Local resident Ben Guenther, right, played the title role in a run of Shakespeare’s “Macbeth,” produced by the Clark State College theater department. (Submitted photo)
2024 In Review | The Arts
- Published: January 3, 2025
FILM & MEDIA
January
• YS Schools students created and released a short film, “OTIS” — described as a meta meditation on the unpredictable nature of art, among other themes — on the “MLQ Productions” YouTube channel.
April
• Yellow Springs Film Festival, which debuted in fall 2023, presented a Mini-Fest at the Little Art Theatre. The event was a prelude to the main festival held in October.
Actor Chris Young, center, and crew prepare to roll camera for a scene in the horror-comedy short film “…And Then She Laughed.” The film, written and directed by Amy Taylor and produced by local resident Ben Guenther, was shot at a village home on Orton Road. (Photo by Lauren “Chuck” Shows)
May
• Honoring the legacy of the late Julia Reichert, the Yellow Springs Film Festival and PNC Bank announced the creation of the Julia Reichert Award, a $3,000 short film prize to be given to an emerging female documentarian.
• A five-day shoot for a short horror-comedy film was held at a home on the south end of town. “…And Then She Laughed” was written and directed by Virginia-based filmmaker Amy Taylor and is currently in post-production.
October
• The annual YS Film Festival returned for the second year, featuring a lineup of screenings of narrative and documentary films, several of which premiered or received awards this year at the prestigious Sundance, Tribeca and Cannes film festivals — as well as guest performances and Q&A sessions.
December
• The Little Art Theatre announced the launch of a new website and a new way for movie-lovers to have some say in what they see on screen on the eve of its 95th anniversary next year.
MUSIC
Feufollet of Louisiana blends traditional Cajun sounds with country, rock and swamp pop. The band played at Antioch College’s Foundry Theater on Wednesday, Feb. 21. (Submitted photo)
February
• The Foundry Theater continued its 2023–24 live performance series by welcoming the Southwest Louisiana band Feufollet.
• The theater also brought famed singer-songwriter and cult icon Jonathan Richman to the stage for a bare-bones, acoustic set, which was a departure from the high-voltage sounds of Richman’s early musical career.
March
• The World House Choir joined forces with MUSE: Cincinnati’s Women’s Choir for the locally based community choir’s second annual “BREAD & ROSES: A Celebration of International Women’s Day” concert at the Foundry Theater.
Yellow Springs resident Kylle Harewood, otherwise known as X the Detective, launched a hip-hop night at the Gulch Saloon — a community-oriented night of beats and wordsmithery for listeners and lyricists alike. (Photo by Reilly Dixon)
• Bringing people together through the power of Hip-Hop, Kylle Harewood, whose musical moniker is “X the Detective,” transformed a simple beat machine into a community-building force by hosting Wednesday night beats and rhyme sessions for freestylers and hip-hop enthusiasts at the Gulch Saloon.
• The News featured local resident and music producer Justin “UnJust” Herman, for his efforts to expand the local hip-hop scene through the OPEN Project, where beats flow freely and artists find solace in shared expression.
• The Yellow Springs Hardware Store began hosting musical performances, benefits and comedic improv shows and workshops throughout the year as part of its Hardware Store Sessions.
April
• The World House Choir returned to its home stage in the Foundry Theater to perform a program of music that included the 20-minute choral piece “Weather: Stand the Storm,” written by composer Rollo Dilworth, a music professor at Temple University, setting music to the Claudia Rankine poem “Weather.”
• The Yellow Springs Community Band performed Songs of the Sea, which included everything from traditional sailing songs to the theme for Pirates of the Caribbean.
May
• The Foundry Theater presented a performance by musicians Marisa Anderson and Jim White, with former Yellow Springs resident Porter Fitch opening; welcomed string duo Larry & Joe. Both based in North Carolina; and held the final performance of its inaugural programming season with folk duo Kristin Andreassen and Chris “Critter” Eldridge.
• Yellow Springs Community Music: the Yellow Springs Chamber Orchestra performed the program “Spaces and Textures,” which included pieces by Aaron Copland, Alexander Borodin and Franz Schubert. The Yellow Springs Community Chorus presented “Songs of Spring,” which featured songs and choral pieces by Franz Schubert, Charles Ives, Antonin Dvorak and Ralph Vaughan Williams.
June
“The Outside Presents,” an experimental music performance series had its final show of the first season on Monday, June 10, at the Antioch College Foundry Theater. The series is hosted by Evan Miller, shown here at a performance from earlier this year. (Photo courtesy of Ruthie Herman)
• Experimental music performance series “The Outside Presents” wrapped up its the season in the Foundry Theater’s black box space. The series — a kind of off-shoot of WYSO 91.3’s late-Sunday-night show “The Outside” aims to expose audiences to experimental music acts from both the Southwest Ohio region and beyond.
• Twenty-seven incarcerated men, members of the NIA Men’s Chorus at Chillicothe Correctional Institution under the direction of local resident Catherine Roma, performed “Les Mis Inside,” a pared-down version of the popular musical with choral arrangements before an audience of invited guests, including a large contingent of Yellow Springers.
July
• Crowds gathered at Tuck-N-Reds Spirits & Wine to benefit Charles “Chuck” Arthur Williams, a local musician fighting cancer. Organized by local musician Danny Sauers, the event, “A Bad Day for Cancer,” featured a host of local acts and raised $1,876 toward Williams’ medical expenses.
August
• Local musicians and educators Cammy Dell Grote, Caryn Diamond, Barbara Leeds and Nancy Lineburgh, revived a local piano ensemble with a history stretching back decades, performing as an eight-hands ensemble as part of the Dayton Music Club’s season-opening September Musicale at Epiphany Lutheran Church in Dayton.
November
• The Yellow Springs Youth Orchestra Association held a benefit for its summer camp that featured performances by young band, orchestra and chorus members.
• Yellow Springs Community Music: the Yellow Springs Chorus and Chamber Orchestra presented W. A. Mozart’s dramatic Requiem (K 626), his final — and uncompleted work — in the newly reopened First Presbyterian Church’s sanctuary, which had been cleared of birds and bats. The Yellow Springs Community Band presented “Forgotten Gems from the Library,” a collection of pieces not often performed anymore.
December
The Yellow Springs Community Band, McKinney Middle School and YSHS choirs, as well as some members of the World House Choir performed a holiday concert to a capacity crowd in the First Presbyterian Church’s Westminster Hall.
A holiday concert played to a capacity crowd Monday evening, Dec. 16, in Westminster Hall at the First Presbyterian Church. It was a collaboration between the Yellow Springs Community Band, the McKinney Middle School and YSHS choirs, and several members of the World House Choir. (Photo by Matt Minde)
Yellow Springs Community Music: The Yellow Springs Community Orchestra presented a Winter Solstice concert, featuring works by nordic composers Jean Sibelius, Edvard Grieg and a commissioned piece by Oliver Kentish, featuring David Coleman, trumpet soloist.
PERFORMING ARTS
January
In January, a new play by Mad River Theater Works, “Keep Marching: The Road to the March on Washington,” delved deeper into the grassroots history of the historic event, particularly what it was like for the thousands who marched, demanding fair wages, voting rights and civil rights protection and an end to segregation for Black Americans. The play — aimed at young audiences, but appropriate for all ages — debuted in the Foundry Theater at Antioch College.
Diana Slickman, left, as Ludwig van Beethoven and Colm O’Reilly as Quasimodo in “The Hunchback Variations,” which the two actors performed March 15–17 in the Foundry Theater at Antioch College. (Submitted photo)
March
• After an eight-year absence, Women’s Voices Out Loud, a long-loved staple of local women’s art and expression, returned to the village at the Herndon Gallery on Antioch’s campus, with an accompanying art installation.
• The Foundry Theater welcomed Chicago-based theater collective Theater Oobleck to its experimental black box theater stage for three performances of “The Hunchback Variations.”
“Roof Man,” Yellow Springs Theater Company’s comedy was performed at First Presbyterian Church earlier this year. The play, written by Yellow Springs local Robb Willoughby, starred Thor Sage, center, as the titular character who refuses to get down from his roof. “Roof Man” also featured, clockwise from bottom left, actors Ellen Ballerene, Seth Ratliff, Saul Caplan, Libby Holley Scancarello and Kayla Graham. (Photo by Reilly Dixon)
April
• The Yellow Springs Theater Company presented the “Roof Man,” a story of world-weary, blue-collar Charlie who refuses to come down from his suburban roof after mounting middle-class problems become too much.
• Young thespians of YS High and McKinney Middle schools presented four performances of “The Addams Family” at the John Legend Theater in Springfield.
May
• The annual 10-Minute Play Festival, sponsored by the YS Theater Company, was staged on the grounds of Yellow Springs High School.
June
• The Mad River Theater Works summer youth theater residency kicked off its second year at the Foundry Theater. Young thespians ranging in age from 8 to 17 were introduced to the ideas and methods of devised theater, or theater created collaboratively without a script from a unifying theme. The residency focused on the theme of “Mystery.”
Local thespians and funny guys Charlie Cromer, Adam Zaremsky and Elliot Cromer took the Foundry Theater stage, Thursday–Saturday, July 18–20, to perform a characteristically over-the-top sketch comedy show, titled “Bigger and Better.” (Photo by Lauren “Chuck” Shows)
• “Bigger and Better,” the third sketch comedy show produced by local duo Elliot Cromer and Adam Zaremsky, and the second accompanied by band The Boogie Bros, elicited laughs from audiences with the staging of three shows at the Foundry Theater.
July
• GravityWorks Circus took to the air for the first time in their home venue, the Foundry Theater, with three performances of “She Grows Wings.” GravityWorks opened in March 2023 as the brainchild of two local residents, Maya Trujillo and Kayla Graham.
October
• Friendship, love, betrayal, reconciliation and a band of forest marauders were enacted when YS High School theater department staged Shakespeare’s “The Two Gentlemen of Verona,” at the Turner Studio Theater in Springfield.
Local resident Louise Smith, left, and New York residents Lizzie Olesker, center, and Peggy Pettitt presented “The Language of Dolls” — a play they wrote collaboratively and which centered questions of racial and cultural identity — at the Foundry Theater. The artists are pictured holding handmade dolls they created for the show. (Photo by Lauren “Chuck” Shows)
• Local resident Louise Smith and New York residents Lizzie Olesker and Peggy Pettitt starred in “The Language of Dolls” — a play they wrote collaboratively and which centers questions of racial and cultural identity — at the Foundry Theater.
December
• All 209 of the fairy tales collected by The Brothers Grimm were presented in a little over an hour through the production “The Brothers Grimm Spectaculathon.” The winter play, presented by the young thespians of McKinney Middle and YS High schools, was a one-act play performed at the Clifton Opera House.
Visual Arts
January
• The News interviewed participants in an Art Book Circle about their months-long artistic collaboration. Ten artists and/or creatives spent the better part of 2023 making 10 books with original art, a page at a time. A new cohort of 30 participants repeated the project over 10 months in 2024. The results were displayed at the library in November and December.
March
• “My Name is Iden” News columnist Iden Crockett, explored her “dual selves” in the “4 a.m. Girl” exhibition at the Yellow Springs Arts Council Gallery.
The late artist and Yellow Springs resident Raymond P. Harris amid some of his work, in a photo from a 1953 LIFE magazine profile about a group of American artists working in Paris, of which Harris was a part. “Artistry Re-Kindled: The Raymond P. Harris Retrospective Exhibit,” a retrospective exhibition of the work of Harris — who lived in the village from the 1950s until his death in the 1980s — opened April 6 in the Herndon Gallery at Antioch College. (Submitted photo, originally published in ‘LIFE’ magazine)
April
• The artistic legacy of mid-century artist and former Yellow Springs resident Raymond Perret Harris was celebrated through the exhibition “Artistry Re-Kindled: The Raymond P. Harris Retrospective Exhibit,” curated by local resident Ena Nearon, of Ten Talents Network.
June
• The themes of community, nature, connection, heart, people, memory, energy and healing were explored in a News feature about local artist Chris Glaser, who 25 years ago started painting more seriously after a back injury.
• The exhibition “Simple Steps” opened to the public. Curated by Dayton-based mixed-media collage artist and creator Carly Evans, it featured the curator’s work, as well as that of four other creators: Tink, a.k.a. Ashlyn Zerangue, Teri Campell, Becky Potts and Bartek Karas.
Sumayah Chappelle (right) was artist-in-residence at Crome Architecture, where “Renaissance,” an exhibition of ceramic relief works was on display earlier this year. (Photo by Truth Garrett)
July
• “Renaissance,” an exhibition by artist and local resident Sumayah Chappelle, opened at Crome YS. The exhibition both reflected her journeys with her Islamic faith and personal growth.
October
Yellow Springs hosted two exhibits for the fall 2024 FotoFocus event, “backstories”: photographers Shem Schutte, whose work, “Thinking Positive, Capturing Negatives,” was displayed at Crome YS; and Juan-Sí González, whose exhibition, “Looking for Cuba Inside,” was featured at Antioch College’s Herndon Gallery.
WRITING, LITERATURE
January
• Jane Blakelock, a retired senior lecturer emerita of Wright State University and a 38-year resident of Yellow Springs reviewed local author Jo Ann Kiser’s new novel, “A Young Woman from the Provinces,” which according to Blakelock, “unspools a journey to the self, the only reliable home that is everyone’s birthright.”
April
• The News interviewed author and Yellow Springs resident Lucrecia Guerrero about her new novel, “On the Mad River,” about life in a fictional 1980s Ohio town and its inhabitants as they confront a changing world and their own changing desires.
Antioch professor of writing and aesthetics Brooke Bryan began the work of reviving some much beloved literary institutions: the Antioch Review as well as the Writers’ Workshop. The first, re-inaugural workshop was held at Antioch’s campus July 8–12. (Photo by Reilly Dixon)
May
• After a four-year hiatus, Antioch College announced that the Antioch Review — the college’s independent literary magazine founded in 1941 — had re-emerged with a new editorial vision and business model, which included the revival of the Antioch Writers’ Workshop. The workshop, held in July, offered morning seminars, afternoon author meetings, writing practices and other literary events. Featured writers included Kashmiri novelist Feroz Rather and Yellow Springs-based authors Rebecca Kuder and Robin Littell.
August
• The News interviewed Brooklyn-based author and illustrator Nina Crews about her newly published children’s biography, “Extraordinary Magic: The Storytelling Life of Virginia Hamilton.” In her lyrical picture book biography, Crews utilized poetry to tell the story of Hamilton’s life.
September
• The News interviewed local resident and writer Cyndi Pauwels — known to readers by her nom de plume, C.L. Pauwels — about her novel “Fatal Errors.” Fatal Errors is Pauwels’ fourth novel, a crime thriller and mystery, published in August by Crossroad Press.
October
• The Senior Center held a Local Writer’s Series in September and October that brought together established and emerging literary voices.
December
• The News interviewed Dr. John E. Fleming about his memoir, “Mission to Malawi,” which was published in spring. The book details Fleming’s service in the early years of the Peace Corps — during which he was the only Black American in his cohort — against the backdrop of the U.S. Civil Rights Movement.
The Solstice Poetry Reading, presented by Tecumseh Land Trust and Glen Helen, was held Friday, Dec. 6, 7 p.m., at the Glen’s Vernet Ecology Center. (Photo by Audrey Hackett)
• The 13th Annual Winter Solstice Poetry Reading was held at Glen Helen’s Vernet Ecological Center with the theme “Stillness.” The event featured 10 poets, an open mic, wine reception and the opportunity to purchase publications from the featured poets.
• Local human rights organization H.U.M.A.N., or Help Us Make a Nation, gave the community a way to process post-election worry and rage and ask the question “What now?” through a coffeehouse event co-sponsored by Mad River Theater Works at the Foundry Theater. During the event, villagers were given the opportunity to express themselves through poetry and music, or to say what was on their hearts and minds in conversation.
The Yellow Springs News encourages respectful discussion of this article.
You must login to post a comment.
Don't have a login? Register for a free YSNews.com account.
No comments yet for this article.