High Low presents our inaugural exhibition, Wig Heavier Than a Boot, featuring a four-year collaboration between photographer David Johnson and Poet Philip Matthews. The exhibition displays photography, poetry and video works that document Petal- a drag persona assumed by Matthews as a means to write, while documented by Johnson. Taken together, the resulting photographs and poems express dynamic relationships between observer, poet, and persona, positioned in interior or expansive environments.

Opening Reception, First Friday, 12/6/19 6-9p
Artists’ Talk, Saturday, 12/7/2019 11a-1p

Wig Heavier Than a Boot is on view at High Low Gallery through January 4, 2020.

A F R O S E X Y C O O L . N Y E . 2 0 2 0

Tuesday December 31st, ring in a new decade with the music, fashion, style, and vibe of STL’s afro-cultural renaissance at Sophie’s Artist Lounge with SOULITION DJs Blvck Spvde, Makeda Kravitz, DJ Nico Marie, and ASC creator James Biko

If you know, you know…if not, allow us to enlighten: AFROSEXYCOOL is an afro-cultural arts + music + dance event celebrating the many dope facets of Blackness while connecting the musical dots of the African diaspora. Be prepared for rhythmic gyrations, high-stepping, clapping and singing to the sounds of Afrobeat, Afro-Latin, Soul, R&B, House, Hip-Hop, Trap, Bounce, Dancehall, and more

Come cap the year off at one of the most unapologetically Black parties in STL
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Sophie’s Artist Lounge
3224 Locust St – 2nd FL
Midtown – St Louis, MO
Doors 9pm / Spins 9:30pm
21+

$15 advance / $20 at the door | entry only
$40 advance / $45 at the door | entry + 1 drink ticket + midnight toast
$120 advance / $125 at the door | entry + open bar all night + midnight toast
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*By attending this event, you agree and irrevocably consent to your image being captured on film and video for any and all artistic and/or promotional uses

#ascnye
#afrosexycool
#newyearseve

5-7pm: KDHX
7-9pm: The Kranzberg Jazz Jam hosted by Bob DeBoo at The Kranzberg
9-11pm: The Dark Room at The Grandel (Featuring a rotating line-up)

Every Wednesday evening, the St. Louis community comes together for the Wednesday Night Jazz Crawl, live in Grand Center. Free, family-friendly, and open to jazz lovers of all ages, this weekly event celebrates the finest in jazz talent, and the venues that form the backbone of a St. Louis legacy.

Sponsored by the Kranzberg Arts Foundation, the Wednesday Night Jazz Crawl helps continue the Foundation’s mission to establish the essential infrastructure necessary for the arts to thrive in the St. Louis community and bring the arts within reach for people of all ages and backgrounds.

Our Fresh Crop Tasting presents new coffee releases to the public. We share samples of the coffee. In addition, our team will present origin information and sourcing stories for each coffee. The next event on January 6 features Ejo Heza, Las Moritas, El Manzano, and Penrose v24. For the first time, the levely High Low building hosts the event.

The events typically last 90-120 minutes. During this time, a social atmosphere is kept. Each coffee spends about 20-30 minutes in the limelight. Our team leaves plenty of time for questions.

If you love coffee and want to know more about where it comes from or why it’s great, this is the event for you. We spend major time and resource sourcing coffees and building partnerships. Once we receive coffee, we careful roast it before sharing it at our coffee bars, wholesale partners, or website patrons.

Our Fresh Crop Tasting VIP ticket includes four sample bags of coffee. Each bag contains a half pound of coffee beans. If you’d simply like to attend the event, then just RSVP for free.Blue

A PUBLIC READING, FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC, of Gilbert & Sullivan’s great, lost, adult, horror-comedy, Bloody King Oedipus, or Pardon Me, Mum!.

After shocking the music and theatre worlds by rediscovering Gilbert & Sullivan’s lost masterpiece The Zombies of Penzance in 2013, and then staging and publishing the controversial original opera, in 2018, now New Line Theatre artistic director Scott Miller has done it once again. This time, Miller has unearthed Gilbert & Sullivan’s even darker and funnier BLOODY KING OEDIPUS, or PARDON ME, MUM!, an adult horror-comedy that no one even knew existed until now, based on Sophocles’ iconic Greek tragedy of murder, incest, disfigurement, and suicide.

The legendary British team of librettist W.S. Gilbert and composer Arthur Sullivan together wrote fourteen comic operas between 1871 and 1896. Or is it sixteen? After rewriting their original Zombies of Penzance at the insistence of producer Richard D’Oyly Carte, the team premiered The Pirates of Penzance in 1879. Until now, scholars believed that their next project was the pastoral satire Patience. We now know that isn’t true. After the huge success of HMS Pinafore and Pirates, the team decided to tackle something a bit weightier. According to personal papers found with the manuscript, it was Gilbert who suggested two unlikely possibilities, Dante’s Inferno, and the classic Greek tragedy Oedipus the King, set in Thebes, a Greek city-state in the 13th century BC.

They both agreed Inferno would make a less than satisfying comic opera.

Gilbert stayed curiously faithful to the plot and characters of Sophocles’ ancient tragedy – until the end of the show, when Gilbert evidently couldn’t restrain himself from adding a comic, Gilbertian twist, upending everything that’s come before, as usual. It’s safe to say Sophocles would not have sanctioned Gilbert’s much more comic ending. The score included song titles like “We’ve Been Very, Very Sick,” “I Can See Now I Was Blind,” “Now This is Quite Awkward,” “So Our King Just Might Have Murdered Our Last King,” and “He Hasn’t Taken It Too Well.”

As he had done with The Zombies of Penzance, Richard D’Oyly Carte refused to produce the gory Bloody King Oedipus, convinced that Gilbert & Sullivan’s audience did not want to see the hero of the story gouge both his eyes out after his wife has hanged herself, beautiful music and clever rhymes or not. Gilbert was enraged, but eventually gave in (again) and wrote an entirely new libretto to Sullivan’s finished score, now as the gentle satire Patience, leaving nothing of the original text.

In 2018, Miller was contacted by an American college student in London, who had come across the original manuscript of the full score of Bloody King Oedipus, while cataloguing some newly discovered private papers of Richard D’Oyly Carte’s cousin Maud. There among the correspondence was a letter written by the outraged producer, though evidently never mailed, to the Archbishop of Canterbury, insisting on the excommunication of Gilbert from the Church of England due to his “second un-Christian opera in a row,” Bloody King Oedipus.

The discovery of this second lost Gilbert & Sullivan horror opera now forces a reexamination of the team’s entire output, and what we thought we knew about their taste in source material. It has already been widely documented that Gilbert urged Sullivan in 1885 to try a Frankenstein adaptation, though Sullivan refused.

And now, at long last, King Oedipus, Queen Jocasta, General Creon, Milo the Herald, and all of Thebes will make their comic light opera debut. Miller has painstakingly reassembled these rediscovered materials into their original form; and St. Louis composer and orchestrator John Gerdes is reconstructing Sullivan’s music, after doing the same with The Zombies of Penzance.

New Line Theatre will present a public reading of the rediscovered show in January 2020. The company has not yet announced a full production.

For the reading, Dominic Dowdy-Windsor will play King Oedipus; with Kimi Short as Queen Jocasta; Kent Coffel as Gen. Creon; Lindsey Jones as Manto; and Zak Farmer as the Royal Messenger, and Tiresias the Blind Seer, and Milo the Herald, and also Phorbus the Shepherd. The rest of the cast will be announced later. The reading will be directed by Scott Miller and music directed by Nicolas Mario Valdez.

Stone’s Salon is a monthly gathering of writers, musicians and educators from St. Louis and beyond curated and hosted by Rabbi James Stone Goodman at Grand Center Arts District’s new literary Center High Low. Under the Kranzberg Arts Foundation’s umbrella of creative programming and facilities, Stone’s Salon seeks to bring together poets, storytellers, academics, songwriters, and experimental artists from a cross-section of disciplines, age groups and cultural divides.

Stone’s Salon is called for every second Thursday of the month at 7 PM.

Admission is free.

Beats & Vibes returns to Sophie’s with another great night of music. Join MaDMAn as some of the best producers around town showcase their music. Kick back with a drink in one of the coolest lounges in St. Louis.
There will be live painting from talented artist Pia Rene.
No cover fee, so bring friends!

Lineup:
HugoBawse
Lexxiii Beatz
Trippy Dude
O.N.I.
Flexxworthy

Jazz | Lofi

The brainchild of multi-instrumentalist Mark Wallace, tristaño operates under the combined influence of jazz legends and contemporary beatmakers, to inspire detailed sonic excursions via lush instrumentals!  Audiences are taken on a ride of deep tone, vivid texture and elastic composition, a genre bending landscape of creativity!

DJ/bassist/composer Enoch has shared stages with some of the industry’s most prominent musicians, deejays and producers on the Soul, Jazz and Dance Music scenes including but not limited to Rich Medina, Osunlade, Questlove from The Roots, and has opened concerts for Musiq Soulchild Julie Dexter, Anthony Hamilton, and Eric Roberson.

A staple of St. Louis’s nightlife scene in the early 2000’s, Enoch presents his latest project Enoch Raavi and Indigenous Groove, the group features compositions that he calls “Jazz from a DJ’s perspective”, a sound blending artful turntablism and soulful live instrumentation!

Join us for a night of classic cocktails and true art soundscapes!

Join us at the High Low Literary Arts stage to witness the works of acclaimed writers Kathryn Davis, Jeffrey Thomson, and Alison C. Rollins!

$5 General Admission
$4 Students and Seniors
7PM

Kathryn Davis
Kathryn Davis is the author of eight novels, the most recent of which is The Silk Road (2019). Her other books are Labrador (1988), The Girl Who Trod on a Loaf (1993), Hell: A Novel (1998), The Walking Tour (1999), Versailles (2002), The Thin Place (2006) and Duplex (2013). She has received a Kafka Prize for fiction by an American woman, both the Morton Dauwen Zabel Award and the Katherine Anne Porter Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. In 2006, she won the Lannan Foundation Literary Award. She is the Hurst Writer in Residence at Washington University in St. Louis.

Jeffrey Thomson
https://www.jeffreythomson.net/
Jeffrey Thomson grew up in St. Louis. He is a poet, memoirist, translator, and editor, and is the author of twelve books including Half/Life: New and Selected Poems (Alice James Books, 2019) and a memoir, fragile (Red Mountain Press, 2015). He has been an NEA Fellow, the Fulbright Distinguished Scholar in Creative Writing at the Seamus Heaney Poetry Centre in Belfast, Northern Ireland, and the Hodson Trust-John Carter Brown Fellow at Brown University.  He is currently a professor of creative writing at the University of Maine Farmington.

Alison C. Rollins
https://www.alisoncrollins.com/poet
Alison C. Rollins is the author of the poetry collection Library of Small Catastrophes (Copper Canyon, 2019). Born and raised in St. Louis city, she currently works as the Lead Teaching and Learning Librarian for Colorado College. Her poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, New England Review, The Poetry Review, and elsewhere. A Cave Canem and Callaloo fellow, she is also a 2016 recipient of the Poetry Foundation’s Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship. Rollins has most recently been awarded support from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and is a recipient of a 2019 National Endowment for the Arts Literature fellowship as well as a 2018 Rona Jaffe Writers’ Award.

Every 3rd Tuesday of the month The Cabaret Project of St. Louis hosts an Open Mic at Sophie’s Artist Lounge, on the second floor of the .ZACK, 3224 Locust in Grand Center. Bring your sheet music and join us! Chuck Lavazzi is your host, with pianist and music director Carol Schmidt.

If you plan to sing bring sheet music, preferably in your own key, and perform your favorite Broadway, pop, or jazz tunes. Medium/up-tempo songs are encouraged but not required. Or you can just relax, have a drink, and enjoy the music.

No admission or cover, but there is always a tip jar! All proceeds go to The Cabaret Project, a 501c3 non-profit dedicated to promoting, developing, and sustaining the art cabaret in St. Louis

FREE PARKING in the .ZACK lot across the street.

All are welcome.

End Hunger in St. Louis and Support the Local Dance Community!
January 22, 7:30 PM
Preshow vocals at 7 PM

January 26, 3:30 PM
Preshow vocals at 3 PM

At the Grandel Theatre. Admission is one bag of non-perishable food items. See some of the best St. Louis dance companies literally for beans!

Dance for Food is a program designed to unite the dance community, rallying audiences to collect food for the hungry. Artistically directed by Linda Green, the Dance for Food program has hired many of Missouri’s finest dancers to showcase their talents to an audience whose only admission fee is a bag of unexpired, nonperishable goods. Each “food raiser” performance will include a range of choreography from five participating companies. In an effort to raise more food, there will be a competition between dance companies to see who can bring in more donations.

Artists for a Cause is proud to partner with Operation Food Source and Food Outreach, two great organizations that will be the recipients of the food collected. New this year, Artist for a Cause is partnering with MADCO (Modern American Dance Company) as the fiscal sponsor for both Dance for Food events. Thanks to Dance for Food partners and support from the Bayer Foundation, these events will continue to feed the hungry in the St. Louis area.

Companies involved include: MADCO 2, Ashleyliane Dance Company, WUDance Collective, Tour Dance of Turning Point Academy of Dance, Midwest Ballet Theatre, Beyond Measure Dance Theater, Convergence, Pazazz Performers of St. Louis Academy of Dance, and Grand Center Arts Academy.

A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step”, or so the ancient Chinese proverb goes. Join us at our January Story Lounge to hear tales of the small steps, and even the missteps, along the way that got us to where we needed to be. Want to be on the lineup? Make sure to drop us a line ahead of time, with a DM or email to [email protected]

This event will be our first at the High Low, the cool new literary arts venue in the heart of the Grand Center Arts District.
$5 suggested donation at the door.

Singer/song-writer, musician, composer, and creator, Katarra is the musical idealist!

Allowing her creations to delve into the ups and downs of loving and living, passion and pain, self-reflection, and self-awareness, Katarra’s magic through sound heal all who hear.

From soul-bearing anthems to jazz clad hip-hop, Katarra creates a world for those who appreciate music’s magical properties.

Katarra takes Jazz, Soul, R&B and Hip-Hop as her own…all within her own universe of black girl magic. Let her music be your guide to another place!

End Hunger in St. Louis and Support the Local Dance Community!
January 22, 7:30 PM
Preshow vocals at 7 PM

January 26, 3:30 PM
Preshow vocals at 3 PM

At the Grandel Theatre. Admission is one bag of non-perishable food items. See some of the best St. Louis dance companies literally for beans!

Dance for Food is a program designed to unite the dance community, rallying audiences to collect food for the hungry. Artistically directed by Linda Green, the Dance for Food program has hired many of Missouri’s finest dancers to showcase their talents to an audience whose only admission fee is a bag of unexpired, nonperishable goods. Each “food raiser” performance will include a range of choreography from five participating companies. In an effort to raise more food, there will be a competition between dance companies to see who can bring in more donations.

Artists for a Cause is proud to partner with Operation Food Source and Food Outreach, two great organizations that will be the recipients of the food collected. New this year, Artist for a Cause is partnering with MADCO (Modern American Dance Company) as the fiscal sponsor for both Dance for Food events. Thanks to Dance for Food partners and support from the Bayer Foundation, these events will continue to feed the hungry in the St. Louis area.

Companies involved include: MADCO 2, Ashleyliane Dance Company, WUDance Collective, Tour Dance of Turning Point Academy of Dance, Midwest Ballet Theatre, Beyond Measure Dance Theater, Convergence, Pazazz Performers of St. Louis Academy of Dance, and Grand Center Arts Academy.

The 2019 St. Louis Post-Dispatch Favorite Open Mic night returns in full swing for the 2020 season. Come be a part of the vibe! Calling all poets, singers, rappers, comedians to the stage. Join us for a night of poetry, music, comedy, and amazing energy. Tickets go on sale Jan. 17. Pre-Sale tickets available now for only $11 via cashapp | $poeticjusticeopenmic or venmo | @poeticjusticeopenmic

Sign-up to perform is at the door.
All talent welcomed.