The
ARTS
Jazz, comedy and weightlifting -- OH MY! We’ve got a full issue this week of some cool stuff going on in the Arts world, and I personally would like to invite you to buckle in and take a gander!
12 October 2017
Strength
Photo by Mikayla Mallett
By Nick D’Aloia STAFF WRITER
Neatly laid out on the floor of UNH’s Museum of Art are a number of scandalous magazines. Behind the fortress of Playboys and Vogues are upwards of twenty purses draped over a homemade squat rack, an odd scene for the middle of a museum. The room is dead silent as the crowd of about thirty patiently waits for Kledia Spiro’s Made Masculine performance, “The Weight.” The Made Masculine exhibit on Wednesday, Oct. 11 captured the attention of the entire Museum of Art, as Spiro demonstrated her weightlifting prowess by power lifting dozens of purses filled with the objectifying magazines. Hoping to send a message about the rigid idea of masculinity, Spiro completed the amazing feats of strength while wearing an extremely constricting body suit and high heels.
and art:
Made Masculine exhibiting artist and former olympic lifter Kledia Spiro uses lifting to empower.
“This particular performance is centered around the burden that is placed on women, their body expectations and how women’s fashion and pornography have developed throughout the years,” Spiro said. “Back then, a Playboy was almost the same spread as if you opened up a Vogue or an Elle magazine today. The spreads are almost identical in terms of color, composition and women’s poses. You can see this change in the magazines throughout the decade. You can see how the accessibility society has to objectify women has increased so dramatically, which has really caused me to think about how much we comply in that objectification.” Spiro’s work has been featured across the country, from places like the Grace Exhibition Space in New York, to the ProArts Gallery in Oakland, California. Each performance, Spiro
Continued on page 14
Photo by Adrienne Perron
Delfeayo Marsalis Quartet jazzes up UNH By Adrienne Perron STAFF WRITER
UNH’s Traditional Jazz Series hosted its second concert of the year featuring the Delfeayo Marsalis Quartet in the Johnson Theatre at 8:00 p.m. on Monday, Oct. 9. The Delfeayo Marsalis Quartet is made up of four musicians including Delfeayo Marsalis on the trombone, David Pulphus on the standing bass, Richard Johnson on piano and Ralph Peterson on drums. According to UNH College of Liberal Arts’s web page about UNH’s traditional jazz series, Marsalis is “one of the top trombonists, composers and producers in jazz today.” Also according to the website, Marsalis, his father and his three brothers “earned the nation’s
highest jazz honor – a National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Masters Award” in 2011. According to Leonard Feather from the Los Angeles Times, Marsalis is known for his “technical excellence, inventive mind and frequent touches of humor.” This humor was particularly shown during a transition between songs during Marsalis’ set, where he stated that even though the song that the quartet was about to perform was meant to feature a trumpet, they were going to “play it anyway.” In regard to what brought the quartet to New Hampshire, Marsalis stated that he has been coming to New England every year since Hurricane Katrina. “After Hurricane Katrina, I formed a partnership with New England College… so I’ve
been coming up probably every year since... and this particular year, Nate Jorgensen, [Director of jazz studies at UNH], decided to bring me up to play a special concert for the series here at UNH,” Marsalis stated. The quartet started off their set with a version “Tin Roof Blues” by Louis Armstrong. According to Marsalis, the quartet always starts with a piece from “The Louis Armstrong Songbook” because “that’s where it all started.” The piece featured each musician’s talent with a short solo while the other members of the quartet would show approval by nodding their heads along with the music. Other pieces performed by the quartet ranged from songs with themes of romance to songs that mourned the dead
which originated from New Orleans. According to Marsalis, one song was a story about the journey of two men of the laboring class in the 1890s. The men in the story were traveling north to escape an oppressive farmer and master. The quartet concluded their showcase with a classic and crowd favorite, “It Don’t Mean a Thing if it Ain’t Got That Swing.”Harry Mussman, a member of the audience from York, Maine, comes to the Jazz Series at UNH “quite often” and enjoyed the quartet’s performance. “It was very good… I’m not the greatest music critic… but I’ve never heard a trombone sound so good,” Mussman said. Marsalis, when asked how he believed the performance to have gone, echoed Mussman’s
sentiments and stated simply, yet confidently “good.” Marsalis also shared his thoughts about the importance of jazz and sharing his music with others. “Music, it really has a certain power that even sometimes words don’t have… I think the great thing about jazz is not only that it represents American democracy at its finest in the sense that everyone gets an opportunity to have a voice, but… there’s also certain elements that we get that come from the African tradition, and that’s the joy and celebration, and I think that real great jazz has that feeling that you get when you hear it, and that’s what we always try to include in the music,” Marsalis said.