SeaBus Dance Company is excited to announce our upcoming project LOOM, an improvisational dance piece that will bring distant dancers and Columbus communities together. LOOM will premiere Friday, October 27th at Art of Yoga and will continue through the weekend with a October 28th show at MadLab Theater and a October 29th show at Flux + Flow Dance and Movement Center. Wherever you reside, we didn’t want you to miss it, which is why we included performances all across the city: in Franklinton, Downtown Columbus AND Clintonville! Just as LOOM aims to weave distal Columbus communities together with dance, its goal is also to gather dancers from across the country and present the converging of ideas, movement and narrative. 

By Madeline Stocker and Nicole Butler

Sparked by the outcome of last November’s presidential election, a fire is spreading across Columbus.

Even people who don’t usually pay attention to local politics are witnessing a shift in the political landscape of Ohio’s capital city. There has been a surge in anti-Trump marches, demonstrations outside the Statehouse and public outcry against the top-down legislation threatening to compromise the everyday lives of Columbus residents citywide.

In other words, ‘resistance’ has become a daily practice for hundreds of thousands of Ohio citizens. But each day since last November, more and more Columbus residents are channeling their efforts into resisting the status quo here at home.

“I want to stand against the harmful and flawed policies coming from Washington D.C.,” said Ernest Whitted Jr., who lives with his wife on the South Side. “But I’ve started to notice that many of the decisions that hurt me and my family are made right here in my hometown.”

If the whole state of Vermont, the cities of San Francisco, Los Angeles, Phoenix, Denver, Seattle, Minneapolis, Albuquerque, Davenport, Iowa, and even Oberlin, Ohio can change the name of Columbus Day to Indigenous Peoples Day – could Columbus, Ohio be far behind? Sadly, yes.

Following the Ameriflora controversy in 1992 – the international flower festival at Franklin Park celebrating 500 years since Christopher Columbus invaded North America – Native Americans descended on Columbus City Council playing drums and chanting. Council members refused to change the name of Columbus Day, but as an immediate concession to the victims of genocide initiated by Columbus and to make the Native Americans go away, agreed that a week starting on Columbus Day would be designated Indigenous People’s Week. But we never heard anything about that again.

There were some victories: our city hasn’t held a Columbus Day parade since the 90s, the Santa Maria is thankfully gone, and activists successfully prevented a Christopher Columbus statue made by a Russian sculptor, six feet taller than the Statue of Liberty, from being erected downtown.

By Andy Hudson, Grge Boas, Jane Ries, A.J. Vanderelli and Michael Kehlmeier

Imagine a time when there was no Short North Arts District, no Short North Gallery Hop, no WexnerCenter for the Arts, no cap over I-670, no not-for-profit art galleries on High Street, no lighted arches, no galleries or coffee shops, no health gyms, no preppy apartment buildings and no fancy restaurants. Rather there was just the Press Grill, Bob’s No-name Bar, PM Gallery, Michaels Goody Boy, the Short North Tavern and some antique stores and other long gone businesses. Thirty years ago that was the situation in 1987 when Geoffrey Taber created the ACME Art Co. (at first named the Geoffrey Taber Gallery).

A viral cell phone video of a nine-minute long police assault of an unarmed man inside a Livingston Avenue convenience store on September 1, horrified and sickened many people who viewed it.

The video, shot by a bystander inside the store, shows a black man being attacked and brutally beaten by men, who look like skinheads, who turned out to be plainclothes members of the Columbus Police gang unit. The store owner insists he did not call the police on Timothy Davis, who had not committed any crime in the store. Later, the officers can be heard on police bodycam video saying they followed Davis into the store because there was a warrant for his arrest.