- [Announcer] This is a production of WEDU PBS, Tampa, St. Petersburg, Sarasota.

- [Dalia] Funding for WEDU Arts Plus is provided by the Community Foundation, Tampa Bay.

In this edition of WEDU Arts Plus, a Sarasota performer breaks the stigma of mental illness through humor.

- People love that there was a wonderful degree of humor in it, and I felt really good that I could laugh about this stuff, which was not funny eons ago, but I could laugh at it now.

- [Dalia] A dynamic contemporary dance company.

- Our heart and soul really goes into our productions, our classes, our workshops.

- [Dalia] Depicting the natural world.

- [Teresita] I've been spending a lot of time thinking about what the landscape actually looked like before colonizations.

- [Dalia] And portrait painting.

- [Zoe] I'm interested in understanding how we see things in as natural a way as possible.

- It's all coming up next on WEDU Arts Plus.

(cheerful music) Hello, I'm Dalia Colon, and this is WEDU Arts Plus.

Sarasota actor and storyteller Scott Ehrenpreis presents Clowns Like Me.

This hit one-man show is breaking down the stereotypes of mental illness as Scott shares his own struggles with his mental health journey through humor.

(uplifting music) - I thought I would just be doing a script punch up.

Come in, script doctor, easy peasy.

But I met Joel and Scott and they had a huge, wonderful idea.

Scott wanted to tell his story.

He's a trained actor.

He is a great actor, and he has lived with mental illness his whole life and kept it hidden as best he could.

And it was time for him, he wanted to come out and help other people by telling his story through the medium he knows best, which is theater.

- And this is why kung fu movies just really get to me.

Because of the generosity you see between the fighters.

They have to put ego totally aside because you only look badass if the enemy you're fighting is badass too.

You need a worthy opponent to move with you.

There's no suspense, there's no payoff.

That's why the bad guys are the unsung heroes of martial arts films.

Those guys are just as talented.

They're willing to lose, to get beat publicly to serve the story.

(pleasant music) - Scott was born in 1979, and pretty much from early on, we knew something was a little, you know, not quite right, but we had very little information to help guide us and I still feel guilty about this.

I raised him as the child that I wished we had had instead of the child that we had, because I thought, you know, just put him in normal environments and he'll learn to be so-called, you know, normal and fit in, and didn't quite turn out (laughs) as planned.

He was a bit hyperactive and then it got more painful as he got older and couldn't make friends, couldn't keep friends, and so that was hard.

- Based on his diagnosis, which didn't happen until later in life, until he was 25, that he learned about Asperger's and being on the spectrum, that one of the things that I realized, that those that are on the spectrum are very gifted at one particular thing to a detriment of a lot of other things.

And one of Scott's gifts is acting.

- I'll let you find you another place.

I've been asking you for seven years now.

You're going to get sick.

There was a playhouse called Brundage Park Playhouse right down the street.

And my parents signed me up for an acting camp, and I didn't wanna do it.

I was like, what is this acting?

This does not speak to me.

But then when I went and I experienced what it was like to be in a theater and having floorboards underneath my feet, it was like the moon and the stars were aligned kind of thing, you know?

So I immediately found my calling, my path.

(dramatic music) - When Joel and Scott told me what they wanted to do, it spoke to me on a deep level of truth telling.

There was going to be an authenticity here.

'Cause Scott was not only the performer, he was the subject.

- He's an actor's director.

So Jason got to know me.

He made it such a healthy collaboration where I was kind of the author of my own story.

He wrote it, but some of the dialogue from the play came right out of my mouth, and that inspired him to extrapolate my truth.

And all the other campers start chanting, "Hit him!

Hit him!

Hit him!

Hit him!"

And I look over and my brothers are screaming too, "Hit him, Scotty.

Hit him!"

Oh, I finally something in me snaps, and I just start punching.

Left, right, left, right, left, right, right into his gut.

His hands are up here, and my little 9-year-old arms are going like pistons, and I'm sweating.

And all the other campers are screaming with pre-teen blood lust and waving their canteen cards and my brother Noah, who has turned into a bookie, he's taking bets on how long I'll last.

(audience laughing) - I gave a big piece of advice at the front end.

They had come to me with a very, very rough draft of about a five-minute monologue.

And it was, to be frank, it was very angry, which makes sense.

He's been put upon his whole life.

He feels unseen.

So their first attempt to tell the story was just getting it off his chest.

And I was like, okay, yeah, there's truth in here, but no one wants to listen to this.

(laughs) No one's gonna pay money to come listen to you rant at them and tell them they're a bad person for being mean to you.

No one wants that.

So as I teach all my playwriting students and my actors, look, entertainment's not a dirty word.

It's the spoonful of sugar, right?

If you want an audience to get close to you and to listen to the hard truth, you gotta make them like it.

You gotta make them have fun.

So we very intentionally took kind of a standup comedy approach to start, and as the show kept developing, we held on to some of that standup comedy, but let it also become its own storytelling theater.

It goes into very deep, dark places too, but we earn the right to do that because he's so dang funny and nice and charming at the top.

- [Scott] Jason and I took a McCurdy's Comedy Bootcamp Class to learn the art of audience address 'cause comedians, the great ones are conversational.

It was a struggle.

It was terrifying.

People loved that there was a wonderful degree of humor in it.

And I felt really good that I could laugh about this stuff, which was not funny eons ago, but I could laugh at it now.

It made it more comfortable and gave me more confidence that, you know, hey, I can execute this.

I can do this.

(soft piano music) - The audience reaction was everything we were hoping it would be, both in terms of them being entertained, but also them being impacted.

Part of the project is that every performance includes a talkback.

- We want people to stay, spend another 20 minutes with us.

And I have to tell you, that's when the impact is its greatest.

- We had to take a leap of faith that if we told our story and told it true, that people would hear their story reflected to them and they would embrace us.

And that's-- I get kind of emotional-- and that's exactly what happened.

- It feels liberating that I can give experience, strength, and hope through my lived experience to others and make them not feel alone as I've felt for so long.

- [Dalia] To learn more, visit lifelineproductionsinc.com.

Since 1980, DDC Dances has been presenting remarkable works of contemporary dance in Michigan.

As a dance company, they choreograph original expressive performances for audiences to enjoy.

(gentle dance music) - [Amy] The traditional forms of modern dance continue to speak to an ever-changing world.

(gentle dance music continues) - The essence of dance, for me, is about humanity and there's so much in this world today to express.

- DDC is a group of performing artists that bring modern dance throughout Detroit and the greater Detroit area.

And also, we provide outreach education programs throughout Michigan.

- DDC Dances began in 1980.

We were founded at Wayne State University, actually.

The founding members were Paula Kramer, Anita Surma, and Sue Ellen Dar, and myself.

We focused on a technique that was developed and designed by Doris Humphrey and Jose Limon, pioneers of modern dance.

And really, the genre today still really works because it's based on how human beings like to move in space and time.

So that's what we liked about working in that way.

And so obviously, after 40 years, it's developed into something a little bit different because those two, Humphrey and Limon, wanted future generations to develop their technique.

- I started out in ballet growing up, and in college, I first discovered modern dance, really fell in love with it just because of the expressivity, the freedom, yet its connectedness and roots to ballet and to a strict technique.

It just really allows for expression and a lot of creativity in terms of music choices, choreographic choices, choreographic sites.

- [Barbara] I really like to look not just for technique, but for performance skills.

Who they are as people and what they communicate through their body.

We work a lot through improvisation.

So when I'm making choreography, it's the idea of breath and gravity.

It's all natural elements that surround us.

So we work on improv, that's based on ideas that interest me as a choreographer.

There are dances in our upcoming concert that deal with climate change, that deal with mental health, that deal with extinction.

So all of these things are important to society today and we're expressing how we feel about these issues through movement.

- So there's a lot that goes back and forth.

As a dancer, you're not just simply a dancer, you're choreographer, you're innovating with the artistic director, which is a really beautiful part of this company.

- [Barbara] She comes in, puts a bench down in black, and she'll sit down and be forward.

And lights and music go together.

Today, we are doing a tech for each of the pieces, so you'll be watching us create the lighting.

And then once the lighting's created, then we will run the piece like a dress rehearsal.

Getting the right lighting design to enhance the dance, and to really be a partner with the dance.

So stage lighting is really very important.

It becomes a marriage between the dance, dancers, and the space.

Well, the first piece of the program were excerpts from a whole evening work that we did at Jam Handy last fall and it's called Rock On.

And I've always wanted to create a concert based on rock music.

So there's some small excerpts from that.

So you'll see dancers performing to some of the classic rock music that we all know and love.

One of my young dancers and emerging artists, Liz LeClair, she choreographed a new solo.

I really like to give young emerging artists an opportunity to show their work.

So her work is actually based on mental health.

It's really interesting the way she communicates those ideas.

There's a piece that I choreographed 30 years ago, it's called Journey's End, and that's based on environmental change.

And 30 years ago, we were talking about environmental change, and this piece is still pertinent today and happens to be performed to the music of the Beatles.

The last work is called Absence.

It's a brand new premiere for me, and it deals with the idea of loss.

What is has been lost or gone may never exist again.

And the dancers all wrote their own stories.

So that was like a jumping off point for the work.

They all created movement based on the idea that they had written on their story.

And then, you know, we improvise with it and then I take it and I mold it and I change it and I structure it to express the full piece and what we wanna say in terms of that particular idea.

Each of the individual dancers in the company bring their own voice to the movement.

So whatever that means to them, they create gestures perhaps, or entire movement phrases that deal with their story.

- The wonderful thing about it is that, oftentimes, there are many interpretations to it so it doesn't have to have a certain, like, one specific meaning as is the case in many different forms of modern art.

It's really inspiring to dance with my colleagues.

They all have their strengths and we're all unique in our ways, but we come together and are stronger as a group I think.

- I'm really proud of the company because I think we have a variety of ways to communicate the art form.

Our heart and soul really goes into our productions, our classes, our workshops.

Everything we do with the community has meant so much to us, and we are hoping it has meant a lot to the people that we serve.

(gentle dance music) - Discover more at ddcdances.org.

The exhibition Teresita Fernandez: Elemental gives viewers the opportunity to encounter powerful landscapes of the natural world.

Head to the Perez Art Museum Miami to get a closer look.

(ethereal music) - A landscape that might have one meaning for me and another meeting for you.

It opens up possibilities for interpretation that take us to other places based upon personal experience.

My name is Franklin Sirmans.

I'm the director of the Perez Art Museum, Miami, and I'm also a co-curator of Teresita Fernandez: Elemental.

Think about landscape, for instance, just in terms of being a genre, specifically of sort of traditional art-making experiences.

She explodes that traditional idea completely on its head.

(upbeat music) One way that she describes her relationship to creating landscapes is she calls them "stacked landscapes" to suggest this idea that there is almost like sedimentary layers, which relates to geology in the same way, but more metaphorically in that we are looking at layers of time that are part of the experience of any landscape.

So there's a direct reference to a colonial landscape.

- I've been spending a lot of time thinking about what the landscape actually looked like before colonization.

The landscape and the land in the Americas was manipulated in very sophisticated ways for thousands of years before Europeans ever arrived.

- [Franklin] I like to think of like, Italo Calvino, this idea of invisible cities in a way, right?

They may have a reference point in the mind of the artist or when she's creating them, but they allow for us to see things in a way that is much broader.

This is nocturnal horizon line, work that's been created by graphite.

All of it.

Painting, or shall you say, sculpture.

It has elements of both.

When you look at the top of that surface, you see this kind of, this sheen, this kind of glare that almost makes it have qualities of reciprocity, of being almost like a mirror.

And then you go down a little bit and the graphite is kind of little bit thicker, creating this horizon line and creating this kind of texture that almost looks like it could be waters, perhaps, it could be a seascape.

And then you go a little bit further and it gets thicker and it feels like the earth.

So maybe we've gone from the sky down below through the ocean and into the ground below.

Maybe.

At the end of the day, this is a really beautiful painting.

It's one of my favorites in the exhibition, and I'm glad we got to talk about it a little bit.

Our exhibition ends with a series of works that are around the thematic of landscape and fire.

The entire exhibition being called Elemental.

And you can see the hand in that, and you can see like, there are little tiny pieces of mosaic that make up this whole.

And so much of our work is about looking at the things that make up a hole.

In the case of going directly on the wall, I think there's clearly an immediacy to that gesture that is part of the moment and it cannot be divorced from the moment.

- You know, they came at a moment where it just seems completely inappropriate to be subtle.

You know, those pieces were about American violence and they were about the land and the destruction of the land in many ways, right?

And so, just the climate just seemed like it wasn't appropriate to just make it about something abstract.

- And a big part of who she is is an activist, in addition to being an artist, and I think those things can be one in the same, and in her body and practice, it really is.

So they're coming to the fore in a much bigger way, I would say, right now, but they've always been there.

- Check out more at pamm.org/elemental.

In Reno, Nevada, artist and anthropologist, Zoe Bray, paints from life.

Fascinated by humankind, people are her subjects.

With her brush, she captures the identity and spirit of the individual.

(gentle guitar music) - [Zoe] I am an artist and an anthropologist, and therefore, as an artist, a lot of my interests in what I paint and just create is related to people.

People in their environment.

So that's their social, political, and natural environment.

So how do people make sense of who they are, create their identity, and relate to their surroundings?

As an artist, I'm classically trained in the sense that I've undergone a training with an old style atelier painter and it was always with the life model so there was absolutely no drawing or painting or sculpting from photographs.

It was really, you had to have the real thing in front of you and feel it.

And this also resonated with my work as an anthropologist.

I studied anthropology at the University of Edinburgh and then did my PhD at a European institute in Italy, in Florence.

And as an anthropologist, this is pretty much also what you do.

Your research is about people with people.

(cheerful music) My best heritage is something that I'm constantly rediscovering.

And right now, I have this exhibition on of Nevadan Basques with oil painting and charcoal drawings exhibiting at the City Hall of Reno.

I was interested in painting people who have some kind of connection with Basque culture, usually who have Basque lineage, but not necessarily, I mean, that's also what interests me is what is identity today?

How do we identify ourselves?

Is it our lineage, our background, or is it what we choose ourselves to be right now in the present?

So painting from life is, for me, extremely important.

(lively music) When I can go into more depth into a painting or into a portrait, than I will go use the oils.

And the oils, again, I use very simple colors.

And just with these four, you can actually mix them up and get all the nuances, all the subtleties, all the different tones that you find in nature.

(lively music continues) If I have to define myself in terms of, you know, what kind of painter I am, I'd say I'm a naturalist rather than a realist.

I mean, when people see my work, they say, "Wow, that's so realist."

And the term realist, it can be understood in many different ways.

I would agree I am a realist, but it's a more of a naturalist realist in that I'm interested in understanding how we see things in as natural a way as possible.

So for instance, when I'm looking at somebody, when I'm painting somebody, I'm interested in focusing mainly on the eyes because when we communicate, we look at each other in the eyes, and at that point, everything else is out of focus.

So it's deliberate that to other parts of the portraits are not so specific, so details, so defined.

But then I want the viewer to have their eyes wander around the painting and notice how they hold their hands or what are they wearing, how significant is that to the identity of the person.

So I would try and draw these things out.

There has to be some kind of a journey for the viewer to embark on.

Every portrait is a new adventure.

- See more at zoebray.com.

And that wraps it up for this edition of WEDU Arts Plus.

For more arts and culture, visit wedu.org/artsplus.

Until next time, I'm Dalia Colon.

Thanks for watching.

(intense music) (intense music continues) Funding for WEDU Arts Plus is provided by the Community Foundation, Tampa Bay.