The Great Northern Podcast

Jothsna Harris is a climate and cultural strategist and the principal consultant of Change Narrative LLC. With nearly a decade of experience building capacity for the climate justice movement, Jothsna has designed and implemented award-winning climate change programs. She coaches people to find compelling narratives as an advocacy tool for solutions. For this episode, Jothsna paired up with Tabitha Montgomery, Executive Director of the Powderhorn Park Neighborhood Association. Tabitha has crafted her climate story specifically for The Great Northern Podcast. Enjoy.

In this episode of The Great Northern Podcast, we get to sit in on a conversation between Ashwini  Ramaswamy and Yia Vang. Ashwini is a celebrated choreographer, dancer, and artist who has spent years steeped in south Indian classical dance, while also creating her own personal vision of South Asian women's representation within the performing arts. Chef Yia Vang was born in a Thai refugee camp where he lived until his family resettled in central Wisconsin. Yia uses food to tell a story and believes that every dish has a narrative. Please enjoy this conversation between two cultural creators who navigate multiple influences.Both Ashwini and Yia are part of this year's Great Northern Festival. Visit The Great Northern for more info.

For this episode, we drop into a conversation between Anthony Taylor and Kari Leibowitz. Anthony Taylor is the Senior Vice President of Equity in the Outdoors for the YMCA of the North, a leading non-profit dedicated to strengthening communities through youth development, healthy living and social responsibility. Kari Leibowitz is a health psychologist, speaker, and writer. Her research, writing, speaking, and teaching aims to help us understand and harness the power of our mindsets to improve our health and wellbeing. Specifically, she has written about Wintertime Mindset. Kari will be hosting a workshop as part of The Great Northern on Saturday, January 29 at Silverwood Park.The YMCA of the North will be partnering with The Great Northern for events on January 29 and February 5. Visit The Great Northern for more info. Please enjoy Anthony and Kari's discussion which explores some of the contours that shape the work of The Great Northern.

In this episode, composer Molly Joyce talks about her practice, and specifically her new project Perspective, which is a part of The Great Northern this year. The work features words and stories of disabled interviewees, set within a complimentary soundscape. Perspective is on view at Second Shift Studio Space, opening January 28. More information is at The Great Northern Festival. We hope you enjoy learning about Molly's process.

Join Dream the Combine and Issac Gale in a follow up conversation to our first episode. They share their finished audio project from their collaborative process TRACKING: A Polyrhythm of Winter.https://thegreatnorthernfestival.com/allevents/dream-the-combine-trackingMixed by Ryan Olson

In the final weekend of The Great Northern Festival, we are excited to share a conversation that looks ahead to 2022. Artists Andy Ducett and Jovan Speller share their process for a sculptural installation in development for next years festival. To support this project and all the work of The Great Northern, make a donation here.Thanks so much for listening to the 2021 Season podcast. We'll see you next year.

Enjoy this conversation with The Sioux Chef's Sean Sherman and VILD MAD's Mikkel-Lau Mikkelsen“For Sherman, the revitalization of Indigenous food systems is not only a way to address health and financial disparities within Native American communities and to start healing after centuries of trauma, but it's also a way forward to a healthier, more sustainable world.” —Food & Wine “Foraging is a way to engage with nature to better understand and appreciate it. We've created a program dedicated to teaching everyone in Denmark, including school children, to learn about our landscape, understand how to find food in the wild, and how to cook with it. The program simply wants to make everyone a forager.”—chef René Redzepi on VILD MAD, led by Mikkel-Lau MikkelsenDue to travel restrictions, what would have been a live event has been reimagined as a dynamic podcast episode featuring Sean Sherman (The Sioux Chef, Minneapolis) and Mikkel-Lau Mikkelsen (VILD MAD, Copenhagen) on getting outside and connecting with nature through foraging. The talk will include a focus on seasonality/rhythm of foraging in northern climates, similarities/differences between Sherman and Mikkelsen's approaches, what is foragable in winter, climate change's effects on foraging in Minneapolis and Copenhagen, and foraging as a path to sustainability. This event is in association with Meal Magazine Issue 2, featuring two long-form articles commissioned by The Great Northern featuring Sean Sherman, Mikkel Mikkelsen, Yia Vang and Wendy Geniusz. Learn more.

We have a special bonus episode featuring Winter Kill by J. Drew Lanham. Poet, teacher, birder and conservationist J. Drew Lanham is author of The Home Place—Memoirs of a Colored Man's Love Affair with Nature (Milkweed Editions). This episode includes Hoyt Schemerhorn by Aorta. Music by Christopher Cerrone, Performed by Vicky Chow.The Great Northern has partnered with On Being with Krista Tippett for her interview with J. Drew Lanham. That podcast episode is released Thursday Jan 28 with a radio broadcast on Sunday, January 31. More information here.Cultural Acknowledgment "I have written and attempted to speak with veracity and reverence, the words and language of First Nations and Indigenous Peoples. I am not indigenous nor First Nations,  but am deeply  grateful to the Anishinaabeg and Ojibwe People, and all First Nations and Indigenous Peoples, acknowledging their presence in lands that I have known, and hope one day to know."-J. Drew Lanham

Dig into a conversation between Gabriel Cabezas,  Gabriella Smith, and Nadia Sirota for their new collaboration: Lost CoastAnd, register here for a free online event:Music preview, video premiere by Darian Donovan Thomas and q&aIn partnership with Bedroom CommunityWith support from Anne Carayon and Dan PennieTuesday, February 2 at 7:30pm CST Composer Gabriella Smith, whose music has been described as “high-voltage and wildly imaginative” (Philadelphia Inquirer) and “the coolest, most exciting, most inventive new voice I've heard in ages” (Musical America) comes together with Sphinx Medal of Excellence recipient cellist Gabriel Cabezas on Lost Coast, a forthcoming album that addresses both the natural beauty of the planet and humanity's hand at destroying it. Recorded in Iceland's famed Greenhouse Studios during the extremities of the country's far-northern daylight cycle, Lost Coast sees Cabezas's virtuosic cello playing layered acoustically with Smith's arresting vocals to create an addictive and unexpected palette, deployed with Smith's trademark compositional ingenuity.

Listen in to a conversation between two centerpieces of the Twin Cities art scene,  Alec Soth & Dave King for their new project The PalmsPurchase tickets to the exclusive livestream, commissioned by The Great NorthernTickets: $15 at thegreatnorthernfestival.veeps.comSaturday, January 30, 20218:00 PM  9:00 PMWith support from Weinstein Hammons Gallery*, Dr. Tom von Sternberg and Eve ParkerIn partnership with Street Factory MediaVirtual event, Parkway TheaterThe sound of a slide dropping into a projector's carousel, the smell of a photo album being opened for the first time in decades: there's a physicality to memory that's largely lost in the digital age. First-time collaborators, renowned photographer Alec Soth (“celebrated chronicler of contemporary American life" —The Guardian) and drummer/composer Dave King (“better than anyone at mixing the sensibilities of post-‘60s jazz and indie rock” —The New York Times) explore these sensations in The Palms, an improvisatory rummaging in the attic of memory.   Special thanks to Schubert Club for donating the piano used in this performance. 

Listen in to a conversation about T R A C K I N G by award-winning architecture/art duo Dream the Combine. The project is an intimate portrait of winter for The Great Northern. Consisting of a series of five movement prompts and responses distributed via text message, the artwork will be an archive of our collective remembrances of winter. Register here to participate in the project.Project participants will explore the ways in which we are all bodies of water in relation to each other by receiving a text message that offers an intention for the day. People are then invited to share their response to the day's message in the form of audio, video, and/or image files sent as a reply within 24 hours. Tracks and visuals received will later be combined to create a polyrhythmic sonic image of this time and place. T R A C K I N G encourages you to bring your awareness to the small moments of winter that cohere all of us (body, environment, cosmos) in an interrelated system. The movement prompts are simple, often tapping into our long-term procedural memories. They can be done wherever you find yourself, highlighting that we can all experience something unexpected right where we are.The final output of the project will be a series of audio tracks made in collaboration with artist Isaac Gale and made available during the vernal equinox on March 20, 2021. This is when our side of the earth tilts back towards the sun and water moves toward its eventual thaw. About Dream the CombineJennifer Newsom and Tom Carruthers are licensed architects, artists, and principals of Dream The Combine, based in Minneapolis, MN. They have produced numerous site-specific installations in the U.S. and Canada that explore metaphor, perceptual uncertainties, and the boundary between real and illusory space. They are winners of the 2018 Young Architects Program at MoMA PS1 for their installation Hide & Seek, and were recently named winners of the 2020-2021 J. Irwin and Xenia S. Miller Prize. Jennifer and Tom are both graduates of the Yale School of Architecture. http://www.dreamthecombine.com/https://thegreatnorthernfestival.com/allevents/dream-the-combine-tracking

Subscribe today! We can't wait to share our first season with you, launching with the start of the festival on January 28, 2021.