Welcome to Cultural Odyssey's 30th Anniversary e-newsletter, our online experience, sharing our further artistic adventures. We are celebrating our 30th Season! See us visit South Africa for the third time conducting residency and performance activities at Naturena Women's Prison (Sun City) in Johannesburg in collaboration with the Johannesburg Correctional Services and Urban Voices Festival. Watch our U.S. Department of State Tour of Russia interacting with a community of Russian artists, intellectuals, community workers, sociologists and psychologist all who are working and coming to grips with many of the problems and issues we also face here in America. Experience Cultural Odyssey at the National Black Theater Festival in August 2009 where we presented four different shows from the company's repertory featuring Joanna Haigood, Angela Dean Baham, Frederick Harris and Stephanie Johnson as well as ourselves. Finally, witness and preview the preparations for our 30th Anniversary Celebration of New Works, which runs from February 4 - March 15, 2010. Please consider making a contribution in support of our 30th Anniversary Season and the continuing work that we are so proud of.

Come and participate with us around the world through the prism of art as social activism in search of human culture.

	Rhodessa & Idris at Lenin's Tomb - Red Square

September 19th is lost to the shabby indifference of American air travel, despite traveling first class! Arriving at SFO on time only to be delayed for two hours, causing Idris and I missing the only Russian flight of the day out of Chicago. We lost a day of the tour (which was suppose to be our rest day). After a night at the Holiday Inn in Chicago we are finally flying to Moscow!

Dr. Zhivago has definitely left town! We are met at the airport by a Russian embassy car. Small sleek clean, as is the, driver who speaks minimal English. We stuff our luggage and props into the trunk to snake our way threw belligerent traffic! Industrial grey city- silver splinters of light bouncing off buildings, dancing on the hoods and bumpers of very expensive cars.

	Moscow Walk (YouTube - click to view)

Our driver holds his own on these streets. — jockeying for position as we drive through this modern Moscow. A Moscow not of our dreams, but a bustling hurrying, rude metropolis of the 21st Century! The cold war is over! The Soviet Union is relegated to the dust of history! Moscow is a billionaire's city.

After what felt like forever we arrive at a Holiday Inn in the city's center. After checking in I am exhausted! There is a feeling of winter in the grey air. It is a false promise of snow that brings on my desire to hibernate. My room is large and bright with tall windows that look down on a street corner with multiple kiosks offering candy, cigarettes, fruits and bottled water.

I awake to an early morning sky; almost Caribbean pink. A promise of sunshine. I look forward to seeing the Praktika Theater. It is here that I will perform "Big Butts Girls, Hard-Headed Women" my award-winning show about incarcerated women.

	Moscow (YouTube - click to view)

Idris and I will be in residence for the next two weeks. Artists as social agents, social activism, and the art of social work are at the center of this residency. Our performance" Big Butt Girls" will be our introduction to Moscow. The Praktika theatre is a small sweet theatre, a well-oiled operation!

Katrina the administrative director warmly receives us. The team of technicians and theatre workers are a friendly, creative, hard working group. We work diligently moving into the space. Finally the lights, sounds and props are in place for tech. With few adjustments the show is ready!

We break for supper. House is opened. A full house greets us- each seat is equipped with headphones for translation. A great inspiring performance! A packed house sits through the Q&A after the show. The questions are varied, diverse covering everything from the creative to the political.

[see metro article photo gallery for Big Butt Girls]

Stomp-Clap-Sing (YouTube - click to view)

Creative Performance Workshop (YouTube - click to view)

Rho lecture Ryazan (YouTube - click to view)

Back to Moscow (YouTube - click to view)

After a successful performance we are ready for ten days of lectures and workshops with sociologists, philosophers, community organizers, and theatre professors. We meet with social workers and directors of community centers, drama therapists and social teachers. At the University of Moscow we enjoyed creating theatre with about fifty students. Idris led music and singing exercises with very talented art students. R&B is very popular! I used writings from the Medea Project with the theatre students to great success! It was revelatory to listen to these young actors in Moscow speaking and emoting the words of incarcerated women. Amazing!!

The Last night of working in Moscow one of our students, Julia, invited us for a Russian dinner. At her apartment we ate soup, spreads like lox and chicken salad with a group of her friends. There was very intense conversation touching on all kind of subjects. Julia runs a non-profit called "The Basement" working with troubled teenagers. She wants us to return to Moscow and work with her to create a show that peruses discrimination that Russian "Blacks" (Azerbaijanis', Caucasus people) experience. We drank wine and vodka and ruminated until about 10:30 PM. That afternoon we had our last Moscow workshop. It went very well!

September 24, 2009 — Friday
The Russian weekend!

Sitting on a train riding to Ryazen  — 3 hours south of Moscow with Rhodessa and Maria Shustina our State Department sponsor. Listening to the sounds of the train; we ride through the lush verdant Russian countryside. It is fall and the leaves are just starting to turn. The forests are beautiful-many trees and rolling fields. We arrive in Ryazen and our greeted by our University hosts. Here we will conduct several days of workshops and lectures for the University students. We return to Moscow by car which allows us some tourist time stopping as we drive at sites along the way. We have one day in Moscow before we leave for the U.S. for the long flight home.

Diary September 6, 2009

NBTF flyer

The Breach Part II (YouTube - click to view)

"The Breach" - The Angel (YouTube - click to view)

Music for One Hand Clapping (YouTube - click to view)

Unsung Diva (YouTube - click to view)

The summer is over! Long live the summer! Sitting down and writing my thoughts on the past several months. After returning from an enormous winter tour of "The Love Project" we began preparing immediately for the next production entitled, "The Breach", with Joanna Haigood that will have a work-in-progress performance at the National Black Theater Festival during August. After a lot of trepidation about the concept we began rehearsing at Joanna's studio in the Bay View. The rehearsals were intense! Sometimes taking the whole day. At an early point during the process I suggested a session of improvisation on the themes we had previously rehearsed. This session was videotaped and became the template for the show.

We departed for the Festival taking four Cultural Odyssey shows including The Love Project, The Breach, Music for One Hand Clapping, and The Unsung Diva. The Cultural Odyssey caravan included Stephanie Johnson, Joanna Haigood, Frederick Harris, Angela Dean-Baham, Rhodessa and myself. The New Performance in Black Theatre Series was moved from the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art (SECCA) to the Drama Workshop Theater at Salem College, a wonderful little theater.

The performances went fabulous! In the maestro Billy Strayhorn's words "Onward and Upwards!"

December 2009 - Rhodessa and Idris are just returning from the National Performance Network Annual Meeting in Knoxville, Tennessee. During the meeting they Co-Directed an exciting new project entitled, "Women of Calypso" that is supported by The Pilot Performing Americas Program Creation Fund (PAPCF) that aims to establish a model for the commissioning of international work within the NPN. The project features renowned Calypso artists 'Singing Sandra', Queen Fayola, and Kizzie Ruiz, and musicians who were in residence in Knoxville creating and performing the work. Click here for sneak peak! part 1 | part 2

February - March 2010 - 30th Anniversary Celebration of New Works

January - April 2010 - California Tour of "Artistic Being", a new jazz/world music concert tour featuring Idris Ackamoor and Frederick Harris supported by a California Arts Council Music Presenting Grant.