Arts District: Scene's Arts Blog

Sarah Morton puts it kindly when she says her challenge in writing Dream/Home was to "find a way to get into the nuts and bolts" of the foreclosure crisis without "becoming a lecture on the economy or the lending industry." In other words, she wanted to turn socio-economic calamity into a play. So she decided to write scenes and characters that deal with the ripple effect on a single, unspecified Cleveland neighborhood. Dobama Theatre commissioned the story as part of its series of plays about Cleveland. The curtain goes up this week.

"We see moments with nine characters as they struggle with what's happening in their neighborhood as people try to hang on to houses" despite job loss and the rise of crime that follows, says Morton.

The one character present throughout is a banker who grew up in the neighborhood and whose mother still lives there. Played by George Roth, he's trying to come to terms with what happened and his share of responsibility — and the mistaken belief that driving the economy with risky loans was a sound strategy.

Morton wrote the story over the course of a year, the literal and financial landscape changing week by week. The play ends in September 2008 with a character about to lose her house — a teacher who was persuaded to take out a loan she couldn't afford and who's been facing foreclosure throughout the play. Her loss comes to a head with poetic injustice in the final scenes, as she and her beleaguered neighbors see the banks get bailed out by the federal government, not the homeowners.

Morton's first drafts were "more dark and angry," but after writing for a year, she started look beyond the doom and gloom. "It became a play about resiliency," she says.

Dobama will offer free tickets to homeowners and renters facing foreclosure. There's also a series of facilitated, post-show conversations.

Given its name, SPACES could hardly pick a more appropriate show than Internal Compasses, curated by Jeff Chiplis, Jeanne Grossetti and Vlada Vukadinovic. Press materials describe the artists in the show as "visual thinkers who map, code and catalogue experiences and information, then systematically arrange the material evidence according to personal internal strategies." Images from the artists include explorations of space defined by lines or lines of force rendered in some physical way, like Athens, Ohio, artist Sarah FitzSimmons' tent sculptures that mirror geographic features of their settings. Internal Compasses opened Friday, along with a show by Israeli artist Efrat Klipshtien and Brooklyn-based Sung Jin Choi's Ambient Sound in the SPACELab. SPACES (2220 Superior Viaduct, spacesgallery.org, 216.621.2314). It's free.

This video is like a flippie book. Thanks to my friend Jason, for showing it to me. You’ve seen flippie books, and probably even made them yourself. You draw and re-draw a picture dozens, maybe hundreds, or even thousands of times. You flip through the pages, and your stick figure seems to run and then jump into a hole and then disappear, or whatever. It’s a great use for notebooks and virgin post-it pads.

This video is like a flippie book, but it just happens to be the size of a city block. An Italian street artist who goes by the name “Blu” made this in Buenos Aires, Argentina. You can see the ghost lines of previous drawings as he painted over them in white and re-drew the same figure in slightly different position. On a building, a city wall, and spilling onto a sidewalk and underground, he painted a constantly morphing human figure, his head unfolding into a cascade of building blocks, his chest opening to have other versions of himself come out, his body collapsing into a pile of lines, and seeming to bloom as it re-grows. This involved days and days of work. You can see the shadows and light change as the days go by. This involved paint rollers on long poles, and, if other links to Blu’s work are any indication, the use of a scissor lift, or one of those cherry pickers the tree trimmers use.

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Cleveland has a lot of terrific street art, partly because the city has a lot of walls that aren’t used very much: abandoned buildings, highway overpasses and abutments, and above all, the Red Line, the largest public art installation in the state. But Cleveland doesn’t have a whole lot in the way of innovation when it comes to street art. Plenty of writers have highly developed skills in terms of color and line in their lettering, but it remains for the most part just that: lettering, fat and exaggerated, proclaiming the writer’s name, or whatever it is that the writer writes.

Blu and plenty of others around the world take the form to a level that simply does not exist here. Not yet, at least. — Michael Gill