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A lot of artists will tell you an inner voice propels them to create. The Asheville playwright Jamie Knox says, for her, it’s often a voice that isn’t her ....
4:41 Nikki Lee moved to Asheville with her three adult children and her mother during the height of the pandemic. Credit Matt Peiken | BPR News Here’s how tight Nikki Lee’s family is: She convinced her mother and three adult children to move last fall from a lifetime in Cincinnati to the unknown of Asheville. “One of my clients years ago had always told me that I’d connect well in Asheville because I seemed like the hippie type, and I am,” Lee recalled. “We just visited and we fell in love with the mountains.” Like many who move to this area, Lee arrived without much of a plan. What she did have was her faith her unwavering compass throughout her life. Around 2012, that compass pointed her to sell her thriving hair salon and devote herself to writing. ....
4:14 Collaborators Nye (left) and Terran first met at a goth picnic in Asheville s Riverside Cemetery. The people who call themselves Nye and Terran met two years ago at a goth picnic in Asheville’s Riverside Cemetery. “We decided we should have a meeting to see whether or not we were psychopaths,” Terran said. “So we picked a neutral location that now lives forever as the Waffle House of Friendship, so that we could get to know each other and decide whether we wanted to be friends, and it was like a fire started.” That fire, as Terran put it, has resulted in an artistic achievement astonishing in its breadth and ambition. “Vacant Arcadia” is a musical theater opus airing online, in sound only, over 10 episodes spanning about 5½ hours. The show premieres March 18 through an online company called Holophonic Theatre. ....
Credit Hindsight 2020 Every college student has experienced academic and social turmoil over the past year. Few have had the encouragement, as Tristan Rice has, to put it into song.
Rice and a couple dozen other UNC-Asheville students answered an open call in the fall to write music, poetry and plays, make dances and create digital art inspired by the past year of the pandemic and social justice movements.
Stephanie Hickling-Beckman, the founder of Asheville’s Different Strokes Performing Arts Collective, rehearsed and coached the students, whose work comes together in “Hindsight 2020,” a variety show streaming over video March 5-6 through the university’s theater department. ....
2:56 Credit courtesy Caleb Beissert Last March, when the public still grasped the reality of a pandemic, Katie Jones looked at the calendar and thought the Asheville Fringe Festival, which she directs, might have to do things differently in 2021. “Our initial thoughts were actually that we might just cancel altogether,” Jones said. Over the next several months, Jones watched how Fringe Festivals elsewhere handled the realities of social distancing. “We decided we can still make a really good festival if everything’s virtual,” she said. “And so we just need to focus on that because it’s the safest and most responsible, but we can still provide really good content.” ....