The Hillsboro Story
Dancer-writer Susan Banyas and jazz composer David Ornette Cherry, team up to perform excerpts from The Hillsboro Story as a movement monologue with live music, directed by choreographer, Gregg Bielemeier.
The Hillsboro Story -- a non-fiction book-in-progress -- opens in Hillsboro, Ohio on July 5, 1954 when the "colored" elementary school went up in flames. The fire sparked a "school fight" led by five African American mothers that became the first test case for the Brown v. Board of Education decision (May, 1954) in the North. Ms. Banyas was in the third grade, and the memory of those times sparked this cultural detective story -- a lively mix of voices, images, and narration backed by an evocative sound score by David Ornette Cherry.
Excerpts from The Hillsboro Story will be performed on March 14, 2008 at Columbia University in New York, sponsored by Oral History in the Mid-Atlantic Region, the Columbia University Oral History Research Office & the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts.