What's Up - Your guide to what's happening in Fayetteville, AR this week!
Issue link: https://www.epageflip.net/i/921773
JANUARY 7-13, 2018 WHAT'S UP! 41 what's going on on stage, something else will be on in a few minutes." The variety show has moved around a lot — from the Fayetteville Underground to the now-gone stage at Ryleigh's to one-offs here and there — but found a more permanent home in 2017 at the Fayetteville American Legion. The primary objective of Last Saturday is to bring together different art forms, but the other goal is to grow the slam poetry scene. Hughes says when he moved to Fayetteville, the sphere where slams existed was completely self-indulgent. "Slams were very insular. We were doing poems for other people who wanted to do poems, so there was no impetus for us to get better or reach out to a broader audience," Hughes reveals. "Now, most of our audience has never seen slam before or are coming back for the artist, not for slam. A lot of times, they're blown away by how raw and in-your-face it is, but also how good the writing can be." Each Last Saturday event includes a Word War where poets perform in an audience-judged competition — motivating poets to improve their work. Performers from these challenges have gone on to represent Northwest Arkansas at the Women of the World Poetry Slam three of the past four years and at the Individual World Poetry Slam. To further promote growth in prestige and talent for the region, Hughes lends his knowledge and experience to a writing club — a free round-table critique for poets and musicians — as well as offers writing lessons and workshops in both schools and the community. "There's the selfish aspect of if I don't get more people involved in this, it's going to die out," he admits. But promoting slam's contribution to the artistic community is about more than Hughes' own vision. "Slam is doing its best to be progressive, and as it moves forward, is becoming more [an outlet for] marginalized voices — for anybody who needs to be able to shout something cathartic. I'm a big fan of using slam to help you figure out your own world view, and I think people better themselves in the process of writing poems." DANIEL HINTZ How does our food and culinary scene contribute to a larger conversation about place and who we are as a region? That's the biggest question Daniel Hintz was considering in 2017. Founder and CEO of the Velocity Group, an urban planning and experience design firm in Bentonville, Hintz considers himself a "citizen provocateur and community cheerleader" for the Northwest Arkansas culinary scene — spreading word and excitement over the growth and potential of the area. And in the past year, he set in motion a new culinary ambassador program that aims to connect our regional scene with similarly developing areas. "The culinary ambassador program is larger than just chefs — it's the concept of connecting up those in the food industry whether they're chefs, innovative farmers, food technologists — [and] I think what you're beginning to see is this [pursuit of] exchanging ideas with folks all over the world," Hintz reveals. Ahead of the Roots Festival in August, three area chefs and a student from the Brightwater culinary institute traveled with Hintz to Milwaukee to participate in the first "cultural and expertise exchange" of the ambassador program. They visited some 30 locations in four days, including breweries and distilleries, a shop owned by a female butcher, and James Beard Awards nominee Justin Carlisle's restaurant Ardent. Carlisle was one of the featured guest chefs at this year's Roots Festival, bringing the exchange full-circle. "The culinary program was not necessarily about the Velocity Group doing it, we were just thinking of one more way to extend what was already going on," Hintz says in reference to the collaborative work already happening through Roots, BITE NW Arkansas, Brightwater and the Bentonville Chef Alliance." My hope in 2018 is we start to see a more aligned strategy [of] leveraging that collective wisdom and collective network. That's where I think the power is." Hintz says chef Carlisle has already expressed interest in connecting with Brightwater, and other relationships are being established through the other entities in the food economy. The next step is to continue that positive impact, but also to expand the conversation and involve some institutional backing in order to capitalize on these systems in a way that builds capacity in our local scene, he says. "I want to be able to create bigger conversation. We can't stop experimenting. We have to be hungry — literally and figuratively — all the time." WILLI CARLISLE Willi Carlisle Goehring — Goehring dropped for his stage name — just wants to make weird plays. And continue his more "normal" musical performances. And to be known and to know others. "I wake up happy every day, even when I make mistakes, and it's a damn pleasure to be on planet Earth with everybody," the multi-instrumentalist and performer says of what he wants others to know about him as an artist. Carlisle spent much of 2017 touring his musical performances as well as the one-man operetta he authored — titled "There Ain't No More!" — wherein he portrays a dying folk singer through songs, jokes, political plot points and non-linear storytelling. Though "some people can't believe you could do more than one thing in this life," Carlisle says it's been "so far, so good" at making his living as a folk singer/theater artist. "I think folk singing is one of those things that is liberal in that it's an art and conservative insofar as it's based on legacies," he shares. "I continue to make the distinction between my own original [songs] and folk songs so that I make sure I honor the ghosts. "It is really a joy to say, 'I learned this song from, who learned it from, who learned it from,'" Carlisle goes on. "To bring up that lineage I think champions the oddness of the material, and brings up a lot of the historical polemics that drives me to make things at all." Carlisle is back in Northwest Arkansas for a short time, but then that drive has him tackling ambitious new ventures in 2018: A house concert tour on the East Coast, a Canadian and possible European tour over the summer, a new album and the debut of the one-woman play he is writing. With exciting new projects and tours on the horizon, Carlisle's wish to share his storytelling, his experimentation and the lineages of folk culture and traditions with wider audiences has a strong foundation going into the new year. "It's better to be strange, but you also want to be understood," he muses. "I want to attach myself to interesting projects that are interdisciplinary, because I guess that's what being a folk singer to me is: it's interdisciplinary." People Continued From Page 40 Houston Hughes Daniel Hintz Willi Carlisle COVER STORY