Melanie Beth Curran Oct 2024 Tour Dates
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Events
An Evening of Irish American Songs with Melanie Beth Curran
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Thank you everyone who came out on August 2nd for our first show of the Irish American songs from my songbook zine! It was a blast. You are the best fans and enthusiasts a gal could ask for. Thanks especially to Eli Hetko on Bozouki and Mandolin, and Jaden Gladstone on Fiddle. Thanks a lot to Jalopy Theatre in Brooklyn and all the folks who work there and make it happen! Thanks to Nicolette Gold for the beautiful photo for the flyer.
People’s Beach Day, October 23rd 2021, 200 Dekalb Avenue - (Stu Leach)
What The Heck Was People's Beach Day and What Can Be Born of its Natural Beauty?!
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“Feel free, this is the beach!” Was Miss LPK’s refrain as pedestrians encountered her, majestic, reading treatises and poetry on the sidewalk. For an afternoon in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, a chunk of cement was transformed. “We often hear about midwifery, but what about housewifery?” Miss LPK embodied that ecosexual poetess, pouring truth, an orator in public.
Miss LPK, poet and ideologue. - (Lindiwe Priscilla Kreskin)
The show did not stop and end with her transformational language. Before she took to the proverbial stage, Eli and Eliana graced our ears with folks songs from an old Greece, in the style known as Rebetiko. If a battle is to be won for the hearts and minds let it be with guitar and bouzouki.
Eliana and Eli Hetko, playing rebetiko - (duskin drum)
Onward prowled the occasion in the form of Melanie Beth Curran, who in fact was putting on this whole event. She, with the help of fantastic fellows brought her new album, San Benedito Beach, into living, luscious three dimensions. As a crowd continued to grow, perched on Beach chairs, she serenaded the populous with popular track The Last Corona (On The Diamond Princess). A raucous singalong bringing us out of Pandemic doom and gloom could only be followed by that most soulful of entertainers, Yva Las Vegass.
Yva Las Vegass, Venezuelan-born-Seattle-native present-day-New Yorker changing LIVES. - (Stu Leach)
Yva! Who gracing us with her originals brought to life the struggles and triumphs of a thousand lives absolutely freaking done with white supremacy. She is a storyteller, a poet, a transmuter of time and space. And just right there in the middle of her musical, foot stop, deep and true oration when here comes Bochay with the sandwiches, Stu with the camera, and Scarlett with a PA.
Yva Las Vegass on San Benedito Beach - (duskin drum)
The whole thing occurred on the chunk of sidewalk where each and every Saturday there is a tradition of vending. For upon this entire block where the wares both used and handcrafted and found and repurposed being sold to those who might, at this change of season, be hungry for a brand new leather jacked painted with van Gogh’s face, ear bleeding, and the children are congregating now.
Melanie Beth Curran, serenading the strip. - (Stu Leach)
Can imagine a way through this hurried state, this rushing state, this eager and consumptive stage, can we make time stop? Melanie Beth Curran takes up the fiddle and sings her mournful love lost dirge. She’s wearing a blue suit and between her and Miss LPK its been 1hr spent applying falsies. This is the America we dreamed about or could. Melanie Beth Curran plays Walkin’ The Line as Scarlet Dame, ambient techno artiste sets up her stage which is much more like an altar.
Scarlet Dame, melting hearts with beats - (Stu Leach)
And from this point on, all bets are off. Anything you see here you will never be able to recapture in language. But try I shall. The sun leans slanted over the brownstones and casts a yellow gold through the cast iron rails of this, Edmonds Playground. The beats begin subtlety and the audience is supercharged, immediately. Bochay is shelling black beans with Qiao and Yvonne, longtime vendor of this sidewalk, is marvelous with a smile on her face.
Bochay and Qiao shellin’ beans - (duskin drum)
duskin really feeling it and some kids too. - (Stu Leach)
Scarlet Dame’s synthesizer - (Stu Leach)
Space and time open wide and duskin is dancing. Ricky and Dylan who came all the way from Seattle are joyful in their youth. A kid actually tells Melanie Beth Curran that when she grows up, this is what she wants to do. And that is the point. That is the point people. We make a new future, out of the old. Built from the now. Hearty and falling into fall she comes. And for one enchanted afternoon we were the Shepards of this coming realm. And for one enchanted afternoon, we opened the door.
Melanie Beth Curran celebrating her album release - (Stu Leach)
in the morning, getting set up with Dylan - (duskin drum)
People’s Beach Day was supported by The City Artist Corps Grant, given by the New York Foundation for the Arts to help revive public cultural life after the pandemic (inside of the pandemic). The grant put artists back to work! Items for People’s Beach Day were culled at Materials For the Arts, an insane warehouse in Long Island City full of Art supplies.
Thanks to everyone that came and everyone who bought an album! They are for sale here:
Songwriter Melanie Curran recognized with $5,000 City Artists Corps Grant From New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA) and the New York City Department Of Cultural Affairs (DCLA)
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Melanie Curran Will Present People’s Beach Day on September 25th, 2021 as Part of Award Program
New York, NY – Songwriter Melanie Curran is one of 500 New York City-based artists to receive $5,000 through the City Artist Corps Grants program, presented by The New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA) and the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs (DCLA), with support from the Mayor’s Office of Media and Entertainment (MOME) as well as Queens Theatre.
Melanie Curran was recognized for People’s Beach Day, which will bring a live performance of her upcoming album, San Benedito Beach to the Clinton Hill/Fort Green neighborhood of New York in Brooklyn on September 25th.
People’s Beach Day is a live-music performance experience that channels the power of the people to create paradise no matter where they are.
The beach is a space where people can start anew after dark times. Melanie Curran’s album, San Benedito Beach, which will be released on American Standard Time Records in September of 2021, tells stories of people coming through hardship and finding new reasons to hope.
People’s Beach Day is a celebration for the public to experience a similar transformation. It is an event where visitors come together to collectively feel and dream. Instead of a real beach, the performance takes place in a park, parking lot, community garden or otherwise non-beach location in Brooklyn. This exemplifies that it is us, as people, who create that magical transformational quality the beach offers, through our will to collectively dream.
People’s Beach Day will happen around sunset. There will be a live performance of the album, and screenings of music videos through a projector. There will be a map and diorama making station on site where visitors can create their own visions of paradise. We can create the future as we move through the darkness out of the pandemic era.
Over the course of three award cycles, more than 3,000 artists will receive $5,000 grants to engage the public with artist activities across New York City’s five boroughs this summer and fall. Artists can use the grant to create new work or phase of a work, or restage preexisting creative activities across any discipline.
Members of the public can participate in City Artist Corps Grants programming by following the hashtag #CityArtistCorps on social media.
City Artist Corps Grants was launched in June 2021 by NYFA and DCLA with support from the Mayor’s Office of Media and Entertainment (MOME) as well as Queens Theatre. The program is funded by the $25 million New York City Artist Corps recovery initiative announced by Mayor de Blasio and DCLA earlier this year. The grants are intended to support NYC-based working artists who have been disproportionately impacted by COVID-19. It is strongly recommended that a portion of the grant be used to support artist fees, both for the applying artist and any other artist that are engaged to support the project.
The Cycle 2 application will open on Tuesday, July 6 at 10:00 AM EDT and will close on Tuesday, July 20 at 10:00 AM EDT. The Cycle 3 application will open on Tuesday, July 27 at 10:00 AM EDT and close on Tuesday, August 10 at 10:00 AM EDT. Please visit NYFA’s website for full details and eligibility requirements.
Webinar March 4th - Finding Songs On the Air: Lessons From Bretagne, France - University of New Mexico
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The University of New Mexico College of Fine Arts is hosting me for their musicology colloquium series, Spring 2021 - “Ethnography and Creative Process in The Arts”. I am honored to be presenting through a webinar, open to all. March 4th, 2-3:30pm mountain time.
In this talk, I share how learning a Breton song opened me to the ways traditional music can transmit during the digital age. Participants will examine the songs they carry. We’ll be thinking about how regional culture transforms through digital interfaces.
Please register for “Finding Songs on The Air: Lessons From Bretagne, France” here.
Artwork by Sophia Tschida
Western Female's Folklife Performance Featured in The Kitsap Sun
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Please Read Michael Moore’s Article, “Melanie Curran Hopes to GIve Back at Folklife”, here:
The Art of Elegant Confusion
My intent as an artist is to venerate common spaces. To map the tension between the now and the has been, and to observe how memory looks against the backdrop of present day. My project in New York has been to write a book about my deceased Uncle Colin’s life in this city. He lived here from 1976 to 1983, before taking his own life at 25. My days are spent finding out as much about him as possible, including the historic backdrop of his time period in the East Village.
I stress that I can only tell his story by mapping my own interest in it. By highlighting the contours of my curiosity, I thus make my life into text and art, and render a composite of him. The particular way I bumble over his artifacts and stare at the façades of buildings where he used to go, shows more than anything how grief, a suicide, an absence is passed through a family. I find so much comfort in knowing that not knowing is a valid position to take as a writer. That there is no need to improve a narrative or impose a storyline, when I can write my own confusion elegantly. Mine is a purposeful mistranslation of history or of his story. I write a book at ease with not having the answers.
I built my proposal for a Fulbright grant with the same intention, that as an ethnographic writer coming into the traditional music community in Finistère, Bretagne, I would have little if nothing to say about ‘what is going on’. Instead, I proposed to write about what I did not know, based on an accumulation of interviews, musical knowledge, and archival materials. And guess what? The governments of America and France have approved my project. I will be moving to France in Fall to simply be with musicians, learn new musical techniques, and write about my own sense of dislodgement during my nine month research period. Time enough for a baby! A baby of non-knowledge. Please, please come and visit me here.
When I left my love in January, I spent the first days alone, crying in an apartment in Catania, Sicily. Resting on the bed, as though fated, was a book chronicling the influence of artist Sophie Calle. The book was written in dense art-critic French, but I could understand enough. Sophie Calle is the queen of the First Person, Moi:Je. In all her work, she is always there (video, text). There is no art without her body and her curiosity. She does no hiding, except if it is from those she stalks publicly. I figured her as my patron saint as I delved deeper into the Italian language, into feeling my foreignness, and into the pain of losing someone I had loved so much. She was with me as I took a photograph of my tear-soaked face in the mirror, mascara blackening my cheeks. That misery can be a state of grace. She was with me as I came back to New York to document my inability to tell, coupled with my devotion to the cause of telling.
The events have occurred rapid-fire since I returned to New York. My book stared to take on a velocity of its own. So many rejection letters came from so many publications at once. An acceptance came from Fulbright. Heartbreak, more of it, all of it. Therapy- yes. A musical performance. I was sexually assaulted. The person who did this to me a couple weeks ago is a part of a group of people who I met last year. When I met this group last year, another member of that group threatened to rape me. I can remember running away from him through the streets of Chelsea, terrified for my life. Today I have a renewed sense of when certain environments are not hospitable to my radiance. I continue to mine for the truth in spaces I feel safe and loved.
These two months have been some of the most intense months of my time on earth. Through my research, I learned something terrifying and illuminating about my deceased uncle (You'll have to read my book!) There has been sobbing, and more sobbing. What didn’t redeem me kept me moving. I have learned to recognize that as I grow stronger, certain people will try to bring me down. I purchased an electric blue power suit. I conducted a disco photo shoot in the front bedroom. I have spent hours banging on the fucking piano.
I have my body. The way people will decide what kind of life I should be living, based on the way my body looks, are deeply mired in their own pain. Thank you to those who have supported me in this intense time, who have celebrated with me, who have been there for me as I cry. Because as a woman (a Western Female?) grows, it will become clear to her the people in her midst who are incapable of letting her be powerful. And I have seen those souls and I touch them.
Performances:
Tonight! March 20th, 9pm, Jalopy Theater Roots and Ruckus, Red Hook Brooklyn
Western Female Pacific Northwest Tour!
May 24th, Folklife Festival, Seattle, WA American Standard Time Stage
May 25th, The Roost, Bellingham, WA
More dates TBA!
Publications:
I wrote this book review in The Brooklyn Rail:
https://brooklynrail.org/2019/02/books/Girl-Zooby-Aimee-Parkison-and-Carol-Guess
And interviewed Francisco Cantú, author of The Line Becomes a River:
https://newschoolwriting.org/interview-with-2019-nonfiction-finalist-francisco-cantu/
RECOMMENDATIONS!
Late Night YouTube Hits from Feral Foster’s Kitchen:
Busta Rhymes, Gimme Some More
Whitney Houston Singing the National Anthem at 1991 Superbowl
Really long and emotional Thai commercials ... or this one
Movies where women are filming themselves and their buddies:
Double Blind (No Sex Last Night) by Sophie Calle
She Had Her Gun All Ready by Vivienne Dick (I get to meet her in April!!!!!!)
Paris is Burning by Jennie Livingston (Maybe her subjects are not really her buddies, that is up for debate online, but WATCH THIS MOVIE Jesus. So incredible.)
Best of My Netflix Breakup Binge:
Russian Doll with Natasha Lyonne: My favorite piece of new TV. Particularly with regard to ghosts and the East Village
Dear White People by Justin Simien: A great show depicting a group of black students on a majority white campus, and what that means.
GLOW: Female wrestlers in the early 80s. So much good.
And the Crown Jewel of My Life:
Five Foot Two, The Lady Gaga Documentary. Also this interview with Lady Gaga.
The Extended Diamond Brand Universe:
Sophia Tschida of Wolf Moon Doula is a star birth practitioner in Kitsap County. She is organizing the Peninsula Birth and Baby Expo in Bremerton, Washington on March 30th.
Hannah and Marc Doucette, also of Kitsap, are the dream team behind Wassail Ecological Landcare and can help make your permaculture design and implementation dreams come true.
Jon Glovin sells a very exciting collection of books online at Fenrick Books.
Beto Bonus:
The American Poetess in me loves Beto O'Rourke's musings about America.
Long live hope and pleasure.
Peace be with you for Spring! See you soon!
Love Melanie