- [Announcer] This is a production of WEDU/PBS Tampa, St. Petersburg.

Sarasota.

- [Announcer] Funding for "WEDU Arts Plus" is provided by the Community Foundation Tampa Bay.

- In this edition of "WEDU Arts Plus", Stage Work's theater celebrates its 40th season in Tampa.

- As we approached the 40th anniversary season I wanted to make sure that we stayed true to the mission that we always have stayed true to, that we gave as many artists as possible the opportunity to participate and that we were making good work.

- Videos of the world we live in.

- One of the most important things to me when I'm shooting is to find that subject in light that is timeless.

Shoot something that you normally don't see.

It isn't about having the perfect picture.

- Creating one of a kind dolls.

That love of a doll never leaves a person.

The idea of replicating the human form on a small scale is so compelling for people.

- And from the military to the arts world.

- I like taking multiple elements in my artwork and repeat those design elements and apply them in different ways.

- It's all coming up next on "WEDU Arts Plus".

(mellow jazz music) Hello, I'm Dalia Colon and this is" WEDU Arts Plus".

In October of 1983, Anna Brennan directed Stageworks theater's first performance, "A Couple of White Chicks Standing Around Talking".

40 years later, the theater company remains focused on their vision to eradicate intolerance through performing arts and educational programs.

- The mission of Stageworks is to ignite the human spirit.

We can tell stories for people for whom stories are underrepresented in society as a whole.

Anna Brennan, who was the founding artistic director here at Stageworks, started the company in 1983 in a storefront in Ybor City.

From there, went on to create quite a body of work before she passed.

She was doing Athol Fugard, who was a South African playwright, dealing with apartheid, dealing with LGBT issues long before anybody else in town was.

There was always a commitment to social justice and to making social change.

She was the first and for many, many years the only female artistic director here in town.

But she kept after it and she knew that the work that Stageworks was doing was important.

And there was a great uncertainty about where one was going to rehearse or perform.

So we were all over the place.

We were at the JCC, the Straz.

Friday Morning Musicale, at HCCE Ybor.

We were looking for a permanent home.

Mercury Advisors, who developed this building, Grand Central and and the channel district.

We were able to take possession of this space.

we had to raise about $1.4 million in a capital campaign and that's where we've been.

One of the biggest bonuses when Anna was starting the company was a woman named Andrea Graham who was well familiar with a lot of the movers and shakers here in Tampa.

She was able to garner individual sponsorship and donations and then as the body of work grew we were able to go offer grants and other foundation support.

- Ola Mrs. Delgado.

- So as we approach the 40th anniversary season I wanted to make sure that we stayed true to the mission that we always have stayed true to, that we gave as many artists as possible the opportunity to participate and that we were making good work.

I chose then "The Color Purple", which has been a dream of mine to produce for quite some time.

♪ The Lord works in mysterious ways ♪ - The next show was a play called "Christmas Contiga", which is the East coast premiere - I'll do the real work.

- Right now we're doing a play called "The Smell of the Kill" which is only three people, but it's three of my very favorite actors here in town.

They had not really had a chance to play together as a trio, so I wanted to give them that chance.

- You're crazy.

- Oh no, she's right.

- No.

- The next is a world premier play and Mark Leib, who is a local playwright, he has written a play called "When the Righteous Triumph", which is about the lunch counter protests here in Tampa in the 1960s.

After that, we have a play called "Talking With".

It was a show that Anna Brennan had directed and produced several times in the history of the company.

The education programs are varied.

Most of the work that we do in the community in terms of education is not here in the theater.

We send teaching artists into schools and to community groups.

We also teach the opportunity for young people to write their own stories and perform them or choose a performance surrogate to do that.

The drumming is a very very big part of the education work that we do.

It's probably our most popular program as Alvon is our most popular instructor.

- Obviously, I'm there to share what I do, which is bucket drumming but we get into the very interesting conversation.

We start with the right left, right, left, right, left and every hit has a number and you start with your right hand, all your odd numbers on your right all your even numbers are on your left.

They also learn to focus and concentrate.

It's about working together as a team.

It's not all about me, me, me.

It's about us and how we sound together and how we play together.

I realized after they started playing, the drum became their voice.

They were playing really loudly and they were playing really well and after they were finished, I said, was that okay?

Yeah, that was great.

Do it again.

- Wow.

- Wow.

- Recently we've started to offer classes in improv.

It allows actors ways to sort of shed their inhibitions to sort of shed their closed minded thinking of what they can and cannot do.

It just gives actors a breadth of space and air in which to do their work.

Plus, it's super fun.

I think it can be for business professionals, it can be for anybody who wants to sort of loosen up a little bit and have some fun while you're doing it.

- Carla pulled me aside and said, "Hey, listen would you be interested in being part of a a program where we do plays in both English and Spanish?"

And I jumped at it.

Exploring the same story in two languages feels a lot like doing two different plays.

"Christmas Contigo" was our last Hispanic initiative project.

It's a very funny comedy about a woman who goes off to law school.

She lives in Miami with her Cuban family, and she comes back after two years with an unannounced fiance and hilarity ensues.

- If we are going to dance, we are going to dance with (indistinct).

- So one of the points of doing plays about Latino and Hispanic people is to A, give people a chance to see themselves, to offer a mirror.

As Shakespeare tells us, we all want love, we all want happiness.

We all want to experience some level of success.

And by seeing plays about people in other cultures we realize mostly how similar we are.

And so celebrating our common humanity is another reason for the Hispanic initiative.

- I think that artists are the historians of society and if we are not telling the stories of our community now and what is going on now, I think that future generations won't understand our times.

- To learn more, visit Stageworks theatre.org.

At Pepper Mill Resort properties in Nevada, guests have the exciting opportunity to view videos taken from around the world.

In these hotels, video screens display landscapes, culture and wildlife from all seven continents.

(soothing music) - Essentially, "Windows of the World" is taking video images and presenting them like still images.

Finding beautiful shots that you normally would shoot a photo with, but add the motion of video.

A photo is an instant in time.

"Windows of the World" is moments in time.

We started off shooting locally and then it was thought of maybe expanding the content to larger parts of the world.

And that actually happened when the owner of the Pepper Mill were considering putting in an aquarium.

The aquarium that they were talking about putting in was a big deal.

It was gonna cost them $1 million and it was gonna cost them 80 grand a year in maintenance.

The owners came to me and they said, well Joe, do you think you can do that with your cameras?

And I said, oh, yeah.

I wasn't sure how I was gonna do it but I said, I think I can.

We found a way to get those red cameras underwater and we went to Belize and we shot underwater and it became a big success.

And then we started traveling all over.

I've been to hundreds of countries, I don't know how many, but from Mount Everest to Antarctica to all over Alaska, China, Vietnam, Thailand, New Zealand, Australia, India.

The key to the success of this is having as much content as you possibly can and playing it completely random.

Right now we have over 50,000 different images and we play it in about a half a dozen formats.

That's the power of it, because you never know what's coming next and then you just add content to it.

You see all the shots but also now you're seeing new ones on occasion and by the time you get to over 10,000, 20,000, 30,000 50,000 images, it just becomes this library, this plethora of content that just you never know what's gonna show up next.

This experience with traveling with "Windows of the World" and creating these images allow me to bump into different cultures that I wouldn't have expected.

We're literally working in these countries.

Were not tourists, but more importantly, the people and cultures that we've experienced really are the true treasures that we take home from these trips.

We have three Mountain Gorilla Treks scheduled in Rwanda.

We were hiking way up in the mountains and we went up there.

We get to the very top and you get one hour with these gorillas.

Of this group of gorillas, about 20 gorillas, a family of 'em is right behind the tree.

You know, as soon as you walk through that little canopy, that's where they're all kind of hanging out.

You know, they don't let you bother 'em too much.

Well, we got there and so you get enough time, you have to build your cameras again 'cause they're all in backpacks.

You get all ready, okay, bam.

They let you go there and the clock starts ticking.

The one hour we go there and, oh, there's one.

And it looked like a little chimpanzee.

It was a young one or, or a mother.

They're just walking through, but they're just walking away and all I was getting is their butts.

All I saw was their butts and I was starting to worry a little bit.

There was one, the big patriarch of the whole family.

The big silverback was hanging in a big heavy kind of tree in the back.

And I had my big $50,000 lens zeroed in on 'em but the leaves were in front of him.

I didn't get a straight shot.

He just had his legs kind of hanging off and everything.

Of course, on wild animals you want them to look into the camera lens.

While I had this thing focused up and I wasn't getting anything, but I said, you know what?

I'm going to get it focused right on his eyes.

I can tell where his eyes were and I'm gonna hit record and if somehow he would expose himself, I would have that National Geographic shot that you just dream of.

I hit record and like it was on cue, he opened up and exposed his face, looking right into the camera.

My hair stood up like this and I pinched myself and double checked that my record light was on, and I started crying inside.

And I think he felt that.

I just felt this joy and this like exaltation of getting this incredible creature on film.

I love walking through the Pepper Mill and seeing people react to these screens.

I mean, just the other day I saw a couple and they were kind of holding hands and looking and pointing and they were saying, remember my sister was there.

What a lot of people are doing when they're watching these screens is they're taking selfies of themselves with these screens in the background.

But it's so funny, you can have a $5 million action sequence it cost to produce, and you can have that playing at the Pepper Mill and people walk right by it.

But if they walk by a shot of a river or a butterfly that kind of floats down or a glance of a mountain gorilla and you see the title and it's from Rwanda and it's a real thing it's not a zoo animal, it's a real wild animal.

They'll stop and look at it and it'll touch and move them more than anything else.

One of the most important things to me when I'm shooting is to find that subject in light, that is timeless.

Shoot something that you normally don't see.

It isn't about having the perfect picture.

These don't have to be planet Earth hugely high budget shots.

You just have to feel something when you're shooting this content.

If the photographer or cinematographer feels something when they're shooting a shot, it will rub off and the audience will feel that.

And that's what makes a great picture.

It's trying to find the beauty of this world and capturing that moment in time and feeling something and then transferring that out.

That's what art really is.

(contemplative music) - For more information, go to peppermillreno.com and search "Windows of the World".

Artist Randy Channel makes unique porcelain ball joint dolls.

Each doll is its own special work of art.

In this segment, head to Clintonville, Ohio.

to learn more about her creative process.

- I think that there's something really magical about dolls.

There's a mystery and there's a potential to tell a story.

(mellow piano music) I grew up loving dolls.

It was my favorite thing to do was to dress dolls.

I didn't really even act out stories so much with them as got really involved in like building a house or making clothes or wiping their face off with nail polish remover and trying to paint their face back on.

There are so many differences between Barbie and this type of doll.

They're made from a different material.

They're made from porcelain.

It's a material that requires a lot of patience to work with.

Ball jointed dolls go back for hundreds and hundreds of years, but they're not intended for children, which is, I think maybe another reason people kind of have a hard time like understanding.

Why would you make a doll that's not for a kid?

(perky music) That love of a doll never leaves a person and I'm not really exactly sure what that is.

Even though I spend so much time making dolls I'm constantly asking myself this question.

What is it that is so special about a doll?

And I think the idea of replicating the human form on a small scale is so compelling for people.

And for me it's not so much the owning the thing because I actually have very few dolls.

It's the making of the thing and then spending so much time with it that I really feel like I've imbued it with a sort of spirit.

This is a thigh and this is a little piece of suede.

So you just kinda like put this inside the joint or inside the socket so that when you put the joint in place you have a cushion that protects the porcelain and helps the doll hold a pose better.

(lively music) The whole process of making a porcelain ball jointed doll takes an incredible amount of patience.

I do try to give them a character, a personality.

(lively music) I really like the bottom of her feet the best.

I feel also like my work kind of straddles the line between what might be considered a craft and what might be considered fine art because I also love to sew and I also love to screen print.

And I also love to make a hairstyle happen.

I like to make shoes.

She wears a platform shoe, not a high heel shoe.

Typically Barbie is on her tiptoes and she wears high heels.

However, I do avoid a tiptoe foot.

I like a flatter foot.

I like the idea that this doll can stand on her own.

Sometimes I think the reason I make dolls is because it's an excuse for me to put a lot of time into paying close attention to a detail.

So the box takes quite some time to make.

And a thing that is really important I think in the doll collecting community is the box.

The box is part of a ritual called a box opening.

That's a thing that I noticed when I started making dolls.

And I was like, well, I can't just shove this doll in the shoebox and I try to make a box that is gonna make a doll collector very happy to open and document the process.

I think about them as a part of myself that comes out and then is made tangible through porcelain, alpaca hair, lamb locks, suede, steel springs and so many other materials.

- See more of Channel's, creations on Instagram at tiny-_shirt.

After serving in the United States Navy, artist Arthur Kettner decided to go to school to study art and the veteran hasn't looked back since.

Here's his story.

- My artwork is based around structure.

I like taking multiple elements in my artwork and repeat those forms or design elements and apply them in different ways.

Some of my artwork, like my bacteria series, I'm using organic forms and I'm tumble stacking them together in this chaotic way.

And they're chopped up and reassembled into ways that suggest a mechanicalness to them but yet have an organic feel.

Clay wants to go natural.

So working against clay's own predisposition has been a really interesting challenge.

After my service at the United States Navy, participating in Desert Shield, Desert Storm, and becoming a veteran, I moved back to Ohio and I completed my bachelor's degree at Bowling Green State University in ceramics, glass and computer art.

(dramatic music) I taught for two years at Sinclair Community College.

And it really set me up for wanting to go to grad school that I understood that there was more to ceramics that I wanted to know.

I was accepted to Tyler's School of Art at Temple University in Philadelphia.

So my wife and I moved to Philadelphia so I could become a grad student.

During that time, my first child was born and I knew when I graduated that I needed to get a job.

After finishing my master's of fine Arts degree I started to work for industry.

For an artist to work in industry is an interesting proposition.

So I received a typical job like color matching at a glass enamel place.

And so somebody would say, I want you to make this color.

So I would use the chemicals and then we'd make a color.

During that time working in the industry I learned how to be more formulaic, how I could use scientific method to understand the materials I was working with.

A lot of these places I did work under chemical engineers and I was a sponge.

They would start talking and I would just sit there and listen.

So I really grew as a technical artist, if that makes sense in the way that I could understand my materials better and how to apply them in more effective ways.

During the past 14 years of working in industry, it's always been a challenge to make art.

Family obligations, work obligations, and there's so many hours in a day but somehow I always found time to make things.

Being the inaugural artist in residence at the Rosewood Art Center is very special to me.

I feel very fortunate that this opportunity had presented itself.

To be able to come into this wonderful community asset and work with other artists of all levels is just a wonderful opportunity.

A clear glaze on porcelain is not gonna necessarily look the same as clear glaze on a stoneware body.

I think that the Rosewood Art Center is such a gem in this town.

There's so many opportunities here for children and for adults to really explore themselves in their art because back in the day before sodium silicate, anytime somebody had to make a cup or a bowl or anything like that, they had to throw it on the wheel.

It's given me, an artist, a great opportunity to come in and make work.

I have a little studio space and really make the work I'm making today.

This is pushing my skill limit to the very edge of what my ability is.

I've been doing ceramics for around 20 years now and I love the medium, but I wanna explore some more things.

I've got more ideas that don't lend themselves to ceramics.

So going forward, it's gonna be interesting because I have this great chance after this residency program to really evolve as an artist and really take things up to more of a sculptural level.

I want to be more of a sculptor instead of just considered a clay artist.

- To see more of his work, check out arthurkettner.com And that wraps it up for this edition of "WEDU Arts Plus".

For more arts and culture, visit wedu.org/artsplus.

Until next time, I'm Dalia Colon.

Thanks for watching.

(upbeat music) Funding for 'WEDU Arts Plus' is provided by the Community Foundation, Tampa Bay.