It all started as a senior project.

It will likely grow into a regularly recurring series of distinctive events combining visual art, music and the performing arts.

“Black & White,” the first show in an initial four-show spring series, happens March 29 at the so-called Cube House, designed by architect Michael Graves.

It will feature the art of Lauren Castleman, Michael Ganser, Reggie Johnson. Suzie Suraci, Sara Conrad, April Weller, Dee Dee Morrow (and others) and musical performances by the Sean Christian Parr Trio, The Turn Signals (and others).

The title is an entreaty to attendees to wear their Sunday best to the event but its organizers say that guests are free to interpret the dress code any way they wish.

“Black & White” is the brainchild of three University of Saint Francis students: Jacob Ganser, Carrie Hart and Bee Kagel.

Ganser is on the verge of earning a music technology degree at the school and he proposed a series of four events as a way of fulfilling his senior seminar requirement.

Some students elect to record an album for their senior project, Ganser said. But that wasn’t something that interested him.

He felt that organizing these events would challenge him in a rewarding way.

Ultimately, though, he decided he needed some help.

So he enlisted the aid of Hart and Kagel.

It wasn’t long before the trio started talking about expanding the concept beyond the initial four events.

Hart said she has been inspired by the “shared bohemian poverty” espoused by British philosopher Alan Watts – collaborating with like-minded people to maximize minimal resources.

“There are a lot of things we’re doing (with Black & White) where we’re just putting it together with what we have,” she said. “We’re building our own walls, for example. We want to prove that we can make an event like this work while spending as little money as possible.”

Ganser said a lot of artists and musicians with big plans are frustrated by lack of funds. So one of the goals of this endeavor is to look for ways to circumvent that real or perceived roadblock – by pooling resources, by fostering collaborations, by devising workarounds, by seeking out previously untapped performance and exhibition spaces.

Most gallery spaces plan exhibitions a year in advance, he said. But artists in their teens and twenties don’t tend to think that far ahead.

So one of the ideas here is to create something that’s a little lighter on its feet.

“(People in their twenties are) so focused on the now,” he said. “We’re not thinking about a year from now. So we want to find spaces that will work with that mindset.”

“We just want to provide opportunities for artists and musicians where there aren’t so many tight constraints involved,” Hart said. “Where people can just show up and say, ‘You know what? This isn’t half bad. I am really enjoying myself.’”

The learning curve for this first event has been steep for the trio, Ganser said.

“We have three people doing the work of 20,” he said. “Most committees have people who do advertising and people who set up the meetings. There are delegated responsibilities. Each job has its own little focus.

“What we have is two people from the studio arts and one person from the music tech department doing the promotion, doing the networking, doing the meetings,” Ganser said. “We’re testing our comfort zones a little bit. This is an area that we have never physically been in.”

Ganser has been studying psychology as well as music technology at the school. Hart’s academic focus is photography and Kagel is in museum studies.

Those are some disparate interests and aptitudes but Hart said the trio has worked surprisingly well together.

“I can’t think of another instance in my life where three people with the skills that they have and the resources that they have have come together so well,” she said.

The final three events in this initial series will happen April 14 at the Crimson Knight Tattoo and Art Gallery, 1804 W Main Street, April 27 at the Cube House, 10220 Circlewood Drive and the USF Performing Arts Center, 431 W Berry Street.

The details of each are still being worked out. For the Crimson Knight show, Hart envisions having artists create work live during the event and then showcasing the finished pieces near the end of the event in some dramatic and technologically savvy way.

“So that it’s not just an art show,” she said. “It’s something that plays off experiences and emotions.” Hart and Ganser say they want these events to mix professionalism with spontaneity and an element of surprise.

Ganser will take a year off between college and grad school. The trio plans to begin devising themes for future events this summer.

If enough people can be brought on to help, Ganser said it’s not fanciful to imagine one event per month or several events per month at various venues.

“The more people we can bring onto the committee, the more we can delegate certain actions,” he said.

Hart said some of what the trio envisions is hard to put into words. But their passion is palpable.

“I don’t know exactly how clear our message will be,” she said. “But we definitely have an intentionality behind all this.”

 

There are many reasons why a theater director might want to produce an all-female production of William Shakespeare’s “Hamlet” in 2018.

But Thom Hofrichter’s reasons are entirely practical.

The interest in Shakespeare among female actors hereabouts is inversely proportionate to the number of roles available.

Translation: Too many great female actors, not enough female roles.

One solution is to be less strict about gender specificity.

Hofrichter, the minister of drama at First Presbyterian Theater, said the meaning of Shakespeare’s work doesn’t really change when a director plays fast and loose with time, gender, nation and/or setting.

“If you put him in Elizabethan times verses putting him in the 1920s,” he said, “it really doesn’t matter. The wisdom and the humanity is there.

“I have seen ‘Hamlets’ where they whip out guns,” he said. “It comes down to how humans behave and Shakespeare does that better than anyone else. Why shouldn’t women have a chance to play some of the greatest roles ever written?”

Why not, indeed?

In fact, there is a rich tradition in theater of women playing the lead role in this play.

Sarah Bernhardt, a French actress of the late 19th and early 20th centuries who was as famous in her time as Helen Mirren is in ours, played Hamlet on stage and screen.

”I cannot see Hamlet as a man,” the New York Times quoted Bernhardt as saying. ”The things he says, his impulses, his actions, entirely indicate to me that he was a woman.”

Local actress Kate Black, who may be Fort Wayne’s Helen Mirren, is playing Claudius in the upcoming First Presbyterian Theater production.

Black is no stranger to gender-switch Shakespeare. She played the title role of Othello in a First Presbyterian Theater production of that play in 2000.

And she played Gertrude, the wife of the character she is now playing, in a 1999 Civic Theatre production of “Hamlet.”

“It’s pretty exciting,” Black said of playing Claudius. “It’s exciting to have the opportunity to climb into the character because he’s such an evil guy. He’s such a slime bucket, such a politician.”

Playing Claudius has helped Black understand the play better.

“It is such a wonderful and interesting thing to be coming at it from such a different angle,” she said. “A much more acrimonious angle.

“From a purely selfish standpoint,’ Black said, “it’s such a joy to have the opportunity to put my arms around character as large and well fleshed-out as this role is.”

An all-female cast exudes a different energy than a mixed cast, Black said.

The challenge for this particular all-female cast, she said, has been to strike a balance between hyper-masculine and hyper-feminine interpretations of the characters.

There are a number of lines that have suddenly become problematic in this context – “Frailty, they name is woman,” “’Tis unmanly grief,” etc. – and the actors have to figure out how to deliver them.

One of the singular pleasures of being involved in this production, Black said, is that every actor brings intense passion to her role and to Shakespeare’s work in general.

“I would say that every single person who comes to rehearsal every night is invested in making it as good as they can make it,” she said. “You always really want that.”

It was a natural affinity for Shakespeare’s words that convinced Hofricher to cast Halee Bandt as Hamlet.

“I never thought I would get an opportunity to play this role,” Bandt said. “I do love Shakespeare. I have loved the entirety of his work since I was a teenager. I was one of those nerdy kids who liked it when no one else did.”

Hamlet remains one of the most divisive characters in theater. Scholars and thespians still argue over his merits and failings, rarely agreeing on which is which.

Bandt said she sees Hamlet as an intellectual thrust into a situation that does not call for an intellectual.

“At the root of it, at the end of the day, Hamlet is an overanalytical overthinker,” she said. “He is a thinker who has been put into a situations that demands action. That causes all the turmoil we see in the play.”

“Hamlet” is one of the few thinkers in western theater whose thought processes are there for the audience to see, Bandt said.

“If to think is feminine, then Hamlet is feminine,” Hofrichter said. “Hamlet is someone who usually does not act rashly. It’s kind of ironic that the one point he does act rashly – because literary people are always busting his chops for not being a man of action – he kills the wrong guy.”

“It’s not unlike when you take quick action, you might actually attack the wrong country,” he said. “There’s a lesson there. Slow methodicalness is not necessarily a bad thing.”

As Hamlet, Bandt said she and Tara Olivero as Laertes get to engage in the traditionally male theatrical activity of fighting with swords.

“How often do two women in theater – or on film, for that matter – get to engage in truly physical combat?” she said.

Bandt shares the stage in this production with some of Fort Wayne’s greatest actresses and she said it’s been quite an education.

“It’s amazing,” she said. “I sat down for our first table read, and I am just listening to their voices speaking this text. I thought to myself, ‘How lucky am I to be with these women and we’re all working on the same thing?

“They have such a natural grasp of this text,” Bandt said. “And they make such beautiful sense of the language. Just being around them, I pick things up. Their home is on the stage. They feel very natural up there. They actively listen. It’s just a lot of fun.”

The challenge of casting Shakespeare, Hofrichter said, is finding actors who can bridge the gap between the play’s language and the audience’s understanding.

“This idea of – I don’t want to say translating Shakespeare, because that’s not quite it,” he said. “But interpreting Shakespeare in a certain way. Part one is the actor has to know exactly what they are saying with all the implications. Part two is ‘How do those words come out of your mouth?’ and ‘How is your body reinforcing the meaning so the audience understands?’”

The cast of “Hamlet” is uniquely suited to these aims, Hofrichter said.

Hofrichter doesn’t think there is any one way to look at “Hamlet” because it’s one of those puzzles where perspective changes interpretation.

“It’s like that old story about the three blind men who touch different parts of an elephant and come up with wildly differing descriptions,” he said. “In some ways, that’s ‘Hamlet.’ It’s the first piece of dramatic writing to do that. And I’m not sure it’s not still the best piece of dramatic writing to do that.”