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      ‘It Taunts the Eye’: Footwork’s Fast Moves Loom Over Chicago

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      Projected onto the Merchandise Mart, “Footnotes” honors a style that’s become popular around the world but isn’t always given recognition in its hometown.Footwork, the Chicago-born music-and-dance form, is famous for its speed. D.J.s deliver a tense, polyrhythmic mix of stuttering samples at the jacked-up rate of 160 beats per minute, and dancers meet the challenge with an onslaught of swivels, kicks and scissoring steps even more bewilderingly quick and intricate than the music.This summer, that speed is finding a match in size. From Tuesday through Sept. 16, “Footnotes,” a short footwork film, is being projected across the 2.5-acre facade of the Merchandise Mart, a behemoth of a building covering two blocks of downtown Chicago. That’s a screen the size of about two football fields. Each night, the incredibly fast dance grows incredibly large.It’s a boost in visibility for a style, developed by Black youth, that hasn’t always been welcome in the city’s center — a style that has become popular around the world but isn’t always given recognition and respect in its hometown.“It’s about damn time,” said the footwork dancer Jamal Oliver, better known as Litebulb. “Footwork has been part of Chicago for 30 years.”Litebulb, in “In the Wurkz,” a touring show by the Era Footwork Crew.Wills GlasspiegelLitebulb, 31, who dances in the film and helped produce it, said that while appearing on the side of a building is exciting, “what’s more fulfilling is giving that opportunity to kids who would never get that chance.” Paying it forward is part of the mission of the Era Footwork Crew, a collective Litebulb helped found in 2014, and of its offshoot nonprofit organization, Open the Circle.In footwork parlance, “opening the circle” means making a space for dancing when the floor is too packed. Open the Circle seeks to do something similar in the field of social justice, not just making spaces for dancing and dancers but also spreading knowledge through education and funneling resources like grant money into the communities that created footwork.“When most people create these kinds of organizations, they’ve already made a fortune and now they want to give back,” Litebulb said. “But we’re doing it from the grass roots.”By design, the work of the Era and Open the Circle blurs in footwork projects, including public “dance downs,” a summer camp (Circle Up), videos, rap singles, a touring show (“In the Wurkz”) and a feature-length documentary on the way (“Body of the City”). The collectives extend footwork into the world of art galleries, universities and music festivals without losing touch with where it came from.Wills Glasspiegel, working on “Footnotes.”Jason PinkneyBrandon Calhoun, adjusting the camera, with DJ Spinn on the MPC drum machine.Jason Pinkney“Footnotes” is an extension of these efforts, both an advertisement and an upshot. “We’ve been doing a lot of work with the City of Chicago,” said Wills Glasspiegel, the documentary filmmaker and scholar who made the film with the Era dancer and animator Brandon Calhoun. “The city has recognized us as a good partner.” (Glasspiegel and Litebulb are both founders of the Era and executive directors of Open the Circle.)In this case, the Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events reached out about its “Year of Chicago Music” project and a partnership with Art on theMart, which has been projecting public art on the building since 2018.Glasspiegel jumped at the chance. “Footwork is emblematic of our city,” he said, “so we tried to make the film as Chicago as possible, expressing the city as we Chicagoans experience it.” The filmmakers brought in musicians with deep local roots: Angel Bat Dawid; Amal Hubert of Hypnotic Brass Ensemble; and the Chicago Bucket Boys, who, Glasspiegel said, “are the sound of Chicago’s streets.” Elisha Chandler, a dancer with “In the Wurkz,” sings.But if the film’s musicians connect footwork to the city, its method of composition connects the musicians to footwork. To create the soundtrack, the Bucket Boys improvised at 160 beats per minute, then the others laid down improvisations in response, riffing on the blues song “Sweet Home, Chicago.” DJ Spinn, a seminal figure in the genre, took all those pieces and treated them as samples, turning them into footwork.Using the music as a map, Glasspiegel edited together footage of the musicians with footage of dancers. The contribution of Calhoun, also known as Chief Manny, was crucial, too: transforming some of that footage into animation. It makes the dancing more legible.Angel Bat Dawid in a scene from “Footnotes.”Wills Glasspiegel and Brandon K. CalhounThat’s particularly important for “Footnotes,” since the Merchandise Mart presents a challenging surface for projection — the facade is perforated with hundreds of windows that may or may not be lighted. But the animation is useful in conveying footwork more generally. “Footwork moves so fast, it taunts the eye,” Glasspiegel said. Calhoun — with his dancer’s inside knowledge — clarifies its phrasing and shape.At one point in the film, an animated DJ Spinn taps an MPC, the sampling device that is the main instrument of footwork music, and an animated dancer bounces on the keys. This image is important, Glasspiegel said, because it’s a metaphor. “That’s a driving theme for us — that footwork is both music and dance — which people might not know if they don’t know the history.”Footwork developed in the late 1980s and early ’90s in dance clubs, community centers and roller-rink discos that played house music. Another important site was the Bud Billiken parade, one of the largest African American parades in the country and one of the oldest, happening every summer since 1929. In these places, foundational footwork moves, like the Holy Ghost (a slack-limbed shaking) and the Erk n Jerk (a sequence of seesawing, sideways kicks), emerged before footwork got its name.Some of the top dance crews of those days — Main Attraction, House-O-Matics, U-Phi-U — included dancers who became D.J.s, most importantly RP Boo and DJ Rashad. And it was these dancers-turned-D.J.s who created the footwork sound, increasing the tempo and stripping things down to ratchet up the tension (or throw off rival dancers) in dance battles — intense, improvisational face-offs that became the core of footwork culture in the early 2000s. Overlapping rhythms gave dancers more options, and competition pushed innovation.As had happened before with hip-hop — when M.C.s, who made money for the music industry, eclipsed b-boys, who didn’t — the music spread without the dance, especially abroad. “People didn’t really see the dance until DJ Rashad and DJ Spinn brought dancers on tour with them in 2010,” Litebulb said.Elisha Chandler, center, a dancer with “In the Wurkz,” who sings in the “Footnotes” film.Wills GlasspiegelLitebulb was one of those dancers, discovering rapturous fans in Europe but finding less recognition back home. “Too often dancers are viewed as background or bodies, not artists,” he said. “It’s important to have the balance, celebrating what the DJs are doing and what the dancers are doing.”“Footnotes” does that, but it also shows other ways that the Era and Open the Circle have been influencing the footwork scene. When footwork moved from clubs, parades and dance groups into more insular battles, women got pushed out. The Era and Open the Circle have been inviting them back in.“In battling culture, women were expected to stand on the side and look cute,” said Diamond Hardiman, a 27-year-old dancer who appears in the film. “You couldn’t get in the circle.”Women of her generation began battling one another. “It was empowering, seeing what we could do with each other to make ourselves better and letting the guys know that us women can do the same thing that y’all doing.”Diamond Hardiman: “In battling culture, women were expected to stand on the side and look cute. You couldn’t get in the circle.”Jason PinkneyWomen like Hardiman made space for themselves, but Open the Circle has also helped by reconnecting footwork with the youth dance groups in which it began. These groups are filled with girls and often run by women. (Women in the family of Shkunna Stewart, who directs the group Bringing Out Talent, have been running groups for four generations.)Members of such groups are the core population of Open the Circle’s summer camps on the South and East Sides of Chicago, camps where women like Hardiman teach. Some of these children appear in “Footnotes.” A girl called Ladybug leaps like a grasshopper, a dozen stories tall.The goal of the camps is broader than correcting the gender imbalance, though. “In our community, footwork is kind of viewed as nostalgia, but if we can get the kids, then footwork can live on,” Litebulb said. “It will be a whole new evolution than what we thought it was.”And it’s about more than perpetuating a style. As some of the camp T-shirts attest, “Footwork saves lives.”“It really did save my life,” Hardiman said, echoing the sentiment of other Era members. “I grew up seeing the stuff I wasn’t supposed to see at a young age, but footwork showed me I didn’t have to do those things.”“I don’t want my child to go through what I had to go through,” she added.That aspiration can be felt in the film as well. “The big kicker for me is showing the kids anything’s possible,” Litebulb said. “Look at yourself on the side of a building now. Who would have thought?” More

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      Bob Koester, Revered Figure in Jazz and Blues, Dies at 88

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      Mr. Koester’s Delmark Records and his Chicago record store were vital in preserving and promoting music the big labels tended to overlook.Bob Koester, who founded the influential Chicago blues and jazz label Delmark Records and was also the proprietor of an equally influential record store where players and fans mingled as they sought out new and vintage sounds, died on Wednesday at a care center in Evanston, Ill., near his home in Chicago. He was 88.His wife, Sue Koester, said the cause was complications of a stroke.Mr. Koester was a pivotal figure in Chicago and beyond, releasing early efforts by Sun Ra, Anthony Braxton, Jimmy Dawkins, Magic Sam and numerous other jazz and blues musicians. He captured the sound of Chicago’s vibrant blues scene of the 1960s on records like “Hoodoo Man Blues,” a much admired album by the singer and harmonica player Junior Wells, featuring the guitarist Buddy Guy, that was recorded in 1965.Delmark captured the sound of Chicago’s vibrant blues scene in records like Junior Wells’s “Hoodoo Man Blues.” It also documented early examples of the avant-garde jazz being promulgated in Chicago by musicians like Anthony Braxton.“Bob told us, ‘Play me a record just like you played last night in the club,’” Mr. Guy recalled in a 2009 interview with The New York Times, and somehow he caught the electric feel of a live performance. In 2008 the record was named to the Grammy Hall of Fame.About the same time, Delmark was recording early examples of the avant-garde jazz being promulgated by the pianist Muhal Richard Abrams and other members of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, an organization formed in Chicago in 1965. The company’s recordings were not, generally, the kind that generated a lot of sales.“If he felt something was significant, he wasn’t going to think about whether it would sell,” Ms. Koester said by phone. “He wanted people to hear it and experience the significance.”As Howard Mandel, the jazz critic and author, put it in a phone interview: “He followed his own star. He was not at all interested in trends.”For decades Mr. Koester’s record store, the Jazz Record Mart, provided enough financial support to allow Delmark to make records that didn’t sell a lot of copies. The store was more than an outlet for Delmark’s artists; it was packed with all sorts of records, many of them from collections Mr. Koester bought or traded for.“The place was just an amazing crossroads of people,” said Mr. Mandel, who worked there for a time in the early 1970s. Music lovers would come looking for obscure records; tourists would come because of the store’s reputation; musicians would come to swap stories and ideas.Mr. Koester in an undated photo. His store was packed with all sorts of records, many of them from collections he bought or traded for.Chicago Sun-Times“Shakey Walter Horton and Ransom Knowling would hang out there, and Sunnyland Slim and Homesick James were always dropping by,” the harmonica player and bandleader Charlie Musselwhite, who was a clerk at the store in the mid-1960s, told The Times in 2009, rattling off the names of some fellow blues musicians. “You never knew what fascinating characters would wander in, so I always felt like I was in the eye of the storm there.”Mr. Mandel said part of the fun was tapping into Mr. Koester’s deep reservoir of arcane musical knowledge.“You’d get into a conversation with him,” he said, “and in 10 minutes he was talking about some obscure wormhole of a serial number on a pressing.”Ms. Koester said the store held a special place in her husband’s heart — so much so that when he finally closed it in 2016, citing rising rent, he opened another, Bob’s Blues and Jazz Mart, almost immediately.“He loved going into the studio in the days when he was recording Junior Wells and Jimmy Dawkins,” she said, “but retail was in his blood.”He especially loved talking to customers.“Often they came into the store looking for one thing,” she said, “and he pointed them in another direction.”Robert Gregg Koester was born on Oct. 30, 1932, in Wichita, Kan. His father, Edward, was a petroleum geologist, and his mother, Mary (Frank) Koester, was a homemaker.He grew up in Wichita. A 78 r.p.m. record by the Original Dixieland Jazz Band in his grandfather’s collection intrigued him when he was young, he said in an oral history recorded in 2017 by the National Association of Music Merchants. But, he told Richard Marcus in a 2008 interview for blogcritics.com, further musical exploration wasn’t easy.“I never liked country music, and growing up in Wichita, Kansas, there wasn’t much else,” he said. “There was a mystery to the names of those old blues guys — Speckled Red, Pinetop Perkins — that made it sound really appealing. Probably something to do with a repressed Catholic upbringing.”College at Saint Louis University, where he enrolled to study cinematography, broadened his musical opportunities.“My parents didn’t want me going to school in one of the big cities like New York or Chicago because they didn’t want me to be distracted from my studies by music,” he said. “Unfortunately for them, there were Black jazz clubs all around the university.”Music lovers would come to the Jazz Record Mart looking for obscure records; tourists would come because of the store’s reputation; musicians would come to swap stories and ideas.Sally Ryan for The New York TimesHe also joined the St. Louis Jazz Club, a jazz appreciation group. And he started accumulating and trading records, especially traditional jazz 78s, out of his dorm room. The rapidly growing record business crowded out his studies.“I went to three years at Saint Louie U,” he said in the oral history. “They told me not to come back for a fourth year.”His dorm-room business turned into a store, where he sold both new and used records.“I’d make regular runs, hitting all the secondhand stores, Father Dempsey’s Charities, places like that, buying used records,” he told The St. Louis Post-Dispatch in 1993 for an article marking the 40th anniversary of the founding of his record label. “And I’d order records through the mail. Then I’d sell records at the Jazz Club meetings. That was the beginning of my retail business.”He had started recording musicians as well. He originally called his label Delmar, after a St. Louis boulevard, but once he relocated to Chicago in the late 1950s he added the K.He acquired a Chicago record shop from a trumpeter named Seymour Schwartz in 1959 and soon turned it into the Jazz Record Mart. His label not only recorded the players of the day but also reissued older recordings.“He loved obscure record labels from the ‘30s and ‘40s, and he acquired several of them,” Mr. Mandel said. “He reissued a lot of stuff from fairly obscure artists who had recorded independently. He salvaged their best work.”Mr. Koester was white; most of the artists he dealt with were Black.“He was totally into Black music,” Mr. Mandel said. “Not only Black music, but he definitely gave Black music its due in a way that other labels were not.”That made Mr. Koester stand out in Chicago when he went out on the town sampling talent.“When a white guy showed up in a Black bar, it was assumed he was either a cop, a bill collector or looking for sex,” Mr. Koester told blogcritic.com. “When they found out you were there to listen to the music and for no other reason, you were a friend. The worst times I had were from white cops who would try and throw me out of the bars. They probably thought I was there dealing drugs or something.”It was the atmosphere of those nightclubs that he tried to capture in his recording studio.“I don’t believe in production,” he said. “I’m not about to bring in a bunch of stuff that you can’t hear a guy doing when he’s up onstage.”In addition to his wife, whom he met when she worked across the street from his store and whom he married in 1967, Mr. Koester is survived by a son, Robert Jr.; a daughter, Kate Koester; and two grandchildren.Ms. Koester said their son will continue to operate Bob’s Blues and Jazz Mart. Mr. Koester sold Delmark in 2018.Mr. Koester’s record company played an important role in documenting two musical genres, but his wife said that beyond playing a little piano, he was not musically trained himself.“He would say his music was listening,” she said. More

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      Pervis Staples, Who Harmonized With the Staple Singers, Dies at 85

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      He sang alongside his father and sisters as his family’s gospel group achieved renown in the late 1950s and ’60s.Pervis Staples, who sang harmony and also provided quieter forms of support during the rise to gospel stardom of his family’s group, the Staple Singers, died on May 6 at his home in Dolton, Ill. He was 85.The death was confirmed by Adam Ayers, a spokesman for Mr. Staples’s sister, Mavis Staples. Mr. Ayers did not specify the cause.Pervis Staples joined two of his sisters, Cleotha and Mavis, and their father, Roebuck Staples, known as Pops, on travels through the gospel circuit in the late 1950s and ’60s. Their sound was heavily influenced by the Delta blues that Roebuck had learned during his youth in rural Mississippi. Roebuck and Mavis were the lead vocalists; Cleotha and Pervis sang harmony.At a time when performers like Bobby Womack and Curtis Mayfield were starting their careers singing hymns and spirituals, the Staples were gospel stars. They performed in their Sunday best, with Pervis and Roebuck wearing matching dark suits and shiny alligator shoes while Cleotha and Mavis wore bridesmaids’ dresses.In an interview with Greg Kot for his 2014 biography of Mavis Staples, “I’ll Take You There,” Pervis compared their effect on ecstatic church audiences to “a miracle or the hand of God.”The group contributed to the soundtrack of the civil rights movement, touring with the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and recording some of Bob Dylan’s more political songs, including “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” and “Masters of War.”Pervis also helped write vocal arrangements, protected his sisters and ventured into segregated towns to buy groceries.As popular tastes changed in the 1960s, Pervis encouraged his father, the leader of the group, to expand its range beyond gospel music, asking, “Do you think religion was designed to make pleasures less?”Even as their lyrics retained a social message, the Staple Singers went on to adopt more of a soul-music style. They placed several records in the Top 40 in the 1970s and in 1972 had a No. 1 hit, “I’ll Take You There.”But by that time, Pervis had left to pursue his own ventures.He tried his hand as an agent, representing the R&B group the Emotions, and opened Perv’s Place, a nightclub in Chicago that was popular in the mid-1970s, before the rise of disco.He rejoined the family group when they were inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 1999.Pervis Staples was born on Nov. 18, 1935, in Drew, in western Mississippi, and raised in Chicago. His father shoveled fertilizer in stockyards and laid bricks before putting the family vocal group together. Pervis’s mother, Oceola (Ware) Staples, worked as a maid and laundress at a hotel.He attended grammar school with the future singing stars Sam Cooke and Lou Rawls. After class, Pervis and his friends would practice singing under street lamps and in Cooke’s basement. The boys had voices so sweet, “they could make the mice come down the pole and watch,” he told Mr. Kot.When Roebuck Staples formed the Staple Singers in 1948, Pervis sang second lead and hit the high notes. He was replaced as second lead by Mavis when his voice dropped an octave during puberty.Pervis Staples graduated from Dunbar Vocational High School in 1954. He was drafted into the Army in 1958 and honorably discharged in 1960.Another sister, Yvonne, replaced Pervis when he left the Staple Singers. After Perv’s Place closed, he remained active in the music business.Mr. Staples’s two marriages ended in divorce. He is survived by his sister Mavis, who is now the last surviving member of the Staple Singers, as well as five daughters, Gwen Staples, Reverly Staples, Perleta Sanders, Paris Staples and Eala Sams; a son, Pervis; seven grandchildren; and seven great-grandchildren.The Associated Press contributed reporting. More

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      Taking Over Victory Gardens to Make a ‘Theater for All’

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      CHICAGO — Ken-Matt Martin, the incoming artistic director of Victory Gardens Theater here, said he never has revealed this publicly before, but he has a Sankofa bird tattooed on his back.This mythical creature, with a name that means “return to retrieve” in Ghana’s Akan language, is depicted with its feet pointing forward and its head turned backward — a reminder, Martin said, of “making sure you have a reverence and understanding of the past so that as you move into the future, you know what the hell you’ve come from. That’s key to how I move, how I operate in the world.”And that’s the delicate balance Martin, at 32, intends to strike as he takes the reins of this 47-year-old Tony Award-winning institution that had an even more tumultuous 2020 than most theater companies.Between late May and early June, a key group of affiliated playwrights quit en masse, protesters demonstrated outside the boarded-up Lincoln Park theater, and its white executive director, who recently had been named artistic director as well, and board president resigned.Victory Gardens has a new board president, Charles E. Harris II, and a new acting managing director, Roxanna Conner, and on March 17 it announced that Martin would become its third artistic director since its 1974 founding. He begins April 19.That this new leadership triumvirate is entirely Black represents a first for Victory Gardens, a theater that has championed diversity while sometimes struggling to live up to those ideals. And this shift is being echoed throughout the Chicago arts scene, where Black leaders have secured the top jobs at House Theater, Sideshow Theater Company, Hubbard Street Dance and the Second City.These moves came in the wake of the social-justice movement spurred by the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis and fueled by the demands of the “We See You, White American Theater” national coalition of theater artists of color.“I would not be in the position I’m in if we had not had that collective awakening this past year,” said Lanise Antoine Shelley, the House Theater’s new artistic director.“Sure, something is shifting,” Martin said, “but you’re also talking about highly qualified people getting jobs that they’re more than qualified for.”The cast of “Prowess,” a play by Ike Holter that Martin directed at the Pyramid Theater Company, which he co-founded in Des Moines, Iowa.Mark TurekPunctuating his assertions with laughter while sitting outside a South Loop cafe blocks from his apartment, the Little Rock, Ark., native was casual and comfortable as he discussed the weighty issues facing theater and the larger culture.“I woke up this morning and was like: You know? I’m not going to be cagey today. I’m just going to tell it straight,” he said.He wore a baseball cap from Brown University, where he received his M.F.A. in directing, and a black mask from Chicago’s Goodman Theater, where he was serving as associate producer alongside the longtime artistic director Robert Falls when he landed the Victory Gardens job.He was introduced to the entertainment world at age 12, when his mother drove him to Atlanta to audition for the Nickelodeon series “All That.” He landed a bit part and when that contract later prohibited him from taking a role on another network, he said he became determined to learn the business side of entertainment.In Little Rock, Martin said, the majority of his classmates — as well as teachers, principals, and doctors — were Black. Moving to predominantly white Des Moines, Iowa, where he earned degrees in musical theater and public relations at Drake University, and encountered racism on the street, was a shock to the system.Yet he remained in the city to pull off what he said will remain his crowning achievement: He co-founded the Pyramid Theater Company, which has thrived connecting the work of Black playwrights and artists to majority-Black audiences.Martin said it took “chutzpah” to make that happen in such an environment: “There were people saying, ‘We don’t need another theater. You all need to be working to make the theaters we already have more diverse.’ ”Antonio Woodard, left, and Tiffany Johnson in the Pyramid production of James Baldwin’s “Amen Corner,” which Martin directed.Andrea MarkowskiIn 2015 Martin began a yearlong Goodman Theater apprenticeship. Afterward, as he pursued his M.F.A. at Brown University, he did work at the affiliated Trinity Repertory Company, where he recalled being asked at a meeting: “Hey, can you help us figure out how to better market this show to Black audiences?”“Mind you, I’m a student.” He laughed. “What does that say that you have to come to me to figure that thing out?”As producing director at the Williamstown Theater Festival, he spent the non-summer months in New York City negotiating contracts and transfer deals while having such random encounters as passing Adam Driver in a stairwell while the “Star Wars” actor practiced lines for a play.“I’m the only person of color, period, in 90 percent of the conversations that I’m having,” Martin recalled, “and yet here I am, just this kid from Little Rock, and I can run into Kylo Ren on the way to my office.”The Goodman enticed Martin to return to Chicago in November 2019 to take the No. 2 artistic position to Falls. Martin did hands-on work with such productions as Jocelyn Bioh’s “School Girls; Or, The African Mean Girls Play,” which had an artistic team of all Black women.“None of us had been in a room like that before,” the show’s director, Lili-Anne Brown, said. “He understood how significant that was, and he worked to uplift it and protect it.”Ciera Dawn in the Goodman Theater production of “School Girls; Or, the African Mean Girls Play,” which had an artistic team of Black women.Liz LaurenThen the pandemic hit, live performances were suspended, and the team had to navigate a new path through the shutdown and ensuing social unrest.Martin stressed the need for “nuance” as he discussed the Goodman. He referred to Falls and the Goodman executive director Roche Schulfer each as a “mentor” and “dear, dear friend” yet said his experiences there and at Williamstown and Trinity Rep solidified his determination to pursue a leadership position.“What I wasn’t interested in doing any longer was being the Black or brown shield and token within some of these larger institutions that had snatched me up,” he said.“The theater’s mission literally says to be a theater for all,” Martin says.Nolis Anderson for The New York TimesA few miles north of the Goodman, Victory Gardens had its own problems.Founded in 1974 and now based in the historic Biograph Theater in upscale Lincoln Park, the theater has traditionally focused on a diverse range of new work by Chicago writers. The theater’s first official playwrights’ ensemble included Steve Carter, Gloria Bond Clunie and Charles Smith, as well as John Logan, Jeffrey Sweet and Claudia Allen, who wrote extensively about L.G.B.T.Q. characters. The Cuban-American playwright Nilo Cruz joined later.In 2001, Victory Gardens became the third Chicago recipient of the Tony Award for Outstanding Regional Theater. When Dennis Zacek, the first artistic director, announced his retirement in 2010 after 34 years, the board named the acclaimed director and playwright Chay Yew as his successor, making Yew a rare artistic director of color at a major American theater.Lucas Hnath’s “Hillary and Clinton” had its premiere at Victory Gardens and later was presented on Broadway, starring John Lithgow, left, and Laurie Metcalf.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesYew shook things up over his nine years in the top job, bringing in his own ensemble of playwrights while aiming for a younger, more diverse audience and tallying his share of successes. (Lucas Hnath’s “Hillary and Clinton” had a Broadway production in 2019.) After Yew announced his departure, the board in May 2020 named Erica Daniels, already its executive director, as its new executive artistic director. In response the playwrights’ group resigned, blasting the board for not communicating with the theater’s artists or for conducting a national search.The administration’s decision in early June to board up the theater’s frontage — at a time when other theaters in Chicago and New York were opening their doors to protesters decrying racial injustice — inflamed tensions. About 100 activists assembled outside the Biograph on June 6 and posted messages such as “BLACK LIVES MATTER. But do they matter to this theater?”Two days later, Daniels resigned, as did Steve Miller, the board chair. A more inclusive, transparent search process followed.“I was one of the loudmouths yelling at them, and months later they asked me, ‘Do you want to be one of the people who helps us chose our next artistic director?’” said Brown, the “School Girls” director. “Victory Gardens’ board has done more work at transformation than anyone else I’ve seen.”She was pleased with the choice of Martin, saying, “I think this is an opportunity to show everyone in the national theater forum what it really can look like to gut rehab a historically white institution.”Falls said seeing Martin leave the Goodman was “bittersweet,” but “it’s a fantastic moment for him and the city of Chicago and nationally. He’s an extraordinary person and a wonderful artist who brings a plethora of skills that most people do not have in running a theater.”Like just about every theater company, Victory Gardens is trying to figure out when and how it will welcome live audiences back into the building.Martin said he also intends to use the connections he made at Williamstown to give more Victory Gardens productions an afterlife in New York and elsewhere. And he expressed interest in bringing back older Victory Gardens playwrights to foster “larger intergenerational conversations.”“But at the same time, yeah, I’m going to have some new writers,” he said, “because I know a lot of dope writers.”He spoke most energetically about the need for Victory Gardens, onstage and off, to reflect and engage with the city’s broad range of communities. “The theater’s mission literally says to be a theater for all,” he said.He hopes to draw on the wisdom of an emerging “cohort” of fellow artistic directors of color in theater — not to mention the inspiration of that Sankofa bird — to pull it off.He’s not worried.“If I figured out how to get Black people to come to a theater in Des Moines,” he said, “I can probably figure out how to get all peoples within this larger beautiful city to come out as well.” More

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      Damon Locks and the Black Monument Ensemble’s Spiritual, Funky Escape

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      The Chicago musician’s group is following up its 2019 album, “Where Future Unfolds,” with an LP reacting to the events of 2020 titled “Now.”During the summer of 2020, as protesters took to the streets after the deaths of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery and Breonna Taylor, and the United States once again reckoned with fierce racial and ideological divides, the Chicago-based vocalist, producer and sound artist Damon Locks found himself at a creative impasse.“Where Future Unfolds,” his 2019 album as the leader of the 18-member Black Monument Ensemble, expressed the pain of seeing Black people killed without adequate justice. Should — and could — Locks gather the Ensemble during the pandemic to record new music in response to what was happening around them?“The challenge was, ‘What would I say now?’” Locks, 52, said in a recent phone interview from Logan Square. “And when breath is the most dangerous thing around, how do you record up to six people singing?”He emailed a local studio engineer about recording with a condensed version of the group in the building’s backyard garden. Two obstacles made themselves evident. One, it was hot. “I think it was like 93 degrees the first day, which is a lot,” Locks said. Then there were the cicadas; they were chirping so loudly you would’ve thought they were in the band.“They were seriously right on beat a number of times,” said the clarinetist Angel Bat Dawid, who plays in the Ensemble.Undeterred, Locks and the Ensemble convened at Experimental Sound Studio in late August and recorded what would become “Now,” the band’s new album, out Friday. Where the group’s 2019 LP spun racial disharmony into a sacred celebration of Blackness, the new record envisions an alternate universe of infinite possibility. “The moment ‘now’ is not accounted for,” Locks said. “So anything can happen, you know?”Partially inspired by sci-fi shows like HBO’s “Watchmen” and “Lovecraft Country,” where Black people literally transport themselves out of perilous situations, “Now” uses up-tempo electro-funk and lyrics that spin societal despair into forward-looking optimism. The album — and Locks’s music, in general — also explores the concept of “the Black nod,” or the unspoken mode of communication between Black people in public spaces. In turn, Locks’s Ensemble work — with all its spiritual jazz arrangements, vibrant drum breaks and esoteric movie clips — feels overtly communal, like a private conversation between those who understand the nuances of Black culture.“To me, the nod speaks to this destabilized scenario in the United States and acknowledges that you’re here,” Locks said. “‘I understand that this is crazy, so I see you.’” Locks, who also teaches art in Chicago Public Schools and at the Stateville Correctional Center, a maximum security men’s prison about an hour outside of Chicago, said he was encouraged by the activism he saw in the wake of protests and the pandemic. “I took inspiration from people checking in on people, people trying to get money from one place to the other, trying to find ways to get food to people who didn’t have food,” he said.Locks grew up in Silver Spring, Md., and was introduced to punk as an eighth-grader. One year later, he started going to punk and hardcore shows just down the road in neighboring Washington, D.C., where he saw now-legendary bands like Minor Threat and Bad Brains.As a nascent musician and visual artist, he loved the freedom these groups exercised onstage. That inspired him to create work based on his own feelings, regardless of what was popular. In 1987, as a freshman at the School of Visual Arts in New York, he became fast friends with a classmate named Fred Armisen, who’d only gone to the college to form a band. (“Because all of my favorite bands were art school bands,” Armisen said in a recent interview.) Armisen couldn’t really find anyone to play with, until he met Locks, who had spiky red-and-black dreadlocks.Locks discovered punk rock as a teen and played in the group Trenchmouth with Fred Armisen and Wayne Montana for eight years.Jermaine Jr. Jackson for The New York Times“Damon had a jacket with the Damned painted on it, and I loved the Damned,” Armisen remembered. A year later, Locks transferred to the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Instead of saying goodbye, Armisen dropped out of S.V.A. and moved too. Another friend and bandmate, the bassist Wayne Montana, followed suit. “That’s how much I believed in him,” Armisen said. They started the experimental rock band Trenchmouth in 1988.The band lasted eight years, during which Locks earned acclaim as a powerful vocalist, performer and visual artist. He made the band’s fliers, collagelike drawings mixing intricate sketches and printed images, which he photocopied at Kinko’s. “That’s the first place where I was like, ‘Oh, this guy is just a genius,” Armisen said. “This is a brilliant person who cares about every millimeter of what something looks like and sounds like.”After Trenchmouth split, Locks and Montana formed the Eternals, an amorphous outfit with a sound rooted in reggae and jazz. Where Trenchmouth scanned as punk and post-hardcore, the Eternals tried to be even weirder. “We let that free openness overtake the music,” Montana said. “We started using some samples and clips from movies in Trenchmouth, but as we got older and bought more equipment, it allowed tonal things to happen that we were always reaching for.”Locks was doing a studio residency at the Hyde Park Art Center in 2017 when he had the idea of putting singers together to expand the sound of his performances. He contacted Josephine Lee, the director of the Chicago Children’s Choir, who sent him a list of five adult singers who could bring his songs to life. The first performance was in his art center studio, where “I just opened the doors and put chairs out in the hall,” he said. The band landed a gig at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. The percussionists Arif Smith and Dana Hall agreed to do the show. The cornetist Ben LaMar Gay, a friend of Locks’s, joined, too.The band’s breakthrough performance came in 2018 at the Garfield Park Conservatory as part of the Red Bull Music Festival, where Locks brought in dancers, a few new singers and Dawid, who filled in for Gay. The Black Monument Ensemble was born; “Where Future Unfolds” is a live recording of the Garfield Park performance. The group’s membership, and size, is fluid: “Some of the singers have changed over time but I consider it a family and possibly folks might show up again,” Locks said.On “Now,” Locks purposely left studio chatter on the album to underline the band’s kinship. (Listeners can experience the joy that comes after the sessions are done, as the melody fades and the Ensemble applauds the take.) “For it to be such a hard time right now, and for us to have this time to record, it was absolutely beautiful,” Dawid said. “We were just thankful to see each other again.”Locks said that his art is designed to speak one-on-one with the receiver. “I’m just trying to communicate as a human being,” he said. “The idea is to be in classrooms talking to students, to be in Stateville talking to artists who are incarcerated, trying to get their voices out there.” And with the collective anguish endured over this past year, he hopes “Now” can bring some positivity: “I’m talking about things that inspire me and passing that along.” More

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      Bonzie Longs for a Post-Pandemic ‘Reincarnation’

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      On her third album, the Chicago-based songwriter offers melody, mystery and prized imperfections.Nina Ferraro, the songwriter who records as Bonzie, had been working since 2018 on her third album, “Reincarnation.” It would be the continuation of a fully independent career that has consistently yielded richly melodic and mysterious songs. Then Covid-19 hit, and, like everyone else, she had to change her plans. She moved from Los Angeles to Chicago, where she had lived before; she learned how to be her own recording engineer; she immersed herself in studying Japanese. The centerpiece of her album-in-progress became a song she wrote during quarantine: “Alone,” an understated, haunted, not quite acoustic ballad that she released in 2020.As she continued writing and recording, the songs for the album — released on March 16 — converged into a narrative arc from separation to reconnection, pondering mortality and tenacity. “Either you want to die or you don’t want to die/Both are so lethal/Me, I’m stuck in the middle of the glorious combat,” she sings, gently and matter-of-factly, in “Lethal.” It’s a song she wrote before the pandemic.“That’s just the nature of this unstable rock that we’re on,” Bonzie said on a Skype video call from her home in Chicago. “We feel some of these things very strongly right now, but they have always been there. It’s impossible not to be affected by the world situation, but a lot of things are constant for me.”Bonzie, 25, was wearing a hoodie with a design by one of her favorite songwriters, Daniel Johnston. It showed the “Silver Sufferer” (a skull-faced parody of the Marvel superhero Silver Surfer) singing the opening line of the Beatles’ “With a Little Help from My Friends.” An electric bass and an electric guitar leaned against the walls; her Yorkie, Kiraki (“Sunday” in Armenian), spent time in her lap.Behind her was a large picture frame holding a small yellow rectangle: a sketch on a Post-it note made by the prolific Chicago producer Steve Albini, one of Bonzie’s early supporters. It showed a bell curve of creativity — a burst of inspiration and work followed by quickly diminishing returns.Bonzie said she was inspired by the Japanese aesthetic of wabi-sabi: “You preserve these natural imperfections that are actually beautiful details.”Alexa Viscius for The New York Times“I just thought it was funny,” she said. “There are two people in you at all times. One is this endless spirit soul, that’s just creative and will go forever. And then the other one is trying to gently guide that person, to remind you that you’re physical material. The curve represents time spent creatively, and then the X represents where you stop.”On the new album, Bonzie’s music merges the singer-songwriter staples of guitar, piano and finely turned melodies with synthesizers and programmed beats. For most of the album, Bonzie worked with a co-producer, DJ Camper, who has extensive credits in hip-hop and R&B. One song, the trap-tinged “Up to U,” was co-produced by Yeti Beats, better known for working with Doja Cat. The album’s title song, “Reincarnation,” envisions a post-pandemic renaissance: “We will change, I swear we’re gonna change,” its chorus insists.Bonzie was 12 when she began singing her own songs weekly at a coffeehouse in her hometown, Racine, Wis. She didn’t want to use her own name, and eventually chose Bonzie as an abstract word that also looked good graphically in capital letters. Using a stage name “just felt better to be able to say everything I wanted to say,” she said, “and not be worried when I was singing about all of these dark, deep secrets that I wouldn’t tell anybody.”She moved with her family to Chicago, where, as a high schooler, she performed at well-known clubs like Schubas Tavern and Beat Kitchen. She self-released a debut EP as Nina Ferraro when she was 15, followed by her full-length debut album as Bonzie, “Rift Into the Secret of Things” — a phrase from Henry David Thoreau’s “Walden” — in 2013. She had already begun to mingle folky coffeehouse basics with electronic experimentation, and she found fans among the city’s indie musicians.“I was impressed by her drive and her seriousness at a very early age,” Albini said by phone from his Chicago studio, Electrical Audio. “She was more serious about her decisions and about her aesthetic than a lot of people her age. It was clear that she had listened and thought very deeply about what she was doing. And the thing that made her stand out immediately was just a singular drive — not to get famous, not just to become known, but to express herself in a way that meant something to her.”Bonzie’s music grew more elaborate on her second album, “Zone on Nine,” released in 2017. It roved from straightforward acoustic strumming to the delicate sonic apparitions and intricate backup vocals of freak-folk to the crunch of hard-rock guitars; her lyrics could be startlingly direct or poetic and elusive. Now, with “Reincarnation,” she has stripped back her music. “I wanted it to be more personal,” she said.Her interest in Japanese culture — which began with high-school exposure to Pokémon and anime — led her to the aesthetic of wabi-sabi, the idea that “artifacts that come from your medium, that you didn’t intend, are what you highlight and you keep,” she said. “You preserve these natural imperfections that are actually beautiful details. It’s accepting the nature of your imperfect humanness. When producing this record, I thought about that a lot. Like, that’s not perfect with my voice, and that’s not like the most shiny, brilliant, beautiful take, but loving that imperfection that we all have.”She was also seeking what she had heard in gospel music. “Some of the best voices in the world are gospel singers,” she said. “And I like the way that it feels like there’s nothing that’s unneeded in gospel production.”Once the pandemic is over, “I think it’s inevitably going to birth a new type of life,” Bonzie said. “I think that there could be a lot of positive things that come on the other side.”Alexa Viscius for The New York TimesShe came across the productions of DJ Camper — who has worked with Brandy, Drake, Jay-Z, Tamar Braxton and H.E.R. — while living in Los Angeles. By coincidence, she found his Twitter account on his birthday, which was also her older brother’s birthday. She contacted him. “We kind of felt like we’d known each other for a really long time,” she said. “He’s a musician’s musician. We related on that level where we would be producing and we didn’t even talk at all. We would find something and we’d just, like, look at each other for a second. And then that would mean like, yeah.”“Reincarnation” begins with “Caves,” which has psychedelia-tinged electric guitars and lyrics that could be about obsessive love or addiction. “I’ve been waiting my whole life/To feel this good for just one night,” Bonzie sings.She said, “You have to start off in a place of letting go of stuff, and then you can explore other things.”In “Slated,” she sings about a lonely oblivion, intoning, “I hope that you will find me,” as electronic tones ripple around her; in “Eternity,” she fingerpicks quietly and repeats, “I wish that you could stay, but these things fade,” as harp, orchestral strings and electronics materialize and vanish around her lustrous voice. But she ends the album with a hymnlike affirmation: “Come to Me.” Floating on synthesizers and organ chords, she sings, “Hold you up/No fear/We are free.”She said, “I feel like so much has changed so fast, and we’re still adapting to the pandemic. We’re still in a shock period. Once we get out of it, I think it’s inevitably going to birth a new type of life. I think that there could be a lot of positive things that come on the other side of this era of humanity.”Like Bonzie’s other songs, “Come to Me” isn’t simply topical, conceptual or autobiographical. “A lot of things go into the pot,” she said. “And then there’s some alchemy, and then the song comes out.” More

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      Before Lockdown, This Super Fan Went to 105 Shows in One Season

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }At HomeFall in Love: With TenorsConsider: Miniature GroceriesSpend 24 Hours: With Andra DayGet: A Wildlife CameraAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyHe Went to 105 Shows in One Season. Now He Watches TV.What has this year been like for the most voracious of culture vultures? A super fan in Chicago lets us into his life without the arts.Edward T. Minieka, a 77-year-old arts enthusiast, in the doorway of the Chicago apartment where he has spent much of his time during lockdown, unable to take in live events.Credit…Evan Jenkins for The New York TimesMarch 11, 2021, 5:00 a.m. ETEdward T. Minieka was 5 years old when his parents started taking him to see shows.The Miniekas lived in Bridgeport, on Chicago’s South Side, and hopped a streetcar to get downtown. They watched “King Midas and the Golden Touch” at the Goodman Children’s Theater, plus family programs at Symphony Center and the Civic Opera House. On good days, there might be a visit to the Woolworth’s lunch counter; on really good days, the Walnut Room at Marshall Field’s.Minieka is now 77 years old. He still lives in Chicago. And he still loves the arts.In the last prepandemic season, he bought tickets for 105 live performances — symphony, opera and lots of theater.Then, thanks to the lockdown, he got a TV.With his new (to him) TV, Minieka is watching British shows and the occasional movie. But he has no use for digital theater.Credit…Evan Jenkins for The New York TimesThe performing arts depend on people like Minieka — culture vultures, often retired, who fill the seats at many a show. And that dependence is mutual. There are lots of people, many of them older, for whom the arts are a way to stay connected to the world — intellectually, emotionally and socially.This last year, when live performance before live audiences has been largely banned, has hit the most devoted especially hard.“What I miss most of all is the community,” Minieka said in one of a series of telephone interviews from the antiques-filled downtown apartment where he has been holed up for most of the year, but for the occasional walk, weather permitting, and a weekly early morning trip to the grocery.A former professor of management and statistics at the University of Illinois at Chicago, he is accustomed to solitude, having lived alone for a long time. “I tried living with boyfriends off and on,” he said, “but I’m better off having my own space.”He pauses to reflect. “It’s OK,” he added. “I have a nice apartment. I’ve got the TV set up. I just got a new phonograph — my old one died after 25 years — and I’ve been listening to some of the old opera recordings my father gave me just before he died.”Opera recordings, antique English furniture and old master paintings fill Minieka’s art-filled apartment. (Maria Callas is one of his favorite sopranos.)Credit…Evan Jenkins for The New York TimesHe’s been quite intentional about maintaining social ties. He doesn’t like video chatting, but schedules one to three phone calls a night. He makes lists of what he wants to talk about, just to jog his memory.But it’s not the same. One day, taking the bus to a doctor’s appointment, he ran into a woman he knew from the art world, and it hit him, the absence of serendipity. “A phone call is arranged,” he said. “I don’t run into chums, and get some buzz from them — that someone who has just come home from New York, and tells you about what show they saw. That’s gone, and there’s no way to replace that.”The Same Seat at the SymphonyIn the before times, Minieka would put on a coat and tie every Thursday and take a bus to the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, settling into the same seat in the back corner of the sixth floor where he’s sat for years. “I close my eyes and listen,” he says. “I just want to hear them.” During intermission, he and his gang would meet in the Symphony Center’s ballroom, saying hello and trading gossip.He’s been a regular attendee since his undergraduate days at Illinois Tech, when he’d buy $1 tickets; he still remembers seeing Fritz Reiner conduct. “They didn’t have an elevator then, but I didn’t mind walking up six floors,” he said, “and the sound in the top gallery is sublime.”More than anything, Minieka (sitting before a prized and rare 19th century piano) says he misses the community that comes with attending cultural events.Credit…Evan Jenkins for The New York TimesMinieka began grad school at Stanford, and while there he’d visit the San Francisco Opera; he finished up at Yale, where he learned to love plays at the drama school, and where he organized a car pool to New York to see productions at the Metropolitan Opera.He’s not interested in Broadway in Chicago or the big nonprofits — too commercial. But he subscribed to the Court and TimeLine and Steep and Redtwist and A Red Orchid, key pieces of the city’s thriving small and storefront theater scene, as well as to the Lyric Opera.He’s a pensioner, and money is tight, so he bargain hunts — balcony seats, discounts, last-minute tickets. “It’s my own fault, buying antiques,” he shrugs. “There were smarter things to buy.”There are so many memories — just last season, there was the Pride Films and Plays production of the musical “A Man of No Importance,” which Minieka attended with 20 friends, and the series of short plays by women at the Broken Nose Theater’s summer Bechdel Fest.During the live performance shutdown, he has visited one museum. “I went once during the last year, to see the El Greco show,” he said, “but the problem was people were congregating around the captions. It was just too risky.”He’s also stopped, after 40 years, going in person to the solemn high Mass at the Church of the Ascension, known for its music. “Now they have reservations, but I don’t want to do it,” he said. “It’s not going to be the same.”Will Minieka return to live performance? “I’ve kind of gotten used to sitting at home, and not paying for tickets, or spending a couple of nickels to have things streamed,” he said.Credit…Evan Jenkins for The New York TimesArt fills his life, literally. He lives in a vintage apartment filled with his collection of English furniture and old master paintings, plus, of course, shelves of opera on vinyl. “I like to pull out some of the old ones,” he said. “You come to a new level of understanding.”Before the pandemic, he enjoyed playing host. Every winter since 1978, he had convened a series of Wednesday night salons, inviting curators, collectors, artists and art lovers to gather at his apartment. “It’s amazing the conversations that happen around midnight,” he said.His final night out was March 9, 2020, when he went with friends to Petterino’s Monday Night Live, a cabaret showcase. “It was full throttle,” he said, “as if everyone knew the lockdown was coming.”A few days later, he dressed up and boarded the bus to watch the symphony perform “Rhapsody in Blue” and “Boléro.” He arrived, found out the performance had been canceled, and went back home. That was March 12.Late to Binge WatchingMinieka never had much use for television. For years he had a hand-me-down black-and-white he used to watch the Oscars and the elections, but when the tubes started leaking, he threw it out. At the start of the pandemic, a friend offered him her old TV — she was upgrading — and he decided it was time to hook up cable and figure out streaming.He’s bingeing “Downton Abbey,” “The Crown” and “Brideshead Revisited.” He watches the occasional movie. But he has no patience for digital theater. “I just don’t enjoy it,” he says. “I’ve been to the real thing.”Now he’s had both vaccine doses, and he’s planning to celebrate by seeing a Monet exhibit at the Art Institute. But will he go back to live performance? He’s not sure.“I’ve kind of gotten used to sitting at home, and not paying for tickets, or spending a couple of nickels to have things streamed,” he said. “And it used to be you had an 8 o’clock curtain, and if I wasn’t there they’d close the doors. Now I can start whenever I want, and I don’t have to wear a matching tux.”“I was running at full steam, going out every night,” Minieka said. “Suddenly it all stops, and I adjust.”Credit…Evan Jenkins for The New York TimesHe describes this period as a “sabbatical,” and ponders what he would want to see next; at other times, he says he thinks of this as a second retirement, and that he might just move into a retirement community and stop going out. After all, he has a heart condition, he takes 16 pills a day, he uses a cane for balance, so maybe it’s time?“I was running at full steam, going out every night,” he said. “Suddenly it all stops, and I adjust. In a way, it puts a coda on that part of my life.”As for his annual salons? “March 4, 2020 was the last one,” Minieka said. “I’m too old to do it. It’s a lot of work. And it’s nice to end something when you don’t know it’s the closing night.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Erica Faye Watson, Comedic ‘Hidden Gem of Chicago,’ Dies at 48

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Coronavirus OutbreakliveLatest UpdatesMaps and CasesRisk Near YouVaccine RolloutNew Variants TrackerAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyThose We’ve LostErica Faye Watson, Comedic ‘Hidden Gem of Chicago,’ Dies at 48Best known as a regular on a local morning talk show, she also wrote plays and acted in movies. She died of complications of Covid-19.Erica Watson  was a regular on “Windy City Live,” a morning TV talk show in Chicago. She also did stand-up comedy and acted in movies.Credit…Patti K. GillMarch 4, 2021, 6:23 p.m. ETThis obituary is part of a series about people who have died in the coronavirus pandemic. Read about others here.When a candidate for state’s attorney in Cook County, Ill., held a lunchtime fund-raiser in downtown Chicago in 2016, the campaign hired a local comedian and television personality named Erica Faye Watson to warm up the crowd.Ms. Watson had never met the candidate, Kim Foxx, but that didn’t keep her from diving into an extended riff about Ms. Foxx’s hair. “I had never been publicly roasted before,” Ms. Foxx said in an interview. “I was like, who is this woman?”But the jokes were just a setup for Ms. Watson’s real point: what it would mean to have a Black woman as the county’s chief prosecutor, and how proud she would be to see Ms. Foxx in that role. The two became fast friends.“She was very much about empowering Black women,” said Ms. Foxx, who is now in her second term. “She was fighting not just for herself but for people like her.”Ms. Watson was a Chicagoland celebrity, best known as a regular on “Windy City Live,” a morning talk show on WLS-TV, Chicago’s ABC affiliate. She also performed stand-up comedy, wrote and directed plays and acted in movies.Ms. Watson died on Saturday in Montego Bay, Jamaica. She was 48. The cause was Covid-19, Patti Gill, her former agent, said.“Erica was a hidden gem of Chicago and a voice for overlooked businesses and causes,” said Ms. Gill, who cast her in “BlacKorea,” a short film she wrote, in 2017.Erica Faye Watson was born on Feb. 26, 1973, in Chicago, to Henry Watson, a postal worker, and Willie Mae Watson, a homemaker.Her survivors include her parents and her brother, Eric.Ms. Watson attended the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where she was a fixture on the school’s Black arts scene.The Coronavirus Outbreak More