Big Bang! Arts Week 2010

With a large pile of cash and a serious commitment to overthrowing the popular sentiment that the “beer-a-mid” Chip made last weekend is the greatest work of art that U.V.a. has ever seen, the Drama-led Arts Board has brought you Big Bang! Arts Week. Delivering on its name by opening new worlds of the mind, the week has seen three truly amazing artists sharing their work and their knowledge with students and community members. Headed up by fourth-year chairman Sam Rabinovitz, the Board has brought in Ray Tintori, a filmmaker famous for his Sundance award-winning short and his MGMT music videos, Rennie Harris Puremovement, an elite hip hop dance group from Philadelphia, and Daniel Beaty a world-renowned spoken word poet, actor, and writer. Beaty and Puremovent are each working respectively with a group of U.Va. poets and dancers to form a new collaborative work that will be performed for the first time ever at Old Cabell Hall on Sunday, February 6, at 2 P.M.

With this one main event remaining, it seems appropriate to look back on the success of the week so far, recap the wild happenings, and help break down the lessons you should or could have derived from each occasion.

Ray Tintori
The first event held this week was a screening of director Ray Tintori’s collection of shorts in Clemons Library. Tintori, the young avant filmmaker who will undoubtedly replace his Facebook profile picture with Liev Schreiber and/or Gerard Butler for Doppelganger Week, shared his award-winning short works with a crowd of unloved film students. Death to the Tinman and Jettison Your Loved Ones demonstrate Tintori’s mastery of “showing the seams” and bringing the laughs with his signature deadpan comedy, while Glory at Sea proved his versatility to pull at the heart strings. After the viewings, Tintori cordially answered questions, including a few notable ones, such as, “What was your inspiration for Glory at Sea?” This would be a fine question if not for the fact that the film is a story about people in New Orleans mourning the loss of loved ones who had drowned after some sort of large storm had swept through. The jury is still out as to what the inspiration was.

The next day Tintori hosted a master class and workshop where he showed off his awesomely trippy MGMT videos, including the “Kids” video that has garnered impressive amounts of hate mail from both angry mothers and disappointed Joanna Newsom fans. Tintori provided further tips on how to be a badass filmmaker and answered a series of awkward questions from one nameless individual wondering how to get an internship, which was actually just a thinly veiled attempt by that individual to ask Ray Tintori to give him an internship.

The Top 8 Things We Learned From Ray Tintori and His Films
8. Six minutes is the fastest you can tell an intricate story without making your audience vomit.
7. Your conception of physics is based on Ren and Stimpy and doesn’t actually work in real life.
6. Asking your crazy high school teacher to star in your independent film project is a great idea.
5. Sometimes when you die, you come back as a meat puppet.
4. Google Image searching abstract concepts and looking at your friend’s old Myspace page can lead to practical artistic results.
3. MGMT’s new album will blow your mind.
2. Making your film in black and white lets you get away with murder. We think this might be a metaphor.
1. Young people who make films, cast their friends in the films, and avoid stuffy over-sophistication in their films will be asked to give talks about their films at U.Va. during Big Bang! Arts Week. Unfortunately, if your name isn’t Ray Tintori, you’ve already missed
this opportunity.

Rennie Harris Puremovement
On Friday night in Helms Theatre, the Rennie Harris Puremovement dance group put on a dance demonstration and lecture covering the “History of Hip-Hop” to a packed house. The incredibly talented dance crew and hip hop historians took the audience in Helms on a ride from The Lockers to the “Steve Martin” with the progression of hip hop dance. Rennie Harris was not present, but his spirit was indeed felt.

The Top 8 Things We Learned From Rennie Harris Puremovement:
8. The MJ moonwalk is a cheap knockoff of the Boogaloo Sam backslide.
7. Holding yourself up with one hand is achievable by people other than Neo from the Matrix.
6. That dance move you think you created probably already happened on Soul Train.
5. (Lessons 5, 4, and 3 all begin with the phrase, “If you’re this damn good at dancing, you...”) ...are absolutely allowed to have a mullet.
4. ...don’t need to awkwardly force an audience to clap along with the beat, they just do it by nature.
3. ...can fearlessly use the term “cat” to refer to a human being.
2. There is locking, there is popping, but there is no pop locking.
1. Street smarts + Education = P. Diddy.

Daniel Beaty and the Poetry Slam

U.Va.’s own spoken word poets busted out their original works in a showdown of “rhyme spitting” (as the kids might say) to decide who would open for Daniel Beaty the next day. Michele Miller won after two rounds of competition, though speculation as to whether or not fellow Arts Board member Kadeem Cooper fixed the vote is hotly contested. Many assume that Mr. Cooper, resident of Lawn Room 50, is also responsible for the generally unappetizing redesign of Pavilion X. After the student contest was finished, others took the floor for an open mic session. Finally, the evening closed with a very special sneak preview from Daniel Beaty, performing a clip from his new show, “Through the Night.”

On Sunday night, Daniel Beaty took the stage in Old Cabell Hall to display his breathtaking one-man show concerning black identity in America today. Simply put, this was the most beautiful and significant artistic endeavor I have witnessed in my time at this University. Daniel Beaty’s performance was thrilling from start to finish, evoking wild laughter one moment and uncontrollable tears the next. In this masterful one man show, Beaty takes on over forty characters, sings gorgeously and speaks directly to your soul. After the performance, Drama Department Professor Theresa Davis hosted a wonderfully enlightening talkback session. If you missed this, go to YouTube immediately, search “Daniel Beaty” and watch whatever comes up. This is a distant substitute for the live performance, but it’s the best you can do at this point to make yourself feel a little less bad about making one of the biggest mistakes of your young life.

The Top 8 Things We Learned from Daniel Beaty and the Poetry Slam:
8. There’s a very good chance that you’re using the term “swag” incorrectly.
7. Professor Theresa Davis should have her own talk show.
6. I’m not sure if this one has been mentioned yet, but Daniel Beaty is incredible.
5. Slavologists are under-appreciated in academia.
4. Read this entire line in auto-tune. Oops, too late.
3. White boys may not be able to jump, but thanks to the poetry of Marky Mark Goldberg, it’s obvious that they can rap.
2. America’s Next Top Poet would put Simon Cowell to shame.
1. It is an absolute necessity to go see Daniel Beaty’s new show, “Through the Night,” when it opens at the end of February.

Be sure to check out the final collaboration on February 6th at 2pm in Old Cabell Hall. It’s free and worth your time.