Deckle Edge Opening Night Party w/ Stefanie Santana, She Returns from War, & Banned Books Burlesque

We here at Jasper are super-psyched for the Deckle Edge Literary Festival, particularly since so many of our staff members have had a hand in bringing it to fruition. We hope you’ll check out the full slate of events here, but particularly encourage you to come out to the Opening Night Party at Columbia Museum of Art.

The opening entertainment for the evening happens to be two of South Carolina’s finest singer/songwriters, Stefanie Santana and She Returns from War frontwoman Hunter Park. The two also happen to be particularly appropriate for the literary-minded nature of the party thanks to the haunting poetry of their lyrics.

Santana, whose strong, pure vocals and adept ukulele accompaniment suggests an almost twee indie folk-pop archetype, writes with an uncommon sensitivity to character and situation. This is equally true of her most autobiographical writing, like “Liar Song” or “Grown Up Joke,” the latter of which balances parental expectations, heartbreak, and the struggles of the daily grind with a soaring repeated chorus of “I WANT TO QUIT MY JOB,” as it is with tunes where she turns her eye to the unlikely emotional cache of starfish and sea crabs. There’s something beautifully representative in Santana’s songs of the current crop of twentysomethings (of which the writer is one)—they seem to strike at the real, nuanced reality of the Millennial generation in a way that a thousand think pieces so utterly fail to do.

Park is an ideal match for Santana. While her songs are almost exclusively focused on love and longing, there’s a poetic tendency in her writing that makes each song feel like its own philosophic treatise on the very nature of desire. “I would like a chance to travel all of the hallways of your spine/I would plant a thousand flowers and pick the petals for the rest of the time” she sings at her most giddily romantic on “Little Pharoah.” Elsewhere, she sings with stark honesty about romantic failure with equal conviction: “It seems pretty obvious we all got our poisons/be it arsenic or ether or fire on the cedar/or the telephone receiver/You know I can’t be your cure you were never mine either.”

 Banned Books Burlesque

Hang around after the concert for part two of the night’s entertainment when, all the way from Tampa, Florida, Banned Books Burlesque presents literary classics in a whole new light. Bringing beloved books like Gone With the Wind, The Great Gatsby, Harry Potter, and more, to life in the naughty ways those who’d like to ban them have portrayed, the cast of BBB guarantees a tantalizing look at censorship, great literature, and the art of the tease.

$10 admission for all three events

Find tickets at Brown Paper Tickets.

About Jasper

What Jasper Said is the blogging arm of Jasper – The Word on Columbia Arts, a new written-word oriented arts magazine that serves artists and arts lovers in the Columbia, SC area and its environs in four ways: Via Print Media – Jasper is a bi-monthly magazine, releasing in print six times per year in September, November, January, March, May & July, on the 15th of each month. Jasper covers the latest in theatre and dance, visual arts, literary arts, music, and film as well as arts events and happenings; Via Website – Jasper is an interactive website complete with a visual arts gallery, messages from Jasper, an arts events calendar that is updated several times daily, bite-sized stories on arts events, guest editorials, local music, dance & theatre videos, community surveys, and more; Via Blog – What Jasper Said -- you're reading this now -- is a daily blog featuring a rotating schedule of bloggers from the Jasper staff as well as guest bloggers from throughout the arts community; Via Twitter – Jasper Advises is a method of updating the arts community on arts events, as they happen, with more than a half dozen active tweeters who live, work, and play inside the arts community everyday ~ Jasper Advises keeps the arts community abreast of what not to miss, what is happening when it is happening, and where to be to experience it first hand.
This entry was posted in General and tagged , , , , , . Bookmark the permalink.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *