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Despite Syracuse Stage’s Cold Read Festival being canceled this year due to the coronavirus pandemic, Kyle Bass, associate artistic director at Syracuse Stage and the curator of the festival, added a new component to the annual event.

The “COLD READ SHORTs” series features virtual performances from artists that are available for viewing on Syracuse Stage’s website and on YouTube.

“I wanted to give (artists) a way to be visible in small bites with new presentations of short new works,” Bass said.

Bass, Carrie Mae Weems and Bill Bowers created the works in the “COLD READ SHORTs” series. Each of the pieces are under five minutes and focus on topics such as police brutality and life during the time of COVID-19. The works incorporate digital and visual effects as well as spoken word, said Bob Hupp, artistic director at Syracuse Stage.

In addition to curating the series, Bass created one of the pieces himself. Working as a Black man in a predominately white theater industry, Bass said he received emails from white colleagues asking if he was OK after the death of George Floyd. One of these emails prompted Bass to create the piece titled “Until There’s a Vaccine for White Supremacy,” he said.

Bass wasn’t sure how to respond to the email, which asked if he needed anything.

“It raised in me this other existential question of, ‘What could I possibly need if my right to breathe is not guaranteed?’” he said.

Bass created an acrostic, in which the first words of each line of his poem are the words of the email. He shared the work with Hupp, who asked if Bass would be open to publishing it. Bass was hesitant to publish the work in print, so he decided to record himself reading it. He also sent the poem in response to his colleague’s email.

Carrie Mae Weems’ work also focuses on police brutality. In “The Man was Rejected, The Woman was Denied” a Black man walks and then runs under an illuminated clock before the screen goes dark. “Commemorating all of the fallen and all those who have endured. Commemorating every Black man who lives to see age 21,” the narrator says before stating the names of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown and Eric Garner. The narrator then repeats the word “commemorating” before listing names of other Black people killed by police or through racial violence.

The other artist whose work is featured in the series is mime artist Bill Bowers. His performance “Show the Way” is about life during the coronavirus pandemic.

Bowers created the piece for a separate online festival, and then Syracuse Stage reached out to him to include the work as part of the Syracuse Stage “COLD READ SHORTs.” The piece was an experiment in doing a performance online, Bowers said.

A poem about Pagliacci, a clown character in an opera, inspired Bill Bowers’ art video. Courtesy of Syracuse Stage

A poem about Pagliacci, a clown character in an opera, inspired the piece. In the poem, the actor who plays Pagliacci seeks help from a doctor because he is depressed, and the doctor advises him to see the clown Pagliacci to lift his spirits without knowing that the patient is actually Pagliacci himself.

Bowers combined this idea from the poem with the concept of being isolated and not knowing what to do next. Many people have been stuck inside during the pandemic and are experiencing uncertainty as to what’s coming up in their lives, he said. David Wilcox’s song “Show the Way” also inspired the performance, and Bowers decided to incorporate the idea of putting on a mask in the performance.

“Kind of the confluence of all those ideas together came together to make this piece,” Bowers said.

Over the course of the performance, he wipes his mime makeup off, then puts on a mask and gloves and draws a smile on the mask. The piece is a response to what life is like during the pandemic, specifically for a performing artist who has nowhere to perform, Bowers said.

“It certainly was this feeling I have of, ‘What am I going to do with my art?’” Bowers said. “How do you move it forward when there’s no place to be? And I kind of just left it with the idea of, ‘Well, you go out and paint a smile on and just try to do what you know how to do wherever you can do it.’”

The cold read piece was the first time Bowers has worked with Syracuse Stage before, though he has worked with Hupp. Bowers was scheduled to be the solo act performer for the Syracuse Stage Cold Read Festival before it was canceled due to COVID-19, and he will perform at next season’s festival.

Hupp is not sure if the “COLD READ SHORTs” series will continue online or if it will switch to an in-person format in future years after the pandemic. One of the advantages of holding the series virtually is that it allows artists who are not in Syracuse to participate in the program, Hupp said.

Theater companies like Syracuse Stage are finding ways to give artists an opportunity to create and share work that resonates with audiences, even though the pandemic has prevented people from being together. The “COLD READS SHORTs” series is one way of doing this, he said.

“Theater and the arts are vitally important right now because they allow us to continue to express ourselves,” Hupp said. “Even though we can’t be together communally in a space, which is really one of the defining characteristics of theater as an art form, we can still and we still need to find those ways of expression that allow us to get at our feelings, to get at what we’re experiencing.”

Published on September 6, 2020 at 10:47 pm

Contact Mandy: ackrayna@syr.edu | @MandyKraynak