 FCC presents makes socially relevant sketch comedy and builds a space for and by Black comedians in D-FW.
Rashaad Leggett discovered improv by accident. He was always interested in stand-up comedy, so when his Uber driver invited him to see a show in Los Angeles, he jumped at the opportunity. But when he arrived at the theater, he walked into the wrong room. It wasn’t stand-up. It was an improv show. “I was like, this looks easy. I could do this,” he said. Improv classes in LA were expensive, but when he moved to the Bay Area shortly after, he found one that could work for him. The only problem was, their classes for beginners were full. “So I signed up for their level two, and I was just going to pretend like I knew what I was doing,” Leggett laughed, “They believed me.” Only three months later, he was teaching the level one classes himself. “I had only been doing improv for two months before I was being asked to teach classes, and I was getting paid. By my third month in improv, without any real experience and without anyone actually checking my background. Like it seemed like opportunities were being thrown my way,” Leggett said, “It felt like this might be what it’s like to be white.”
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 The Chicago-born artist has a new immersive experience at the Dallas Museum of Art.
For anyone familiar with contemporary art, Rashid Johnson is a recognizable name. His work, which crosses genre and media lines, defies easy definition. It tackles big topics, like race and class, with an ambiguity that allows the work to take on a singular poeticism, which is to say that looking at Johnson’s art can be both a profound and an enjoyable experience. The New Black Yoga Installation, a video work by Johnson that is on display at the Dallas Museum of Art, offers an excellent introduction to his art. Visitors to the museum will find the piece tucked into a small gallery midway through the museum’s main corridor. It’s set up as an immersive experience — the video projection takes up an entire wall, and visitors can sit or stand on a collection of Persian rugs that fill the room’s floor. The experience runs on a loop that lasts nearly 11 minutes, which is enough time for the human brain — or at least mine — to slip into a meditative lull, watching the gestural flow of the men on screen.  An Oscar nominee for Best Makeup and Hairstyling, Camille Friend explains how she crafted the looks of the tribes and the Talokanil.
“It’s not another superhero movie,” Camille Friend, the hair department lead on both “Black Panther” and “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever,” says of Ryan Coogler’s Marvel sequel. “It’s a movie with heart, with soul, and we care about what is happening on the screen and behind the screen, and we have people of color [on both sides]. And we can do excellence in a movie — we do that.” An Oscar nominee for her work on “Wakanda Forever,” Friend estimates that probably 95 percent of the “Black Panther” crew returned for the sequel’s shoot in Atlanta in summer of 2021. And it was a tough return for everyone after Black Panther himself, Chadwick Boseman, died of cancer less than a year earlier. “Everybody was pretty broken still and were grieving,” says Friend. “One of the most beautiful things is that [director] Ryan [Coogler] had us all get on a plane and go to Chadwick’s grave to have a little service. We had drummers there. And his best friend, Jabari. It was momentous, and we needed it because it gave us more closure. When we got back to Atlanta, it was like, OK, get down to work.”  Celebrating a queen’s birthday is quite common in most of society. In England they have celebrated Queen Elizabeth II’s birthday with festivals and parades, every year since her crowning. Last December, Empress Masako celebrated her birthday with a tour of historic cities and landmarks throughout Japan. So it was with great pleasure for DW to have been invited to witness our queen, the South Dallas legend and musical icon, Erykah Badu.
On February 24th, Erykah Badu celebrated her 52nd trip around the sun with another amazing concert featuring Dallas native Marc Rebillet, Raekwon “The Chef” and myriad of emcees with Zach Witness, like Space Boi Fresh and Bun B. The sold-out birthday celebration was held yet again at The Factory in Deep Ellum, bringing thousands from the DFW to the party. |
AuthorDFW Black Arts is your trusted source of news and events for the DFW metroplex Archives
March 2023
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