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Solarity Celebrates 10th Anni versary with Bloom
ARTS & CULTURE
December 17, 2021 Established 1874 Volume 151, Number 9
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Solarity Celebrates 10th Anniversary with Bloom
Musical artist Tommy Genesis will headline Solarity.
Photo by Andi Elloway
Lilyanna D’Amato Arts & Culture Editor
This Saturday, Solarity will host rappers Tommy Genesis and Duckwrth — alongside a plethora of student performers — in its 10th-anniversary rendition, Bloom. Solarity, which is a student-run group, holds a large concert event each semester in an effort to unite the campus and curate a welcoming safe space for collective artistic expression. This will be the first Solarity for most first- and second-years, who were not on campus for Solstice, Solarity’s summer festival, due to the College’s three-semester plan.
Kate Steifman, College third-year and one of Solarity’s co-chairs, said this is the biggest event the College has seen since the onset of the pandemic. While the original headliner, St. Louis rapper Smino, had to drop out of the event earlier in the week, the concert will still be the largest Solarity to date.
“We’re going to have the most acts that we’ve ever had this semester,” Steifman said. “It’s definitely the biggest budget we’ve ever had. It’s the big 10th anniversary, and we’re all so excited. We’re gonna make it pretty big. We’re putting on eight acts during the show, which is a really big undertaking.”
College third-year and Solarity’s other co-chair Erzsi Misangyi is excited to introduce the new students to the event. While they’re excited about bringing artists to campus, Misangyi is most looking forward to showing them all of the student performance groups.
“We wanted to put on a big show so that everyone could just kind of like have a night to enjoy,” Misangyi said. “There’s a lot of people on campus that just have never experienced Solarity and we wanted to make the 10th anniversary a big deal. … I’m excited for OCTaiko and [College third-year] Reggie [Goudeau] to perform. We have AndWhat!? performing, and OCircus is going to be doing some stuff. Kopano is performing and Tali is our closing DJ. A bunch of really amazing student acts.”
Ahead of the commemorative anniversary, Assistant Director of Student Activities and Solarity’s faculty advisor Sean Lehlbach reminisces on the event’s origin. Prior to the advent of Solarity, Oberlin didn’t really have any school-wide events of the same scale.
“In the spring of 2011, the event originated to highlight student art and performance,” Lehlbach said. “They used to have huge art installations. But through the years, it has evolved into having that student art in performance in varying ways in addition to larger acts. See Saturday’s, page 12
Next to Normal Student Production Opens at Kander Theater
Sydney Rosensaft Senior Staff Writer
The Oberlin Theater department will stage Brian Yorkey’s 2008 musical Next to Normal from Dec. 16 through Dec. 19 at Kander Theater. Directed by College fourth-year Emily Newmark, the play revolves around a family coping with the struggles of mental illness and opens as the mother of the family, Diana, is diagnosed with bipolar disorder. After going off her medication, she exhibits symptoms of mania and experiences delusions. Over the course of the show, Diana sees multiple doctors and tries various kinds of treatment while each family member grapples with learning to live with Diana’s mental illness.
This show dovetails Newmark’s two academic interests: psychology and theater. Newmark knew early on that she wanted to direct this production for her Theater capstone.
“I’m an avid theatergoer,” Newmark said. “I think activism through theater is really powerful. The mental health topics discussed were along my path here at Oberlin as a culminating project between my two majors.”
The Kander Theater, which typically hosts capstone performances, is a simple black box theater with a small, elevated platform for a stage that makes for an especially engaging venue for this production. For the majority of the show, actors perform on the floor, pulling audience members directly into the family dynamics throughout the story arc.
Kiva Wise, College fourth-year and stage manager, discussed the advantages of staging performances in the space.
“The Kander is where all student directing capstones go up,” Wise said. “The space itself is quite flexible physically, as the risers for the seating can be configured a lot of different ways. … The particular setup we’re using is called thrust, which means we have an audience on three sides.”
The cast have gotten very close after two months of six rehearsals per week, three hours a day — the timeline was compressed due to the Kander Theater’s show schedule. The size of the cast and tight space result in an intimate staging of the show.
Anna Cohen, College second-year, plays Natalie, a high school senior dealing with a sick mother while trying to find her footing in the world. Cohen explained how the close nature of the show added to her experience.
“It is like having a second family,” Cohen said. “Performing in a show as demanding as this, both emotionally and time-wise, it has been really important for the six of us to bond.”
Aside from a little input from Newmark’s advisor, Next to Normal is entirely student-run. College third-year Ethan Smith-Cohen took on the role of musical director, deliberating crucial musical elements of the performance. Smith-Cohen noted how this production is a conglomerate of everyone’s vision; each student involved had a hand in creating the musical on stage this weekend.
“Emily is the director and has her own vision, and I’m the music director and have my own music ideas to put in,” Smith-Cohen said. “But the thing that I really love about theater is that it’s more than just any one person’s vision.”
Especially in a story that raises sensitive topics surrounding mental health, a conversational aspect between the director and actors is important. Next to Normal is an emotionally taxing story that easily affects people. Newmark did not want actors to get bogged down by drawing too deeply from their own mental health struggles.
“We had a lot of conversations about how we were going to go about talking about mental health within the rehearsal room,” Newmark said. “Making sure that the actors were not pulling from pieces of their own life was really important to me.”
Emily picked Next to Normal for her capstone because the entire cast and crew knows that mental health, although difficult at times, is a worthwhile subject to portray theatrically. However, the conversation about mental health has shifted since the show was written, now offering a more inclusive, accepting space for people dealing with mental illness.
“The show is meaningful,” Smith-Cohen said. “But in that same vein, the show was written in 2008. The ways in which we discuss mental health and the ways that the show discusses mental health have diverged.”
For example, some of the characters in the performance serve as caricatures of specific mental disorders, depicting them falsely and harmfully. Newmark aims to address these inconsistencies in a talk-back after each show.
“We’re going to talk with the audience about the changes that have been made since this was written, in the mental health sphere, and say, ‘Here’s why it’s important to talk about the media representation of mental health versus the reality of it,’” Newmark said.
Newmark wants the show to be a powerful experience for the audience and hopes that they can use it as a jumping- off point for broader discussions surrounding mental health.
“My hope is to start a conversation about mental health activism,” Newmark said. “[At Oberlin], we’re really lucky to talk about mental health all the time, but it’s also really important to make sure we’re aware that those conversations are cultivated from a place of research and activism.”
Next to Normal runs through this Sunday, Dec. 19. Tickets can be purchased online at the Arts at Oberlin website.
Theo Croker Courtesy of Jeff Dunn
Indigo Stevens
Grammy-nominated trumpeter, composer, and bandleader Theo Croker, OC ’07, returned to Oberlin on Dec. 15 for a performance at Finney Chapel. Since 2006, Croker has released five studio albums: The Fundamentals (2006), In the Tradition (2009), AfroPhysicist (2014), Escape Velocity (2016), and Star People Nation (2019). In his latest album, BLK2LIFE || A FUTURE PAST (2021), Croker blends post-bop, funk, and electronic music to explore the universal origins of Blackness. Croker has also been featured on J. Cole’s 4 Your Eyez Only (2016), Common’s Black America Again (2016), and Ari Lennox’s debut album Shea Butter Baby (2019). This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
What intrigued you about the trumpet?
It’s just brass. To me, the trumpet has a lot of dynamics to it. It always had a lot of expression. The trumpet players I first was hip to — even before I was into jazz or playing trumpet — were my grandfather, of course, and also people like Dizzy Gillespie, Lee Morgan, Clifford Brown, and Miles Davis, those kinds of sounds. To me, even the Gloria Estefan album Mi Tierra just struck me and pulled me in. My older brother played the trumpet for a while too, and I used to want to do everything my big brother did, so I used to sneak into his room and play his trumpet.
I transferred before the last two years of high school to a school called Douglas School of the Arts in Jacksonville, FL. That’s where I met Scott Dickinson, Wilbert Neal, Jamison Ross, Larry Wilson, Alphonso Horne, Ulysses Owens Jr. — cats like that. We were all classmates up there. I went there because that was the compromise to me not running away from home to go to New York at 15. Florida’s got a crazy music education program. The public schools are pathetic, but it’s amazing how good all the music programs are. I know a lot of great educators here.
What were some of your early influences outside of the trumpet?
Musically, some of my early influences were people like Björk. I liked her album called Vespertine. When I first heard that album, my mind immediately opened up to more electronic music; before then, I wasn’t tryna hear that. People like Outkast and Mos Def were influences as well. I grew up hearing rap, hip-hop, and R&B on the radio — that’s what we generally listened to in my family — but hearing the Outkast album Aquemini, the Mos Def album Black on Both Sides, and the one that came before that pulled me really into deep hiphop. Not that Tupac wasn’t deep, but Tupac and Biggie — we heard them on the radio. That was culture music, our Black cultural pop. I got deeper into the underground, things like Black Star, Slum Village, and eventually Wu-Tang Clan. The way I learned music in my household was listening to records. My brother was really into hip-hop, R&B, and electronic music. My father was really into classic funk and soul: Earth, Wind & Fire; Parliament-Funkadelic; Donald Byrd’s Street Lady; Gato Barbieri; John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme. That was his language: the real straight-ahead jazz and the funk soul era. My mom was really into Latin music and Stevie Wonder. Apparently she was into The Beatles, too, but I think she kept that to herself.
Which faculty members impacted you the most during your time here?
There’s really influential people there like Justin Emeka. Super influential! He did something really important at the time. I used to live in Afrikan Heritage House, and I remember when Justin Emeka came to the College and started a Capoeira class. He had a general one but also
See Theo Croker, page 13
Erika Scharf
As winter break approaches, the College’s five a cappella groups are hosting end-of-semester concerts. Nothing But Treble held its end-of-semester concert on Dec. 11 at Fairchild Chapel, performing songs such as “Nobody” by Japanese-American singer-songwriter Mitski and “Telephone” by Lady Gaga and Beyoncé.
Sierra Colbert, College first-year and Nothing But Treble member, says that being able to put on a show like the end-of-semester concert with her group was really fun.
“I think that one of the most exciting things was that it was just our group’s concert, and I think, as a group, we were able to feel more comfortable with each individual song,” Colbert said. “Just like all the other groups, it was just us, and we were able to have a larger repertoire of music, and we could really demonstrate all the work we’d been doing and not have to worry as much about the one or two songs that we were doing on that night.”
The five Oberlin a cappella groups — Nothing But Treble, The Acapelicans, Pitch Please, ’Round Midnight, and The Obertones — have all previously performed together twice this semester. The first time was in a concert at Finney Chapel for Parents and Family Weekend, and the second was at Dye Lecture Hall as part of the “study break” performance, held annually during midterms. As Colbert mentioned, each group only performs one or two songs during these joint concerts, whereas in a full-length concert, they would perform around seven or eight songs.
College fourth-year Emily Fiorentino, another Nothing But Tremble member, said that while COVID-19 has made the concert preparation process challenging and frustrating, the opportunity to perform in an indoor, in-person concert is unparalleled.
“This has definitely been a strange semester for us, to say the least,” Fiorentino said. “Our biggest challenges have definitely been the threat of COVID, but I’m really proud of the fact that we had seven songs ready for our concert.”
This weekend, Fairchild Chapel will host multiple a cappella concerts, with Pitch Please performing there on Friday, Dec. 17 at 8 p.m. and The Acapelicans performing on Sunday, Dec. 19 at 8 p.m.
