The Ohio Department of Agriculture has issued a statewide quarantine for the invasive spotted lanternfly, expanding a previous quarantine that targeted 18 of Ohio’s 88 counties.

The spotted lanternfly is an invasive pest of grapes, hops and apples, along with many other species of plants.

Under the quarantine, trees, nursery stock and other such products may not be moved out of the state without a compliance agreement, permit or inspection certificate. The insect is especially a concern for Ohio’s grape and wine industry, which contributes more than $6 billion dollars in economic activity to the state yearly, according to a press release from the ODA.

Businesses that need help certifying shipments of affected products are advised to reach out to the ODA’s Plant Pest Control Section.

The ODA is no longer encouraging the public to report local sightings of the pest. Recommendations on treatment methods for one’s property can be found in the ODA’s “Spotted Lanternfly Management Guide.” An invasive tree known as “tree of heaven” is the primary host for the insect.

A native of Asia, the spotted lanternfly was first detected in the U.S. in Pennsylvania in 2014. It was likely brought in by imported goods. The first confirmation in Ohio was in Mingo Junction in 2020, according to the ODA.

On Saturday, Feb. 28, two acts — Chicago-based guitarist, songwriter and composer Bill MacKay and area experimental percussion duo Neutrals — will take the stage in Herndon Gallery at Antioch College for an avant-garde double bill that promises approaches to sound and structure that, at turns, overlap and diverge.

The News spoke this week with Evan Miller of Dayton-based Neutrals,  formed in 2016 by Miller and Andrew Seivert, which will open the show. The duo blends written percussion works with electroacoustic improvisation, drawing from both classical training and underground music scenes, and Miller said the Neutrals looks forward to bringing that sonic tincture of structure and spontaneity to the Herndon.

“Every time we play is a little bit different,” Miller said. “Depending on the room or who’s asked us to play, we might lean more toward chamber music, or something more improvisational — or a little bit of both.”

Neutrals has made a practice of performing established repertoire alongside commissioned works by composers known to the duo. Miller said a number of the composers whose music the duo performs are themselves active improvisers, instrument builders or experimental performers.

“We seem to gravitate toward people who live in both worlds,” Miller said, estimating that more than half of the chamber works Neutrals has performed were pieces commissioned directly for the duo, often beginning as friendships and conversations that eventually turned into formal projects.

“Some of the pieces we’ve played forced us to make sounds we never would have thought of on our own,” Miller said. “And then those sounds get folded back into how we improvise later.”

One work the duo expects to perform on Feb. 28 is “Settle,” by composer Sarah Hennies, a piece built around sustained tones and gradual shifts in volume and resonance via vibraphone.

“It’s really just one chord for about 12 minutes,” Miller said. “But the speed you play it, and how it sounds, depends entirely on the room.”

In that piece, Miller said, the space becomes part of the performance as sound interacts with the dimensions of the room, the surfaces, the reverberation.

“Every space is different,” Miller said. “You start to hear what the room is doing back to you.”

To that point, Neutrals performed “Settle” last year in the former community gathering space on Short Street, where he said the vibraphone’s tones “dissipated in a different way” than they would in a room.

Miller described Herndon Gallery as intimate but “alive,” where subtle changes in intonation or resonance can register more apparently than they might in a more “dry” space. Having performed in spaces as varied as living rooms and basements, traditional stages and dive bars, Miller said Neutrals is accustomed to adjusting the way they play to the space they inhabit.

“We know how to play to the room,” he said. “It won’t feel like we’re under a microscope.”

Though both Neutrals and Bill MacKay move within the avant-garde, their sounds don’t share an immediately apparent surface language, but both, in their own ways, move fluidly between structure and openness. For MacKay, who spoke with the News earlier this month, that’s an ideal lineup.

“I really like when bills are overlapped, maybe, in some ways, but our bags are quite different as well,” he said.

Based in Chicago, MacKay has built a career that balances solo works with a wide range of collaborations. He’s released several solo albums on Drag City Records, most recently “Locust Land.” Alongside his solo releases, he has ongoing collaborative projects in Chicago, including BCMC with organist Cooper Crain of psychedelic drone outfit Cave and Chicago supergroup Black Duck with Douglas McCombs and Charles Rumback.

Still, MacKay said his solo practice has remained a constant, and in recent years, he’s brought vocals back into the mix, which he called a “nice change.”

“To me, it’s all instruments,” he said. “But that’s a particular instrument — the voice — that hits a lot of people in different ways. It’s widened the vocabulary of my solo work.”

By way of example: MacKay’s 2021 EP “Scarf” is a 22-minute guitar track that layers bright, distorted notes over a persistent drone before shifting midway to contemplative tones, then lilting melodic lines that melt into swelling chords and return, resolved, to somewhere near where the piece began. Conversely, 2024’s LP “Locust Land” is a generous mixture of instrumental and lyrical tunes. The album’s tracks flow between rock-and-roll-adjacent jams and singer-songwriter sensibilities, book-ended by brief, diaphanous works that fit neither category. 

His listening vocabulary, too, is broad, he said, extending into what he called “two wings” — one that returns to familiar music for comfort, and another that keeps reaching in uncharted directions.

“I’m very thirsty for new sounds,” he said, “whether it’s new or old music, but music that’s new to me … experimental, going in directions that I’m not so familiar with.”

MacKay said he grew up in a “family that had pretty wide listening habits,” and started writing songs very early after picking up guitar. Thus, he said, he never developed a hard mental barrier between composition and improvisation. To his mind, they share a source: A composition, in performance, becomes “the blueprint of a ritual,” while improvisation is “a fresh assembly” of familiar instincts into something new.

“In a way, songs are improvisations that are repeated,” he said. “Generally, I don’t leave a ton of room for all-out free improv [in performances]; usually it’s in the context of a song, or maybe some free things that are more like intros and interludes.”

He also described the work of shaping a live set as its own kind of composition, and something he considers as carefully as he thinks about album sequencing.

“I’ll put a set together in the same way,” he said. “Being kind of a hybridist artist, I always try to think carefully about hitting the different points of this song vocabulary … and think of songs that will cover some ground.”

That instinct toward shape and pacing, he said, sometimes draws him to unconventional rooms and curator-led series. Though he has never played in Yellow Springs, he said he was drawn to the local show through the feel of the season series itself.

“I like to do things that are special,” MacKay said. “Within touring, there’s a range of very standard places you end up playing — it’s just part of the gig. But when a series looks unique and fun to do …  that makes all the difference.”

Miller expressed a similar sentiment: that Yellow Springs has room for unique, varied kinds of listening experiences, and venues that can hold them.

“I hope this show continues to reinforce with people in the community that this is a place that is welcoming to these kinds of sounds, and a community that is fostering it,” he said.

Bill MacKay and Neutrals will perform Saturday, Feb. 28, 7–9 p.m., in Herndon Gallery at Antioch College. Parking is available in the lot behind the Wellness Center and Olive Kettering Library, with on-street parking on Livermore Street. An accessible passenger drop-off and pick-up area is available via Morgan Place off Livermore.

Tickets are $20 for general admission and $5 for students, and may be purchased in advance online at http://www.bit.ly/MacKayNeutralsHerndon

A winter heating issue at Antioch College has prompted a venue change — but not a pause — for two upcoming events sponsored by Mad River Theater Works.

A poetry event on Thursday, Feb. 20, and a hip-hop performance on Friday, Feb. 21, originally slated for the Foundry Theater, will now be held at the Herndon Gallery after a boiler malfunction and subsequent water damage closed the Foundry, as well as the Wellness Center and the Art and Science Building.

Via the college’s website last week, Antioch officials said replacement parts for the failed boiler have arrived and been installed, but the Foundry remains closed while damage from frozen and burst geothermal lines is assessed. The move comes with reduced capacity; advance ticket registration is strongly encouraged. Parking for the events is available behind the Olive Kettering Library.

The Wellness Center reopened Wednesday, Feb. 11, with staff noting that the pool and spa are closed until water can be returned to an appropriate temperature.

Full information on the closures and updates are being posted online at antiochcollege.edu.

Speaker series: Ross Gay, janan alexandra

The first of the two events, set for Friday, Feb. 20, will feature a joint reading and conversation from poets Ross Gay and janan alexandra as part of a continuing speaker series.

Mad River Theater Works Managing Director Chris Westhoff said the idea for the event began with Gay, a well-known contemporary poet and essayist whose work he felt would resonate strongly with a local audience.

“He’s very attuned to people’s struggles in all different ways, but his focus, at least in his work, remains in areas of joy and what he calls ‘delight,’” he said.

Westhoff described the evening as a shared reading, noting that Gay and alexandra are colleagues who know each other well and who both teach writing at Indiana University. Gay, he said, suggested inviting alexandra to join him for the inaugural event.

alexandra, who spoke with the News this week, is both a poet and a self-described “burgeoning writer of nonfiction,” and said Gay’s invitation for her to co-headline the event is an extension of a professional and personal relationship shaped by magnanimity.

“He’s a very generous person and friend and mentor in my life,” she said. “He often brings people into things.”

alexandra’s debut poetry collection “come from” was published last year, and she said she often writes from a place of close observation of her own inner life, her body and the world around her — her “experience of being alive.”

“It’s beautiful to take notice — to notice what moves us, to be interested in how our mind works,” she said.

Taking notice, she said, extends outward to others as well, especially at a time when reliance on technology can create distance between people.

“Increasingly, as you disconnect — you know, have AI write your emails — people are very removed from their bodies, the wisdom and knowledge in their bodies and feeling,” she said. “I believe in the primacy of feeling.”

As an educator who has taught creative writing in a variety of settings, alexandra brings a similar philosophy to the classroom, where she said she aims to help folks be curious and connect with themselves and each other as creative beings — and to belay some of the anxiety that can sometimes be attached to the practice of writing.

“Especially in school settings, there’s so much fear connected to reading and writing and getting it right, spelling correctly, but we all use language all the time,” she said. “You know how to woo your crush via text message; you’re using the same skills in writing.”

Language — its limits, its gifts, its eccentricities, its cultural consequence — is a central theme in much of the work that populates alexandra’s book “come from,” which braids English with Arabic to explore home and family. Within the poems, alexandra’s Lebanese-American identity is reflected in exploration of both belonging and disconnection, particularly around her relationship to the Arabic language.

In “Invocation,” the opening work of “come from,” alexandra writes about calling her mother to ask for an Arabic word she’s forgotten, for which there is no English equivalent. She ends the poem by wondering:

when i can
no longer call,
what else
will have no name?

“I write in English,” alexandra said, “but I started experimenting with having a little bit of Arabic on the page, or at least transliterated Arabic as an expression of parts of my identity and things that don’t exist in English but do exist in Arabic.”

That experimentation, she said, was guided in part by formal study of Arabic while in graduate school, and in part by seeing other writers engage in “language retrieval work,” which she described as “invoking the importance of language that has been in some way lost” through “immigration or dislocation or war or colonialism.”

“I feel this very deep connection to the language,” she said. “But I’m not always legible in Arabic to other people, my identity as Arabic is questioned because I’m not fluent … and [language is] a big part of how people determine belonging. … I think some of that playing on the page and moving between voices is my own intuitive experiment in being.”

Playing on the page is a physical exercise for alexandra’s work, at least in its initial stages, as she said she writes longhand daily before later transcribing and shaping her work. Writing in this way, she said, feels like a “sanctuary,” away from the many assorted tasks that proximity to a computer might demand.

“I think writing is a very embodied practice; people think of it as happening in your head, but there’s a brain-hand connection, and writing by hand helps me find out what I’m thinking about and what I’m feeling,” she said. “My attention’s not pulled in five directions — and there’s just the pleasure of a pen, feeling that juicy connection to a page, that feels good.”

As for what she will read on Feb. 20, alexandra said she is still deciding. She often adjusts her selections based on the room, the audience and the moment. No matter what she reads, she said she hopes the audience will walk away “being filled up with good stuff.”

“Connection, care — anything that helps people build their capacity for being alive and continuing to work hard to survive and help other people survive,” she said. “I hope it’s fortifying.”

It’s a hope, she said, that’s rooted in the act of gathering during difficult times; she acknowledged that, against all odds, humans have “survived so much unspeakable brutality.” With that in mind, being together around art, she said, doesn’t mean we have to evade the painful or unresolved elements of living.

“It’s not that we’re turning away from what is devastating,” she said. “What is devastating is with us as well.”

In that sense, she said, joy and grief are not opposites, and people connecting with and caring for each other is a kind of shared endurance.

“The joy is not that we’re talking about happy things,” she said. “It’s that we’re together.”

“No More Knocking”

The following night, Friday, Feb. 21, Mad River Theater Works will present “No More Knocking,” a hip-hop performance featuring well-known area artist Tronee Threat, along with Chris., Blakk Sun and 11-year-old break dancer Kai the Action Kid.

Westhoff said the idea for the project grew directly out of a performance he heard last summer at the former community gathering space on Short Street, where Tronee Threat, Chris. and Blakk Sun performed together.

“They were both on Tron’s Short Street set last summer, and I so dug it,” Westhoff said. “It was so good. It was so life-affirming. It was so forward-thinking.”

Westhoff said he was drawn to the energy of the performances, but also to the substance of the words beneath the music.

“Sometimes hip hop is really great because the energy and the spirit is great, and the sound of it is big and full, and it’s all happening, but the content can be anything,” he said. “But with their set, there wasn’t a sentiment that didn’t mean something resonant.”

After that performance, Westhoff told Tron he wanted to find a way to bring the work into an indoor setting, and he said Tron was on board from the get-go. Thus was born “No More Knocking” — a title, Westhoff said, that communicates the show’s underlying idea: a refusal to wait for permission from entrenched systems.

“The concept is that waiting for someone to open the door for you, when that someone is the establishment, isn’t working,” he said. “So we’re not going to wait.”

Kai the Action Kid, a competitive break dancer from Columbus, will serve as a connective presence throughout the evening.

“I think his dancing is the main way he communicates to us,” Westhoff said, describing the young performer as an interlocutor between the other artists during the show.

In the tradition of some of Mad River Theater Works’ past devised performances, Westhoff said “No More Knocking” is coming together organically, with room for adjustment up until the doors open at the Herndon.

“We have the show in order,” he said. “But the way in which it comes together — all the elements will be there, and then it’ll be my job the day of to put it together. We’re really excited.”

janan alexandra and Ross Gay will read and speak Friday, Feb. 20, 7–9 p.m. “No More Knocking” will debut Saturday, Feb. 21, 7:30–9 p.m. Both events will be held in the Herndon Gallery; for more information, and to purchase tickets in advance, go to http://www.antiochcollege.edu/foundry-theater.

Around 100 villagers crowded the John Bryan Community Center’s gymnasium on Wednesday, Jan. 21, to sound off at a public forum hosted by the James A. McKee Association. The topic was Short Street — whether to re-open the downtown road to vehicular traffic, keep it closed in perpetuity as a community gathering space, or come up with some kind of middle ground.

A handful of folks went to the mic to weigh in — from advocates of needed accessibility and more downtown parking to hacky sack enthusiasts who found a home on Short Street. No consensus was reached nor were any decisions made — but that may come on Monday, Feb. 2, at the next Village Council meeting.

According to the meeting agenda, which can be read on page 10 of this week’s issue of the News, Village Manager Johnnie Burns, Assistant Manager Elyse Giardullo and Police Chief Paige Burge will lead a one-hour discussion and presentation on the future of Short Street.

The ostensible goal of the presentation will be to fill the Council and public on a greater breadth of pilot project details: costs, visions, mock ups, renderings, traffic studies — “Anything you need to make the best decision,” Burns said, alluding to a potential vote on whether or not to reopen Short Street.

Thousands of neighbors to Yellow Springs’ north may be the targets of a possible large-scale federal immigration enforcement operation to take place in the coming weeks.

According to reporting earlier this week by the Springfield News-Sun, Springfield officials are bracing for a heightened presence of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, agents in the city beginning Wednesday, Feb. 4 — the day after Springfield’s estimated 15,000 Haitian residents will lose their Temporary Protected Status.

The supposed operation will last at least 30 days, according to the report.

TPS is an immigration designation that allows people from countries experiencing political unrest — such as Haiti — to emigrate to the U.S.; it’s what brought Haitian asylum-seekers to Springfield in greater numbers beginning in 2020, eventually becoming approximately 25% of the city’s entire population. But next week’s expiration of TPS could shift those demographics.

This anticipated ICE operation in Springfield comes on the heels considerable upheaval and mass political demonstrations in Minneapolis, Minnesota, after Border Patrol agents shot and killed two city residents over the course of January.

Whether ICE operations extend 10 miles south to Yellow Springs remains to be seen. 

At the Tuesday, Jan. 20, Village Council meeting, Council member Carmen Brown reminded the village of a few indelible truths — namely Resolution 2018-42, which states that “no Village department may use Village funds, equipment or personnel for the sole purpose of detecting or apprehending a person’s suspected immigration status, unless in response to a court order.”

“Basically,” Brown said, “Yellow Springs Police cannot help or hinder [Border Patrol].”

Learn more about the past, present and future of Springfield’s Haitian residents this Sunday, when the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship will host guest speaker, Viles  Dorsainvil, co-founder and director of the Springfield Haitian Help and Support Center. 

The News will provide future updates to any local ICE operations as they occur.

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