Music, dance part of Central High observance
A number of public, arts-centered events are on the schedule this weekend in conjunction with the 60th anniversary of the desegregation of Little Rock Central High, 1500 S. Park St., Little Rock:
University of Central Arkansas film professor Scott Meador, with help from UCA music professor Blake Tyson, will transform the Central High facade through 21st-century visual effects with “Imagine If Buildings Could Talk,” a 3-D mapped video projection. The eight-minute video will run every 15 minutes, 7:309:30 p.m. Saturday-Sunday. Admission is free. The video also commemorates the 90th anniversary of the school’s construction in 1927. Tyson’s soundtrack is a piece he composed for six percussionists (three marimbas, two vibraphones and a glockenspiel).
The No Tears Suite,a 30-minute, large ensemble jazz work by Little Rock composer and jazz pianist Chris Parker, will receive its world premiere at 6 p.m. Saturday at the Magnolia Mobil service station on the Central High School National Historic Site, Park Street and W. Daisy L. Gatson Bates Drive, Little Rock. Parker took his inspiration from Warriors Don’t Cry, a memoir by Melba Patillo Beals, one of the Little Rock Nine.
Joining Parker for the premiere: drummer Brian Blade, bassist Bill Huntington, tenor saxophonist Bobby LaVell, trumpeter Marc Franklin, alto saxophonist Chad Fowler, singer Kelley Hurt and singer/arranger I.J. Routen.
The piece will be part of a 90-minute set that will include a variety of Arkansasand civil rights-inspired jazz tunes, including music by Pharoah Sanders, Sam Rivers, John Stubblefield and Charles Mingus. Student music ensembles from area high schools and colleges will perform from noon to 6 p.m. Admission is free. Sponsor is Oxford American magazine. Call or visit OxfordAmerican. org/Events.
Opera in the Rock will perform a concert version of the opera Troubled Island by Arkansas native William Grant Still, with a libretto by Langston Hughes and Verna Arvey, 7 p.m. Friday in the third-floor auditorium of the Mosaic Templars Cultural Center, 501 W. Ninth St., Little Rock. It will be the Arkansas premiere for the opera, first produced by the New York Opera Company in 1949, the first time a major company performed a grand opera by an American black composer. The setting for the three-act opera is the 1790s Haitian revolution, which resulted in the installation, and later overthrow, of a corrupt leader. The company plans a fully staged version of the opera for May. Admission is free. Call (501) 683-3593 or visit MosaicTemplarsCenter.com. Opera in the Rock and the center will also host a free lunch lecture at noon Friday with discussion and musical selections in the auditorium.
Core Performance Company will put on a site-specific dance and spoken commemorative word performance, Civil Twilight: Reflections on Fear, Courage and Resilience, in collaboration with local spoken-word performers LeRon McAdoo, Marcus Montgomery and Central High’s Writeous Poetry Club, 6-7:30 p.m. Sunday, Central High School National Historic Site Commemorative Garden, on the northwest corner of Daisy L. Gatson Bates Drive and South Park Street. Composer Tania Leon and librettist Henry Louis Gates Jr., whose Little Rock Nine opera is scheduled for completion in July, and garden designer and University of Arkansas at Little Rock faculty member Michael Warrick will make brief remarks about the ability of the arts to create social change. The event is also part of the Acansa Festival. Visit acansa.org.
Henry Louis Gates Jr., better known as a historian, and Tania Leon will also take part in a discussion moderated by journalist Donna Lampkin Stephens as part of a program titled “Turning History Into Art,” 7:30 p.m. Monday, Reynolds Performance Hall, UCA, 201 Donaghey Ave., Conway. The evening will include a scene from the Little Rock Nine opera. Tickets are $15, $5 for students, children and UCA faculty and staff. Visit uca.edu/tickets.
A fuller schedule of events is available online at uca.edu/ cfac/central60.