Back to web version
Star Magazine’s 2008 Emerging Artists
SHINE ON
Stepping into the spotlight: Star Magazine’s emerging artists for 2008; meet 11 young Kansas City talents
A LIFE IN THE THEATER
BY ROBERT TRUSSELL
Classical music critics often categorize musical theater as one of the lower species, while theater critics who enjoy a nice melody don’t have much use for opera.
But one local singer/actor, 28-year-old Lauren Braton, keeps a foot firmly entrenched in both worlds. She moves between opera and musical theater with ease, thanks to her ability to handle diverse musical styles.
She just wrapped up “I Love You Because” with a pop/jazz score at the American Heartland Theatre and in early May will be seen in the Metropolitan Ensemble Theatre production of “A Man of No Importance” at the Off Center Theatre at Crown Center.
In 2007 she appeared in two shows at Quality Hill Playhouse (one dedicated to music from the 1950s, the other to the songs of Johnny Mercer); three summer musicals at the Lyceum Theatre in Arrow Rock, Mo.; and John Mueter’s original opera “Everlasting Universe” at the Folly Theater.
The year before, she appeared in “Songs for a New World” at the City Stage in Union Station, and in 2005 she performed in the Civic Opera production of Stephen Sondheim’s “Passion,” which is musical theater with a vocal score as demanding as many operas.
Braton was born in Kansas City and grew up with three siblings on 40 acres in Greenwood in Jackson County, where the kids entertained themselves by putting on shows in the basement. But there were also plenty of outdoor activities, including horseback riding and softball.
“I was a huge tomboy when I was younger,” she says. “I’d climb trees and was always cut up and had bruises.”
Braton said she still stays with her parents in Greenwood when she does a show in Kansas City.
“I live in Sedalia now, which is kind of strange because I always thought I’d be downtown, but I married my husband, and his work territory is in Sedalia, so I moved there.”
Her husband, Ron Fenton, has adjusted to her life in the theater. “He’s so unlike me,” she says. “We are complete opposites, but I don’t think I’d have it any other way. He balances me out. I don’t think he’d ever been to a play or a musical or an opera before he met me. He keeps all of my programs and keeps my head shots in a little drawer and saves all the tickets. It’s very charming.”
Braton, a Lee’s Summit High School graduate, earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in voice performance at UMKC and considered teaching. But she wanted to try a performing career first.
“I came to a crossroads, and it was: Should I go for it or do I teach and just settle? Musical theater was all I knew from the time I was 11 years old … and I got to the point where I thought if I let it go completely, I would be absolutely miserable.”
BAND WITH A PLAN
BY TIMOTHY FINN
The men of Red Line Chemistry have experienced their ultimate dream. They’d like to make it part of their everyday lives.
In June 2007, the band from Kansas City played the opening set at Rockfest, the annual hard-rock orgy at Penn Valley Park. When RLC took the second stage at 11 a.m., a crowd of about 15,000 was waiting.
“It was incredible,” says drummer Mike Mazzarese.
The experience was a lesson in both ambition and humility. On one hand, the band got some perspective on the difference between where it was and where it wanted to be.
“Backstage we were known as the band with the beat-up van pulling the U-Haul trailer,” says lead singer Brett Ditgen. “Everyone else was riding tour buses.”
The other lesson: Once you’ve had a swig of Cristal, it’s tough to go back to yard beer.
“Being up on that big stage in front of so many people — we didn’t want to stop,” says bassist Tom Brown. “It made us realize even more how much we want it.”
Crowds of thousands may not be in its immediate future, but Red Line Chemistry has launched a plan that should lead to more success and a few perks — or at least a bigger van with a smoother complexion. RLC recently hooked up with Alex Brahl and his management company.
“I had been following the band for about six months and listening to the record,” Brahl says, “but it was when I saw them live for the first time that I really knew we should work together. They are an incredible live band.”
Brahl and his partner, Bill Rusch, have been in business together for less than two years. Collectively, though, they have decades of experience in all facets of the industry, from making records to managing bands, owning a label and promoting music to radio stations.
One of the first things they did with RLC is clean up the recorded version of “TheEmpty,” a song from the band’s lone album, and get it in rotation at 98.9 FM The Rock, the local hard-rock juggernaut.
They also spread the word outside Kansas City, via the Internet. The week of April 7, RLC was a featured band at MySpace. That week, its jukebox took more than 7,000 hits a day.
As the Brahl group figures out the next steps and strategies, the band is focused on its simple game plan. The mantra, according to lead guitarist Andy Breit: “Write, rehearse, record and play live.”
Brahl is down with that, especially that last part.
“I have never seen a local crowd go as crazy for a local band as their crowd,” he says. “They sing every word.”
IT’S ALIVE! (AND A CAREER IS BORN)
BY ROBERT W. BUTLER
Local filmmaker and film educator Benjamin Meade sees a lot of student work. But when David Matheny’s 10-minute film “The Scientist” turned up on his desk at Avila University, he realized it was something special.
“Watching it, I knew that Dave had crossed that invisible line between student and semi-pro,” Meade says. “I think he may be the best young filmmaker we’ve got in this town.”
“The Scientist” is as impressive for what it isn’t as for what it is.
Most young filmmakers doing a variation on the “mad scientist” movie would go for creepiness or comedy. They’d revel in the laboratory hardware, they’d lavish attention on the “monster” on the slab.
Matheny defies those expectations. His camera rarely puts the action front and center. It’s a film of oblique angles and cluttered compositions. Action takes place just out of sight.
The story — a man attempts to create artificial life in the basement of his suburban home using little more than junk collected from trash bins — is told without dialogue. The central character speaks only a few lines, and those are in some foreign tongue (actually it’s beginner’s Hebrew).
By being evasive, by not looking directly at his subject, Matheny gives weight and plausibility to a proposition that in other hands could quickly descend into camp.
“It’s what you don’t see that’s scary,” the 23-year-old filmmaker says. “It’s what your mind creates.”
Here’s the real kicker: “The Scientist” was made for about $120. Most of the money went into a lab coat for the title character and odds and ends from Home Depot that double as medical equipment.
Long a movie fan, Matheny started making his own films while a student at Gardner-Edgerton High School: “Me and my buddies made movies in the backyard … fight scenes, stuff like that.”
He’s enrolled at Avila but says he’s not sure whether he’s a junior or a senior. It’s about making movies, Matheny says, not counting credits, and he has spent most of his college career holding a camera, often as a crew member on the films of his mentor, Meade.
Now he’s editing his latest, a feature called “My Stepdad’s a Freakin’ Vampire.” Unlike the bargain-basement “Scientist,” “Stepdad” will cost nearly $70,000. Matheny went deep into debt on his credit cards, but his father and namesake, Gardner chiropractor David Matheny, has promised to pay them off.
“He believes in me more than I believe in me,” marvels Matheny the Younger.
“Stepdad” should be ready for home video release by Halloween. Then Matheny will turn to a new project, which may have nothing at all to do with scary stuff.
“Horror is just part of the package,” he says. “Before I’m done I want to do a bit of everything.”
CHANNELING THE COMPOSERS
BY PAUL HORSLEY
The first thing to get past is the pronunciation of his name.
After that, Behzod Abduraimov seems like any other good-natured 17-year-old. He has a quick wit, an infectious laugh and dark eyes that burn with intensity.
But BECH-zod (with a mildly guttural “ch”) Ab-du-ra-EE-moff is no ordinary kid. He’s one of the most remarkable pianists of his generation.
The Uzbekistan native has been performing on the stage since elementary school.
He’s performed the Tchaikovsky Concerto No. 1 with orchestra “like 20 times.”
In recent weeks he sailed to easy victories at two competitions in Texas, most notably the Corpus Christi International Piano Competition.
He could have studied with any teacher in the world but instead of Juilliard or Berlin he decided to study at Park University with Van Cliburn gold medalist and Park professor Stanislav Ioudenitch.
“My whole family played piano,” says the Tashkent native and undergraduate, who learned English lickety-split after arriving here a little more than a year ago.
His family is Muslim, like 88 percent of Uzbekistanis. His mother, Gulsun, taught him and his three siblings piano, starting Behzod at age 5.
His father, Abdurazzak, was a physicist who taught at the university in Tashkent and invented a car that ran on oxygen.
When Behzod was 10, his father died suddenly of a heart attack.
His 11th birthday was on Sept. 11, 2001.
His mother had prepared the traditional lamb pilaf for his birthday dinner. His sister came home suddenly, upset: “Turn on the TV.” The fall of the World Trade Center put a pall on dinner.
There were other twists along the way. He suffered severe food allergies from birth, which caused his skin to break out in oozing rashes for years.
“You can see it in videos of me then. I looked like Quasimodo.”
The reaction was treated successfully, finally, by an herbalist who prescribed a Tibetan herb. Behzod still takes it daily.
He remains a faithful Muslim, praying twice a day and practicing around the clock in the piano studios beneath Park’s Graham Tyler Memorial Chapel.
“Now I’m 17, and it’s time to work.”
His goal is “to show what a composer wanted to say through his music.”
He came to Ioudenitch after a lesson he took with him in Lake Cuomo, Italy. “He found so many interesting things just in the first page,” he says.
Ioudenitch wanted him as a student the minute he heard him play.
“There are millions of performers, good performers with wonderful technique, but not every one communicates this energy,” Ioudenitch says. “Besides his great technique, he really communicates. He has his own ‘face.’ ”
Behzod’s hobbies include Internet video games. He can’t wait for “Grand Theft Auto IV,” which takes place in the city he hopes to live in some day: New York.
“You feel like you’re free in the city to do anything you want,” he says of the game’s therapeutic value.
And 10 years from now?
“I hope I can be a pianist. Not just any pianist. A pianist people need, who can give people something incredible — who can make people happy.”
LOOKING EVERYWHERE FOR ART
BY ALICE THORSON
Anne Austin Pearce has built a solid reputation in the Kansas City art world — and a national exhibition record — for her psychologically probing figurative works and more recent abstractions.
“Pearce seems to understand the intimacies of behavior and how they play out and can be emotionally and psychically mapped,” says Pitch art critic Dana Self, who saw Pearce’s “Rhetorical Black Holes” series in the Urban Culture Project’s February-March “Mapping” show at La Esquina.
Last year Pearce exhibited the series at an international listening conference in Germany. Her more recent works include a compelling set of tiny ink and acrylic stain paintings called “Squirrel Spirits,” inspired by the dead squirrels ubiquitous on local roadways.
In addition to her accomplishments as an artist, Pearce has also made her mark as a thoughtful curator.
As director of the Greenlease Gallery at Rockhurst University since 2004, Pearce (shown there with a landscape by Topeka native Lee Bowers) has racked up a long list of strong shows, including a provocative exhibit of history paintings by Lawrence-based American Indian artist Wayne Wildcat in fall 2006.
Her 2007 “Beasts” show of animal-inspired works by Kansas City artists provided an early look at the growing trend of animal imagery in contemporary art.
“I’m looking for art wherever I go,” Pearce says. “I love getting to know the artists and what’s underneath.”
Pearce got to know KC artist Marcus Cain in 2004. Enthused about his work, she gave him a one-person exhibit at Greenlease in 2006. Last summer the two collaborated on works they exhibited at the Epsten Gallery at Village Shalom.
“She’s open to whatever possibilities may exist in a situation,” Cain says. “She’s a collaborator, whether she’s curating or exhibiting. She’s very inclusive and very generous in that way.
“She’s very resourceful and has fostered a lot of networking,” he says. “I don’t think people realize how much she’s been involved with over the years.”
At the Greenlease, Pearce is fond of pairing Kansas City talents with out-of-town artists. In 2006 she organized a two-person show of KC artist Susan White and Los Angeles artist Leigh Salgado. Both use burning tools to create their work.
One of the most important exhibits Pearce organized was a Mott-ly retrospective, mounted shortly before the popular local artist’s death at age 44 in 2007. She also produced a detailed catalog for the show, which serves as a lasting record of his life and work.
In addition to her curatorial responsibilities, Pearce also teaches two studio classes at Rockhurst. With all those claims on her time, she still manages to grow and develop as an artist.
This year she’s exhibiting work in a half-dozen shows, including the Drawing Center Viewing Program in New York City and a “KC in LA” group show at the Milo Gallery in Los Angeles.
SOMETHING'S AWFUL FUNNY
BY DAN LYBARGER
Richard “Lowtax” Kyanka and his Web site, somethingawful.com, are all about guilt-inducing delights.
For example, in a recent “PhotoShop Phriday” entry, users can see a series of altered photos of a formerly innocent science fair that now includes a display on how to dispose of dead bodies. Needless to say, don’t visit the page at work.
Still, mere tastelessness doesn’t cut it with Kyanka, who lives in Lee’s Summit.
“The whole thing I base all my decisions on is if it makes me laugh,” he says. “And so I only hire writers if they make me laugh, or I’ll only use your feature if I think it’s funny.”
Kyanka, 31, had originally started Something Awful as a personal site while he was working for gaming company GameSpy. But the site now includes thousands of amusing contributions from people who proudly dub themselves “goons,” providing Kyanka with his primary source of income.
A longtime cult favorite, Something Awful has at least 100,000 registered users in its forum and has inspired several similarly demented sites.
Kyanka says Something Awful survived and prospered after the Internet bubble-burst of 2000 because he had something other than money in mind when he founded it in 1999.
“All the stuff that died were people who were using the Internet just to make money. And when you have a bunch of people who see an opportunity to make money, and they all flock to it, it’s like the mortgage subprime industry. It just falls out. My mistake-slash-blessing was to start a business I never intended to be a business.”
The site includes short comic videos, Kyanka’s scathing reviews of energy drinks and transcripts of bizarre pranks.
“Originally our tagline wasn’t ‘The Internet makes you stupid.’ Before that, it was a tossup between ‘The Internet makes you stupid’ and ‘If you read it on the Internet, it must be true.’ ”
Attending Rockhurst High School had an impact on what he does.
“Jesuits will make you crazy,” he says. “Catholics in general make you crazy. I’ve always had that general sense of humor.”
Kyanka took his nickname from Tennessee politician Byron (Low Tax) Looper, who was convicted of murdering a rival in 1989. Kyanka, who was attending Tennessee’s Vanderbilt University at the time, almost became an intern for him.
The webmaster has endured his share of controversy. He attracted the ire of the Foreskin Restoration and Intactivist Network, who didn’t appreciate being lampooned on the site.
“I’m actually hoping those people take me to court, because I want to see ‘Richard Kyanka vs. Foreskin Restoration Society.’ ”
THE NONSTOP WRITER
BY JOHN MARK EBERHART
There are times Angela Cervantes would rather write than eat.
“Right now I am attached to a short story I am writing that could become a full-length novel,” Cervantes says. “It’s weird, but when I leave for work, I actually miss it. I am sitting there thinking about the characters and can’t wait to get back to them at the end of the day. I get resentful when grocery shopping, phone calls or having to eat gets in the way of finishing a line or chapter.”
Now that’s a writer.
Cervantes’ dedication has started to pay off. One of her short stories, “What’s up with dads and pork chop sandwiches?,” was featured in the 2005 anthology Chicken Soup for the Latino Soul. Her work has seen print in Kansas City Voices, Urban Latino and in the pages of this very magazine (“Abuela’s Revenge” in 2004). She has won honors from several literary organizations including the Missouri Review.
But she has yet to publish a full-length short-story collection or novel. She turned 37 earlier this month — and she’s not worried one bit that she hasn’t yet emerged as a widely known author. If it happens someday, of course it would be great. But Cervantes knows how difficult it is to get a book published these days.
“My goal for myself is just to keep writing for the pure love of it. I hope to send off a proposal for this novel this year and we’ll see what happens.”
“The pure love of it” describes half her feelings toward writing; it’s a love/hate relationship if ever there was one. Cervantes confesses she’s not always the kindest Latina soul when she’s in the middle of a project.
“I am a happy person in general. I love meeting new people and I love art and creating, so I am not easily depressed — but interrupt me while I am writing and you will find a different person. My self-esteem is at its lowest when I am writing. When dialogue is coming out right, it’s the best feeling and I am all at once in love, but mostly it is an agonizing experience for me. I have to lock the door to spare my husband from the Jekyll-and-Hyde madness that plays out while I am writing.”
Her husband, Carlos Antequera, runs a Kansas City software company and seems like the kind of man who would be very patient with his creative wife.
It also doesn’t hurt that he and Cervantes are newlyweds; the couple married last September.
As for Cervantes, she works for Children International, the child sponsorship organization headquartered here.
In short, life is pretty good these days — even when Cervantes is fuming over a tricky piece of dialogue or a phone call or some other interruption. Difficult as writing can be, she’s addicted to it. The plan is to never, ever stop.
“Even if I’m never published again.”
redlinechemistry, where you can also purchase copies of the CD.
The band headlines a show May 17 at Davey’s Uptown Ramblers Club, 3402 Main St. RLC has also been invited back to perform at Rockfest 2008 on June 7 at Penn Valley Park.
The free performances are part of the university’s third annual Student Research and Creative Arts Symposium.