Codemakers is the Fine Arts Center’s artist-activist conversation and performance series highlighting boldly creative and socially engaged artists, thinkers, and projects from across the country and around the world — and especially those working outside
Hamed Sinno
Thursday, October 9, 7:30 p.m.
Bowker Auditorium
Lebanese-American singer-songwriter Hamed Sinno’s R&B-tinged compositions, lush arrangements, and mellifluous vocals evoke artists ranging from Morcheeba and Massive Attack to Lambchop and Raphael Saadiq. Accompanied by Sinno’s electronic music and a string quartet, their impassioned lyrics speak truth to power and question the foundations of empire. Brilliant multimedia projections complete the experience and drive home the message.
Paul Beaubrun
Tuesday, October 14, 8 p.m.
The Drake
The son of Haitian music stars Lolo and Manze Beaubrun (of Boukman Eksperyans), Paul Beaubrun is a magnetic performer who sings in Haitian Creole, French, and English; draws musical influence from across the Caribbean, the United States, and throughout the African diaspora; and plays guitar like a cross between Ali Farka Touré and Jimi Hendrix.
The Horse of Jenin
a Troupe Courage production
by Alaa Shehada
Thursday, November 6, 7:30 p.m.
Bowker Auditorium
Built from the debris of a major invasion, the Horse of Jenin sculpture became a constant presence in actor/comedian Alaa Shehada’s life as he grew up in occupied Palestine. It stood proudly in the center of the city for twenty years, symbolizing hope and resistance until an Israeli bulldozer entered the city, ripping the sculpture from its place — and from its people. Constructed from the fragments of Shehada’s memories, The Horse of Jenin is an ode to the power of imagination and the resilience it inspires.
Carsie Blanton
Wednesday, February 11, 8 p.m.
The Drake
Take a bit of Billy Bragg, some Michelle Shocked, Poly Styrene, and Kathleen Hanna — and you start to get a sense of Carsie Blanton. She’s a protest singer whose songs defy genre pigeonholing, whose melodies are straight-up pop, and whose lyrics are imbued with humor and insight, embracing the complexities of being human. She’s what you need, what we all need, right now.
Sunny Jain’s Wild Wild East
Thursday, February 19, 8 p.m.
The Drake
The latest project from the founder and leader of Brooklyn’s undefinable Red Baraat draws from Sunny Jain’s identity as a first-generation South Asian American and as a global musician. And it finds Jain sourcing musical inspiration from the scores of Bollywood classics and Spaghetti Westerns, Indian folk traditions, jazz improvisation, and rollicking psychedelic and surf guitar styles.
Bill T. Jones
Friday, May 1, 8 p.m.
Frederick C. Tillis Performance Hall
We close our fiftieth anniversary season in much the same way we opened it, with an internationally renowned performing arts troupe presenting a new work for the first time outside of their home in New York City. People, Places and Things is a meditation in movement on self determination: living where one wants to live; loving whom one wants to love; and celebrating that youthful desire to be free and discover the world and oneself within it.