(dramatic music)
- There's a sense of
openness to Atlanta.
- It's got this history.
It's Southern and Conservative,
but it's got a progressive element.
- We have this world of possibilities.
The city gets to be what we make of it.
- You can't help but draw
from the people around you,
and everyone seems to be growing
in several directions all at once.
- There's so many dynamic and amazing
artists who live and work here.
- There's something about Atlanta's
energy that always feels
like it's just starting.
- [Announcer] Funding for Music Voyager
provided in part by:
Celebrating Culture,
Encouraging Communication,
Create for Change, a non-profit
for bridging cultures through film.
Look, Listen, Learn.
Additional funding for this season of
Music Voyager provided by:
PromPerú Commission for
Travel and Tourism Perú.
Atlanta Convention and Visitors Bureau.
Tauck, how you see the world matters.
(soft music)
- My name is Tara Lee,
and I've been a dancer with
the Atlanta Ballet for 20 years.
A typical day in a dancer's life
we always start with a company
ballet class in the morning.
That's just our routine every morning,
how we warm up,
how we get our mind and bodies
kind of prepared for the day.
It's exercise after exercise
we start at the bar.
We end up in the center of the floor
jumping and turning.
In a way it's the hardest
part of the day
because it's a technical,
physical hour and a half.
It's there to keep us in shape,
and for us to keep on pushing ourselves
to improve our technique,
and our instrument.
Then we have up to
six hours of rehearsal.
It's intense, it's intense.
I've been choreographing
for the last few years,
and this last summer
I did a piece called
Under The Olive Tree
for New Orleans Ballet Theater.
Another piece we did before that
was called Pavo.
We actually commissioned a new
musical score for that one.
That was performed at
the Woodruff Arts Center.
I love the idea that you can
dream up something in your mind,
and during the process of it
being created it changes,
and surprises you as it goes.
It's also a process where it's
creating itself and you get to
kind of witness it,
so it's much of you discovering it
as creating it.
Ballet is very much
a collaborative art form
because not only is there
choreography in dancers,
but there's other production
elements that go in,
so it's very much always
a collective effort when you see
the finished product on stage.
When you kind of conceive of an idea
you have to all of a sudden
think about the nuts and bolts of it.
Imagery translates into
how is that gonna interpret itself
to become what it should look like
on stage as the choreography, lighting.
It's the music, of course.
It's the costume design.
Kevin Anderson is director
of our costuming.
We do a lot of building
of costumes here.
- We are building as you know
all of our company dancers
brand new rehearsal tutus.
There are over 133 yards
of tulle in total in this.
Imagine going across
to a football field,
walking on your fingers
a half an inch at a time.
That is what these amazing people
are doing behind us.
Just to see the state you're in
right here is about three days of work.
- So all this work is just for
a rehearsal costume?
- Just for the rehearsal costume.
- Classical ballet is so difficult
because there is a standard of
perfection that we all understand
that no one can
necessarily ever achieve.
The other side of the spectrum is
creating new work and new language,
and that's so important as well.
I mean both sides are needed.
One example of our city's eclectic
mix of dance voices is
Lauri Stallings and glo.
- Lauri Stallings
is a good friend of mine.
I did a workshop with her
the year after she got to Atlanta.
- She's an artist that represents
really pushing the edge,
and furthering the language to things
that challenge and provoke people
to think of dance in a different way.
- The style it's so hard to explain.
- We are working in the outer limits,
sometimes, incredibly ambiguous places.
Mind, heart spaces.
- Most of all it seems to be a very
reactive dance to the ground,
or to the architecture of a space,
which I find fascinating.
- These moments are also offering
a different kind of time to live in
stretching time, slowing it down,
hence the reason the work could
happen over six hours,
or it could happen 24 hours a day
for seven days.
I'm saying that performance has
a longevity in a different kind of
potentiality with people and cities,
and that's what we're
constantly working with.
The moment where she finds you,
and starts getting closer and closer
that system happens very early
in the installation like really early
like almost out of the gate
this is the first thing the horse does,
and, Michelle, she's got so much
intentionality into her work,
and it went on four or five minutes,
and then it just vanished.
I use vanishing a lot.
We just vanish,
and we move on to another idea,
or another situation.
- Creating new work
has to happen all the time
because that's what's relevant,
so there's no standard,
or there's no model to follow.
There's only something to create,
and to discover.
- As the practice develops
I more and more consider
this whole thing,
and it's very much an experiment
this hybrid form of social art.
I consider it a form of DJing.
Today I was navigating
in and out of the space,
and calling systems based upon
perhaps your needs,
or just how the space was constructed.
Most everyone was over there.
It's a form of DJing.
Spano and I talk about this quite a bit.
It's also a form of conducting.
- Maybe
the most surprising,
and fruitful collaboration
I've had in Atlanta is with glo.
We're an unlikely pairing in a way
because she's doing
this work in
public spaces,
and her dancers do these
incredibly extended
almost like installations,
moving installations.
She calls them moving artists.
They are moving artists.
The incredible stuff
they did in Central Park.
Then later at the goat farm
she had me really quite involved
in much of the movement aspect
of the work we did together,
which was such a great challenge for me
to engage with these incredibly
cultivated dancers.
To me that's what's so exhilarating
is when you're on a voyage of discovery.
I'm often asked what does it
mean to be a conductor?
What are you doing up there?
I often say first
if you ever get the chance take it
because it's the best place
to hear an orchestra.
When you're conducting
you also get to influence it,
and guide it, and shape it.
One of the marvelous things about
being a conductor
it's not just that wash of sound,
but all of that creative energy that's
coming from these individual musicians.
You're interacting with
all of them in a sense,
so there's also that rush of
creative juice.
I mean as a conductor
you're the musician
who doesn't make any sounds,
so you really don't make music
as a conductor without other people.
- A conductor sometimes feels as if
they're not doing their own music
they're always interpreting others.
- I finished a project I've been
working on for a very, very long time,
which is solo piano music.
I looked at the songs and I thought
Jessica Rivera should sing these.
These are perfect for Jessica.
She is a tremendously inspiring singer,
so I finished the set for her,
and it all worked out beautifully,
so to have her sing them
is also a great gift.
There's the obvious collaborations
when people have a certain kind of
empathy or sympathy to begin with,
or share a certain kind of discipline
that's beautiful,
but for me what's even more exciting
is when the intersection of
the two circles is not so obvious
until the work happens.
- The first three years of my career
I was very much
a conventional choreographer.
I spent a great deal of time
in and out of Atlanta as
resident choreographer of the ballet,
so I had the blessing of working
really rigorously with Big Boi
and the Dungeon Family.
We mixed and speaking of DJing we DJ'ed.
- Then you find that there's this
whole other world that opens up
because of what each party
brought to the table.
- [Lauri] I fell in love with Atlanta
during that process.
- Yeah, this is where they call
the SWATS Southwest Atlanta.
It's one of the many areas that
freight areas exist in Atlanta.
- I grew up in the South.
I grew up on the "other"
side of the tracks,
The Dirt Road the Projects.
I found a family through
the hip-hop community here.
- My name is Dr. Dax.
I grew up in Atlanta,
and I grew up with Outkast,
Goodie Mob, The Dungeon Family.
Everybody I went to school with
that I was friends with were
creatives which in Atlanta wasn't
really a cool thing back in the day.
Everybody was into sports,
and street things.
Being in band and playing the clarinet,
or being in drama wasn't as cool
as being a football player,
or even a drug dealer, or whatever,
so growing up with those guys,
and just, you know, seeing their method,
and like their strategies,
and the way they were approaching art,
and taking it dead serious
influenced me in the direction that
I went into as far as doing graffiti.
So, hopefully, in a second here
I'll show you a little bit
of what I'm talking about.
The guy who started Outkast
and Dungeon Family who made that
whole sound his name is Ray Murray.
He's one-third of Organized Noize
a production team here,
which made the Atlanta Sound.
He was a graffiti writer that wrote Raz,
and when I first noticed
graffiti it was his,
so that was the spark.
The circle of Dungeon Family
we never really looked at it as like,
okay, you guys do music,
and you guys are the artists.
We just looked at it as kind of
like Southern hip-hop.
We didn't really know about
the elements of hip-hop,
and to later find out, you know,
that these are the four elements
of hip-hop being DJing
breakdancing, graffiti, and mc'ing,
and we just looked at it
as one big creative movement.
While those guys were
in the studio making music
I was painting trains behind the studio.
Sometimes those guys
would watch out for me.
We started just applying, you know,
traditional like graffiti
that is known as it is today
started applying it to freight trains
because they go all over North America,
Canada, you know, Mexico,
being in the South,
and not being seen as much.
That was a good way for us to like,
you know, let the world know that
we were here and it worked way better
than we could ever imagine.
We were in Philadelphia it was snowing.
I got on tour with Outkast.
There were trains at our hotel,
and I was like, man, I knew
I should have bought some more paint,
and André 3000 was like,
Oh, I just happen to have
some paint on my bus,
and like they all watched out for me.
We painted trains before
we went into our hotel
with the tour buses sitting outside.
You know, painting the trains has always
had a special place in my heart.
I spent my whole childhood doing it.
I get excited even still when I see
the trains and the engines running
just as I think as any kid would.
You know, I embrace my graffiti history.
You can see my graffiti in all my art.
It's pretty much just a bunch
of graffiti style because graffiti,
you know, isn't on canvas
it's on trains and buildings,
but if it was to be
on canvas there it is.
I have a lot of murals here
like all over Ponce de Leon,
East Atlanta Village
all the way up to Buckhead.
You know, turn of the century
all the way to the '90's
which a lot of factories,
and industry closed down here,
so now we're left with a lot of
abandoned tracks and stuff,
and people went to the streets,
and started street bonding.
Hense, I met back in the early '90's.
He's a little younger than me.
I found out he went to
my high school and stuff,
so I didn't necessarily
take him under my wing,
but we used to be really cool.
We did graffiti together.
- So everybody in Atlanta knows Hense.
He wrote his name all over the city.
- In Atlanta the graffiti scene
was smaller than what
we had in New York and L.A.
and larger cities,
but we had something special I think.
The name Hense was something that
I just developed when I think
I was 14 or 15.
I was looking for a cool name to write.
I was into skateboarding.
I was into graffiti.
- He was a monster.
He was obsessed.
He was a graffiti bomber.
He bombed really hard, yeah.
- I wanted to associate myself with
things that were not mainstream.
I wanted to be doing what
Kurt Cobain was doing, you know,
something that was considered cool,
but not like status quo.
I think that's where the whole
attraction to graffiti came from.
- I painted way longer than him,
but once he got the bug
he went ballistic.
- Hense developed a very eclectic style
of graffiti on objects and on buildings.
- He painted a much shorter time,
but in actual painted time he did
what I did in my 25-year career
in probably like a 10-year period,
which shocks people it's very shocking.
- I remember
going down to these legal walls,
and just the mystery behind it
I think was what was really intriguing.
I didn't know where they were from.
I didn't know how old they were.
I didn't know it was
a male or a female.
That was really captivating,
and it was also rebellious.
- He would paint his name
hanging off rooftops.
If you look downtown there's
reminisces of the era of Hense.
- When I met Hense I told him I'm like,
"Hense, one day you're gonna
"have to grow up,
"so writing your name around
"is not going to be
"what you want to be best known for."
- Right now we just left Midtown West,
and we're gonna be headed
over towards Piedmont Park,
and I've got a mural on a wall
in the Beltline that we're headed to.
I remember going to a gallery show
here in Atlanta and thinking that
I possibly could be arrested.
There was the moment where I was still
painting outside without permission,
and then also trying
to show in galleries.
I remember telling my wife
who was my girlfriend at the time,
you know, will you go and tell me
if the police are there, you know,
like I don't want to show my face.
- When he transferred into art
I think people were buying
his name at first,
but then he also holds his own
on canvas and murals.
(soft music)
- This is a wall that was commissioned
by the Atlanta Beltline in 2014.
One thing you learn through graffiti
is that you need to be clean,
and as soon as I could get
that out of my head I feel like
that actually like gave me the ability
to move into a different
realm with my work.
This is just an example of
using brushes as opposed to spray cans,
and kind of treating it like
I would treat a canvas in my studio,
but just in a public setting,
and on a bigger scale.
You know, what I got from graffiti
that was like the inner rebellious kid
that was wanting this notoriety
in a different way,
and what I do now is more
it's just a different feeling
of, you know, satisfaction.
(soft music)
- Hense's reputation soared to where
he's now in national locations,
and even internationally.
Hense was one of the first artists
that we used during ELEVATE
to actually create a mural.
ELEVATE is a festival that started
because it was a way for us to
reimagine downtown as a cultural hub.
For 10 days we created
art installations, performances, murals.
- I would say that there were a lot
of really talented artists
that have passed through Atlanta.
- During our first year I was introduced
to a very young firebrand
by the name of Courtney Hammond.
She came in and worked with us
for about three years
as we pushed ELEVATE to the limits.
Then she partnered up with
Beth Malone to create Dashboard.
- We run a group called Dashboard,
and we have been doing this work
for seven years.
Dashboard goes around
the city of Atlanta and produces
art exhibitions and art experiences
in vacant properties.
- We are a platform for
non-traditional artwork,
non-traditional artists,
performance, sculpture,
lighting, soundscape,
and we use architectural
elements to heighten artwork.
- Dashboard and what they do
is hard to describe,
but incredibly fun to experience.
- Dashboard is one of those things
where it's like, man,
I wish I had thought of that.
- They find really unique spaces
that seem to hold power,
and then some sort of history
in Atlanta that has been overlooked.
- Let's keep this dark,
and that's gonna shine.
We put artists in unique spaces
to create even more unique artwork.
- They are re-imagining every space
that they can get their hands on.
- Atlanta is a city of neighborhoods
all with individual identities,
and what we've always been excited
about is trying to connect them,
which is a huge conversation in Atlanta
it's like how do you connect
all these neighborhoods?
People talk about that
through the Beltline,
through our public transit system,
through our roadways,
and we wanted to connect it
through exhibitions.
Our appetite is not just so small
as to do it in one neighborhood,
one gallery, one space,
which means that we're
gonna have to hit the road.
The thought is,
and has continued forever.
Naturally, we do most
of our work in a car.
- Often we're driving around the city
looking for beautiful buildings
that are vacant that we can use
for our shows and our projects.
- Dashboard has not only
set a standard, you know,
for what could happen they've also
led the charge.
- Several years ago we had discussed
how do you produce artwork
with no outside stimulation,
so we wanted to do an experiment.
- In 2013 we found this building
that the people had been evicted,
so we came in and decided that
we wanted to use it for a show.
- [Courtney] We locked two artists
in here for 22 days,
and told them that they had no other
direction besides just to make artwork.
- We wanted to see what people would do
if they were removed from
their normal environments.
- [Courtney] When we opened the doors
on the last day of the third week
of their kind of imprisonment
we found this.
- They had completely painted
the walls in this dizzying pattern.
They found two pool tables.
In the basement they found
a working Galaga machine,
they found a working jukebox.
They created a completely
immersive environment.
- The energy it's just
being born for the arts.
Things are happening,
things are growing,
things are becoming
something new everyday.
- It is an ever evolving work of art.
- It's like become this melting pot of
creativity and people are I think
excited about Atlanta.
- I feel like the potential
will never be reached.
It's always something that
we're aspiring to and that's
what's exciting about the city.
(dramatic music)
- [Announcer] Funding for Music Voyager
provided in part by:
Celebrating Culture,
Encouraging Communication,
Create For Change, a non-profit
for bridging cultures through film.
Look, Listen, Learn.
Additional funding for this season
of Music Voyager provided by:
PromPerú Commission for Travel
and Tourism Perú.
Atlanta Convention and Visitors Bureau.
Tauck, how you see the world matters.