The Distinguished Carlson Lecture at the University of Minnesota is on again. Michael Bloomberg was originally set to appear in the series on Dec. 5. On Nov. 15, the Humphrey School of Public Affairs canceled that event because it seemed that Bloomberg would soon enter the 2020 presidential race. Which he did, officially, on Nov. 21.

Per a statement issued on Nov. 15, “University policy and federal law prohibit any arm of a public university from engaging in activity that may support a current presidential candidate. This includes funding an event with a candidate on a public university campus.”

On Tuesday, the Humphrey School announced that Gloria Steinem will be at Northrop on Wednesday, Feb. 19, for the 2020 Distinguished Carlson Lecture, an evening of conversation with Kerri Miller.

Steinem is a writer, lecturer, political activist, feminist organizer and role model whose accomplishments are staggering: a founder of New York and Ms. Magazines, author of several books, co-founder of the National Women’s Political Caucus and the Ms. Foundation for Women (among many other organizations), and recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the Freedom Award (National Civil Rights Museum). Miller is the award-winning host of “MPR News with Kerri Miller” and “Talking Volumes.”

6 p.m. FMI. Free, but tickets are required.

The next ‘Glensheen’?

The History Theatre will start 2020 with an intriguing Raw Stages New Works Festival. Over four consecutive days beginning Jan. 16, it will present four staged readings of four new plays – each a reminder that there’s still a lot of Minnesota history to cover on stage, and the History Theatre deserves our thanks for doing it so well.

What jumps out first is “Jesse James: The Musical.” Its creators: Jeffrey Hatcher, Minnesota’s most prolific playwright, and Chan Poling, musician, composer, performer (Suburbs, New Standards) and author (“Jack and the Ghost”). What else have they done? A little something called “Glensheen,” the History Theatre’s biggest hit. And “Lord Gordon Gordon.” The Minnesota connection to their latest collaboration is a botched robbery that took place in 1876, when the James-Younger Gang hit the Northfield Bank and the town fought back. The raid is re-enacted each year during a four-day “Defeat of Jesse James Days” celebration. The musical will likely be hot as a gun barrel.

We’re happy to see Harrison David Rivers’ name. Rivers is the pen behind “To Let Go and Fall” and “Five Points” (Theater Latté Da), “This Bitter Earth” (Penumbra), “the bandaged place” (Playwrights’ Center) and “A Crack in the Sky” (History Theatre). With Robin Hickman, Rivers has written “Parks,” a play inspired by the life of esteemed photographer Gordon Parks, who launched his career in St. Paul. Hickman is Parks’ great-niece.

Ola Larsmo’s novel “Swede Hollow,” a fictionalized account of the former St. Paul shanty town, is a best-seller in Sweden and has won prestigious awards there. The American Swedish Institute featured an exhibition about the novel in 2017 and hosted the book launch in October  2019 for the English translation published by the University of Minnesota Press. Meanwhile, Swedish playwright Alexander Mörk Eidem wrote a play based on the Swedish version. Eidem’s play has been translated by Rachel Willson-Broyles, and that’s the version we’ll see here. If you want to know more about “Swede Hollow” the novel, and how Larsmo came to write it, read this.

Albert Lea’s bitter meatpacking strike of 1959 made national news and turned lives upside-down. “Wilson’s Girl” revisits the turmoil through a unique perspective: the eyes of a teenager. Based on Cheri Register’s memoir, “Packinghouse Daughter,” adapted for the stage by Eva Barr, an organic farmer and theater maker in Wykoff, Minnesota, this play is cleverly subtitled “Unpacking the Beef in a Minnesota Town.”

Each staged reading will be presented only once. Thursday, Jan. 16, 7:30 p.m.: “Wilson’s Girl.” Friday, Jan. 17, 7:30 p.m.: “Swede Hollow.” Saturday, Jan. 18, 2 p.m.: “Jesse James: The Musical.” Sunday, Jan, 19, 2 p.m.: “Parks.” (A free “Parks” reception will follow the reading.) FMI and tickets ($15 general admission, $30 all-access pass).

P.S. You can see another new play by Jeffrey Hatcher on Jan. 13 and 14 at the Playwrights’ Center. “Author Author,” which Hatcher wrote with actress Sandra Struthers, explores the friendship between novelist Henry James and actress/suffragette Elizabeth Robins, tracking gender dynamics across history. This staged reading is part of the center’s annual Ruth Easton New Play Series. FMI. Free, but registration is strongly recommended.

Guthrie receives $50K Joyce Award

The new work, which is expected to premiere within the 2020-21 season, will center on the stories and experiences of the Twin Cities Native community, in particular the Dakota and Anishinaabe-Ojibwe people. It will be an extension of 2019’s “Stories From the Drum,” which featured an all-Native cast from the Twin Cities and had three performances in June on the McGuire proscenium stage. “Stories” in turn built on summer 2017’s “Water Is Sacred,” a community gathering in the Dowling Studio. Both were created by Defoe and FastHorse.

Donnie and Marie, Sonny and Cher, Tony Orlando and Dawn, meet Sam and Carrie.

Except Sam is Sam Bergman, violist with the Minnesota Orchestra since 2000, co-creator (with conductor Sarah Hicks) of the “Inside the Classics” series, and trained at Oberlin Conservatory, where he hung out with the new music kids. Carrie is Carrie Henneman Shaw, in-demand soprano, member of Quince Contemporary Vocal Ensemble and Chicago’s ensemble dal niente, and teacher at Bethel University. And Outpost, their live performance series, is more than entertainment. It’s a thinking, feeling person’s variety show.

The two first worked together in 2012 on “Slippery Fish,” a new dance work by choreographer Penelope Freeh and composer Jocelyn Hagen. At first, Freeh was a little vague about what they would do. “By the time we got to the performance,” Bergman remembered with obvious relish, “this thing had Carrie carrying a hugely muscled male dancer on her hip around the stage while singing a high A. It had me shoulder-rolling off a chair while playing my viola.” Turns out Bergman and Shaw are risk-takers. “We both love walking out on the limb, and if it breaks, it breaks.”

They broke the mold of assigning themes to each performance. Printed on every program are these words: “There’s no specific theme to the performance unless you perceive one, in which case that’s the theme, and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.” Bergman explained: “One thing we knew we wanted to do was invite performers and then ask them to do what they wanted to do, not what we wanted them to do. We realized very quickly that if we were going to do that, themelessness would be an asset. It was our job to build a show around the people we invited, not expect them to tailor what they do to us.”

Bergman and Shaw started with the spoken word artists – people they liked and wanted to work with – and then chose the music, shaping each performance so the parts would complement each other. Almost like creating a record album. “Or a mixtape,” Bergman said.

And they held the series at the Hook and Ladder Theater in Minneapolis, a venue better known for rock, roots and honky-tonk than classical music.

Outpost premiered on Sept. 14, 2018. The first show was an unprecedented blend of people who don’t usually share a stage: actor Steven Epp, stand-up comedian Brandi Brown, and Minnesota Orchestra musicians Silver Ainomäe and Roma Duncan, to name a few. The music was by Sarah Kirkland Snider, Judd Greenstein, Hagen and other living, breathing composers.

The fourth Outpost will take place this Saturday, Jan. 11, back at the Hook. Kao Kalia Yang will read an excerpt from “The Song Poet,” her award-winning book about her father. Journalist David Perry will read his essay about the medical profession’s sad history of mistreating people with Down syndrome. (He has a son with Down syndrome.) Dakota poet Rosetta Peters will perform with guitarist J.G. Everest. Nearly a dozen musicians will play recent works by contemporary composers Karim Al-Zand, Gabriela Lena Frank (“one of the luminaries of American composition,” said Bergman), Kimberly Osberg, L.J. White, and Greenstein again (“a personal favorite of mine”).

Doors at 7:30 p.m., show at 8. All ages. Tickets $20, $15 students and seniors (at the door only).

The picks

Tonight (Thursday, Jan. 9) at the Textile Center: Opening reception for “A Common Thread 2020.” The annual member exhibition, now in its 20th year, will include diverse works of stitching, quilting, knitting, crochet, sewing, weaving, dyeing, felting, needlework, lacemaking, basketry, beading and more by over 100 artists. Reception from 5:30-7 p.m. After tonight, the show stays up until March 14. Free.

Tonight (Thursday, Jan. 9) at the Parkway: “The Man Who Fell to Earth.” In Nicolas Roeg’s 1976 cult classic film, David Bowie is Thomas Jerome Newton, a thin white ET who comes to Earth to get water for his dying planet. This is Bowie the actor, not Bowie the pop star, and his performance is considered one of the best by musicians in movies. Pre-show live music tribute to Bowie by Little Man. Doors at 6:30 p.m., music at 7, movie at 8. FMI and tickets ($9 advance, $11 door).

Tonight, upstairs at the Milkweed building: David Shove Midstream Reading Series. Mimi Jennings will host an evening of original poems read/performed by their creators: Athena Kildegaard, Michael S. Moos, Paige Riehl and Timothy Young. With 15 books and chapbooks among them, this is an accomplished group. The Milkweed building (not to be confused with Milkweed Publishing or Milkweed Books) is at the corner of 39th and East Lake. Milkweed is the coffee shop downstairs. 7:30 p.m. Free.

Saturday at SteppingStone Theatre: Theatre Unbound: 20th Annual 24:00:00 Xtreme Theatre Smackdown. Within 24 hours, six new plays will be written, rehearsed and performed – all by female artists based in the Twin Cities. Among the writers: Lana C. Aylesworth, Kit Bix, Cristina Luzárraga, Jena Young. The directors will include Sarah Broude, Grace Barnstead and Casey Holmes. There will be 18 actors. Everyone will take risks (including the audience, because who knows if the plays will be awesome, awful or somewhere in between?). At the end, the audience will choose the winning play, and the winners will get prizes. 8 p.m. Tickets $18-20.

Sunday at the Parkway: Liquid Music: An Evening with Pekka Kuusisto and Nico Muhly. Liquid Music’s first solo event as an LLC is nearly sold out, so you might want to get tickets now. Finnish violinist Kuusisto and American composer/pianist Muhly are two superstars in the classical/new music world, and great friends besides. Both are in town for a weekend of concerts with the SPCO. The Parkway show will be an intimate evening of music-making. Doors at 6 p.m., show at 7. FMI and tickets ($19 advance, $24 door).

On Saturday and Sunday at Studio Z in Lowertown, audience members will get comfortable on pillows, strap on virtual reality headsets and find themselves in Quarry Park in St. Cloud. Minnesota. Accompanied by electroacoustic and live music, vocalese and a poem by state poet laureate Joyce Sutphen, they’ll travel through the seasons and the colors of the year in real and imagined landscapes.

The experience will be absolute. As you gaze around – the film is in 360 degrees – don’t look down at your feet. They won’t be there.

“The Blue in the Distance,” Miller’s latest VR work, had its start in a bog in Estonia. “Bogs are very important to Estonian culture and history,” Miller explained on Tuesday after a preview at Studio Z. Miller was in Estonia on a Fulbright scholarship, visiting the esteemed Estonian contemporary music group Ensemble U and talking about potential projects. “I mentioned we have a new visualization center at St. Cloud State, and maybe they’d like to do something with VR.” Miller’s “RABA” (the word means bog in Estonian) came out of these conversations. Paired with 360-degree video, it premiered in Estonia in 2017.

Miller wanted to do a companion piece in Minnesota. As it happens, the largest peat bog in the lower 48 states is in Minnesota’s Big Bog State Recreation Area in Waskish. But “it seemed silly to do the same piece again. I knew Quarry Park and thought it was beautiful. I snowshoed in and started filming there immediately after the blizzard in 2018.”

Zeitgeist’s Pat O’Keefe suggested that Miller might want his new piece to have a narrative arc. So Miller headed for the poetry section at the SCSU library and discovered Sutphen. Diving into her poetry, “I ultimately found ‘The Blue in the Distance.’” It’s a poem about color and light, past and future, the power of nature and the pull of the horizon.

Asked how she feels about the final work, Sutphen said, “I love it. It just seems perfect. And it’s so nice to be of use. I’ve always said that poems are perfectly useless and beautiful.”

To Miller, the poem was “essential … Once I figured out from the poem what to do, it was just a matter of doing it.”

Miller is embracing VR technology. “I’m convinced this is going to be an important delivery system for music in general, but especially the kind of music I make. Eventually, it will simply be accepted, and nobody will question how that experience happens. Right now we’re figuring out what that’s going to be like. … Periodically, there are artists who use technology when it’s first available, and they end up defining our expectations.”

Zeitgeist’s Heather Barringer sees VR as a way to make new music more appealing to audiences. “In the experimental music world, film composers and people setting music to imagery can get away with all sorts of very elevated and very adventurous ideas and people don’t blink,” she said. “They don’t think twice about what it is. If you put them in a concert hall, all of this becomes too modern.”

“The Blue in the Distance” will be presented at 7:30 p.m. Saturday and 2 p.m. Sunday. Zeitgeist will also perform two more works: “Nattsanger” by local composer Abbie Betinis and “The Yellow Moon of Andalusia” by George Crumb. FMI and tickets ($15, $10 students and seniors.)

The picks

Saturday at the Parkway: Hamiltunes: An American Singalong. Get your Lyn-Manuel Miranda on with other Hamilfans on Alexander Hamilton’s birthday. How perfect is that? Members of Hamiltunes MSP, the Twin Cities’ original “Hamilton” singalong fan club, will be there to lead songs. You can sign up to lead songs, too. Note that while this event is all ages, the lyrics will not be censored, and some are explicit. Doors at 6 p.m., show at 7. $15 suggested donation; all money will benefit Northern Voices, a local nonprofit that helps children with cochlear implants and hearing aids. Register here.

Sunday at the Fitzgerald: National Geographic Live: Kara Cooney. A professor of Egyptian art and architecture at UCLA explores a time when women ran things. Cooney’s latest book, “When Women Ruled the World,” profiles six female pharaohs, from Hatshepsut to Cleopatra. Cooney also produced the “Out of Egypt” TV series that aired in 2009 on the Discovery Channel. Doors at 1, show at 2. FMI and tickets ($25-45).

Tuesday at Mixed Blood: “End of Life, Live and Unscripted.” Like a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down, the Theater of Public Policy sweetens serious topics with improv comedy. They’re very good at this, and they’ll bring all their skills to the fore after Brenda Hartman, MSW, and Anne McIntosh, MD, share insights and answer questions about end-of-life planning, something we should all get serious about no matter our age. T2P2’s Tane Danger will host. 7 p.m. FMI and tickets ($12 advance, $15 door).

Starts Tuesday at Como Park Lutheran Church: Six weeks of learning about the instrumental music of Johann Sebastian Bach. If you’ve always wanted to know more about Bach’s instrumental music, this is the chance (and the bargain) of a lifetime. For six consecutive Tuesday evenings (Jan. 14 through Feb. 18), experienced co-presenters professor Paul Westermeyer and chaplain John Setterlund will lead a two-hour session of studying, listening to and discussing Bach’s compositions for organ, harpsichord and clavichord, solo and ensemble instruments, and orchestra. Sessions start at 6:30 p.m. Your cost for the whole series: $20. For details and registration, contact Hannah Giersdorf by email or phone: 651-646-7127.

The Minnesota North Stars were one of the teams created during the National Hockey League’s first expansion in 1966, which finally brought an NHL team to the “state of hockey.” Their twenty-nine-year residency in the state produced two trips to the Stanley Cup finals, but their sudden departure to Dallas in 1993 shocked fans throughout Minnesota.

After the NHL announced that they would expand from six teams to twelve in 1965, a group of investors put together a bid for a franchise. Although the sports market in Minneapolis-St. Paul was smaller than others, the NHL chose Minnesota on February 9, 1966. As a condition of their successful bid, investors were required to build an arena that could hold at least 12,500 spectators. This led to construction of Bloomington’s Metropolitan Sports Center, which was built in just over a year.

The North Stars played their first game on the road against the St. Louis Blues on October 11, 1967. It ended in a tie. On October 21, the North Stars hosted their first home game against the California/Oakland Seals—which ended with the North Stars’ first win. However, tragedy soon struck the team. Bill Masterson, a center, hit his head in a legal check on January 13, 1968, at the Met Center. His injury was severe, and he died of his injuries two days later in a hospital. His death is the only direct death resulting from gameplay in the NHL. It precipitated regulations for mandatory helmets, though they weren’t required until 1979. Even with this tragedy, the North Stars ended their inaugural season with a trip to the playoffs, losing to St. Louis in the semifinals.

The decade that followed was less successful. The team’s second season ended with the North Stars in last place for the entire league. In 1978, Lou Nanne became the team’s general manager, and the Cleveland Barons merged with the North Stars, bringing new ownership and players to the team. On January 7, 1980, the North Stars played the Philadelphia Flyers in front of a record crowd at the Met Center. At that time, the Flyers held the record for the longest winning streak in the NHL — that is, until the North Stars beat them 7-1. This momentum led to a successful postseason, but the team lost to the Flyers and were denied their Stanley Cup debut. The following season, however, was their chance: the North Stars met the New York Islanders in the Stanley Cup Finals. While they lost the series to the Islanders 4-1, their 1980-81 season was proof that the North Stars were a formidable franchise.

In 1987, Lou Nanne hired Minnesota hockey legend Herb Brooks to coach the team, but he was unable to relight the spark of his 1980 Olympic “Miracle on Ice.” The North Stars ended the season in last place, Brooks wasn’t rehired, and Nanne resigned as GM. In 1990, the team was eventually sold to Norm Green, a Canadian investor. With new coaching and personnel, the North Stars had another successful year in 1991, reaching the Stanley Cup finals once again. However, the Pittsburgh Penguins beat them in a 4-2 series—denying the North Stars Stanley Cup glory.

When the Metropolitan Sports Facilities Commission denied Norm Green the opportunity to improve the Met Center and connect it to the new Mall of America, he decided he would find another city to house the North Stars. On March 10, 1993, in the midst of the season, he announced that the team would move to Dallas for the 1993–94 season. As the North Stars’ tenure in Minnesota came to a sudden close, they lost their last game at the Met Center on April 13, 1993, against the Chicago Blackhawks and lost their last game ever against Detroit a few days later.

The Met Center was demolished in December 1994 and Minnesota was left without an NHL team. Fans blamed Norm Green — under the moniker “Norm Greed” — for harming Minnesota’s proud hockey tradition. However, the state wouldn’t be without an NHL team for long. The NHL expanded again, and the Minnesota Wild debuted in 2000.

For more information on this topic, check out the original entry on MNopedia.

A few years ago, when Sergio Manancero was a Marine serving in Camp Pendleton, Calif., he dreamed of opening a bar of his own, a place that would mean something to him, his family, and his community. Saturday night in north Minneapolis, that dream was a reality and on full display at Manancero’s popular and meaningful 15–month-old brewpub La Doña Cervecería (241 Fremont Ave. N.,), which bustled with salsa dancers and post-Vikings game perdedores and perdedoras drowning their sorrows in Minnesota’s only Latinx-owned and -catered to craft brewery and brewpub.

“In the Marine Corps, it’s just always a fun thing to think about, opening your own bar when you get out; that’s all any of us wanted to do,” said Manancero, sitting at his own bar last week, sipping a pint of his own brew. “So when I came back to Minnesota and I started going to breweries, there was underrepresentation of the Latino kids that I knew while growing up with my family here in Minneapolis, and I was trying to understand why they weren’t at the craft breweries like everybody else.”

“In our neighborhood, our best friends were the Argentina family that lived a couple blocks away, and my dad worked really close with a lot of guys from Venezuela, Mexico, and Ecuador, so when we had holiday parties, all the kids I played with were also Latino,” said Manancero.

“I didn’t even realize how different everyone was until I got older and in middle school, and nobody really understood my parents’ background and my background, so I spent a lot of time explaining Uruguay, explaining that I wasn’t Mexican,” Manancero continued. “I dealt with a lot of that growing up and that feeds a lot of what’s here: It’s a culture mix. I’m born and raised in Minnesota, but I’ve been trying to explain myself as a Latino the whole time, so for me, this place is a really good conduit for [connection]. Craft beer is a really easy way to bring people together and share culture and explain, ‘This is who I am.’ ‘This is our culture and this is what we do.’”

Manancero first launched La Doña as a stand-alone homebrew beer in 2016, which he sold out of the back of his truck. He and his partners found the space next to the Royal Foundry Craft Spirits distillery in the winter of 2017 and brought on head brewer Dicky Lopez, who had done time at Surly, Fulton, and Northgate breweries.

“We’re really about making sure it’s comfortable for people of color and comfortable for communities that historically haven’t been attached to craft brewery, both in terms of the clientele and also the employees,” said La Doña marketing director Filiberto Nolasco Gomez, who also works as a labor journalist and editor for Workday Minnesota.  “Most of our folks are brown, Spanish speakers, our brewer is of Mexican descent. All of those elements are really important for us. It’s not just a tagline, it’s real. It’s just the way we operate.”

To that end, La Doña is a multitiered event space: The beer is varied, delicious, spicy, and exceptional; a likewise delicious variety of food is available via the local food truck Smashflag; salsa dancers and lessons dominate late Saturday nights; Spanish classes happen the second Monday of the month; yoga classes hold forth on Tuesday, soccer clubs fill up the summer months, and the back room doubles as the UR/IN art gallery, which highlights “Latinx-hearted artists.” Its ubiquitous Day of the Dead branding gives La Doña the feel of a playful sacred space, and perhaps most significantly in terms of good vibes, the brewpub is blessed with the 24/7 presence of the stunning sculpture “La Doña,” by sculptor Kordula Coleman, which is surrounded by candles and serves as something of an altar, perfect for gathering round with a pint and contemplating all this life and death.

“A big emphasis in the beginning was, ‘Hey wouldn’t it be fun to have a brewpub that’s focused around soccer, but for Spanish-speaking soccer clubs and the Latino soccer experience,’ as opposed to Brit’s or wherever else. It’s kind of evolved from then. Hilariously, we didn’t intend for this; soccer is important for us, but the soccer field has become kind of a [play pen] for kids. Parents put their kids in there and we have birthday parties. So now we’re a family-friendly place.”

Nolasco Gomez calls La Doña “a pioneering concept in the oversaturated brewery world,” and the couple hundred drinkers, diners, and dancers Saturday night would undoubtedly agree.

“I was a Ph.D. student in modern Guatemala history. My family’s Mexican; we grew up in L.A., and I’ve always been really connected to Latin America,” he said. “The Ph.D. work on Guatemala also means I’ve been an expert witness for most of the last six years for Guatemalans seeking political asylum.

“So I’m always thinking about ‘What is the experience of Latinx people and immigrants who have moved to Minnesota?’ I always think a lot about what it means to have been raised in Minnesota as opposed to Los Angeles for a person of color. It’s extremely different. Like, I grew up in an area that’s 90 percent Mexican in one of the biggest metropolises on the planet. And I know people [of color] here who grew up in Bemidji or something, and I don’t even know what that would be like. That’s wild.

“In my previous life I worked in music [as a journalist and show promoter] because I wanted to hear that music and feel that vibe and put on Latinx music shows. I take for granted that folks around here don’t have those kinds of spaces, and that’s why this is so important to me. Because I know this hasn’t existed before, and wouldn’t exist if Sergio hadn’t had the idea.”

“We want to create community in the neighborhood,” he said. “There’s a lot of people who come here from other parts of Minneapolis, and they see that it’s like any other part of the city. The buildings are accessible, the people are accessible, you don’t have to be like, scared to come to north Minneapolis. That’s a narrative that’s been pushed that I am not a fan of, at all. Because that has not been the case; we’ve been nothing but loved by everyone here.

“People have said to me, ‘Thank you for opening a place in the Harrison neighborhood that is so inviting to everyone. Because that’s a huge piece of it. If you can’t be a local brewery, then you don’t really have much. We wanted to be local to the people who live in the community, because there’s not a ton over here, and it’s great to have people who have lived here for 30 years come in and say, ‘Finally. There’s a brewery walking distance from my house and I can go have a beer.’ That pays big dividends for me. That gives me great energy.”

All of which is true to the La Doña’s mission statement: “To celebrate the vibrancy, breadth and depth of Latino and Minnesotan culture through superior product and customer experience as a fully operational brewery and community/event center, while raising awareness of and providing support to social, economic, and environmental issues that impact us all.”

“On any given night, there are people here who one hundred percent don’t speak English and only speak Spanish and the bartenders have to interact with them in Spanish, and that’s really fun for us because that’s why I hired bartenders who can speak multiple languages,” said Manancero. “On salsa nights, we have a ton of Latinos from all over the metro. Latino people come all the way from Shakopee to go salsa dancing, and white and black people from north Minneapolis here in the Harrison neighborhood, which is amazing. I’m super happy we ended up here, and it’s been really fun to interact with all those people.”

“The next 20 years of the industry is going to be amazing. Not only here, but everything that happens here is being chased very closely by Latin America. When I was in Uruguay in 2015, there was one craft brewery in this town of 100,000 where my parents are from. So I’m excited to go back now and see what that brewery’s doing. Bring ‘em a growler and say, ‘If you’re ever in Minnesota …’”

Strobel  also served on the executive management team of American Public Media Group (APMG) as general counsel. She earned her BA from St. Olaf College, a JD from William Mitchell College of Law and an MBA from the Carlson School of Management at the University of Minnesota.

Most recently, Strobel has been the chief operating officer for ideastream in Cleveland, overseeing management of WVIZ/PBS, 90.3 WCPM-FM, the Ohio Channel and Ohio Government Telecommunications. She brings more than 25 years of public media experience to her new position at TPT.

“I am so excited to come back to my Minnesota roots to direct the vision of TPT as we move through this next decade,” Strobel said in a statement. “TPT has grown from its foundation as a television broadcast station – blossoming into a true 21st century media organization ensuring all have access to quality educational content on multiple platforms. I am excited to continue this trajectory.

Mia curator Patrick Noon is retiring

If you ever had the great pleasure to hear Patrick Noon speak about art, or follow him around a new exhibition, or ask him questions one-on-one, you’ll be sad to hear this, too. After 22 years at Mia, Noon, senior curator of paintings and Elizabeth MacMillan Chair of the Department of Paintings, will retire effective Jan. 31.

His own research resulted in acclaimed shows, including 2003’s “Crossing the Channel: British and French Painting in the Age of Romanticism” (organized by Tate Britain in association with the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Mia) and 2015’s “Delacroix and the Rise of Modern Art” (organized with the National Gallery, London). Noon authored the catalogs for “Crossing the Channel” and “Delacroix” and books about the British landscape painter Richard Parkes Bonington.

Noon told the Star Tribune that he would have retired sooner, but decided to stay on awhile after Kaywin Feldman announced her departure in December 2018 for the National Gallery of Art. He says he’ll consult for Mia if they need him.

Submissions are open for $10K poetry prize

The largest regional poetry prize in the United States, the Ballard Spahr Prize for Poetry is accepting submissions for 2020. The winner will receive a $10,000 cash prize; publication by Milkweed Editions, one of the nation’s top indie literary presses; a standard royalty contract; national distribution; a comprehensive marketing and publicity campaign; and a public book launch and celebration in the Twin Cities. Poet Aimee Nezhukumatathil will be this year’s judge.

Established in 2011, the Ballard Spahr Prize for Poetry was previously known as the Lindquist & Vennum Prize for Poetry. Winners have included Patricia Kirkpatrick, whose “Odessa” won the Minnesota Book Award, and Caitlin Bailey, whose “Solve for Desire” was a finalist for the award.

Poets must reside in Minnesota, Iowa, North Dakota, South Dakota, Wisconsin, or Michigan. The finalists and winner will be announced April 2020, with publication in November 2020. Submissions are open until Feb. 14. There is no entry fee. FMI and guidelines here.

The picks

Wednesday and Thursday at the Jungle: “A Doll’s House: Part 2” in previews. Strange but true, two of our top theaters will open Ibsen-inspired plays on the same weekend. The Jungle will stage playwright Lucas Hnath’s 2017 Broadway hit, in which Ibsen’s Nora (Christina Baldwin) returns home after many years away. It’s still the late 1800s. 7:30 p.m. FMI and tickets ($20 for preview performances). Opening night is Friday, Jan. 17.

P.S. If you’re thinking you might want to read the original Ibsen play before seeing either one (or both?) of the above, you can find a version online at Project Gutenberg.

Wednesday at the American Swedish Institute: Poets and Writers and Musicians Against the War on the Earth. With Australia burning and storms battering the North Shore and Chicago’s lakefront, what has become an annual event seems even more urgent today than three years ago, when it began. Organized by poets and writers Ruth Bly, Jim Lenfestey and Freya Manfred and musician Tim Frantzich, the program will include a Tibetan blessing, performances by Robert Robinson and Aby Wolf, readings by Minnesota Poet Laureate Joyce Sutphen and several other poets, and a tribute to Swedish Nobel Laureate Tomas Tranströmer (whose work was first translated into English by Robert Bly). Admission is free but donations are welcome; all will benefit environment-focused nonprofits tabling at the event. Doors will open at 6 for hot glogg, ginger cookies, a children’s chorus and silent auction. The program will begin at 7.

Sunday at the Ted Mann: 39th Annual Martin Luther King Jr. Tribute. Founded by the late Reginald Buckner, a professor in the University of Minnesota’s School of Music, this tribute was the first of its kind in Minnesota. It’s now a beloved tradition. Directed by G. Phillip Shoultz III of VocalEssence, this year’s program, “I Am Because We Are (On Being a Good Neighbor),” will blend the words of the Rev. King with multidisciplinary performances by local artists. 3 p.m. As always, it’s free and open to the public.

Classical music is slow to change, but change is happening. According to the classical music website Bachtrack, which last week released its look back at 2019, there are more women conductors than ever. And more women composers. More variety in operatic repertoire, and more contemporary music being performed.

Beethoven is still the most-performed composer, and with 2020 his 250th birthday year, that won’t change anytime soon. In 2019, over 13 percent of all classical concerts featured a work by Beethoven.

Meanwhile, over 24 percent of concerts in the USA included works by living composers. We’re second in the world, after Sweden.

It’s just beginning

Since the calendar flipped on Jan. 1, the Twin Cities has been a nexus of new music. We can’t remember ever hearing as much new music as we have so far this year – or missing as much, because we can’t be in two places at once.

The Minnesota Orchestra rang in the New Year with British composer Hannah Kendall’s “The Spark Catchers.” The following week brought the orchestra’s annual MusicMakers concert (formerly Future Classics), where all the music was new, all the composers were young and three were women. This weekend’s concerts will feature music from the canon by Mahler, Debussy and Ravel, but the conductor will be Simone Young, one of eight women included in Bachtrack’s list of top 100 conductors.

Future concerts by both the Minnesota Orchestra and the SPCO are peppered with new music. The Metropolitan Symphony Orchestra prides itself on commissioning and premiering new works; it had a long relationship with Dominic Argento. Next up for the MSO: the March 29 world premiere of the large orchestra version of Russian-born composer Polina Nazaykinskaya’s “Fenix.”

Outside the concert halls, many smaller venues are featuring new music. On Jan. 9, Icehouse hosted the third annual SongSlam, a night of all-new art songs by emerging classical music composer/performer teams. That night, we had an early listen at a new work by a new production company, Orpheus Music Project: a music-drama based on a historical novel by New York Times best-selling author Sharyn McCrumb, interwoven with selections from the requiem mass. It will premiere in concert at the Ordway Concert Hall in Fall 2020,

Last weekend, the new music ensemble Zeitgeist presented St. Cloud State University professor Scott L. Miller’s latest virtual reality work, “The Blue in the Distance,” a combination of film, poetry, electroacoustic and live music. Saturday brought us to the Hook and Ladder for the fourth installment of “Outpost,” an excellent new music/spoken word series created by Minnesota Orchestra violist Sam Bergman and soprano Carrie Henneman Shaw. All of the music there was by living composers, including two works for soprano and bassoon, a combination we couldn’t imagine until we heard it in person. And the Hook’s theater was filled to capacity.

What to see and hear in the new year

Coming up (and this list is nowhere near comprehensive): Minnesota Opera will open the modern opera “Flight” on Jan. 25 and present the world premiere of “Edward Tulane” in March. Its Project Opera program will offer the new (2017) one-act “Belongings” starting Feb. 8. On Feb. 21-23, 113 Composers Collective will premiere an experimental opera, “The Golden Ass,” at Nautilus Music-Theater, home to much new music in the making.

On Feb. 4, the chamber music ensemble Accordo will give a concert that has become an annual audience favorite: silent films shown with original music by Stephen Prutsman. Also on this year’s program: “Make the revolution irresistible,” a new work by deVon Russell Gray, the Schubert Club’s composer-in-residence. On Feb. 19, the Schubert Club’s Mix series will present Russian Renaissance, grand prize winners of the 2017 M-Prize Competition, the world’s largest prize for chamber music.

Feb. 21 and 22 will bring the ninth annual Cedar Commissions, with all new work by six Minnesota composers. Zeitgeist’s Early Music Festival will explore the music of Frederic Rzewski from April 16-19. The legendary Kronos Quartet and Terry Riley, one of the most influential composers in American music, will be at the Walker on April 25.

Many people consider jazz America’s classical music, and many vociferously don’t. If you enjoy and appreciate jazz, it doesn’t really matter which side of that spat you’re on. Just don’t try to tell us that Maria Schneider’s music, for instance, isn’t as profound, serious and sophisticated as anything being composed by a living composer of classical music and/or opera. The Minnesota-born multiple Grammy winner will perform with her orchestra at Hopkins Center for the Arts on April 21. She’ll be touring behind her new double album, “Data Lords.”

Cutting-edge guitarist Mary Halvorson will bring Code Girl and Thumbscrew to the Walker’s Performing Arts series on Feb. 8. Kamasi Washington will play First Ave on March 4, Brad Mehldau on April 8. Crooners is finding success with tribute shows and classic jazz, but it also brings new music to its Dunsmore Jazz Room, like the Chris Speed Trio on New Year’s Day and, coming up, Brazilian guitarist Badi Assad on Jan. 28 and Red Planet with Bill Carrothers on Feb. 10.

It’s a new year, and the new music has only just begun.

Forty-five Minnesota organizations will share nearly $1 million in grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the NEA announced Wednesday.

Grants were awarded to all 50 states, the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico. Minnesota came in sixth in the number of grants received and seventh in the number of dollars; New York and California led both categories.

The grants awarded in this round include Art Works and Challenge America grants. Art Works grants support specific projects. Challenge America grants help small and mid-sized organizations extend their reach to populations with limited access to the arts. All have cost share/matching grant requirements. None may be used for general operating expenses.

More than half of the Minnesota grants fall within the $10-$15,000 range. Lakes Area Music Festival, Saint John’s University, Stages Theatre Company, Ananya Dance, Illusion Theater, Ragamala Dance, and the Anderson Center in Red Wing are among the winners here.

Grants of $50,000 and above went to Coffee House Press ($50,000), Graywolf Press ($70,000), Minnesota Opera ($55,000 to support its upcoming production of “Edward Tulane,” an opera based on the book by two-time Newbery-winning Minnesota author Kate DiCamillo), and Penumbra Theatre ($55,000 for its upcoming production of Claudia Rankine’s “The White Card”).

The Trump administration has repeatedly called for zeroing out funding for the NEA, the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (which supports PBS and NPR) and the Institute for Museum and Library Services. Instead, the House has approved increases in arts and culture funding. In 2020, the NEA will receive $7.25 million more in funding than it did in 2019, and CPB will get $20 million more.

In June 2019, a special session of the Minnesota Legislature ended with an 11 percent increase in state arts funding, which now totals $40.7 million for each of the next two state fiscal years.

American Composers Forum names award-winning composers

Two of the five winners of a major award for new composers are from Minnesota. The American Composers Forum announced last week that Michael Maiorana and Mary Prescott, both of Minneapolis, have been selected for the 2020 ACF | Create program. Supported by the Jerome Foundation for 41 years, formerly called JFund – Jerome Fund for New Music, the program awards composers $11,000 to create a project, including $8,000 in commissioning funds and $3,000 in production and promotion support.

The other three winners of this year’s ACF | Create are Anaïs Maviel and Richard Sears of Brooklyn, New York and Sugar Vendil of New York City.

Norway House crushes gingerbread house with hydraulic excavator

Nordic humor tends to be, shall we say, a little dark. Also kind of obtuse. As in, “I’m sorry, was that supposed to be funny?” (Disclaimer: this writer is half Norwegian.) Which is why, when a video from Norway House made us laugh, we had to share.

Norway House, the blue building at 913 East Franklin that shares a city block with Mindekirken, the Norwegian Lutheran Church, is beginning an expansion project. It recently demolished an old duplex on the property to make room for a larger campus to include a new event and reception center and a genealogical research library. When its annual Gingerbread Wonderland exhibit (a holiday draw) closed on Jan. 5, bakers were invited to pick up their creations or sacrifice them to a greater good: a gingerbread foundation for the future. Heather Vick made the hard decision.

The reception begins at 6 p.m., with a presentation at 6:30. Thorbeck will be there. Light food offerings and a cash bar will be available. $15 general admission, $10 members. RSVP here. The exhibition will stay up through Feb. 9. The usual gallery admission is $5.

The picks

Tonight (Thursday, Jan. 16) at Mixed Blood: Zealous Hellions: Andrea Jenkins. Mixed Blood is starting something new: a speaker series featuring outspoken artists, cultural provocateurs, politicians and thought leaders. First up: Andrea Jenkins, writer, performance artist, poet, transgender activist and the first African American, openly trans woman to be elected to office in the United States. Jenkins will be in conversation with Tabitha Montgomery, executive director of the Powderhorn Park Neighborhood Association. 7 p.m. FMI and tickets ($25). Two future Hellions are scheduled. March 17: playwright, actor, singer-songwriter, performance artist, director and producer Taylor Mac (“judy”). May 1: Tommy Barbarella, a former member of Prince’s New Power Generation, who will perform “The Girl Who Cried Different” with his 13-year-old daughter, Mariella, who lives with a developmental disorder called Williams syndrome (WS).

Tonight at the Edina Cinema: National Theatre Live: “All My Sons.” Sally Field and Bill Pullman star in Arthur Miller’s drama, recorded live in 2019 at the Old Vic in London. Directed by Jerem Herrin, with Jenna Coleman (“Victoria”) and Colin Morgan (“Merlin”). 7 p.m. FMI and tickets.

Sunday at Zion Lutheran Church in Anoka: Joya Chamber Music: Osmo Vänskä and Erin Keefe. Yes, you read that right. The Minnesota Orchestra’s music director and concertmaster, who are husband and wife, will play a concert of music for violin, clarinet and piano (with Mary Jo Gothmann), including works by Sibelius, Beethoven, Schubert and Arutiunian. Also on the program: a Vänskä-Keefe duo written by Vänskä, and a waltz in A written for them by composer Eric N. King at Vänskä’s request. 3 p.m. $20 cash/check at the door.

Brrr! It’s a good day to look ahead to Saturday, May 9, when the second annual Wordplay festival will bring authors and book lovers to downtown Minneapolis for a day of readings, conversations, workshops, kids’ activities, special events and camaraderie.

Just as the Minnesota State Fair teases us with announcements of grandstand acts months in advance, the Loft, Wordplay’s producer, has dropped the names of four authors who are scheduled to appear this year. Stephen King, last year’s top marquee name, won’t return, but we can pack the streets around Open Book without him.

Here are the four, in alpha order:

Kate DiCamillo. Two-time Newbery Medalist, National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature, almost 30 million books in print, proud Minnesota resident since her twenties. (Did you know that one of her many books, “The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane,” has been turned into an opera and will have its world premiere here in March?)

Natalie Diaz. Prize-winning poet, Mojave, enrolled member of the Gila River Indian Tribe. Her first collection, “When My Brother Was an Aztec,” was published by Copper Canyon. Her latest, “Postcolonial Love Poem,” is due out from Graywolf in March.

Samantha Irby. “Breathtakingly honest, imminently relatable” author of “We Are Never Meeting in Real Life,” “Meaty,” “New Year, Same Trash,” and the forthcoming “Wow, No Thank You,” due out from Penguin Random House in March. Irby also writes the popular “bitches gotta eat” blog.

Jeff VanderMeer. Prolific and versatile writer of fiction and nonfiction, dubbed by the New Yorker “the weird Thoreau.” VanderMeer won the Nebula Award and the Shirley Jackson Award for his “Southern Reach” trilogy.” His novel “Borne” was a finalist for the Arthur C. Clarke Award. His latest is “Dead Astronauts.”

The full list of 100+ authors, along with ticketing and pricing information, will be announced Tuesday, Feb. 11, at 6 p.m. at a member party at the Loft.

New this year: a Wordplay Book Club. A partnership between the Loft and Mpls.St.Paul Magazine, it will launch March 18 at the Loft and will feature DiCamillo’s latest novel, “Beverly, Right Here,” an unexpected trilogy that began with “Raymie Nightingale.”

Last year’s inaugural Wordplay took place May 11-12 as Minnesota’s largest celebration of readers, writers and books. More than 10,000 people came.

Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize is accepting submissions

After giving digital ink to the 2020 Ballard Spahr Prize for Poetry earlier this week, it’s meet and right to note that the 2020 Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize is open for submissions through Jan. 31. (Sorry, we just learned about this one.)

Graywolf will award a $12,000 advance and publication by Graywolf to the most promising and innovative literary nonfiction project by a writer not yet established in the genre. The prize will be awarded to a manuscript in progress. Previous winners include Eula Bliss for “Notes from No Man’s Land,” Kevin Young for “The Grey Album,” Leslie Jamison for “The Empathy Exams” and Esmé Weijun Wang for “The Collected Schizophrenias.” “Zat Lun,” by 2018 winner Thirii Myo Kyaw Myint will be published in 2021.

Graywolf authors have won the Nobel Prize for Literature, the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, the Man Booker Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award and the National Book Award.

FMI and guidelines here.

The picks

Opens Saturday at Bde Unma/Lake Harriet: Art Shanty Projects. Dress in layers and wear your Yaktrax. Art Shanty Projects 2020 starts with Youth & Families Weekend, (Jan. 18-19). continues for three more weekends and ends Feb. 9. This is a big event, with more than 20 unique shanties on the ice, more than 150 artists and performers, many live performances (by Brownbody, Prairie Fire Lady Choir, Twin Cities Native Lacrosse, the Minnesota Art Car Community and many more), food and hot beverages on shore and ATMs nearby. Plan your day (or days) around the schedule of performances and art actions, or just show up and wander around. Tours of the shanty village are held on the hour from 11 a.m.-3 p.m. at Shantastic Tours. MinneSauna will have hour-long sauna sessions; sign up in advance (spots fill up fast; check February first). Several new accessibility features are available this year, including an ADA-compliant ramp. FMI. Suggested donation $10-20. No one will be turned away; just remember that in 2019, Art Shanty Projects had to take the year off due to a funding shortage.

Saturday at Studio Z: Jazz at Studio Z: Atlantis Quartet. We’ve been listening to Atlantis live and on record since 2008, when they played a nightclub so near Déjà Vu that strippers dropped in for drinks. Back then, the group was Brandon Wozniak on saxophone, Zacc Harris on guitar, Travis Schilling on bass and Pete Hennig on drums. Later that year, Schilling would be replaced by Chris Bates, and that’s been the lineup ever since. Their music is original, their energy high, and their group spirit is strong. They have released five albums to date, most on Shifting Paradigm Records, run by Harris. It matters that these four have played together for 11 years. 6 p.m. master class, 7 p.m. show. FMI and tickets ($12; kids 12 and under free)

Monday at the East Side Freedom Library: Screening and discussion of “A Huey P. Newton Story.” Roger Guenveur Smith won a 1997 Obie Award for his stream-of-consciousness solo performance as Newton, cofounder of the Black Panther party. He later adapted it for a film directed by Spike Lee for PBS. Lee complemented Newton’s monologue with documentary footage, an award-winning score by Marc Anthony Thompson and guest solos by Branford Marsalis. The film won a 2002 Peabody Award and two NAACP awards. If you caught Smith at the Penumbra as Rodney King in 2015 or Frederick Douglass in 2018, you know what a mesmerizing performer he is. ESFL will celebrate Martin Luther King Jr. Day by showing the film and hosting a discussion after. 7 p.m. Free and open to all.

As a young coach, Reeve admired McGraw as mentor and a role model. She still does. Reeve always considered herself an advocate for women, using her standing as one of the most successful coaches in WNBA history to push for various causes. But suddenly Reeve realized she was falling short in an important area — promoting and preparing women to be head coaches. 

That reality slapped Reeve hard again earlier this month when the New York Liberty hired young Lynx assistant Walt Hopkins as head coach. Hopkins, 34, is the second Lynx male assistant to land a head coaching job in two years, following James Wade, the WNBA Coach of the Year in his rookie season in Chicago. It might have been three in five years had former assistant Jim Petersen accepted the Connecticut Sun job offered in 2016. 

Hopkins’ hiring gives the league eight male and four female head coaches, a breakdown Reeve calls “disgraceful,” even though Reeve inadvertently contributed to it. And all four of the women are white, in a league where, like the NBA, most of the players are not. (Wade and Derek Fisher in Los Angeles are the league’s only black head coaches.) 

So Reeve vowed to assemble an all-female Lynx staff for 2020 and beyond, with an eye on training future head coaches. She hired Katie Smith, the Hall of Famer and former Lynx great fired as head coach in New York after two seasons, as her lead assistant. Smith will be formally introduced Tuesday at a press conference. Plenette Pierson, the retired WNBA power forward Reeve brought on as a rookie third assistant last year, moves up to the second seat. 

With longtime Lynx lead assistant Shelley Patterson likely joining Hopkins in New York, Reeve plans to tap former players as a third assistant and a video coordinator, the latter an entry-level job that often leads to a coaching position.     

“When Muffet took that stance, the passion she spoke about, as much as I advocate for women, it dawned on me I was doing a poor job to the cause of more women in coaching, particularly the WNBA,” Reeve said.

“Being further along in my career, knowledge of society and how things are working, you get to the point where you say, she’s right. And until we take a drastic stance, drastic measures, what’s going to change, and what role did I have in it? It can’t just be Muffet. Drastic times called for drastic measures. I believe this is a crisis, and we have to treat it like a crisis.”

Reeve says this isn’t about Hopkins, Wade, or any of the league’s male head coaches. She worked for two of them: Dan Hughes in Cleveland and Bill Laimbeer in Detroit. It’s about a hiring process that she believes favors men over women, and makes it more difficult for ex-players to get a foot in the door. 

“We have a lot of men we’ve surrounded ourselves with that believe in the women’s game and want to be in the women’s game, James and Walt included,” Reeve said. “But there’s an underlying problem that men can be fast-tracked into positions of leadership, and there are countless numbers of former women’s players, be it college or WNBA, that want to coach and aren’t getting the same opportunities. I just want to have a laser focus on a way I can be part of the solution in creating the next opportunities for women’s coaches.”

It’s not like there’s any shortage of candidates if anyone looks hard enough. Per the Tucker Center’s most recent Women in College Coaching Report Card, 61.2 percent of NCAA Division 1 women’s basketball head coaches last season were women. McGraw’s all-female staff, however, is unusual; only 14.2 percent of Division 1 staffs are built that way. One is Minnesota, where Lindsay Whalen hired an all-female staff with two former head coaches in Danielle O’Banion (Kent State) and Kelly Roysland Curry (Macalester).

Two minutes of brainstorming with Reeve elicited a half-dozen names of qualified women she believes can coach in the WNBA. Dawn Staley of South Carolina. Kim Mulkey at Baylor. Felisha Leggette-Jack of Buffalo. George Washington’s Jen Rizzotti. Notre Dame assistant Carol Owens. And, of course, Whalen, who was on track to join the Lynx staff until the University of Minnesota hired her straight off the court as head coach. (Whalen spent the week embroiled in her first crisis, suspending leading scorer Destiny Pitts, who plans to transfer, while benching top rebounder Taiye Bello and her sister Kehinde. Not good.)  

Reeve said she has heard from plenty of former players about her vacancies. No matter who she chooses, Reeve said she’s amenable to sharing that list with the league or any other team with a staff vacancy.

“We have situations where people go, ‘I’d like to hire a woman, I just can’t find one,’ “ Reeve said. “What I hope to do in our process is not to just hoard a list of names for ourselves. I want to be a conduit to say, hey, we hired so-and-so and so-and-so, but here are ten names, some good names, so we all can do better. If I have to do the work for some people, that’s okay. However we get there.”

Hopkins, too, said he is committed to hiring more women, from basketball operations to the business side

“That’s central,” Hopkins said in a telephone interview. “Every single person we hire, that’s a part of what we think about. Creating a pipeline for coaches is one focus. As I’m going through a pool of possible assistants, it’s top of mind right now. We see not just bringing in women, but bringing in women of color, hiring people of color, as also being an impetus in what we’re looking at.”

Hopkins was a key hire for Reeve three years ago, brought in to oversee skills development at a time most Lynx veterans skipped the winter overseas season to train in the U.S. Last season he added more scouting duties. “Just having time around that organization and around those people undoubtedly is going to be a huge part of my preparation for this position,” Hopkins said.

His departure, and Patterson’s, means no assistants remain from the 2017 staff that won the club’s fourth WNBA title in seven years. Patterson joined the Lynx with Reeve in 2010, and her low-key teaching and scouting were vital to the championship seasons. The Liberty’s first visit to the Target Center on June 5 should be entertaining, coming five days after the teams meet in Brooklyn.

We’ve all seen the videos. Blue-hued arctic ice melted by warmer weather weakens, breaks off and crashes into the sea.

As average global temperatures rise, cold places, like Minnesota and our neighbors to the north, are warming fastest. And while we may not have any glaciers or ice caps, we do have lots of ice on lakes and rivers in the winter, and scientists expect climate change to have effects on our ice — and our way of life, too.

Scientists have been documenting the loss of ice cover for years: a 2007 study found ice cover on water bodies in the Great Lakes region had decreased by about five days per decade since the 1970s. While there’s lots of research on what that means for the lakes themselves, less is known about the impact of that loss on humans.

That’s the subject of research led by a University of Minnesota researcher and published last year in Limnology and Oceanography Letters.

“One thing I kept coming to was, OK, we’re seeing these changes with the organisms or the water quality … but how could this affect people?” said Lesley Knoll, University of Minnesota Itasca station biologist and an author of the study.

Knoll and her colleagues studied the effects of inland ice cover — or lack thereof — on cultural institutions, like the traditional carrying of a John the Apostle statue across a lake between Switzerland and Germany during the Renaissance; ice roads in Canada; a Shinto ice ceremony in Japan and yes, ice fishing in Minnesota.

“Here in Minnesota, winter is really important to us,” Knoll said. “As we experience less reliable ice conditions, we’re probably going to see a loss to the cultural, social and economic benefits of ice-related winter activities.”

Ice impacts

Knoll and her colleagues got data on ice fishing tournaments — when they’ve been held, when they’ve been canceled and how many people have participated — going back to 2004 in both northern and central Minnesota.

Once the average winter air temperature reached about 25 degrees Fahrenheit, there were — no surprise — more cancellations, Knoll said. In the dataset, the cancellations were limited to central Minnesota — northern Minneseota temperatures don’t tend to get that warm.

Take 2015 as an example, when temperatures were unseasonably warm and about one in six ice fishing tournaments held in central Minnesota were canceled, according to the study.

“2015-2016 was one of those El Niño winters, it was very warm,” said Kenneth Blumenfeld, a senior climatologist at the Minnesota State Climate Office. “That was the first time we really heard about hardships in the ice fishing resort community. We were really starting to hear complaints from the people who run the outfits themselves. There just wasn’t much of a winter.”

The data don’t go back far enough to analyze the impact of climate change on ice fishing, but with projections of average temperatures on the rise, the research doesn’t bode well for the sport.

Ice fishing is a cultural, social and economic phenomenon in parts of the U.S. that reliably see their lakes freeze over in the winter, Knoll said. A 2011 U.S. Fish and Wildlife study found that nearly 2 million people go out ice fishing every year, and spend a cumulative 38 million days and $178 million on ice fishing equipment annually.

“It’s a very important kind of recreational activity, but also social activity for us. Especially in our really long winters, to have something to do outdoors and to do with our friends,” Knoll said.

It’s economically important, too. Lots of Minnesota resorts depend on ice anglers for winter revenue. The Brainerd Jaycees  Ice Fishing Extravaganza brings an estimated $1 million to the region each year (we’re guessing ice fishing brings economic benefit to the beer industry as well, but weren’t able to find figures).

Ice science

Ice cover is a robust measure of the way the climate is changing, said John Magnuson, a director emeritus of the Center for Limnology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and an author of the paper.

“It’s useful as a miner’s canary to point out … not just in the Antarctic or Arctic, but inside and outside the Twin Cities, this is occurring right where you live and you are already being influenced by it,” he said. “The changes are occurring, and they’re occurring rapidly (and) on water bodies people live next to, play next to, ice skate on and so on.”

It’s not as simple as warmer temperatures equals worse ice, Blumenfeld said. It also has to do with precipitation, another thing that’s becoming less predictable as temperatures warm.

“If there’s a thin layer of ice on the lake and then it’s covered by snow, that’s really, really bad for ice formation,” Blumenfeld said. “Similarly, as the ice is freezing or melting, if you have a lot of wind, that just destroys ice.”

As temperatures warm, on average, changes to ice will be gradual.

“It isn’t a nice thing, that they’re always frozen and then bang, they’re never frozen,” Magnuson said. “No ice years begin to occur and become more common, and years in between when the ice isn’t safe in the winter, but you’re also going to have some really good ice years.”

That will make it harder to plan things like ice fishing tournaments, as it will be tough to predict months out whether the ice will sustain people, snowmobiles, trucks and ice fishing houses.

“We’re going to have to learn in Minnesota to be able to deal with this variable in our lives,” Magnuson said. “Especially for those people who still want to do ice things.”

The Near North community of Minneapolis—made up of the neighborhoods of Harrison, Hawthorne, Jordan, Near North, Sumner-Glenwood, and Willard-Hay—has had a major African American presence since the early 1900s. Distinguished by its own businesses, organizations, and culture, it remains a hub of African American Minnesotan life in the twenty-first century.

Minneapolis’ Near North Side has always been a haven for marginalized communities, mostly for its affordable housing and proximity to downtown. In the early twentieth century, much of the Twin Cities’ Jewish population resided in the Near North neighborhood, especially along Plymouth Avenue and what is now the Olson Memorial Highway.

Restrictive covenants written into real estate deeds limited blacks to certain areas of Minneapolis. During World War I, many began moving from longtime-settled neighborhoods, such as Seven Corners near the University of Minnesota, the South Side, and the North Side. The Sumner Field public housing project, completed at 1101 Olson Memorial Highway in 1938, was segregated, but its white Jewish and black residents generally interacted peacefully.

When blacks arrived in the Twin Cities, they often did not have access to the same community-based agencies as whites, so black churches, social organizations, and barber and beauty shops provided support. One such place, the Phyllis Wheatley Settlement House, opened in 1924 as a recreation center for African American children. African American activist and writer Ethel Ray Nance also became associated with the Wheatley House.

Black business began to thrive, too. In the 1940s and 1950s, barber Sylvester Young and his five brothers owned several shops in Minneapolis and St. Paul, with some located in Near North. Harry Davis Sr., an activist and former boxer, was one of the first black executives in the state. He helped establish the Minneapolis Urban Coalition and was the first black Minneapolis mayoral candidate in 1971.

By 1960, one third of Minneapolis’ African Americans lived in Near North, making it the city’s largest black community. Blacks accounted for 8 percent of the community’s total population. Near North’s African American population, excluding the various Glenwood-area public housing projects, was 55 percent. The longtime Jewish community began to disperse around this time, mostly to suburbs like St. Louis Park.

In 1966, Syl Davis founded The Way, a community youth center. The Way was one of the few resources of its kind that was organized and used mostly by African Americans. The community center provided a space for black youth to have a sense of community and belonging, and it became The New Way in 1975. The center turned into a hotspot of the so-called Minneapolis Sound of the 1970s and 1980s.

In 1967, racially charged civil unrest broke out along Plymouth Avenue. This unrest was the result of ongoing racial discrimination and frustration about Near North being neglected by the city. The widening of Olson Memorial Highway bisected Near North, affecting the vitality of local businesses on the south side of the street. The arrival of a federal highway, Interstate 94, in the 1970s further cut off the North Side from downtown.

In the 1970s and 1980s, blacks began moving to other parts of the metro area, including nearby suburbs, and Near North’s population decreased. In the 1980s, the neighborhood became known for its rising crime rates. A variety of people migrated into the neighborhood, including young white professionals and Mexican and Southeast Asian immigrants.

In 1995, the class-action lawsuit Hollman v. Cisneros determined that poor, mostly minority families had been concentrated in a seventy-three-acre site within the Near North Community. This led to the demolition of hundreds of public housing units and to the construction of the Heritage Park development in 2000. While many stayed in the area, many more were displaced and moved to nearby neighborhoods or nearby inner-ring suburbs, notably Brooklyn Center.

In November 2015, Minneapolis police, after some conflict, fatally shot black North Minneapolitan Jamar Clark. The event was a continuation of a national trend of police brutality against blacks and sparked a series of protests throughout the region and nation.

In 2018, the Minneapolis African American Heritage Museum and Gallery opened on the corner of Penn Avenue and Plymouth Avenue North. Its goal is to preserve the history of Minnesota African Americans, and to showcase the community’s achievements.

For more information on this topic, check out the original entry on MNopedia.

Imagine that your father has just died. You’re a young woman who longs to be married, or at least allowed out of the house. Your mother, a formidable matriarch with a cane she uses to walk, pound the floor in emphasis and occasionally swing in your direction, has declared that all of you, including your four unmarried sisters, ranging in age from 20 to 39, will spend the next eight years in mourning. That’s years, not months or weeks or days.

Forget about pleading your case to Mom. She keeps her own senile 80-year-old mother under lock and key, afraid the neighbors might see her wandering around the yard.

You might as well be dead yourself.

Based on the play “The House of Bernarda Alba” by Spanish poet and playwright Federico García Lorca, who finished it in 1936, shortly before he was arrested and executed by a firing squad at the start of the Spanish Civil War, Michael John LaChiusa’s operatic musical “Bernarda Alba” opened Saturday at Theater Latté Da’s Ritz Theater. Featuring a powerful all-women cast, it’s grim, dark and gorgeous.

What you see first is Kate Sutton-Johnson’s stage-filling set. A Spanish mansion hung with tassels and chandeliers, it’s surrounded on three sides by vertical slats that look like prison bars. Alice Frederickson has costumed the cast in long black dresses with lace bodices, tiered flamenco skirts and corsets threaded with red. Add Kelli Foster Warder’s choreography and the whole production is visually arresting.

LaChiusa’s music propels the story with flamenco rhythms and energy: hand-clapping, foot-stomping, thigh-slapping and finger-snapping. The first line of each song (and sometimes other lines as well) ends with a yelp – a quick rise in pitch – that is startling at first, then thrilling. Some of the songs burn with fury; some are beautiful, with layered harmonies and the sweetness of the singers’ voices. Some are filled with longing and desperate hope. And urgency. Music director and keyboardist Jason Hansen leads a small band of musicians on viola, acoustic guitar and mandolin, double bass, and flute, clarinet, and oboe.

Regina Marie Williams is Bernarda, already missing Antonio, the husband who made her feel like a whore. (We learn the reason in the first song, which includes the bitter words “Happy happy family!”) Antonio’s house is now her house, his stables now her stables. Williams is magnificent in the role. Her measured steps as she enters the stage or crosses behind it are terrifying.

Bernarda’s daughters are Angustias (Kate Beahen), the eldest, by Bernarda’s first, unnamed husband; second-eldest Magdalena (Nora Montañez), resigned to her spinster fate; shy Amelia (Britta Ollmann); Martirio, the ugly one (Meghan Kreidler, the opposite of ugly); and Adela (Stephanie Bertumen), the youngest, prettiest and most daring.

Bernarda’s mother, Maria Josepha (Kim Kivens), begs to be free to go to the sea and dreams of having more babies. The servant Poncia (Aimee K. Bryant) has served Bernarda for 30 years and knows her well: her rigidity, her hunger for gossip and power. A young maid (Haley Haupt) is glad Antonio is dead; she was his victim. Sarah Ochs plays the servant Prudencia and other roles, including mute representations of men.

And yet, for the women, they’re the only way out. Lorca subtitled his play “A drama of women in the villages of Spain.” Bernarda and her daughters are not alone in Spain, in the world, or even the past. If there’s a message here for today, it’s to +hold on to our freedoms and fight for them. (This is underscored by an excerpt in the program by Azar Nafisi, author of “Reading Lolita in Tehran,” about the plight of women in Iran.)

From the opening notes, the stage is set for sexual frustration, suspicion, jealousy, betrayal and violence. Happy happy family! Meanwhile, the house moans and creaks and breathes, like a ship at sea (sound design by Kevin Springer), further emphasizing its isolation and the sense that something bad is about to happen.

Expertly directed by Crystal Manich, who led “Così fan Tutte” and “La Serva Padrona” for Mill City Opera in 2019, “Bernarda Alba” is an unstoppable force moving toward a tragic denouement. It’s a strange, shadowy, claustrophobic world in which to spend 90 minutes. It’s also new for Latté Da. (This is the area premiere.) Following “All Is Calm” and preceding “La Bohème,” it may surprise some Latté Da regulars.

If you want a happy ending, look elsewhere. But if you want to be seduced and enthralled, “Bernarda Alba” is for you. FMI and tickets (start at $33). Closes Feb. 16.

P.S. On Monday, Jan. 27, Latté Da will host an episode in its Pin Spot series about “Bernarda Alba.” Series host and curator Max Wojtanowicz will explore the origins, historical context, musical references and legacy of LaChiusa’s musical, with performances by local artists and conversations with experts. Attend if you haven’t seen the show, if you have, or if you’re still deciding. 7 p.m. Free. Tickets here.

It felt like Polar Vortex III walking across Lake Harriet Saturday afternoon, as a howling wind worthy of any Swedish horror film roared through, around, and into the couple dozen ice houses, saunas, and art shanties set up on the frozen lake surface. The occasion was the wacky, whimsical, and way cold Art Shanty Projects, which happens Saturdays and Sundays (10 a.m.-4 p.m.) through Feb. 9 on the frozen tundra of Lake Harriet in south Minneapolis. 

Opening day was met with subzero temps and a smattering of several hundred hardy souls, who warmed up with food and drink trucks before trekking to the middle of the lake. “’Exhilirating’ is definitely the word of the day,” said artist Kat Morgan, who spent her afternoon pedaling art lovers around on a tiny tour bus. All in all, it felt like a Kevin Kling-curated cast of Minnesota artists, goofballs, and joi-de-vivrers that will be gone in just a few weeks. MinnPost took in the 2020 edition of the Art Shanty Projects, in photos and interviews:

Volunteer Maggie O’Connor helmed the Art Shanty survey booth with her spouse, Linda Ridelhuber. “What’s my favorite thing about Art Shanty?” said Ridlehuber. “It gets me excited about art; I feel welcome in the community; it gets me outside in winter, and it’s accessible to me and my peoples. Getting outside in winter is definitely [helpful] for mental health.”

Drew Smith, Isaac Hase-Raney; Austin Watanabe of the Flora Sauna. Watanabe: “It was definitely a collaboration; we all went to school together around the same time at the University of Minnesota, and all of our projects had to do with plants and making a space and utopia. So this is a culmination of a lot of those things.” Smith: “We wanted to make a greenhouse on the ice. Something you wouldn’t think is possible or a smart thing to do, [but] sort of to take on the craziness of the Art Shanty weekend.”

Isaac Hase-Raney outside the Flora Sauna: “There’s two communities here at Art Shanties. The artist community here is very self-supportive. A lot of us have different skills we can share; there’s a lot of carpenters who can teach others who want to build something but might not have that skill set; and there’s the community of people who are visiting. People are very interested in the shanties, people are very interested in each other, and people end up having conversations about all sorts of things.”

Art Shanty Projects revelers played lacrosse, flanked by a display touting the game as “baaga’adoweewin” (in Ojibwe) and “thakapsicapi” (in Dakota), and a sign stating: “Lacrosse is the original game of this land and has been played here for hundreds of years. The drawing shown here is from early 1800’s, and is of a Dakota game near Bde Unma (Lake Harriet).”

At the First Avenue/-7^th Street Entry shanty, Max Irons and Allison Kaieley hung out by the club’s velvet rope outside and danced to a deejay spinning Prince’s “Kiss” on the dance floor inside (next photo). “I was looking for an excuse to get outside today, despite the weather,” said Kaieley. “I’ve been feeling a little cooped up; it takes a certain kind of crazy to get out here and enjoy the weather and meet some new people and try some new things.”

Kat Morgan: “Jeff Sherman made this, built at our studio around a pedal bike we inherited. It’s freezing, but exhilarating. We’ve been taking people around on our Shanty Village Tour Bus, and it’s really a workout. Kids love it. There’s a couple spots where the wind is against us, and that makes turning the corner rough, but ‘exhilarating’ is definitely the word of the day.”

Art Shanty fan Julia Mullin: “We just skied over, from Harriet Avenue over by Washburn High School. I wanted to get out of the house, I wanted to ski, and we wanted to see the Future Forest-Love Your Regional Parks shanty because my husband works for the Regional Parks.”

Singer/songwriter Howard Kranz sang about dinosaurs and the climate crisis at The Shanty of People Who Know Things: “It’s an unusual gig because you’re in the middle of a lake, but we’ve got one of the warmer shanties around here, so it’s a good place to be. It’s a good gig.”

Robin Agency (Sarah Honeywell) and The Leader (Sam Granum): “The name of our shanty is ‘NautiCult: A Cautionary Tale’ (about a shipwrecked crew entombed on the ice of Lake Harriet) because we are totally not a cult,” said Agency. “’Cult’ is a name given to us by people like you in the media who are full of lies and are trying to besmirch our name. We are a simple lifestyle, and we will provide people with the truth,” said The Leader. “The truth is we don’t need oxygen, we can all live under the water,” said Agency. “The mermaid’s power flows through me to you all,” said The Leader.

Josephine Anderson, Andrea Pierre, Millicent Anderson: “I’ve been to Art Shanties in previous years with my kids, and we were coming from roller skating at the Roller Gardens, and I just said to the kids, ‘Let’s see if they’re open yet, and here we are.’ This [MinneSauna shanty] is amazing,” said Pierre. “We [landed here] because we were freezing our ta-coochas off, and don’t ask me to spell ‘ta-coochas!’ We don’t want to leave. I’ve been reading about how saunas are taking a reemergence in Minnesota, and I can’t afford the healing, but I can go to the Art Shanties, right?”

Gabriel Bodkin (inside) and Alex Schluender: “The name of our shanty is Glass Half ____,  and it can be glass half full or glass half empty, depending on how you interpret your world,” said Schluender. “We have a storytelling game here where someone writes a caption, another draws a picture, and the story goes on from there. It’s all about how things evolve over time, and how our story changes all the time based on how we change, like Lake Calhoun to Bde Maka Ska.”

“We have six seeds of native pollinators and dispensers from each of the seeds,” said Grant McFarland, his breath turning to mist as it hit the frigid air. “I’m not from Minnesota, and I haven’t been to this event before, but there’s been a lot of support from everybody around keeping everyone warm and organized. I’ve been pleasantly surprised at how many people have come out here in whatever degrees it is to see us. I do think it’s crazy but it’s super fun. You’re like, ‘Why not?’ And then you see everyone else doing it and you’re like, ‘I’ll be OK.’”

“The philosophy behind The Archive Of Apologies and Pardons is basically that if we have more practice taking responsibility for our actions and also naming them when we experience hurt, we will build our general capacity as a community to withstand conflict and to reduce shame and guilt and other emotions that can be a barrier to understanding how our actions affect others,” said Sami Pfeffer, one of three artists who constructed the art shanty. “It asks a lot of participants, and people are grateful for that experience, and many say how amazing it is to read other people’s apologies and pardons and see where their own experiences lie in other folks’ vulnerability and ability to forgive.”

Matt Stark: “This is Rocky. He’s our pirate ship. Twin Cities Sailing Club, Lake Harriet Yacht Club, and Upper Minnetonka Yacht Club all got together and we try to fly the colors for sailing in the winter. It gives us a chance to work on carpentry and get cold together. A lot of these shanties are high concept art, but we just made a big dumb children’s toy out here.”

Jeff Berg: “This is our fourth time being out here at Art Shanty, and we’re all about play; we want people to play and have fun. Spectra Gigs is an experiment with color and sound together, and we’ve got two installations going on. People stand in front of it and interact with the color and the light and the feeling that they get from it, and then over there is what we’re calling the Spectra Galaxy, and you go inside there and transform the universe.”

Parks’ great-niece, Robin Hickman-Winfield, is CEO and executive producer of the St. Paul-based media company SoulTouch Productions. She’s also the curator of the Minnesota Museum of American Art’s new exhibition, “A Choice of Weapons, Honor and Dignity: The Visions of Gordon Parks and Jamel Shabazz,” which opens tomorrow (Thursday, Jan. 23).

The title was inspired by Parks’ 1966 autobiography “A Choice of Weapons” and his words: “I chose my camera as a weapon against all the things I dislike about America – poverty, racism, discrimination.”

SoulTouch is also a youth mentorship company, so Hickman-Winfield tapped four Gordon Parks High School students as her curatorial advisors: Travell Williams, Andrew Shorty, Amelia Pharmer and Tyrell Horton.

Brooklyn-born photographer Shabazz has been hailed as the Gordon Parks of his generation. He has had many solo exhibitions and authored several books including the now-classic title “Back in the Days,” which documents the hip-hop scene from 1980-89. He’s the subject of a 2013 documentary, “Jamel Shabazz: Street Photographer.”

The M’s exhibition features photographs that document expressions of dignity, honor, hope and love in the African-American community. But it’s more than about the pictures on the walls. Many events have been planned around the show, which will stay up at the M through April 19. So it’s also about history and relationships, empowering communities and lifting up black voices.

On Saturday, Jan. 25, the M will host a conversation between Shabazz and Hickman-Winfield. They’ll talk about the show and their own deep bond, forged over their shared commitment to social justice, black youth and the healing power of art. 1 p.m. Free. RSVP requested.

On Sunday, Jan. 26, Hickman-Winfield and her four co-curators from Gordon Parks High School will lead a tour of the exhibition. 1 p.m. Free. ASL. RSVP requested.

On Saturday, Feb. 1, the Hallie Q. Brown Community Center will host an event called “Gordon Parks’ Legacy in the Twin Cities.” If you have a story, photograph or memento to share about the time Parks spent in the Twin Cities, Hickman-Winfield and her student co-curators want to meet you and hear from you. 10 a.m.-2 p.m. Free. Memorabilia gathered on this day will help shape a companion show, “Gordon Parks: A Homecoming,” that will open at the M on Saturday, March 7.

Family Day on Sunday, Feb. 16, will focus on “A Choice of Weapons, Honor and Dignity.” The day will include creative activities and a story hour with Justice Alan Page. 1-4 p.m. Free and open to the public.

The picks

Tonight at the Hamline Midway Library: Fireside Reading Series: William Kent Krueger. The Friends of the Saint Paul Public Library will launch its popular winter author series with the crowd-pleasing Krueger and “This Tender Land.”  Not a Cork O’Connor mystery, Krueger’s latest is a companion to “Ordinary Grace,” which won the Edgar Award for Best Novel of 2013. With coffee, cider, cookies and a signing. FMI. Free.

Tonight at Magers & Quinn: Candacy Taylor presents “Overground Railroad: The Green Book and the Roots of Black Travel in America.” For many white Americans, the controversial Oscar-winning film “Green Book” was the first they heard of the “bible of black travel.” But what was it, how did it happen, when was it published and why was it so important? Award-winning author, photographer, and cultural documentarian Taylor lays out the history in a big, beautiful book, published by Abrams, that’s earning high praise. 7 p.m. FMI. Free.

Thursday at Mia: McKnight Discussion Series: Emily Liebert, Jim Denomie, Chris Larson. Liebert, curator of contemporary art at the Cleveland Museum of Art, sits down for what should be a fascinating discussion with two artists. Denomie, primarily a painter of narrative work, is a member of the Lac Court Oreilles Band of Ojibwe. He lives and works in Franconia. Larson is a multimedia artist based in St. Paul, an associate professor of art at the University of Minnesota, and co-founder of Second Shift Studio Space of St. Paul. The two artists have very different practices but at least one big thing in common: Both were 2018 McKnight Visual Artist Fellows. In the Pillsbury Auditorium. 6:30 p.m. Free, but tickets are required.

Thursday through Sunday at Lyric Arts Main Street Stage: “Bloomsday.” Thankfully, reading James Joyce’s “Ulysses” is not a prerequisite for seeing and enjoying Steven Dietz’s play. Though, like “Ulysses,” “Bloomsday” is set in Dublin and takes place over a single day. Dietz introduces the element of time travel as two people relive the events that briefly brought them together. Elena Giannetti directs a four-person cast that includes Lolly Foy and Gillian Constable as Cait and Caithleen, Jeffrey Goodson and Brandon Homan as Robert and Robbie. Ages 14 and up. FMI and tickets ($30-35). Closes Sunday; this is the final weekend.

As the Guthrie’s thrust stage prepares for “Twelfth Night,” which opens in February with an all-local cast, the rest of the theater is celebrating Arab artistry. It’s a unique opportunity for all of us: a rare chance, if you’re Arab in the Twin Cities, to see someone like you on stage, and if you’re not, to feel like a foreigner and learn more about other peoples and cultures.

On the proscenium stage, Heather Raffo’s “Noura” takes us into the New York apartment of Iraqi immigrants who have finally – after eight years of anxious waiting – become American citizens. Their new lives can officially begin, but Noura (Gamze Ceylan) can’t let go of her old life in Mosul, an ancient city destroyed by ISIS where Christians, Muslims and Jews once lived side by side.

Raffo, whose mother is American and father is Iraqi, wrote “Noura” after leading a series of workshops with Arab-American women about Henrik Ibsen’s “A Doll’s House.” You can, if you want, see Noura as Nora and her husband Tareq (Fajer Kaisi) as Torvald – and yes, both plays take place on Christmas Eve – but connecting those dots is not at all key to appreciating this potent story.

It’s a tale of passionate love and profound loss, long-held secrets revealed, and people trying to live with a semblance of normalcy. And you can’t help but think that Noura and Tareq, their son Yazen (a role that alternates between Aarya Batchu and Akshay Krishna), their Muslim friend Rafa’a (Egyptian film and TV star Kal Naga), and Maryam (Layan Elwazani), a young Iraqi woman Noura and Tareq have been sponsoring, are the lucky ones. They’re not in camps, in cages, on the run, in ships crowded with refugees. They have futures. They also have been traumatized in ways those of us who haven’t been forced to flee our homes and homelands can’t possibly grasp. “Noura” is a window into that experience.

We saw “Noura” on opening weekend. Screens on each side of the stage displayed Arabic surtitles. During the post-play discussion, which a lot of people stayed for, we learned that the entire play had been translated for the surtitles. That the three people we squeezed past to get to our seats were Iraqi (and big fans of Naga). That many in the audience were Iraqi. “I had chills throughout this play,” one said. “It was a lot of emotion.” Another mentioned “being arbitrarily put in a place you never heard of, like Minnesota.” And unable to return home. What’s inconceivable to most Minnesotans is just another day for millions of people around the world.

The Guthrie’s Arab Artistry series will continue with Amir Nizar Zuabi’s “Grey Rock,” a play set in present-day Palestine, and Hanane Hajj Ali’s “Jogging,” set in present-day Beirut. “Grey Rock” runs Jan. 23-26, “Jogging” Jan. 29-Feb. 2, both in the Dowling Studio. “Jogging” will be performed in Arabic with English surtitles, which is not something we see around here every day. Tickets start at $9 for select performances; all other performances range from $25-32.

On Sunday afternoon, Jan. 26, the Guthrie will host “In Conversation: Celebrating Arab Artistry,” a panel with the Guthrie’s Artistic Director Joseph Haj (himself the son of Palestinian immigrants), Heather Raffo (“Noura”), Hanane Hajj Ali (“Jogging”), Amir Nizar Zuabi (“Grey Rock”), and Kathryn Haddad, artistic and executive director of New Arab American Theater Works and writer of “Zafira and the Resistance,” seen at the Guthrie last fall. The panel will be moderated by Taous Claire Khazem, assistant director for “Noura.” 3:30 p.m. FMI. Free, but reservations are required.

The picks

Tonight (Thursday, Jan. 23) through Sunday at Open Eye Theatre: “How the Wild West Was Spun.” Starting in the 1880s, Buffalo Bill Cody’s traveling pageant “The Wild West: A History Lesson,” toured widely in the U.S. and later in Europe. It attracted millions of people and had a lasting effect on our perceptions of history. Internationally acclaimed Native storyteller Dovie Thomas brings 50 years of historical research to her version, an epic tale that deconstructs Buffalo Bill’s version and challenges its settler colonial perspective. Kevin Kling will host, and all performances will include a Q&A after with Dovie and Kling. This will be the American premiere. 7:30 p.m. Thursday through Friday, 4 p.m. Sunday. FMI and tickets ($22/15).

Friday and Saturday: Lyra Baroque: “Passaggi.” Have you heard of the cornetto? It’s an early wind instrument that looks a bit like an eel, depending on how many curves it has. Bruce Dickey is a modern-day master of the cornetto and especially something called “passaggi” – improvised embellishments or flourishes found in 16th-century music. Here’s a video of Dickey playing some Palestrina. If you enjoy early music and unusual instruments, you may feel like a fish on a hook when you hear this. Dickey will join a group of musicians from Lyra Baroque Orchestra for two concerts this weekend: the first on Friday at Mount Olive Lutheran Church in Rochester, the second on Saturday at Hamline’s Sundin Hall. 7:30 both nights. FMI and tickets ($30/25/5). Pre-concert talks at 6:30 p.m.

Tuesday at the Dakota: “Love & Law: A Century of the ACLU.” To mark its 100th anniversary, the ACLU invited more than 40 writers – including Louise Erdrich, Brenda Child, Marlon James, Ann Patchett, Neil Gaiman, Michael Chabon, Salmon Rushdie, David Eggers, Ann Patchett, Scott Turow, Jennifer Egan and Anthony Doerr – to reflect on landmark ACLU cases. Edited by Chabon and Ayelet Waldman, “Fight of the Century” came out on Jan. 21. Hosted by Birchbark Books and the ACLU MN, this all-star book launch and party will feature readings and performances by Erdrich and Child, T. Mychael Rambo, Dan Chouinard, Kao Kalia Yang, Bradley Greenwald, Prudence Johnson and Chastity Brown. Each guest will get a copy of the book. 7 p.m. FMI and tickets ($100).

In its 10th year of partnering with Minneapolis’ north side community, the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra will do something it hasn’t done before: hold a concert with north side residents at its home in the Ordway Concert Hall.

Along with two more concerts at North High.

The SPCO’s partnership with north Minneapolis began in the 2010-11 season with pop-up concerts at the Capri Theater on West Broadway, where Prince played his first solo shows in 1979. Since 2013-14, the SPCO has presented consistent annual programming at the Capri, including a chamber music series and free family music programs. (For the 2019-20 season, these concerts have moved to Sanctuary Covenant Church while the Capri is undergoing expansion and renovation.)

In March 2017, at the suggestion of Dennis Spears, singer, actor and artistic director for the Capri’s long-running Legends series, the first Northside Celebration took place at North High. It wasn’t just the SPCO performing for the community. It was the SPCO and the community making music together. The program included the world premiere of “True North,” a new work for community choir and chamber orchestra by north side resident Timothy C. Takach, commissioned by the SPCO. Both performances at North High played to capacity crowds.

Co-presented by the Capri, led by Sanford Moore, the Northside Celebration returns this weekend with three concerts instead of two. The first will take place at 8 tonight (Friday, Jan. 24) at the Ordway Concert Hall. The others are scheduled for 2 p.m. and 8 p.m. tomorrow (Saturday, Jan. 25) at North High. All will feature gospel choir music, orchestral music and spoken word.

The Northside Celebration Choir, formed for these concerts, will sing, and the Courtland Pickens Community Youth Choir, and soloist Greta Oglesby. Moore will conduct and play piano. Other musicians will include Jeff Bailey on bass, Deevo on guitar and Brandon Commodore on drums. Amani Wilson and Malik Watkins (MaLLy) will be the spoken word artists.

A string quartet of SPCO musicians Eunice Kim, Nicholas Tavana, Hyobi Sim and Joshua Koestenbaum will perform Michael Abels’ “Delights and Dances.” The program will include music by Bach, Charles Albert Tindley, Donnie McClurkin and other composers; Sherri Orr will lead the Northside Celebration Choir in her own “Arise and Shine.” All concerts will begin with the traditional hymn “Walk with Me” and end with “Joyful, Joyful,” set to Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” melody.

Dennis Spears promises, “It will be electric!”

FMI and tickets. Both North High performances are free, but reservations are required. Tickets to the Ordway Concert Hall performance start at $12. (For 50% off, use code NORTH50.)

The SPCO will return to Sanctuary Covenant Church on April 3 for a concert of quartets by Mozart and Arensky. On April 4, “Xplorchestra! Calling All Horns!” will introduce kids and families to the horn section.

The picks

Opens tonight (Friday, Jan. 24) at Artistry: “The Bridges of Madison County.” Based on the best-selling romance novel by Robert James Waller, which became an Oscar-nominated film starring Meryl Streep and Clint Eastwood, this Tony-winning musical chronicles the brief, passionate affair between a National Geographic photographer and an Italian war bride in rural Iowa. Benjamin McGovern directs a cast that includes Eric Morris as Robert Kincaid and Jennifer Baldwin Peden as Francesca Johnson. Becca Hart, who lights up every stage she’s on, appears as Marian/Chiara. Book by Marsha Norman, music by Jason Robert Brown (“The Last Five Years”). 7:30 p.m. FMI and tickets ($17-46).

Saturday morning at the Black Dog in Lowertown: Schubert Karaoke. You could sit around in your jammies on Saturday morning. Or you could join the Lied Society for a Franz Schubert sing-along. (According to the Lied Society, Schubert’s lieder were the pop songs of the 19th century.) Classical MPR’s Steve Staruch will host; pianists and sheet music will be provided. A full brunch menu and bar will be available. 11 a.m.-1 p.m. Free.

Starts Saturday: Twin Cities Jewish Humor Festival. The weeklong celebration of Jewish humor will open at the St. Paul JCC with James & Eli, creators and stars of the award-winning “Yiddish-ish” web series “YidLife Crisis.” It will end at the Sabes JCC with Queer Night and the El-Salomons – comedians Jess Salomon, Jewish-Canadian, and Eman El-Hussieni, Palestinian-Canadian, married since 2016. In between, Alan Zweibel, a humorist and writer on the original cast of “Saturday Night Live,” will present his new book “A Field Guide to the Jewish People” (“how come they carry each other around on chairs?”) and Emmy-winning TV producer, writer, and novelist Matt Goldman (“Seinfeld,” “Ellen”) will explain how to write funny. Through Monday, Feb. 1. Here’s the lineup and links to tickets (prices vary). Most events will take place at the Sabes JCC; Goldman will appear in St. Paul.

Sunday at the Dakota: Irv Williams Tribute. Beloved Twin Cities saxophonist Irv Williams died Dec. 14 but will long be remembered for his music, his signature tone, his wit and his sweetness. Over his 100 years, “Mr. Smooth” made a lot of friends, and the Dakota is hoping for a good turnout on Sunday for a musical celebration of his life. RSVP your seat by calling the box office at 612-332-5299, then pay what you can at the door. 100% of the donations will go to the Irv Williams Fellowship for young musicians, established last year at MacPhail.

The finalists for the 2020 Minnesota Book Awards were announced Saturday: four books each in nine categories, totaling three dozen titles deemed worthy of consideration for the state’s top literary honors. They were chosen by 27 judges from around the state – writers, teachers, librarians, booksellers and others from the literary community – so if you’re looking for tips on what to read next, this list would be a good place to start.

Topics range from the Apollo missions to Wounded Knee, from the platypus to surviving a grizzly attack. Current and former MinnPost writers are represented by the same book: Bill Lindeke, who writes Cityscape, and Andy Sturdevant, who wrote and illustrated the Stroll for several years, are the coauthors of the Twin Cities bar crawl “Closing Time.” You can read an excerpt here.

The Minnesota Book Awards are organized by the Friends of the Saint Paul Public Library. Winners will be announced at a ceremony on Tuesday, April 28, in the Ordway Concert Hall. New location, new approach: more seats, no tables, one ticket price ($45). Tickets went on sale at noon Monday (Jan. 27).

A Meet the Finalists event will take place Friday, March 27, at George Latimer Central Library starting at 7 p.m.

These are the finalists for the 2020 awards:

Children’s literature: “A to Zåäö: Playing with History at the American Swedish Institute” by Nate Christopherson and Tara Sweeney (University of Minnesota Press), “Home in the Woods” by Eliza Wheeler (Nancy Paulsen Books/Penguin Random House), “A Map into the World” by Kao Kalia Yang, illustrated by Seo Kim (Carolrhoda Books/Lerner Publishing Group), “My Footprints” by Bao Phi, illustrated by Basia Tran (Capstone Editions/Capstone).

Genre fiction: “Black Leopard, Red Wolf” by Marlon James (Riverhead Books/Penguin Random House), “The Body Keeper” by Anne Frasier (Thomas & Mercer/Amazon Publishing), “Ice Cold Heart” by P.J. Tracy (Crooked Lane Books), “Nothing More Dangerous” by Allen Eskens (Mulholland Books/Little, Brown, and Company).

Memoir and creative nonfiction: “All the Wild Hungers” by Karen Babine (Milkweed Editions), “Magical Realism for Non-Believers: A Memoir of Finding Family” by Anika Fajardo (University of Minnesota Press), “The Memory House” by Raki Kopernik (The Muriel Press), “The Twenty-Ninth Day: Surviving a Grizzly Attack in the Canadian Tundra” by Alex Messenger (Blackstone Publishing).

Middle grade literature: “The Line Tender” by Kate Allen (Dutton Children’s Books/Penguin Random House), “The Lost Girl” by Anne Ursu (Walden Pond Press/HarperCollins Publishers), “The Missing Piece of Charlie O’Reilly” by Rebecca K.S. Ansari (Walden Pond Press/HarperCollins Publishers), “A Tear in the Ocean” by H.M. Bouwman, illustrations by Yuko Shimizu (G.P. Putnam’s Sons/Penguin Random House).

Novel and short story: “Evidence of V: A Novel in Fragments, Facts, and Fictions” by Sheila O’Conner (Rose Metal Press), “Stray” by Nancy J. Hedin (NineStar Press), “Suicide Woods” by Benjamin Percy (Graywolf Press), “This Tender Land” by William Kent Krueger (Atria Books/Simon & Schuster).

Poetry: “Bodega” by Su Hwang (Milkweed Editions), “A Bony Framework for the Tangible Universe” by D. Allen (The Operating System), “Mitochondrial Night” by Ed Bok Lee (Coffee House Press), “Safe Houses I Have Known” by Steve Healey (Coffee House Press).

Young adult literature: “Catfishing on CatNet” by Naomi Kritzer (Tor Teen/Macmillan Publishing Group), “Cracking the Bell” by Geoff Herbach (Katherine Tegen Books/HarperCollins Publishers), “Last Things” by Jacqueline West (Greenwillow/HarperCollins Publishers), “The Stars and the Blackness Between Them” by Junauda Petrus (Dutton Books/Penguin Random House).

A few related fun facts:

Yesterday (Monday, Jan. 27), Junauda Petrus’ “The Stars and the Blackness Between Them” was named a Coretta Scott King Honor Book by the American Library Association.

Also yesterday, Marlon James, best-selling author of “Black Leopard, Red Wolf” (and before that, “A Brief History of Seven Killings,” winner of the 2015 Man Booker Prize), launched a new podcast with Jake Morrissey, his editor at Riverhead Books. It’s called “Marlon and Jake Read Dead People.” Morrissey explains, “We’re going to be honest. Brutally, unsparingly honest. Which is why these authors have to be dead.” It’s like eavesdropping on a far-ranging, fiercely opinionated conversation between two people who know each other well and have both read everything, or nearly everything. FMI.

Starting Feb. 29, Nate Christopherson and Tara Sweeney’s “A to Zåäö: Playing with History at the American Swedish Institute” will be the centerpiece of a major new exhibition at the ASI. As is ASI’s pretty cool habit, they will open the show with a party the night before.

Talk of the Stacks to feature Erika Lee, Julia Alvarez, Larry Watson

Announced last week, Talk of the Stacks is a free lecture series from Friends of the Hennepin County Library. All events take place in Pohlad Hall at the downtown Minneapolis library, with doors at 6:15 and start times at 7. Book sales and signings follow. FMI.

Coming in 2020:

Monday, April 20: Julia Alvarez will talk about her latest, “Afterlife.” Alvarez is an international best-selling novelist whose previous books include “How the García Girls Lost Their Accents” and “In the Time of the Butterflies.” Her first adult novel in 15 years, “Afterlife” is also one of the most anticipated books of 2020.

Thursday, July 23: Larry Watson is a regional best-seller, book club favorite and author of “Montana 1948” and “Let Him Go.” He’ll return with his new novel, “The Lives of Edie Pritchard.”

The picks

Wednesday at Hamline Midway Library: Fireside Reading Series: John Coy & Gaylord Schanilec: “My Mighty Journey: A Waterfall’s Story.” St. Anthony Falls – Owamniyomni in Dakota – is the only major waterfall on the Mississippi River. Published by Minnesota Historical Society Press, this book recently won the 2020 Minnesota Book Artist Award, which will be presented at the Minnesota Book Awards in April. Like the Book Awards, the Fireside Reading Series is organized by the Friends of the St. Paul Public Library. Each reading includes coffee, cider, cookies and book signings. 7 p.m. FMI. Free. Note: Schanilec’s artwork, printed with materials collected along the riverbank, is currently on display at the Mill City Museum through March 29.

Wednesday at the Museum of Russian Art: Joshua Yaffa: “Between Two Fires: Truth, Ambition and Compromise in Putin’s Russia.” Yaffa is a correspondent for the New Yorker in Moscow, where he has lived for eight years. Just out, his first book is a portrait of modern Russia and the inner struggles of the people – politicians, entrepreneurs, artists and historians – who sustain his rule. Doors at 6 p.m., program at 7. A Q&A and signing will follow. All galleries will be open for viewing. FMI and tickets ($15/$12 TMORA members/$5 students).

On a cold January night inside a St. Cloud art gallery, Little Falls artist Heidi Jeub shared an exhibit of paintings that she titled “Remote: An Abstract Response to Rural Flight.”  

The odd shapes and bold colors of the works were nothing like the scenes of tired Main Street buildings or rusting tractors that so often depict the rural experience (though the canvas with gray streaks on a white expanse sure gave off the feeling of a cold Minnesota winter).  

Of course, that was the point. Rather than reinforcing accepted notions about rural life, Jeub’s work challenges viewers to consider its complexity – something she knows about as a single mother and artist living in a small town.  

Her job titles, for instance, have included painter, art teacher, nonprofit director, public artist. And she’s not opposed to adding “Uber driver” to that list if need be. “I became a bit of a Renaissance person just because of my remote location,” she said.

One constant: her love of place and her commitment to promoting the arts in the nooks and crannies of central Minnesota. “Contemporary artists are in rural spaces,” she said.

A rural artist’s living

In Caledonia, in the far southeastern corner of the state, Melissa Wray runs the arts-and-culture center Mainspring out of an old Presbyterian church. Recent events at the center have included a vintage and makers market, a concert (by the Minneapolis act The Nunnery), and an arts-and-crafts day.

Jeub and Wray survive like many rural artists in today’s gig economy – selling their work, writing grant proposals, snaring public or corporate projects and often holding down other part-time work. It’s the kind of life that requires a unique skill set – and, in their cases, a decided determination in the face of popular notions about rural decline.  

Their favorite classes included a few that might seem out of place for a couple of artsy types: finance and entrepreneurship. But they provided the kind of insight that the women needed.

Jeub recalled a scenario from a few years ago, when she was hired to be the lead artist on a project to reimagine the site of a deadly paper mill explosion in Sartell. The experience fueled her interest in learning more about the management side of the arts. (That Sartell project can be viewed here).

“It was eye opening in terms of what my skills were prior to that point and how managing a public art project is not just about the art piece,” she said. “You negotiate with the city, you negotiate with workers, you tell stories and you tell them delicately and try to understand the systems around those stories.”

Life among the bluffs

Wray lives in the thriving arts and culture scene in southeastern Minnesota – in the bluff country that made the small towns of Lanesboro and Preston tourist destinations. (A farmer in nearby Spring Grove recently added a distillery to that town’s attractions, as chronicled in this MinnPost piece). 

Wray lived in Minneapolis for 13 years before moving back to Caledonia, where she grew up.  While she was a student at the university, Wray landed an artists’ residency in Houston County, an initiative that gave her a chance to study small communities and to think about, as she put it, “what makes them thrive.” Her sister recently joined her, moving from New York City with her family and opening a coffee shop in town.

Besides her work at Mainspring, Wray is also involved with a podcast called Minnepod – an example of how artists are harnessing technology in an effort to stay locally connected and vibrant. (One recent episode looked at the state of dairy farming, another at the impact of flooding in the region in 2007).

True to their roots

Jeub recently received a McKnight Foundation grant to build a portable art studio – the Tiny School of Art and Design, as she calls it – that she plans to use to bring art to students and families in the Little Falls area.

Meanwhile, in Caledonia, Wray said she feels “a sense of urgency,” exemplified by some new restaurants and shops. She wants to be a part of it.

“There are a million versions of me in the (Twin Cities) doing this kind of work,” she said.  “There aren’t as many people here willing to do that.”

Starting today, you have 12 days to see all the Oscar nominees for Best Film before the winner is announced. And depending on your schedule, you can squeeze in screenings of the live action, animation and documentary shorts.

If you’re thinking the Oscars are coming up quickly – didn’t we just see the Grammys? – you’re right. The awards date (Sunday, Feb. 9) is earlier than usual, which means there’s more of a time crunch between the nominations and the ceremony.

You’ll find the full-length films, live action and animated shorts at the Lagoon Cinema in Uptown starting Friday. For the documentary shorts, head to the Riverview, also starting Friday.

As part of the Landmark Theatres Best Picture Spotlight series, which will bring all the 2020 Academy Award Best Picture nominees to 10 Landmark theaters across the country, the Lagoon will screen “1917,” “Ford v Ferrari,” “The Irishman,” “Jojo Rabbit,” “Joker,” “Little Women,” “Marriage Story,” “Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood,” and “Parasite.” Spotlight will start this Friday (Jan. 31) and continue through Oscars day (Sunday, Feb. 9). All tickets are $5 and you can reserve now.

The live action and animation shorts will be shown from Friday, Jan. 31, through Thursday, Jan. 6. Films in both categories are from all over the world. We happen to have seen “Kitbull” (USA), an animated short from Pixar about an unlikely friendship between an abandoned kitten and a mistreated pit bull. It made us cry happy tears. Tickets for the shorts are the regular price.

The documentary shorts will begin at the Riverview on Friday, Jan. 31. Admission there is $7, $5 for students.

Since all we’ve seen so far is “Kitbull,” we can’t comment further. But critics are saying the live-action and documentary shorts lean toward dark and serious. Here’s a trailer for the shorts.

The picks

Now at Como Park’s Marjorie McNeely Conservatory: 2020 Winter Flower Show. As winter drags on, the snow gets grayer and the streets more narrow, Como Park’s glass-enclosed conservatory is a breath of fresh, moist, flower-scented air. This year’s winter flower show blooms with red cyclamen, blue pansies, purple azaleas, maroon lilies and amaryllis. The hours are generous and the cost is free. 10 a.m.-4 p.m. daily.

Thursday at Highpoint Center for Printmaking: Public conversation for the 2019 McKnight Printmaking Fellowship Exhibition. In 2018, as part of a larger expansion, the McKnight Artist Fellowships program grew to include printmakers, with Highpoint as its program partner. Jenny Schmid, a professor at the University of Minnesota Department of Art, and Justin Quinn, professor of art at St. Cloud State University, were the inaugural 2019 McKnight Printmaking Fellows. Each was given access to Highpoint’s state-of-the-art printmaking studio with technical support, studio visits with invited arts professionals and a $25,000 unrestricted award. Both will be at Highpoint on Thursday for a conversation with Faye Hirsch, senior editor for Art in America. 6-8 p.m. Free. Seating may be limited, so arrive early. The exhibition closes Feb. 22.

Thursday at the Dakota: Afro-Cuban All Stars. Led by Juan de Marcos, the Afro-Cuban All Stars became world famous in the late 1990s, thanks to a series of recordings and a film. In 1996, de Marcos and great musicians he knew recorded “A Toda Cuba le Gusta,” the Grammy-winning “Buena Vista Social Club” (produced by Ry Cooder) and “Introducing Rubén González.” Wim Wenders’ smoking documentary “Buena Vista Social Club” followed in 1999. Some older musicians have passed on and younger ones have moved in, but this is still an amazing band and thrilling to see live. 7 and 9:30 p.m. FMI and tickets ($35-50).

Friday through Sunday at Theatre in the Round: Peter Shaffer’s “Black Comedy.” Shaffer wrote more weighty plays, including “Equus” and “Amadeus,” but arguably none as fun as this. As struggling artist Brindsley Miller and his fiancé, Carol, prepare for an important party, the main fuse blows and the apartment goes dark. In the theater itself, the lights go up so we can clearly see the actors pretend to stumble around in pitch blackness, bumping into each other and the furniture. It’s a farce with a lot of physical comedy, performed by an ensemble of eight actors. The show runs about 90 min. with no intermission, and this is the closing weekend. FMI and reservations ($22; pay at the door).