David Seitz
David Seitz learned his basic audio writing skills in the third Community Voices class. Since then he has produced many stories on music, theater, dance, and visual art for Cultural Couch. He is deeply grateful that most of my stories bring out social justice issues in a variety of art forms, whether it be trans gender singing, the musical story of activist Bayard Rustin, or men performing Hamilton in prison.
For over twenty years, David has taught academic, nonfiction, and business writing in all kinds of genres to Wright State students from first year students to graduate students. He now also teach courses in audio writing for creative nonfiction and podcasting for professional and technical writers. In his classes, he has been able to expand on what he learned at WYSO, and he loves what his students create.
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Aminah Robinson is a name familiar to many people in Columbus. When the African American artist died in 2015, she donated her house and studio to the Columbus Museum of Art. There was an enormous treasure trove that no one had ever seen before. We can now see many of these works in a show at the museum, Raggin On: The Art of Aminah Brenda Lynne Robinson’s House and Journals. -
This week Central State University presents a play that rewrites recent history. Local poet and activist Bomani Moyenda has written his first play, “What’s Done in the Dark.” The play creates a fictionalized case based on the police killing of John Crawford III and a community’s struggle for accountability.
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Eli Harvey grew up in a Quaker community near Wilmington, Ohio to become a celebrated sculptor. And yet most Ohioans have never heard his name. Harvey mostly sculpted wild animals from close observation. The Historical Society in Clinton County has now digitized the art and writings of Eli Harvey.
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The National Afro-American Museum & Cultural Center in Wilberforce, Ohio brings us, Queens of the Heartland, an exhibit that tells the stories of 30 African American women in Ohio from the 1830s to today.
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By now many of us have worked from home on Zoom. So what does that mean if you are a dancer in the Dayton Contemporary Dance Company? When Ohio shut down in March, DCDC choreographers and dancers created dance together through Zoom in their separate apartments-- as best they could. David Seitz joined them online to learn about the process.
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The Xenia Area Community Theater (X*ACT) is currently producing an Ohio premiere, The Face of Emmett Till. In 1955, Mamie Till put her only son, 14-year-old Emmett on a train from Chicago to visit family in Mississippi. He was kidnapped and was brutally murdered for allegedly flirting with a white woman. Decades later, Mamie Till Mobley co-wrote a play about her struggle.
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Last month, a prison theater group at Marion Correctional Institution performed The Hamilton Project, 23 songs from the hip hop musical on the life of Alexander Hamilton.
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In the last several years, many more transgender and non-binary artists have emerged onto the American cultural scene. Recently Earlham College, 50 miles west of Dayton, held a gathering for singers called the Transgender Singing Voice Conference.
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Before the freedom riders and Martin Luther King Jr., there was Bayard Rustin, a gay African American Quaker and civil rights activist.
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Many people here know the high school pop a capella group 11th Hour—their appearance on NBC’s The Sing Off and their success at competitions. At their peak, choral director Brody McDonald chose a different road for this group that paved the way for the national Camp A Capella at Wright State this week. Culture Couch producer David Seitz looks into how Brody McDonald helped make Ohio an epicenter for pop a capella.
