In this new live music and film piece, acclaimed musician and hometown girl Jenny Scheinman invites us into the captivating visual world of H. Lee Waters, who documented over 118 small towns in the southeast between 1936-42. Waterss films are of regular people going about their lives mill workers streaming out of factories, a mother and daughter dancing on a dirt road, an old man reading a war-time headline, children racing in slow motion toward a huge wooden teeter totter. Scheinman and filmmaker Finn Taylor have re-edited these iconic images to Scheinmans music, and created a new movie that speaks to any community as much as to the towns where it was filmed. The score for the film is performed live with a trio that includes Scheinman, Robbie Fulks and Robbie Gjersoe.
These are Americas home movies. They contain a clue to our nature, an imprint of our ancestry. They were shot before Americans had sophisticated understanding of film, and capture truthfulness that one is hard-pressed to find in this day and age now that we are immersed in a world of social media, video, and photography. These people can dance. Girls catapult each other off seesaws and teenage boys hang on each others arms. Toothless men play resonator guitars on street corners, and toddlers push strollers through empty fields. They remind us of our resilience and of our immense capacity for joy even in the hardest of times.
"Scheinman [has] a distinctive vision of American music, suffused with plainspoken beauty and fortified all at once by country, gospel, and melting-pot folk, along with jazz and the blues" The New York Times
Adresse
Arkley Center For The Performing Arts (Afficher)
412 G. Street
Eureka, CA 95501
United States
