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0000017c-60f7-de77-ad7e-f3f739cf0000Arts & More airs Fridays at 7:50 a.m. and 4:20 p.m.Theme music: "Like A Beginner Again" by Dan Barry of Seas of Jupiter

Black Arts Festival Expands, Premieres Theatre Company

The publicity photo for 'Been Loving You.' Face Off Theatre Company will put on the play this month.
Face Off Theatre Company

The annual Black Arts Festival is coming up this month—and it’s bigger than ever. The festival now spans seven days instead of four with more local artists, more demonstrations, and more community events.

The Black Arts & Cultural Center’s new executive director Yolonda Lavender says the organization is going through a transition as younger members have taken the reigns. 

“We are really being adamant about you know getting people excited and fired up again about their community, and specifically how the Black Arts & Cultural Center fits into that equation,” says Lavender.

“Art and culture is essential I think to people’s lives and them knowing who they are and being able to experience different things. And so we want them to be on fire and excited about that.”

In past years, the festival was held in Arcadia Creek Festival Place and Bronson Park. Lavender says this year they’ve moved the festival to La Crone Park in Kalamazoo’s Northside neighborhood.

“And so really engaging with the community and making sure that we’re there, and we’re connected, and we’re accessible is a priority for us. And so that was the primary reason why we chose to move into the neighborhood,” says Lavender.

On Friday the 17th, the Black Arts & Cultural Center will also present its new theatre company, Face Off Theatre. Marissa Harrington is one of the company’s founders. She says creating an actual theatre company for the BACC was a logical step.

“You know, hey if we really want to be a force in this community of theatre, then we need to probably be doing more than two productions a year. However, the Black Arts & Cultural Center is a non-profit and so you’re talking about a responsibility of a whole organization—the theatre is just one leg of it. And so there are those of us that are either from Kalamazoo or live in Kalamazoo, have made Kalamazoo their home. We’re all Western graduates and we’re all friends. And so we said, ‘You know, it would be really cool if we all had a theater company.’”

Unlike BACC performances, this new company will focus more on the regional community, not just Kalamazoo. Harrigton says every performance will be followed by a talk-back with the audience and Face Off will hold public theatre workshops throughout the year.

The theatre’s first play is called Been Loving You. It’s a series of scenes about the relationships between men and women of color taken from August Wilson’s Pittsburgh cycle—those are ten plays Wilson wrote that documented the African American experience in the 20th century.

“You know any time I’ve ever done this show and had a talk-back, it was like fireworks—because somebody had an uncle like that or a grandmother like that or an aunt like that," says Director Tanisha Pyron.

"And these are conversations that are needed in this day and age in order for us to sort of progress as a society. We have so many hot-button issues around gender, and race, and sexuality and all of these things. The arts is a place where you can touch the heart, impact the mind, and have those sort of productive conversations.”

Pyron and Harrington are just two of the six women who founded Face Off. Pyron says the founders represent a voice that is often overlooked—even in today’s modern theatre.

“We have a tradition in the American theatre of actors like Ruby Dee and Maya Angelou even—who started out as a poet and an actress and a dancer—you know, Cicely Tyson. Some of these came up through the ranks of the American theatre—that is missing in this community and in many communities. And we really want to be advocates for that for the next generation and expand the audience for what some would deem to be culturally-specific theatre art.”

The festival will run July 13th through the 19th at La Crone Park in Kalamazoo.

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