will see the moon in full blood bloom.

You will understand the gloom, yet you will still have no way to adjust crimson sadness.

Poetry really does allow me to think expansively.

Just in the manner of the mundane things that happen every day in life, you can see the universe in them.

What I'm trying to do is say what happened to me in a poetic way.

"Dig a shallow grave, swallow and baptize there, the press of God shrapnel from the sky harvesting the earth, its inhabitants, device operating as you kneel."

Oftentimes, I don't understand a lot of poetry that I read, so what I do is I let it wash over me.

And as it washes over me, flecks of things go by and I'm like, "Oh, what is that?"

And then something else is popping by.

The poem can mean different things today than it can mean tomorrow, even, you know.

I think the meaning of art is to inspire, to show other people that I may not get this art, this piece of art, but this person had this feeling in his soul that he could put something, make something, and put it out.

Maybe I could do something like that.

Art is an inspiration machine to me.

Discover more at briancherry.com And here s a look at this week's Art History.

(music) (music) That wraps it up for this edition of WLIW Artsbeat.

Visit our webpage to watch more episodes of the show.

We hope to see you next time.

I'm Diane Masciale.

Thank you for watching.

Funding for WLIW Artsbeat was made possible by viewers like you.

Thank you.

[music]