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The Juneau Arts and Humanities Council is producing a theater project to put under-represented voices on stage. The working title is the “Juneau Histories Theater Project.”

The council is looking for individuals, with a focus on Tlingit and Haida people, to workshop and share and their life experiences for performance in March.

This is video is from a similar performance in Lawrence, Kansas.

The project’s community liaison Frank Henry Kaash Katasse teamed up with fellow Juneau artist Ryan Conarro and the New York-based Ping Chong and Company, a theater company known for working with under-represented communities.

“I know they have done some with Islamic people living in America. They’ve done some with transgender people. They’ve gone to reservations. They did one up in, I think, in the Kuskokwim last year interviewing some Yupik people,” Katasse said. “They travel to different communities and they want people to tell their stories.”

Juneau’s production would be the latest in Ping Chong and Company’s “Undesirable Elements” series.

“One of the themes that we’re focusing on or thinking about is the Old Indian Village, the Willoughby District, in downtown Juneau,” Katasse said.

In Juneau, Katasse, Conarro and theater founder Ping Chong himself, will choose five stories and their tellers, conduct additional interviews, help script those stories, and add theatrical elements.

“One of my missions in life is to get people up on stage,” Katasse said. “It’s what I do through Juneau Douglas Little Theatre, it’s what I like here at Perseverance, and this is a great opportunity for people to get up on stage in a very low stress environment. They have the script right in front of them that they have to read, they’re telling their own stories.”

Katasse and company note that this project is open to more than Alaska Native people.

The group also is interested in hearing experiences relating to the Juneau Arts and Culture Center itself, formerly the National Guard Armory, the gold rush, statehood, fishing and tourism, military and other cultural groups such as Filipino and Pacific Islander communities.

Interested people must be willing to get on stage, and fill out an application by Jan. 10.

Andy Miller describes himself as a reclusive Juneau songwriter and poet. We got Miller, Nanooks hoodie and all, out of the house recently to play a Red Carpet Concert here at KTOO.

The musician’s songs focus on what he calls heart-felt reflections on modern life in Juneau, and often blur lines between earnest observation and satire. Song titles on his most recent album include “Five Exes in Douglas,” “After the Legislature Leaves” and “Mike Chenault and the Triangle Bar.”

Here is Miller singing “Justin Parish’s Beard.”

Christy NaMee Eriksen‘s new video for her poem “How To Say Goodbye” follows a pair of friends over a lifetime. The film is dedicated to Amy Henderson, her friend who passed away from cancer earlier this year. The video arrives on Henderson’s birthday. She would  have been 33 today.

Recorded in the days following Henderson’s death, Eriksen partnered with guitarist Avery Stewart to create the soundtrack. Stewart’s warm electric guitar accompanies Eriksen’s drawn out farewell. Both artists experienced loss in 2017.

“In my family, when we say goodbye on an ordinary day it’s a very long process, almost comically long sometimes,” Eriksen wrote in an email. “After my friend died I felt so angry and sad at having not gotten to experience that final long goodbye with her.”

Her poem is a reminder that saying goodbye is just the ritual to honor and give thanks for friendship, “All the reverence, all the gratitude, everything that happens before the goodbye should matter more than the goodbye itself.”

The film is the third in a series created with videographer Ryan Cortes with support from a Rasmuson Foundation artist award.

The Seattle post-punk band SHIVERTWINS has released their latest song “Watch” before their Juneau homecoming show later this month.

Recorded just over a year ago, songwriter Eric Mountcastle says “Watch” is about their frustrations surrounding America’s current political climate. With issues like global warming, “We’re reduced to spectators forced to watch the world end. … We want to fix it but we physically can’t because we don’t have a seat at the table.”

Bassist James Rosales says the band will always be inspired by their favorite garage rock acts like FIDLAR and The Strokes who they crafted their earlier music around. But their latest, more polished sound, comes from by the mixing of guitarist Lance Fohrenkam’s dream pop influences.

Since moving to Seattle during the summer of 2015, the band’s released an EP titled 19, AGAIN and has recently been selected to play the main stage at Seattle’s Big Ass Boom Box, a free music festival showcasing local artists in January.

On Dec. 23, the band will play an all ages show the Rockwell Ballroom. It will be their first hometown show with the current lineup.

Their full-length debut album is set to arrive spring 2018.

Portugal. The Man started out as a modest indie band with deep roots in Alaska and has since ascended to national, even international, popularity.

The Portland-based group’s music has long been described as “alternative rock,” but their song “Feel It Still” recently earned the band its first Grammy Award nomination — in the pop category.

The single is off their newest album, “Woodstock,” and it has spent weeks at the top of music charts, peaking at number 4 on the Billboard Hot 100.

Reached by phone while he was walking around Atlanta before a show, co-founder and bass player Zach Carothers said the attention has been surreal.

“We absolutely don’t belong in that world, which is funny,” Carothers said. “I don’t have a tan. I’m 36 years old, and I’m from Wasilla, Alaska. And we’re playing next to Selena Gomez and stuff like that. It’s wild.”

The band also includes vocalist and guitar player John Gourley and guitarist Eric Howk, who are joined by Kyle O’Quinn on keyboards and Jason Sechrist on drums.

Like Carothers, Gourley and Howk are originally from Alaska.

The experience has been fun, overall, Carothers said.

It’s given the band a chance to see the world, and he said their lives are a little easier than the days when they toured in a van and ate out of a rice cooker in random parking lots.

Still, it’s a lot of work.

“Since ‘Feel It Still’ has gotten massive, our day-to-day life hasn’t really changed,” Carothers said. “We still just go out on tour, we’re just still on a bus and on an airplane, and we go and do a show, it’s just those shows are getting bigger. But it’s hard to see what’s really happening when you’re kind of in the eye of the hurricane.”

Gourley has said the band’s work ethic comes from growing up in Alaska and seeing how hard work is necessary for survival.

Carothers said the environment in the North contributes as well.

“Growing up and how you grow up is at least half of what you’re made of,” Carothers said. “Half of it is how you were brought up. And then the other half is what you see along the way as your adult life. I feel like Alaskans really know themselves.”

Carothers knows it’ll be a completely different scene when the band walks the red carpet at the Grammys in January.

They’ve been to some awards shows already, and he describes them with one word: “bright.”

The Grammys are a whole different level of attention, though, Carothers said.

“It’s a really weird world and it’s something just very strange to see, especially coming from Alaska,” he said. “It’s just things that you saw on movies or on TV and you never expect to be there. But it’s really fun.”

Carothers said the Alaskan members of Portugal. The Man will take a break from touring to head north for Christmas.

They’ll be in New York on Jan. 28 for the 60th annual Grammy Awards at Madison Square Garden.

A new play titled “Dreaming Glacier Bay” opens tonight at Perseverance Theatre. Based on true events, the play is set on Lemesurier Island near the entrance to Glacier Bay, and involves Hollywood movie star John Barrymore. But what brought Barrymore to our waters?

Check out the above video of John Barrymore playing Larry Renault in the 1933 “Dinner at Eight.”

I asked local film buff Collette Costa if Barrymore was a big deal. She said that in today’s world, Barrymore might be like a Ralph Fiennes or Daniel Day-Lewis stylistically, or a Tom Hanks popularity-wise.

Just before making “Dinner at Eight” in ‘33, Barrymore motored his yacht — three or four times — from southern California to southeast Alaska to visit Joe and Muz Ibach.

Juneau photographer, filmmaker and playwright Joel Bennett was introduced to the history in the 1970s.

“I was always perplexed by why no one really had done anything with this material. Not even a book,” Bennett said.

Since his first introduction to the mysterious story, Bennett spent time at the Ibach couple’s house, which still stands on the island.

He’s examined photographs, letters and any other evidence he could find to explain Barrymore’s strong interest in either Alaska, or the couple — Joe, or Muz — a woman with a mysterious background as a show business dancer back east.

“I’m pretty proud of the fact that the dialogue I think is a true representation of how they would have spoken and what they would have talked about,” Bennett said.

Thanks to their film work, Bennett says the Barrymores were easy. But re-creating the Ibachs was harder — thankfully he had some experience.

“I actually spent a lot of time with an old Alaska couple here that lived on Admiralty Island — Stan and Ester Price who made Pack Creek famous,” Bennett said. “I knew how they talked. I knew kind of how they lived…you know self-sufficiency, and living simply, appreciating the wilderness, attraction to beauty, a relation to wildlife and birdlife—all the things the Ibachs held dear.”

On the surface, that lifestyle attracted Barrymore — a celebrity entrenched in the 1920s and ‘30s Hollywood scene.

“Because he came from a world of illusion and a world of not knowing who your friends were — driven by money and greed,” Bennett said. “He loved regular people.”

And the most fulfilling part of the process for playwright Bennett?

“For people here, it’s a local story. And to be able to share it with the community is really satisfying to me,” Bennett said. “It means a life and those people won’t be forgotten.”

But were two people living off the grid who had a seemingly loving relationship that interesting? Or was there something else that brought Barrymore up year after year?

You’ll have to watch the play to find out.