 here at Davis Media Access. My name is Autumn Labbe-Renau and I'll be your host today. I'm talking with some friends from the Davis Arts Alliance and we're going to be talking about a fun event called Art After Dark. Let me tell you a bit about in the studio first. It's a magazine style show we do here at Davis Media Access, serves two purposes. We highlight events and newsmakers here in town and we use this as a training opportunity to train our volunteers who come through the studio program. You can watch in the studio on DCTV, channel 15, Comcast in Davis and menu 99, AT&T, U-Verse. And of course we also put all of our programs online at DCTV.Davismedia.org. They pop up in YouTube. You can share them and we hope you'll help us spread the word about what we do here. Alright, so my guest today, I'd like to welcome our Timothy Netter, who's the Artistic Director of the Art Theatre of Davis, and Natalie Nelson, who is the Executive Director of the Pence Gallery. Welcome to you both. Thank you so much. It's fun to be sitting with you here because just last week we were gathered with a lot of other arts organizations in the studio here for a meeting of the Davis Arts Alliance. And Davis Media Access is relatively new to this process and I thank you for the invitation. So let's start there. What's the Arts Alliance and how is it bringing folks like us together? Sure. The Arts Alliance is a loose collaboration of individuals from different arts organizations. It's also individual artists and it's people from the business community and the visitor center. It's all sorts of people from different walks of life with the idea that they want to support the arts in Davis. So they see it as not only a marketing opportunity but a place for collaboration with each other, a place to strengthen the arts in our community. So we're really hoping to reach out to a lot of different people. If people are interested they can certainly get a hold of me through the pence and we're really trying to support each other in different ways. There's a lot of people on the list. We have over 50 people who are signed up. Right. Well it's working. We're here. We're collaborating. We're here. That's true. Timothy how did you get involved with the with the Arts Alliance and then we're we're gonna talk a little bit more about the Art Theater of Davis too. Well I was told about a meeting which was at a museum on campus and that's how I got started and I just started talking at meetings with some of the groups are involved. Yolo County Arts Council. I met them there who is now the fiscal sponsor of my theater group. Oh nice. And also met Natalie Nelson who runs the Pence Gallery and now we're working on a collaborative project together. So I think you know the idea of bringing groups together and and inspiring collaboration and sharing is already working. Yeah I think it's really easy as nonprofits and as arts based groups that we can kind of work in a vacuum. We get so wrapped up in what we're doing. So from my perspective it was really nice to sit around a table with I think there are about 15 of us there and hear about a lot of things that were going on and several which I didn't even know about. Absolutely I think we share a lot of common concerns and it's really building on each other's strengths and there's some larger organizations there from campus. There's some really tiny organizations that are all volunteer driven but they all really have a passion for the arts and it's it's been a really interesting place for me to hear about different concerns too. What are people working on. What did they want to what do they need help on. Right. So what we're really going to talk about today is this new project called Art After Dark and I wanted to tell you when I was a teenager I remember reading a book that described an art happening and when I saw your flyer reminded me of that this place where people come together and things happen that maybe don't happen you know ordinarily downtown on a Friday night. So let's let's start there. What is art after dark. Well we do like the idea of of happenings in that it is an event art after dark was designed to be a series of art happenings which take place the first Friday of every month and it's basically it started in September it goes through July and it's from seven to ten at night and the idea is the Pence was dark for you know every night except for one and I thought you know this is really sad there's so many great people out downtown enjoying themselves and both of us had talked about you know bringing more people into our organizations really having people from different walks of life see what we do and we do our second Friday art about but that's a slightly different crowd we wanted to bring in people who weren't necessarily arts people yeah younger people in particular to really build up that next generation of of arts patrons and arts lovers. So I saw the last time I saw you were promoting the the one that happened a couple of weeks ago right tell us a little bit about what that contained. That's a great one to talk about because Timothy's group was also there doing a preview of their performance and it was wonderful because not only did we have a selection from the Art Theatre of Davis of Molière's The Impromptu we also had it was only ten minutes long we also had interactive art activities you could do we had tattoo art we had a whole tattoo section that was set up and you could put on temporary tattoos we had art activities upstairs with explore it they were doing something with feathers we had live music at nine and we had a bartender I forgot about our graffiti wall that was really fun we had some people just stay there the whole night filling out a graffiti wall so we try to do things on themes and the theme was Americana so we had kind of classic cocktails we had classic foods and it was really fun yeah I think your actors had a good time too and Molière and and that may not be Americana but it was great people really enjoyed it and we filled every seat and we had to bring some more seats out for people that's pretty cool tell us about the performance what your actors did so what we're working on with the pence is as part of the art after dark series is a theater show in late October so it's called the impromptu adverse and it's a one-act comedy by the French playwright Molière who many people know through his longer plays like a tattoo or the bourgeois gentillon his large four-act comedies where he makes fun of people's exaggerated vices like being overly avaricious or overly sanctimonious and so on so the story of this play is kind of intriguing actually at the time there were two rival theater groups in Paris and they were each sort of had their own idea about the way theater should be done both like the kind of play and the way the acting should be done Molière and his group had a more realistic and comedic acting style and the other group favored tragedies and a more exaggerated style right and actually Molière was a big fan of tragedy and that acting style too but he didn't do it very well and so he ended up moving more towards this realistic style as well as basically inventing musical theater with composers another artist of the time so this play is one of a series of plays that he wrote arguing for his style and pilloring that's basically the alternative style and the other side was right right up against it it was like a boxing match they wrote play after play attacking the other side and saying no you must act this way no you must act this way so it sounds politics yeah so art theater of Davis was founded when and how can we find out more about you besides what you're doing with art after dark well we started in late 2013 and our website is a great way to find out more about us which is art theater org a r t t h e a t e r and so we're a volunteer community group that produces great works of drama from the past usually an original translation and so there are lots of great theater groups around here but I think one aspect of our group that sets us apart is that our repertoire you know when I started the group I wanted to pick a repertoire that was distinct from what other groups were doing so we have DMTC doing great musical theater will an opera house also does musical theater you have the Davis Shakespeare ensemble which is also focused on classics but mostly Shakespeare and they've also been producing musicals you have winter's theater company they also do musicals and comedies so I thought there was an opportunity to focus on serious works from the past serious when I say that I mean not just tragedies or plays that end with people dying but plays that are written to be a work of art and presenting the work as such and to me that is the one way which I try to lead the art theater is saying look there are many values that are important to any complicated enterprise of this sort but here we really try to put art at the top and let everything else follow where it may nice so art theater org and it's theater with an ER not an RE and and you have other shows coming up this year do you want to talk about what's what's on the near horizon we do yeah I mean we don't have anything definite planned because like many theater groups we face the challenge of not having a permanent home and renting space in Davis as we all know and run into money so we're hoping to produce more plays in the spring one of which we've been working on the translation of is a chekov play so Anton Chekhov the celebrated Russian writer his first successful work the seagull is one work we're hoping to produce in the spring great well you'll keep me posted and then I'll keep our viewers posted how about that we'll bring you back again to when you've got something going on let's talk though about the the next art after dark that's coming up November 4th absolutely what can we look forward to art after dark for November 4th from 7 to 10 p.m. is titled illusion and so we have different optical illusions in terms of art things you can make we have a little mirrored room that you're going to be able to walk into so you can see yourself in infinity we have some things with explore it we're we're sharing so all about the science of perception and then we have two bands I can't announce their names yet because we're still confirming details for I understand that trust me yes and my favorite is there's a wonderful painter in our forgery show which is a group exhibit of painters who've done copies of famous masterworks from history over there and see that it looks fascinating it's really entertaining and Janet crichiden is her name and she's from Mount Shasta and she did this wonderful portrait girl the pearl earring after Vermeer she's going to be doing a like a four by six foot painting she hasn't told me what it's of yet but it's a famous masterwork so you get to see her technique and how she produces this forgery fun all right so 7 to 10 yes November 4th and if people want to find out more about the pence in general they absolutely go to pence gallery dot org that's our website okay and again for the arts alliance because we're new and we're forming and we're trying to to figure out a path forward people want to get more information they would contact you absolutely contact me through the pence you can email me at pence art director at sbcglobal.net or you can call the pence okay and the phone number is 530-758-3370 and all are welcome great we're all about the information here we're wonderful and sharing it right well I want to thank you both for coming on and talking about what you do and I think this piece that you're offering really adds to downtown Davis's kind of destination as as and a place for art I think we've really changed a lot over the last couple of years and it's pretty exciting so absolutely well thank you so much for having us my pleasure so I want to thank our viewers for tuning in and again this airs regularly on DC TV channel 15 Comcast and Davis menu 99 on AT&T U-verse and we'll share it on our social media give us a like on Facebook follow us on Twitter our handle is at DMA feed F-E-E-D and thanks so much for tuning in this is Autumn Leve Renault