John Boylan's Next Conversation
This episode: "Courage and Confidence"
Tuesday, November 17, from 7 to 9 pm
Admission is free. Tell your friends.

This roundtable conversation series happens at Vermillion, a wine bar and art gallery at 1508 11th Ave, Seattle (http://www.vermillionseattle.com/). For more information on the series, call John Boylan at 206-601-9848. jboylan@speakeasy.net

This month we'll be looking at courage and confidence. Most art and culture can't be created without them. Any nation-state that suffers from a lack of them is doomed to fail. Is ours one of these? I'm not talking about cockiness or bravado, but rather a clear sense of where one is going, with a faith in the potential for positive results. And then there's the flipside, with the dangers inherent in confidence, the world of confidence men—and women.

The Guests (see bios below)
Elizabeth Rose, aerialist and dancer
Storme Webber, poet, performer, activist
Deborah Lawrence, artist and activist
Toby Crittenden, youth organizer

The Story
I've been wanting to look at tying together confidence and courage for some time.
I’m interested in the ways in which confidence can be taught, and how courage is,
or can be, integrated into the everyday. I’m also curious about the ways in which confidence and courage affect the making of art and culture. Can art be courageous by nature? Does confidence strengthen, or perhaps weaken, an artist’s ability to make art? And I’m especially interested in the ways in which confidence and courage play out in the political arena. All too often, a citizenry can be moved by fear rather than confidence, panic rather than courage. How does that happen? What does it mean when people in a community— whether a town or a nation—see the world as a place of threats rather than
opportunities? Then of course there are the dangers of confidence, as in, say, confidence
in a man like Bernie Madoff. We often tend to look at courage in terms of military experience. I see battlefield courage as an extraordinary response to extraordinary
circumstances. I’m more interested in talking about courage in the everyday, the
courage and confidence in dealing with the death of loved one or handling the
loss of a job, in running for office or making art. I hope you can come.

The Guests in Detail
Elizabeth Rose is a unique performing artist with a diverse movement background in physical disciplines including modern dance, Bharatnatayam, Filipino martial arts, Commedia dell'Arte, yoga, gymnastics, and stunt training. Elizabeth began dancing professionally in her native Austin, Texas in 1998. She co-founded her first company, REALM dance project, at 19 years old. She left the company to its founding members when she left Austin for NYC, and it is still in operation today. As a dancer, Elizabeth has enjoyed training and performing with Darla Johnson, Deborah Hay, Jacques Heim, and many remarkable artists and colleagues at Dance New Amsterdam in New York. She has trained on aerial apparatus in the U.S. with Elie Venezky, Elsie and Serenity Smith,
Eric Newton, Jukka Juntti, and others. Her choreographic style is marked by graceful fluidity, easy precision, high sensuality, and stunning articulation in the air. She always
emphasizes artistry above spectacle and never fails to make moving and intimate
connections with her audience. Elizabeth believes that collaboration is the soul of performance, loves a good artistic or physical challenge, and is always excited to work
with other performers and directors. She is currently producing new works in Seattle, where she is a company member of the Aerialistas, Seattle's original all-girl aerial gang. She also collaborates locally with members of Manifold Motion, Circus Contraption, PURE Cirkus, and DASS Dance. She also freelances, creating commissioned works for
festivals, events, film, and television. In the summer of 2009, Liza founded ticktock, a post-modern circus for contemporary audiences, with collaborators Jill Schaffner and Bridget Gunning. New works are beginning to emerge to critical acclaim. Her website is
http://www.lizaroseaerial.com/index.html

Storme Webber is a Seattle-born, internationally nurtured writer/poet/performer/visual artist. Mentored by Angela Davis while studying in the Bay Area, she continued on to NYC, London, Berlin, and other cities to perform her work in theater, film, stage and television. In 1990, publication by Sheba Feminist Press of London (Serious Pleasure) brought her to the UK, where she began twelve years of international performance and travel. This included poetry tours of England, Ireland, Germany and the Netherlands.
Venues and organizations include: BBC Radio, ITV Television, KISS-FM, Theater
Royal Stratford East, The Hackney Empire, The Oval, Pride Arts Festival(UK), Strange Fruit (Queer Artists of Color/Amsterdam), Initiative Schwartze Deutsche (Africans/Afro Germans in Germany), SO36, SchokoCafe, Haus der Kulturen der Welt (Berlin), Lounge (Hamburg), Old Bull Arts Center (Dublin), Rio International Film Festival, Sao Paulo Mostra (Brazil), and the Naarnschift (a traveling ship of artists and performers from many EU countries). She was most recently seen on the Sundance Channel in the documentary
"Venus Boyz." Her work can also be found in the anthologies, "Voices Rising: 20 Years of Black LGBT Writing" (Redbone Press), and "Beyond Boundaries: Black Women Writing New Worlds" (Pluto Press). Founder/Artistic Director of Voices Rising: LGBTQ of Color Arts & Culture Writer in Residence at Richard Hugo House (2008-2010) Teaching Artist with Arts Corps, and Writers in the School/Seattle Arts & Lectures City Artist 2008-Seattle Mayor’s Office of Arts and Culture Jack Straw Writing Fellow 2009
CD Forum Creation Project artist 2009-2010 Teacher/Writer with Red Eagle Soaring Youth Theater Company 2009-2010 Guest Curator: “On the Boards- 12 Minutes Max” Spring 2009 Racial Equity Initiative member-Pride Foundation 2007-2010.

Deborah F. Lawrence's controversial holiday ornament for President and Laura Bush's 2008 White House Christmas Tree was celebrated and vilified in over 300 media outlets, because she collaged the word "impeachment" upon it, and leaked the fact to The Washington Post. This earned her the distinction of being named "World's second-best person" on Keith Olbermann's Countdown on MSNBC. Her story was covered in The Huffington Post; Salon.com; CSPAN; Rolling Stone, and Time Magazine, among many others. This year she was not invited to DC for the Christmas festivities, but she and designer Mike Derry have produced The Ornament to Recycle the Pentagon for the 2009 holiday season. Lawrence's satirical collages have been exhibited in solo shows at Lincoln Center, New York; Provisions Library Resource Center for Activism and the Arts, Washington, D.C.; University of Pennsylvania, The Northwest Museum of Arts & Culture, Catherine Person Gallery, Seattle, and many other venues. Lawrence's artwork has received critical reviews in publications such as Art in America, The Los Angeles Times, Art Papers Magazine, and Sculpture Magazine, among others. Her book, Dee Dee Does Utopia, was published in 2008 by Marquand Books, Seattle. The full-color, hard cover monograph features the results of Lawrence's survey of people's thoughts on the concept of utopia, undertaken during the darkest years of the Bush regime. Her website is http://www.deedeeworks.com/

As Communications Director for the Washington Bus, Toby Crittenden gets to talk a
lot about politics, Washington State, and blogs. He also twitters. The Bus engages young people all across Washington in the political process, and is building a new generation of leadership for our state. In just two and a half short years, the Bus has established the power of the young voter bloc, and put the issues of young people front and center in the political discourse. And yes, they have a Bus. Website: http://www.washingtonbus.org/