Ring true: Boxer Jack Johnson became the first African American world heavyweight champion, and at the height of the Jim Crow era he was “the most famous and the most notorious African American on Earth,” according to documentarian Ken Burns. Directed by multi-faceted artist and C-VILLE contributor Leslie Scott-Jones, The Royale, written by Marco Ramirez, […]
When Nina Simone died in 2003, Elton John sent flowers with the message, “You were the greatest and I love you.” That sentiment has been echoed by countless others, and tributes to Simone aim to capture her seductive, hypnotic genius. Richelle Claiborne and Leslie-Scott Jones rekindle the vocal magic during A Night With Nina, with […]
When the student-run UVA Studio Arts Board asked New York artist Ed Woodham to bring his Art in Odd Places to the university, he wanted local artists to take part in the public visual and performance art, and the centerpiece of the two-day April event featured local theater artists Leslie Scott-Jones and Brandon Lee. Two […]
She’d been here before. During a recent rehearsal of August Wilson’s Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, a feeling of recollection overcame Brenda Brown-Grooms as she recited her lines. She was in character as Bertha Holly, wife of Seth Holly and a boarding house matron who likes to bake biscuits, make [...]
The next time you use the Water Street and Second Street crosswalk, look in the Live Arts window. There’s a light on in the lobby—the theater’s ghost light. It’s small and casts yellow light from a transparent glass shade, and, according to superstition, keeps ghosts from haunting the theater [...]
Lights go up on the wood-paneled stage in the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center auditorium to reveal the inside of a jitney cab station in Pittsburgh. It’s early fall 1977 and the Hill District, a group of neighborhoods that have long been the cultural center of black life in [...]
On August 12, when hundreds of white supremacists gathered here for the Unite the Right rally, ostensibly to protest the removal of the Robert E. Lee statue, our city suffered terrible loss. Just a few blocks away from the destruction, Black Lives Matter held an Art in Action event at Champion [...]