JENNY SCHEINMAN & H. LEE WATERS ⏐ KANNAPOLIS: A MOVING PORTRAIT Kannapolis: A Moving Portrait is a music & film project conceived by award-‐winning composer, singer, and violinist Jenny Scheinman. It consists of a live score performed by her trio and sound design for a movie made from the films of H. Lee Waters (1902-‐1997), who documented over 100 towns in the Carolinas, Virginia, and Tennessee in the latter half of the Great Depression. Commissioned by Duke Performances, Kannapolis is the first project of its From the Archives initiative, in which performing artists create works engaging archival materials from Duke's David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library. During summer 2014, Scheinman and director Finn Taylor worked with editor Rick LeCompte and sound designer Trevor Jolly to create a 70-‐minute film, edited from 30 hours of H. Lee Waters’ original footage. Scheinman’s trio featuring guitarist and banjo player Robbie Fulks, multi-‐instrumentalist Robbie Gjersoe, and herself on vocals, violin, and octave mandolin, performs a live score comprising original and traditional songs. The project’s premiere will be at Duke’s Reynolds Theater in Durham, NC, on March 20, 2015, and it will tour in the U.S. and abroad in the 2015/16 concert season and beyond. Herbert Lee Waters’ spectacularly beautiful but largely unknown films captured people of all ages and races on the streets, at school, in factories, and in almost every non-‐domestic part of their lives. He shot in black & white and color, artistically using slow and reverse motion, and showed his films in local movie theaters. Kannapolis is the name of one of the last films that Waters made, in the town of Kannapolis, NC, home to the Canon textile factory. The film was shot in 1941, just months before the US entered the Second World War, when the town was in a state of precarious optimism and Waters was at the height of his powers as a filmmaker. The Kannapolis films are part of the Library of Congress' National Film Registry. Jenny Scheinman employs her formidable musical ingenuity to make a stirring new work incorporating this rich artifact of American cinema. Her score draws from folk music sources, specifically the cyclical musical structures prevalent in the fiddle music of regions visited by Waters. Scheinman, whose most recent release The Littlest Prisoner for Sony Masterworks features Bill Frisell and Brian Blade, “[has] a distinctive vision of American music, suffused with plainspoken beauty and fortified all at once by country, gospel, and melting-‐
pot folk, along with jazz and the blues.” (The New York Times). EPK Kannapolis: A Moving Portrait http://vimeo.com/106545179 Please contact us for more information, avails, budget, etc.