Filmmaker Tedra Wilson is making a documentary about the Baltimore Club scene, “Dark City: Beneath the Beat.”
Photo by: Street Smart Magazine
This city is loaded with interesting local projects – here are a couple we ran across recently . . .
Dark City: Beneath the Beat – Check out this video (and especially the astonishing dance-work on the trailer at the end) to learn about a documentary-in-the-making about the “Baltimore Club” music scene.
The filmmaker, MICA grad Tedra Wilson (aka TT The Artist), tells you in the beginning of her Kickstarter video what Baltimore Club is: a musical genre, created here, featuring “repetitive looped vocal chops and beat samples.”
But then she shows you what it’s all about with music and video of some incredibly skilled and fast-moving dancers performing on city streets.
They’re trying to raise $4,000 and need backers by their Saturday deadline.
Autograph Playhouse Refurbishment – Billie Holiday, Louie Armstrong and Charlie Chaplain once played in this movie house on 25th St., but today a bunch of shaggy-haunched actors, musicians and demi-gods known as the Baltimore Rock Opera Societyare calling it home.
Baltimore's Autograph Playhouse, on 25th St., still has the old "Showtime" marquee. (Photo by Fern Shen)
Most recently known as the Showtime Theatre, the 65-year-old building is owned by actor and theater aficionado, Billie Taylor, who has been letting the BROS group put on their high-camp, (fake) blood-drenched operas there in return for help repairing the long neglected building. The fundraising campaign is aimed at installing a heating and air conditioning system, fixing the battered marquee and more.
The Rock Opera Society has already staged a couple of shows there and in May will present VALHELLA: The Ragnarøkkoperetta, which they describe as “a dreamlike depiction of the end of the Gods,” following the journey “of three crippled sons of Odin as they are tempted and twisted by the progeny of Loki.” Their website offers more descriptions of the show’s “power-metal soundtrack,” depicting “the bowel-churning depths of hell” plus times, prices, etc.
Fern Shen
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