Return of Colors of Rhythm Revitalizes Cherished Tradition

ARTS & CULTURE

April 29, 2022 Established 1874 Volume 151, Number 19

Return of Colors of Rhythm Revitalizes Cherished Tradition

Colors of Rhythm, one of the Multicultural Resource Center’s most anticipated events, returned to campus for the first time since the onset of the pandemic.

Photo by Khadijah Halliday

Sierra Colbert

Senior Staff Writer

Colors of Rhythm, one of the Multicultural Resource Center’s most celebrated annual events, returned to the Finney Chapel stage for the first time in two years. Colors of Rhythm was founded in 1997 by Oberlin students in conjunction with the MRC, and seeks to highlight and celebrate the talent of student-artists and performers of color.

This year’s show saw performances from a wide range of students and student organizations including OSLAM, African Students Association, And What!?, South Asian Students Association, and Oberlin College Taiko.

The energy in the chapel was palpable as Conservatory third-year Rachel Yee took the stage for the first act to cheers and applause, which grew louder with each performance. Throughout the night, students sitting shoulder to shoulder in the crowded pews relished in the sheer magnitude of talent on display.

The event has served as a sanctum for Oberlin students of color for the last quarter of a century, but what made this year’s show stand out was its role in reintroducing many younger Obies to the massive expanse of multicultural art-

given them a place to become closer with each other as they’ve prepared for some of their last performances at the College.

“The cast are exclusively people I was already friends with,” Worth said. “It’s been a great space for us to share with each other and be earnestly vulnerable with each other but in a way that has a sense of humor and a little bit of bite to it.”

The closeness of the actors has resulted in a meaningful final production at the College in which they are able to be creative and explore the characters and setting.

“There’s a dog, there’s a hen, there’s gay people, there’s music, and that’s all you could ever want,” Friedemann said.

Tickets are available at oberlin.edu/tickets.

See OSLAM, page 13

Gothic Satire The Moors Brings English Countryside to Stage

Emerald Goldbaum

Staff Writer

The Moors, a play set in the 18th-century English countryside, will run in the Irene and Alan Wurtzel Theater May 5–8. Written by American playwright Jen Silverman and directed by Professor of Theater Matthew Wright, the show follows an impressionable governess as she begins working for two sisters in their isolated countryside manor. Grappling with mounting jealousy and its inevitable consequences, the play explodes as deeply held resentments come to a head.

According to Silverman, inspiration for the play came from the lives and works of the Brontë sisters, who lived on the English moors.

“I was reading Charlotte Brontë’s letters and was very taken with the isolation against which her life played out,” Silverman wrote in an email to the Review. “I was struck by the way in which the isolation made her perceive her family, her landscape, and the landscape of her internal life.”

To help visualize the setting, Wright showed the cast images of the English moors. Cast member and College fourth-year Katie Friedemann says this influenced her understanding of the lives of the characters.

“Everything’s so sharp and gray, and the wind is so powerful, and the trees grow sideways,” she said. “There’s something just so unnerving about it, but it’s a literal force of nature. There’s no way to change it, so for these people that are on these moors, you live with the chaos.”

The Moors also features original music composed by College fourth-year Juli Worth. Their composition work was influenced primarily by the dark setting and tone of the play, featuring mostly vocal pieces with some lute and percussion.

“The English moors, as they’re presented in this play, are just a kind of sweeping wasteland where connection is almost impossible, and the scale and size of things is easily warped,” they said. “I wanted to make something that was at once disorienting but also rhythmically compelling.”

Worth also plays the role of the mastiff who has a complex and intimate relationship with one of the hens on the moor.

“It sounds a lot sillier than it actually is,” they said. “I mean, it is quite silly, but I think there is a reason for it in the play that’s maybe a little hard to explain in a quick conversation. So that’s been a source of joyful embarrassment for me in conversations with my parents.”

Wright has been interested in Silverman’s work since Oberlin put on their play Collective Rage: A Play in Five Betties in 2020 — the last production run by the Theater department before COVID-19. Wright highlighted aspects of the play’s connection to works such as Jane Eyre. He was interested in The Moors because he wanted to put on a show that expressed a broad range of identities.

“The Moors is a biting satire but very loving takedown of Gothic romance,” he said. “It explores gender identity, sexuality, isolation, and the ways that our culture can be isolating for people because of their identities.”

For example, Friedemann, who plays Marjory/Mallory, a maid whose name changes depending on which room she’s in, explained how the name changes represent changes in her character’s portrayal.

“You very rarely see the real her; she’s always putting something on,” Friedemann said. “It’s been so cool to construct the layers of [the character], and then to figure out at what moments there’s the actual person.”

The stage design pays homage to the art of Edward Gorey with Gothic, macabre visuals mostly in black and white, capturing Silverman’s poetic writing about nature.

“I think one of the most exciting elements about this production is all of the design elements,” Wright said. “[They’re] highly anachronistic but also in keeping with Edward Gorey’s vision.”

Students involved in the production had the opportunity to meet with Silverman over Zoom to discuss their work and vision for the play.

“Hearing what they were thinking when they were writing it opened so many doors, and we were all just kind of freaking out about meeting them,” Friedemann said. “It was just one of those weird high energy moments where everyone’s going a little feral.”

The actors are all graduating fourth-year students, which has resulted in a very tight-knit group that has

Anisa Curry Vietze

Editor-in-Chief

As spring flowers bloom across campus and this year’s seniors look toward graduation, many plan to follow a classic Oberlin path: pursuing a career in the music industry.

When Riley Calcagno, OC ’20, graduated in the midst of the first wave of COVID-19, he knew he wanted to continue making music — both through his stringband The Onlies and his duo with Vivian Leva — but the pandemic made the logistics unclear.

“It was kind of a shock, as I think for everyone who graduated in that year,” Calcagno said. “These days, things are getting back to normal and I’m ... kind of chugging away and just finding moments to play music when I can and little opportunities to connect with people and find new collaborations and a community of music making.”

After releasing an album in March 2021 and moving to Durham, NC, Calcagno has been spending much of his time playing concerts, as other sources of revenue for new musicians are often not as fruitful.

“It’s just wild how many streams you have to have to make any money, especially if a record label is getting the first cut,” Calcagno said. “So, getting out there and playing shows has been so good. [Before,] it was trying to figure out any other avenue to be creative and also get paid for it. The other ways to make money were teaching, so I did that, and we did some song commissions, which is really fun.”

As College fourth-year and musician Sofia Zarzuela gets ready to graduate in June, she also plans to make concerts and touring a large part of her income.

“I’m trying to book my own DIY tour for October … by talking to everyone I know who goes to a college [and] getting booked through colleges because they pay you much better than other venues,” Zarzuela explained. “I just played a show with Kenyon and they paid us $700.”

Ultimately, Zarzuela hopes to sign a record deal with a smaller, independent label. In the immediate future, though, she is considering trying to get a booking agent to help plan future tours.

“I think I’m around the place with Spotify streams where one would get a booking agent,” Zarzuela said. “I would do this thing last year where I would get drunk and I would make TikToks in the bathroom of Harkness [House] … One of them kind of blew up, and then it led to one of my songs getting put on the Spotify algorithm — I wound up getting 10,000 more monthly listeners from it, which is really cool.”

Others leave Oberlin with a love of music but no clear plan to work in the industry. When Dan Zucker, OC ’81, graduated from Oberlin, he didn’t envision himself pursuing a job related to music at all. His time at Oberlin informed his interest in music, and he ultimately found his way to RCA Records, a label within Sony Music Entertainment, where he now works as the executive vice president of business and legal affairs.

“I didn’t know I wanted to be in the music industry,” Zucker said. “I knew I loved music — grew up surrounded by it, obviously went to a college where it’s infused in everything that happens on campus — but I wasn’t thinking that that would be a career.”

Zucker feels that his time at Oberlin prepared him well to work in the music industry. For example, if one of RCA’s artists is planning to release a song that sounds very similar to an existing song, the label might need to approach the artist of the original song to get their permission to use a bit of the composition in the new recording.

The College’s recent announcement of the Wilder Hall renovation will result in the relocation of the WOBC 91.5 FM studio, fanning preexistent fears of the disappearance of institutional memory in the wake of COVID-19. “I can evaluate whether we need to clear something or not because I went to Oberlin and I have some understanding of music theory,” Zucker explained. “It’s not always obvious, and the artist or the producer who put it in might not even know that other song. ... We have a sample team, and when it’s close, they’ll come to me. And I literally pull up Garage Band, work out the cords and stuff, and say, ‘Oh, this is different’ or, ‘Oh, no, it’s not different, I think we need to clear it.’ … Sometimes I feel like, oh my gosh, am I showing off?” Zucker encourages any young Obies interested in being musicians to use the tools available to them. “The industry is changing,” he said. “I’ve been doing it for a long time, and it’s changed a lot. And mostly for the benefit of young artists. The good news is that, unlike when I started, artists can release music on their own and make it available. Before iTunes came along, major record companies like Sony, Universal [Music Group], and Warner [Music Group] effectively controlled the distribution channels. And that’s just not the case anymore. You can go to an aggregator … and make your music available. You put it up, and you get paid for it for whatever it streams. Small pennies at first, but you get paid for it.” Even though the prospect of a career in music can be intimidating, Calcagno hopes that new Obie musicians don’t lose sight of why they’re pursuing music in the first place. “I think it’s easy to get kind of caught up with the business side of it, and I think that it’s been more gratifying just to make music and see what happens,” he said. “Just [by] following your creative vision and trusting that if you [create] what you like to listen to and make connections with people that you admire, … you’ll find some making music mode that feels right and is original.”

fallen by the wayside, facing issues with attendance and lack of engagement with the campus as a whole.

“Since COVID, workgroups and staff positions have been forgotten and fallen under the radar,” said WOBC Music Director and College fourth-year Emma DeRogatis-Frilingos. “It’s no fault to the staff, no fault to the station — that’s just COVID. There’s been a campus-wide forgetfulness; clubs and traditions have been disappearing. … There’s been a complete and utter disruption, and it’s hard to focus on little things like tradition and consistency.”

As WOBC’s music director, DeRogatis-Frilingos oversees the staff, and noted that her goal this year has been to create as much community as possible in hopes of reviving institutional memory.

“My goal was to create a strong foundation specifically with the staff who oversee the work groups, so when we leave, people know the basics of what running a station looks like and how a functioning station happens,” she said. “What I’ve been doing … has been to try to cultivate more community. I don’t know how successful it’s been.”

College second-year Imogen Pranger, who co-directs the traffic workgroup alongside College third-year Ish Houle, hopes that revitalizing workgroups can help recover a sense of community within WOBC.

“It can feel very isolating to just go do your show, and only ever speak to the people before and after you on the show schedule,” she said. “You never get a sense of the larger scope of the people that are involved in WOBC, and how amazing all the other DJs are, how interesting and how much history the station has as a whole. I think workgroups can be a really important vehicle for cultivating that sense of community and purpose within the station.”

Besides a lack of community, there are very real stakes to maintaining a functioning station. A failure to complete small tasks could result in the station losing its decades-long connections with record labels and other stations. One major issue preventing workgroups from functioning properly has been attendance. Without DJs

WOBC Staff, Board Hope to Revive Station Engagement

Photo by Abe Frato

Kathleen Kelleher Arts & Culture Editor

Despite the decades of history scrawled on the station’s aqua-blue walls, Oberlin’s College and community radio station is far from immune to the epidemic of institutional memory loss. Fanning these worries even further, WOBC announced yesterday that the station was going to be disassembled and moved to a different part of Wilder Hall as a result of the upcoming renovations to the building.

WOBC 91.5 FM runs, in part, by delegating station tasks to workgroup leaders, who coordinate groups of DJs. These groups accomplish tasks like listening to new music sent to the station by indie artists hoping to receive radio play, brainstorming station-wide merch, or recording PSAs. The music is listened to and sorted by the traffic workgroup into genre boxes, which are then assessed by genrebased workgroups that decide whether music should be placed in WOBC’s vault. Other workgroups, like outreach and promotion, focus more on management of and publicity for the station. After years of pandemic interruptions, these workgroups have See Amid, page 13