- In this edition of aRTeffects, see the classical Tahoe stage come to life.

- The whole point of any theater is to take you somewhere else temporarily.

(orchestral music) - Accessible studio spaces.

- [Evan Snow] We feel now more than ever, there's a strong need for artists and creatives to have places to be able to create in, outside of their homes.

- Culinary history.

- Food is a vehicle for conversation.

Food is a means by which we can begin to understand ourselves and our neighbors on a much deeper level.

- And pinhole photography with Nancy Raven.

- It's like film noir, you know, there's a very different feeling to the light and the focus.

(relaxing music) - It's all ahead on this edition of aRTeffects.

(upbeat jazz music) - [Male Narrator] Funding for aRTeffects is made possible by Sandy Raffealli, The June S. Wisham Estate, Carol Franc Buck, Merrill and Lebo Newman, Heidemarie Rochlin, Meg and Dillard Myers, the annual contributions of PBS Reno Members, and by, - Hello, I'm Beth McMillan and welcome to aRTeffects.

In our featured segment, we learn about the preparation and hard work that goes into getting the stage set up and ready for the annual classical Tahoe concerts.

(wind instruments music) - Classical Tahoe festival is a world class orchestra with musicians from all over the nation, as well as all over the world.

We're talking first chairs of major orchestras, like the Metropolitan Opera orchestra, Houston Symphony, San Francisco Ballet, San Francisco Symphony, we get all of the primary and secondary players from those orchestras, and we put on three weeks of wonderful concerts, and interactions with the community based in Incline, as well as Reno, Tahoe.

(wind instruments music) - The whole point of any theater, whether it's a movie theater, or a live theater, or whatever theater, is to take you somewhere else temporarily.

It's much more difficult with live theater to try and get somebody sucked in, keep their attention and focus for an hour and a half, and have them not be on this planet anymore.

Have them be in an emotion or a place where you wanted them to go.

That's the incredible beauty and joy of musical theater, of live concerts.

(sweet string instrumental music) My role is to make sure that everything runs smoothly during a show, from start to finish.

- [Male Announcer] Ladies and gentlemen, the show will begin momentarily.

- That people are in on time, that the music starts on time, That things happen the way they're supposed to happen.

You get one shot with a concert or with live theater, so you better make it good.

(smooth orchestra music) - I've been in live theater over 20 years now.

And with life theater, nothing is ever perfect.

There's always things that happen, things that you may not want to have happen, but watching and being around Steve and seeing how he puts things together, how his brain works, how he tries to come up with ways to make things just that much better, that much smoother, it's really inspiring.

- We communicate through radios, and Stephanie and I hardly need them anymore because just a wink, or a look in the face, a facial expression, I'll know if she looks that a chair needs to be moved or a stand needs to be striked.

She pretty much just has to look at it and I'll know what she's after.

That's the beauty of our relationship and our working relationship and why we get along so well, is that we can think what the other one's going to be doing, almost before they're doing it.

(upbeat orchestra music) - To get everything ready for our opening night performance, there is copious amounts of blood, sweat, and tears, literally, and figuratively.

We usually start the production builds, getting things ready, getting things constructed, and it's about a three and a half week process just to get the pavilion and the main grounds, our courtyard, hospitality areas, to get everything ready to go for the musicians to arrive.

And then we have another four days after that before the actual first concert, when the patrons arrive.

(upbeat orchestra music) - We're in the forest, it's a beautiful kind of forest floor.

We build this pavilion out, up under the trees.

Our seating becomes an amphitheater nestled in and actually undulates around the Manzanita and the trees that are there.

What I couldn't see as we were setting it up, is what it would feel like in the environment, what it would be under the stars, what it would be in the rustle of the trees, what the forest smells like when you're sitting there, how the sound moves through the audience, We have a additional lighting this year that we've never had before, and the color wash that we're using with the orchestra, all of these are things that I hadn't imagined, and not until we were really sitting there and it was built, did I really, fully understand how special it was.

(bouncy orchestral music) - The pavilion itself is acoustically designed.

Therefore, the positioning of the orchestra is extremely critical as the sound for live theater.

This tent doesn't have any right angles in it.

It is at an angle which pitches a perfect sound towards people that are sitting directly in front of it.

- It really creates a whole different experience by having it really start on the same plane.

The patrons feel like they're really immersed in what's happening on stage, and that they're actually a part of it, as opposed to just observing it.

(upbeat orchestral music) - There isn't a greater compliment that I can have, hearing from both the orchestra and the audience members, of what an experience they just had.

Saying that they were taken away, that's what we do in theater, is create experiences.

That's when it's rewarding for me, that makes it all worthwhile, then.

(orchestra song finale) (audience cheers) - To learn more about the annual event, visit Classicaltahoe.org.

Zero Empty Spaces is a management company that transforms vacant spaces into affordable studios for artists to work and grow.

We take a trip to south Florida to meet the founders and hear how this project developed.

(bouncy music) - We feel now more than ever, there's a strong need for artists and creatives to have places to be able to create in, outside of their homes.

Time and time again, artists are telling us that they're fighting over the, you know, the dinner table space, where they make their artwork on, and that impetus has really created the growth and demand for Zero Empty Spaces.

Evan Snow, co-founder and managing partner of Zero Empty Spaces.

- Andrew Martineau, co-founder of Zero Empty Spaces.

- The initiative came through some of our other arts advocacy initiatives, where we had formed so many relationships with artists over the years, that they were continually asking us, "where are the studios at, let alone affordable?"

We found this was a great vacancy management solution to activate vacant space, to make affordable art studios.

(upbeat music) - Once we decided that we wanted to look and pursue trying to get, you know, chronically vacant spaces, initially, we did a little bit of research on "where are the other affordable artist studios in south Florida?"

And all of them were non-profits.

So a very limited number of people could actually be part of it, to be able to pay that low rent.

So we kind of took that number and try to create a program and a model that could still afford the artists to be able to pay $2 a square foot, with us paying all the utilities.

We do a month-to-month deal with both the artists and the landlord, so it's fully transparent.

Because we take big spaces and we break them up into much smaller spaces, the artist doesn't have to take over a 3,000 square foot space.

They can take 100 square feet, 200 square feet, 300 square fee, so the amount of money that they pay is a lot smaller.

- I am ecstatically happy to be here because I was occupying three bedrooms, two bedrooms and a den, and a garage at home.

(laughs) I'm Barbara Ziv, and I do many, many different mediums.

(calm piano music) But this has many meanings behind it.

It started out that, a white square, actually, is another sign for peace.

As I got into it, the baby comes out.

I found this baby, it's like, these things were just popping in front of me, and I thought, you know, "that's really about classification."

So it is about peace, but I ended up naming it classification because I think we're all born into a classification because of, people look at us and judge us.

I really, to be honest with you, I have a hard time calling myself an artist.

I call myself a creative, but lately I'm starting to say, "okay, I guess it's okay to call myself an artist."

- Another inspiration for the concept was obviously the early days of Windword and artists going into Windword and going into these vacant warehouses at the time, which weren't incredibly expensive to rent.

So the idea is that artists really kind of create that activity in areas and places that maybe didn't have that much activity, and they create a lot of positivity in these areas as well, and that certainly attracts investment, and that attracts other people wanting to come into this area to really, kind of, be part of that creative energy.

Having a space that is activated, it really kind of helps the walkability from space to space, so you don't have to, like, pass by a dark storefront before you get into the next location.

So it really kind of creates additional activity for the tenants in the area.

- So one of the greatest things about the program that we found as Arts Advocates, some of the artists have only ever created in the privacy of their home and never sold, and never, you know, published on social media or any of those things for many, many years.

And now that they're in a space where they're getting to see other creatives, it's been really beneficial for artists' careers in many various levels.

- I'm very comfortable with, if there's something I don't know how to do, I'm sure I can find somebody here that can say, "here, this is how you do it," and I'm excited about that.

(casual music) - The spaces are open daily between the hours of 12 and 5:00 PM to the public.

- It's a really free and open kind of opportunity for people to come through and just really take a tour and see the kind of work that's, kind of, coming out of the space.

- It's been a very organic, you know, authentic, grassroots-driven process that thankfully the community is really responding well to.

(relaxing music) - Visit Zeroemptyspaces.com to find out more.

Now let's take a look at this week's art quiz.

Which of these instruments is not included in a standard string quartet?

Is the answer, A, violin, B, cello, C, double bass, or D, Viola?

Stay tuned for the answer.

Up next, we visit Williamsburg, Virginia to meet culinary-historian and author Michael Twitty.

In his work, he explores African-American food ways and the role that food has played throughout history and across cultures.

Here's the story.

(Hooves clop) - This would be less mature than that one.

- I want to do this one.

- Okay.

(upbeat guitar music) - We're also making sweet potato pumpkin, also known as cushaw, and that's the big striped pumpkin you see over there.

It's originally from the west Indies and was brought to the American south by enslaved Africans.

Food is a vehicle for conversation.

Food is a means by which we can begin to understand ourselves and our neighbors on a much deeper level.

I think when it comes to Southern food, one of the biggest misconceptions is that it just came out of nothing.

And the reality is, is that Southern food is a result of multiple historical cultural collisions, particularly between Europe, Africa, and native America.

When it comes to people of African descent, it's extremely powerful notes.

That food is how we pass on our culture, Food is how we resisted enslavement and oppression, and food is how we showed our agency, it wasn't passive.

One of the things that gets me the most concerned is when people refer to African-American vernacular food ways, as sort of, like, what was given to us.

No, it's what we created for ourselves and for others.

So I think it's incredibly empowering to learn about that tradition from the historic side, the way I do here at Colonial Williamsburg.

(upbeat music) Field peas, black-eyed peas, we think of them as, something you just eat for good luck on new year.

Something that, you know, fills the bill out of a Meat and Three.

Black-eyed peas your green, and sweet potatoes, and you'll add a little meat.

Well, it's deeper than that.

When I went to Senegal, West Africa, I went to Goree island, which is where enslaved people were prepared for shipment to the new world, including some of my own ancestors.

And the last remaining slave castle, the Maison des Esclaves, they explained to us that black-eyed peas were one of the foods that were given to enslaved Africans, cooked in palm oil to fatten them up.

One thing about sweet potatoes is that, in the west Indies, anywhere they were boiling sugar, they were a really quick energy food.

And when the men would go to the sugar boiling house, their job was to pour the sugar all night long, you know, talking about long ladles, molten hot cane syrup.

That becomes molasses and then it becomes fermented into rum.

Which, of course, will then cross the ocean by more enslaved people and feed a triangular trade.

But what happens is, while they're cooking this syrup down all night, they're dumping some of it over top of an iron pot full of sweet potatoes.

What does that sound like to you?

It sounds like candied yams.

And they would eat that to keep them up all night because they had to be up all night.

It was a high-energy snack.

Every time you eat candied yams, now, I want you to think about an enslaved man in that sugar boiling house all night long, making that dish happen as a means to stay awake.

I'm not interested in recipes, I'm not interested in formulas.

I don't think about food and cooking the way other people do.

I think of it in terms of big black ideas and the ultimate is to create something that tastes good, dude, that's the best black-eyed peas that I've ever tasted, It's not about how much of this or that you put into it, or what technique you use.

Black cooking is more about flavor.

It's about spirit.

And I think it's less about, like, gourmet techniques that require a lot of fancy, because we didn't have that.

Only thing we had was our feeling about the food and our feeling about each other.

For me, I think the epiphany moment was, my parents asked me, "what do you want to be when you grow up?"

and I said, I want to be a writer, I want to be a teacher, I want to be a chef, and I want to be a preacher.

For me, all those elements are conjoined.

This idea of feeding people as a spiritual exercise, this idea of feeding people as being an educator, this idea of feeding people as creating a text that's edible, all of that, to me, it all makes sense.

It's all part of one holistic worldview.

The secret to the best cooking is trying to find things, where everything compliments each other.

It's about creating communalism among your ingredients.

And that's how you make the food taste good.

We call our food soul food.

Why?

It's named after something that transcends life and death.

It's not about our nation, it's about our spirits.

And that's what makes me, like, so proud of it.

One of the things that surprises people about me is that I'm Jewish.

I became officially Jewish by conversion when I was 22 years old.

For me, particularly in Judaism, food and faith go hand in hand in a very particular way.

Every single part of the Jewish Diaspora has its unique recipes and formulas that go hand-in-hand with the holidays and they tell stories.

They're there for a reason.

It's not just because people like to eat them.

You sit down in a Jewish household, in the springtime, we have Passover, we have Matzo.

And Matzo tells the story of how a people who were a oppressed and enslaved got their freedom overnight.

How do we make the world a better place?

How can we learn from our mistakes as a human species?

Those are really big questions in Judaism and Torah.

And that undergirds a lot of my work, including the work I do with food.

I wanted to write, and the one thing it's important to do is really do your own research.

But I think for African-Americans, one of the struggles we have, is that it's not easy for us to find out where we come from, because when we say that our names were taken and our identities were switched around for other people's benefit, we're not joking.

That's how it happened.

We have to scale a lot of brick walls to get to where other people just hop on back.

For some people, they're satisfied knowing that their ancestors came from Germany.

For a lot of African-Americans, they don't know which country's Plural in west Africa their ancestors came from.

So in the cooking gene, I decided to do all of those pieces.

I wanted to know how to, you know, when my ancestors who were enslaved, what kind of work did they do?

How did they process all these crops into consumables?

And to know that if it were not for a certain choices and accidents of history, you might be in their shoes and to have that sort of feeling of gratitude that you're not.

So how hard was it for these folks, our ancestors, our forebearers, to deal with some situations like that, and somehow make a way out of no way?

I never say the word slave, I say slave is an identity.

Enslaved is a condition.

So we don't want to put on our ansesters a label that they themselves would reject because it wasn't true.

Once you have that roadmap to where things start, you can kind of have a roadmap to where things are going to go.

And to me, that's extremely powerful.

(cheerful penny whistle music) - To learn more about Twitty and his work, go to Afroculinaria.com.

Now let's review this week's art quiz.

Which of these instruments is not included in a standard string quartet?

Is the answer, A, violin, B, cello, C double bass, or D, viola?

And the answer is C, double bass.

Minden photographer, Nancy Raven, has gone back to a time before digital photography, and her specialty is pinhole photography.

She takes photo paper and places it in a popcorn tin and then exposes it to light.

The result is a picture that is a dreamy noir look.

- Pinhole photography is probably one of the first ways of taking photographs in history before lenses were created.

And it's, by taking a photograph with just a very small pinprick, in an object, whichever kind of camera you create.

(relaxing guitar music) I'm Nancy Raven, I'm an artist, I do pinhole photography.

I just like the feeling of the way the dark and light relates in pinhole.

It's almost like film noir, You know, there's a very different feeling to the light and the focus.

I have 10 great, big popcorn cans that I've made cameras into.

To make the camera, I get a metal drill and I drill a quarter inch hole in the tin.

I tape the lens, which is a little tiny square of a Coca-Cola can, that I can put a needle through, and I do that, and then I tape that inside the quarter inch hole that's right there.

(relaxing music) The lens is right here, where that dot is.

So I try to place the paper so that it's equally open to that lens.

I kind of look like a bag lady when I go out, because I just go out with all my bags full of cameras, and because you only get one shot per camera, you have to have a lot of cameras to really do anything.

You can't just take out one camera, and take one picture, and hope to get anything, you have to really kind of cage yourself that way.

I'm fascinated by history and historical buildings and barns and things like that.

So a lot of my photographs have been of, when I moved to Carson Valley, I began to see wonderful barns and corrals and leftover parts of what used to be a farm and that kind of thing.

This is the corrugated building in downtown Gardnerville, and you can see the telephone pole wires are just shooting up in the air, and that's part of the distortion of the pinhole curve.

I usually don't take a lot of the same picture with my different cameras.

I do try, maybe a couple of shots with a couple of cameras, and I'll move to something else that I've seen that I want to photograph.

This one is the Carson River in the winter time.

I just love the reflections and the light and the winter trees.

The sun actually was shining right through that.

So you can see that really hot spot in the photograph, but I like it.

When I unload my camera and I put it in the developer, if I see a good negative, it is very exciting.

If it turns all black or all white, then I know I don't have anything, but when you do get a good negative, it's just, it's really exciting.

I hope it will keep inspiring people to try pinhole because it's so different from digital.

It is so very different.

It's not immediate feedback, you can't tell what you've got until, maybe, a week later, if you have time to get into your dark room and print something out to see if you've actually got a photograph or not, that is a different mentality, I think.

You can't, you know, go back and take that same picture again, because the light will be different, everything will be different.

So you just feel really lucky if you nailed it.

- For more information about Nancy, visit lizardrockmusic.com and that wraps it up for this edition of aRTeffects.

For more arts and culture, and to watch past episodes, visit PBSreno.org/arteffects.

Until next week, I'm Beth Macmillan.

Thanks for watching.

- [Male Narrator] Funding for aRTeffects is made possible by Sandy Raffealli, the June S. Wisham Estate, Carol Franc Buck, Merrill and Lebo Newman, Heidemarie Rochlin, Meg and Dillard Myers, the annual contributions of PBS Reno Members, and by, (upbeat jazz music)