Robert Spano returns to the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra to revisit Igor Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring. Over many years, the man has helped to define the music; but the music has also come to define the man.
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Conductor Robert Spano assumes the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra’s podium again this month, his first appearances here since 2022. On May 2 and May 3 the venerated ASO music director laureate conducted a mixed program featuring pianist Garrick Ohlsson.
On May 16 and May 18 he will lead the orchestra in two pieces: the world premiere of Jonathan Leshnoff’s oratorio The Sacrifice of Isaac, followed by a work that has become strongly associated with Spano in Atlanta — Igor Stravinsky’s brutal masterwork, The Rite of Spring. (Below: Stravinsky conducting.)
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Most classical music mavens are familiar with the scandale the Rite engendered in its 1913 Paris premiere with Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes. Audiences were appalled by Stravinsky’s Pictures of Pagan Russia in Two Parts and voiced their displeasure with a passion later described as a “near riot.” Part of the problem lay with the unorthodox choreography of the brilliant, and brilliantly tormented, dancer/choreographer Vaslav Nijinsky, who had already scandalized Paris with his blatantly erotic staging of Debussy’s Afternoon of a Faun.
But Stravinsky’s musical portrayal of primitive life confounded everyone. No composer of Western music had created such rhythmic complexity before. The Rite’s unique combination of lyricism and irregular meters, and the movements of the dancers on stage meant to evoke primitive cultures, drew titters and outright rage from first-night listeners.
A century later, that uproar seems quaint, even amusing. The Rite of Spring is now one of the most popular works in the concert repertory and still enjoys a healthy life in the theater, most notably in the Joffrey Ballet’s re-creation of the original production in 1987 and in the raw 1975 Pina Bausch version, which was recently revived for an all-African cast.
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Curiously, the work even entered the family-friendly entertainment arena more than 80 years ago with Walt Disney’s Fantasia, where its driving rhythms underscore a depiction of the Earth in pre-Paleolithic times, a primitivism of another sort.
Stravinsky’s Rite has also enjoyed more than 100 commercial recordings, dating back to the first from Pierre Monteux, who led the world premiere (and who, upon encountering the score, reportedly left the room muttering that he would stick to Brahms). Modern listeners may choose from the considerable standard set by Pierre Boulez in his first recording with the Cleveland Orchestra, a passionate account from Leonard Bernstein, the precision of Igor Markevitch or the unbridled brutality of Valery Gergiev. The choices are virtually limitless.
Spano’s relationship with the piece began in childhood, with the influence of his clarinetist father, Tony Spano. “My father is a wonderful musician, and he was also an audiophile,” Spano recalls. “He had a particular love for early 20th century music. I had a compilation set of LPs, and The Rite of Spring was on it. It was a childhood favorite.”
He first conducted the work with the New Japan Philharmonic in Tokyo. “I was doing my best Boulez impression, using minimal gestures that weren’t athletic at all,” he laughs. “But the closer we got to that final dance, I was drenched in sweat. I will never forget that feeling of abject terror!”
Abject terror notwithstanding, Stravinsky’s seminal piece has played a key role in Spano’s career. He has led the Rite with the ASO multiple times, in 2004, 2007 and 2010. He recently performed the piece in Detroit and Aspen, and in 2025 will revisit it with the Fort Worth Symphony, where he now serves as music director.
Atlanta audiences also had the opportunity to hear excerpts from Stravinsky’s four-hand piano version of the score when Spano shared the podium (and a pair of “dueling pianos” per ArtsATL reviewer Mark Gresham) with Donald Runnicles in concert in 2014.
“There’s something about playing the piano version,” Spano reflects, “just the thought that Stravinsky and Debussy were playing it [that way] for rehearsals. When you play it, it’s clear that Stravinsky wrote at the piano. He was not one of those composers like Bach or Britten or Strauss, who wrote at the desk. There’s a tactile sense to the music when you do it on keyboard.”
In September 2014, the ASO’s Principal Guest Conductor Donald Runnicles joined Conductor Robert Spano for the two piano version of Stravinsky’s “The Rite of Spring.”
Spano particularly treasures his performances of the piano version at glo with choreographer Lauri Stallings, also in 2014.
“We did it with two pianos and two percussionists,” he remembers. “It was wonderful. The piano was on a platform with wheels. At moments I would leave the platform and interact with the dancers. There was a startling effect when they put me and the piano in motion around the stage. The whole thing was incredible.”
He also played the piano version in a 2018 collaboration with Immerse ATL and Staibdance as part of the Emory Chamber Music Society of Atlanta’s Emerson Series
Spano’s traversals of the piano version inevitably inform his readings of the full score, though he observes, “I don’t know exactly how. The piano version has a visceral excitement of its own. It’s a totally different experience. Sometimes these things are not conscious design; they are more of a seeding of your understanding of a piece.”
“I worked with a wonderful opera director at Oberlin,” he continues. “We did tremendous research on everything we did. Someone asked how that translated into her direction and she said, ‘I have no idea, but I’m tilling the soil and I’m trusting it will affect the harvest.’ I thought that was so insightful.”
Stravinsky’s Rite will be performed by the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra along with the premiere of composer Jonathan Leshnoff’s oratorio The Sacrifice of Isaac, which Spano feels is a particularly appropriate pairing. “It’s got a lot of lyricism and tenderness,” he observes, “but it also has these driving modal rhythms that stand up to that aspect of The Rite of Spring.”
Besides his current leadership in Fort Worth, Spano remains a force at the Aspen Music Festival and will seize the reins of Washington National Opera in 2025. For now, though, he is excited to come “home” to Atlanta, and of course to The Rite of Spring. “Leaving Atlanta was hard,” he muses. “This is my musical family. There are new people, a new principal clarinet and principal horn. I’m so excited to meet them and to see my old family.
“I can’t wait. I’m just champing at the bit.”
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Mark Thomas Ketterson is a Chicago-based arts critic and writer. He was the longtime Chicago correspondent for Opera News and has also written for Playbill, the Chicago Tribune and other publications.

Through movement and fabric, sound and disco ball, a new site-specific work by Jimmy Joyner will tether today’s queer awareness to lives lost to AIDS.
In the early 1990s, when a person living with AIDS wore the now familiar red ribbon, it was a radical declaration, a demand to be seen, counted and humanized in the face of homophobic policies and little federal support for researchers working to find a cure. Beyond the political, red was a symbol of both love and blood, both life force and home of the deadly infection.
The now iconic symbol of HIV/AIDS awareness first appeared in 1991 and catalyzed ribbon awareness campaigns for years to come. When worn pinned to the shirt, the elegant shape — reminiscent of a heart or a cursive “I” — was intended to signal solidarity with those affected as well as those living with the disease.
In his new work, “Red Tethers,” Atlanta artist Jimmy Joyner uses fabric and disco ball mirrors to create a mood.
Red Tethers, a series of solo dances created by multidisciplinary artist Jimmy Joyner that premieres May 17 through May 19 in Woodruff Park, draws on the red ribbon as a cultural symbol and builds on a four-decade legacy of artists responding to the devastating scourge of the disease.
A textile artist, costumer designer, choreographer and Fly on a Wall team member, Joyner draws on a range of interests and skills to bring attention to the lives and stories of queer Atlantans lost to HIV/AIDS.
With a 10-foot by 10-foot swath of sheer white fabric, six paracords, six pulleys, some carabiners and a red laser, Joyner will enact and build a “temporary monument” to the city’s queer ancestors through improvisational movement and material manipulation. The installation will then remain in the park, a public art piece and performance archive.
Joyner designed and constructed a disco ball dress which he will wear throughout Red Tethers. “If queerness was to manifest itself, it’s a disco ball on a dance floor,” he says. Or, rather, queerness is the effect disco balls create where “light and sweat and spirit and joy and sorrow come together in this temporary space. And who doesn’t like something sparkly and flashy?” Joyner wanted to be that disco ball, the source of an outward trajectory of energy and love directed to all those who join him in the park.
Yet the disco ball, Joyner says, is also “the eye that oversaw the site of infection.”
Joyner’s costume is inspired by the iconic disco ball.
A native of West Tennessee, Joyner came out in high school and moved to New York City in 2003, a time when gay men, he says, “weren’t necessarily out of the woods.”
Despite the largely contained AIDS epidemic, he recalls that claiming a gay identity was synonymous with sickness and death. What should have been celebratory instead felt ominous. The number one narrative, he says, was: “Why come out as gay? You’re just going to be lonely, and you’re going to die.”
A recorded interview with fellow Fly on a Wall team member and collaborator Nicholas Goodly will serve as the work’s sound score. In their conversation, Goodley and Joyner talk extensively about shame, control and self-compassion, “things that are indescribable and understandable” and resonate heavily with his queer identity.
Initially, Joyner grappled with “the idea of making another AIDS dance.” It has been done so many times and with such emotional impact, especially during the height of the crisis when almost everyone in the New York City and San Francisco dance scenes knew someone who had died of the disease. “I can’t make an AIDS dance in 2024 that looks like an AIDS dance made in 1986 by Keith Hennessy [the San-Francisco-based choreographer/performance artist famous for his queer activist dances],” says Joyner.
As part of the research process for Red Tethers, Joyner traveled to the Slippage Lab at Northwestern University to work with his mentor and “thinking partner” Thomas F. DeFrantz, an esteemed dance scholar and visiting professor at University of the Arts, where Joyner recently earned a master of fine arts in dance.
Joyner credits DeFrantz with helping to unpack an uncomfortable sense of responsibility to “pay honor” to queer Atlantans lost to HIV/AIDS. Somehow, honoring them felt inauthentic and too prescriptive. A sense that “you need to do something in a certain way for someone else” closed doors that Joyner wanted to open. Initially, he intended to center Red Tethers on the stories of a few Atlantans who lost their lives to HIV/AIDS, but how does one tell or embody a story that is not their own?
“Let’s shift the phrase telling a story to living a story,” he says. Instead of telling someone else’s story, an impossible task Joyner says, through performance, research and what he describes as spiritual practices, he can “be with these people” and open a portal, a tether and a connection to their presence. The tether — perhaps an extension of the red ribbon — reaches out, “it connects and signals, I’m here,” Joyner says. The tether also ties him to “queer ghosts . . . I’m haunted but I’m also trying to haunt.”
Through spontaneous movement, Joyner will tie himself to trees, move through and around the swath of fabric and hand cords to audience members. He intends to create “an affirmation of belonging and aliveness” felt by all who witness it. “It’s so important for queerness to have an aliveness and a visibility. And also for queer folks to affirm other queer folks and say that you’re not alone.”
For Joyner, Red Tethers is a public ritual that allows him — allows us — to be with our queer ancestors and “that’s enough. The tether is a bloodline and a lifeline that holds us together.”
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Kathleen Wessel is a movement artist, choreographer, educator and writer who has been covering dance for ArtsATL since 2012. She is on the faculty in the Department of Dance Performance & Choreography at Spelman College.

Staged readings at various venues around South Fulton encourage audiences to connect to the themes of theater and to each other.
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The very reason South Fulton Arts exists is to bring attention to the artistry on display in South Fulton County. To that end, South Fulton Arts has been staging a reading of Tiny Beautiful Things, on stage again May 17 and May 18 as part of its Courageous Conversations series.
Courageous Conversations was founded in 2022 in an effort to build an audience base for South Fulton arts organizations. The organization stages approximately four readings per year, with Tiny Beautiful Things being its seventh since the program’s inception. 
“South Fulton County has historically been excluded from several resources, including the arts,” says Executive Director Jennifer Bauer-Lyons. “That’s not to say that there aren’t great art nonprofit groups in South Fulton County, but they are geographically much more spread out than what we see in North Fulton County or in the city of Atlanta proper.”
The Courageous Conversations series remedies this by using open-forum discussions to encourage South Fulton audiences to connect with the arts. Professional actors and directors are brought in for a bare-bones reading featuring no costumes, sets or props and minimal sound effects. Each reading is followed by a guided talkback session focused on the themes of the play.
“It’s not your typical talkback. If the actors want to participate, they come offstage and they sit in the audience just like any other audience member. It really is focused on the themes of the play and not so much on character development or acting technique,” says Bauer-Lyons. 
A reading of “The Mountaintop,” by Katori Hall, as part of the Courageous Conversations series.
This reading certainly offers opportunities for discussion. Adapted by Nia Vardalos from a book by Cheryl Strayed, Tiny Beautiful Things follows Sugar, an anonymous advice columnist, as she offers insight and compassion to a variety of readers seeking help with the difficulties of life. The play is based on Strayed’s real-life experience as the writer of the column Dear Sugar. Some of the topics covered include drug addiction, sexual abuse, career indecision, isolation of trans youth and grief over lost family members. The thematic variety is part of what led Bauer-Lyons to choose the play for the series.
“What I love about Tiny Beautiful Things is that I think everyone can find a character to see themselves in because there are so many letter writers throughout the play. It allows for that human connection, but it also allows people to understand that you’re not in this on your own.” 
Other subjects covered in past talkbacks include racialized police violence (American Son by Christopher Demos-Brown), issues of sexual intimacy and consent (Actually by Anna Ziegler), science and politics (Smart People by Lydia R. Diamond) and the effects of incarceration (Clyde’s by Lynn Nottage).
The impact of the readings is felt outside of South Fulton County as well. Theatrical Outfit’s recent production of Clyde’s, which received praise from audiences and critics, took place partly because some of the company’s artistic staff attended a reading held last May as part of this series. 
The Courageous Conversations readings have seen an uptick in attendance even just since 2022, with audiences being eager to participate in these discussions.
“We’ve had conversations that have lasted 20 to 25 minutes, and then we’ve had conversations where we had to shut the venue down and cut people off because they were so into being able to talk about the themes of the play and how the characters maneuvered through those themes.”
The series works in tandem with multiple other programs designed to build arts patronage in South Fulton County. Notably, South Fulton Arts publishes a magazine called Arts United, to which any nonprofit arts organization in the area can submit articles or advertisements for their events. The magazine is published twice a year and is available for purchase at readings. 
Since this program exists to bolster arts organizations in South Fulton, the Courageous Conversations series makes a point of moving to different locations, with each one of the four readings taking place at a different venue. This practice increases accessibility for South Fulton audiences who may be too far away from one venue. It also allows the organization to showcase different performance spaces in the area. 
Tiny Beautiful Things will take the stage again on May 17 at Academy Theatre and May 18 at Onward Theatre, and South Fulton Arts has two more readings planned for this year: The Cake by Bekah Brunstetter and Feeding Beatrice by Kirsten Greenidge.
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Luke Evans is an Atlanta-based writer, critic and dramaturg. He covers theater for ArtsATL and Broadway World Atlanta and has worked with theaters such as the Alliance, Actor’s Express, Out Front Theatre and Woodstock Arts. He’s a graduate of Oglethorpe University, where he earned his bachelor’s degree, and the University of Houston, where he earned his master’s.

Groundbreaking landscape artist Richard Mayhew turned 100 this year. Black Art in America invited 16 artists to respond to his legacy.

This year, pioneering landscape painter Richard Mayhew became a centenarian. That means he was born a year before Malcolm X and has been painting since about the time Dwight D. Eisenhower was in the White House. Mayhew is still working today and recently had a resurgence in popularity with a high-profile exhibition at the new Venus Over Manhattan space on Great Jones Street in New York and the survey Richard Mayhew: Inner Terrain at the Sonoma Valley Museum of Art in Sonoma, California.
Over the course of a seven-decade career, Mayhew has tapped his African American and Native American ancestry to bring a personal brand of colorism to a subject matter — the American landscape — that has not been dominant in art since the Hudson River School of the mid-19th century. Nevertheless, Mayhew’s ability to use color as an emotional barometer of American soil soaked in Black and Indigenous blood has made him a leading practitioner of the form.
In Landscapes for Richard Mayhew on view at Black Art in America in East Point through May 18, curator Faron Manuel has set five original Mayhew paintings and prints in the context of works by 16 other artists responding to Mayhew’s work either in form, content or both. Artists include Curlee Raven Holton, Ted Ellis, Lillian Blades, Freddie Styles, Michi Meko, Emma Amos and more.
A few highlights from the show appear below.

“Untitled,” Richard Mayhew, watercolor on paper. Mayhew has called his works “mindscapes” as opposed to landscapes, emphasizing the extent to which he views his works as personal explorations of space and color.

“Desert Serenade,” Richard Mayhew, oil on canvas.

“Summation,” Richard Mayhew, hand-pulled silkscreen. “Summation” is one of Mayhew’s signature print works and represents the increasingly acidic palette the painter deployed as his career progressed.

“Summation Mayhew Homage,” Lillian Blades, mixed media assemblage on wood panel. This homage channels Mayhew’s color palette and evocation of space in the Blades’ vernacular of collected bits and pieces pulsing with glowing inner light.

“Abstracting the Abstract,” Najjar Abdul Musawwir. The show contains oblique takes on the landscape tradition.

“Quiet Time #8,” Mason Archie, oil on linen. Archie’s work reflects something of Mayhew’s personalized sense of color interpretation.

“Decaying World,” Larry Jerome, wood and metal.

“Atascadero,” Richard Mayhew, hand-pulled silkscreen.

“Maestro Mayhew II,” Curlee Raven Holton, watercolor and ink on paper. A clever reference documenting both Mayhew’s creation of the “Atascadero” print and Holton’s longstanding friendship and collaboration with the painter.

“Loner,” Michi Meko, acrylic, aerosol, oil pastel on paper. Meko continues his meditations on water, buoys and family identity.