Jason Ikeem Rodgers
Orchestra Noir
On the weekends in college, Jason Ikeem Rodgers played his music loud in his dorm room. With Beethoven blaring, he conducted in front of his mirror with movements modeled after Leonard Bernstein. Rodgers would get lost in the music and often went to bed as the sun rose. “I was so attracted to the kinesthetic power and physical connection to the music,” he says. “When I listened to my usual, hip-hop or R&B, I would still be conducting.”
Rodgers, already a music major at University of North Carolina School of the Arts, added conducting to his degree. After graduating in 2007, he trained in orchestral conducting at the Cleveland Institute of Music. His ambitious next step in Europe—the proving ground for conducting—was met with sweeping success. Rodgers won the London Classical Soloists Conducting Competition and, at 31, the Orchestra da Camera Fiorentina Conducting Competition. His prize was a solo show at Orchestra Toscana Classica, with his face on posters all across Florence.
Rodgers returned to his native North Philadelphia in 2016 and acted on a realization he made in his college dorm room: All music deserves a conductor. That same year, Rodgers founded Orchestra Noir, an orchestra that blends Black music from classical, jazz, and blues to hip-hop and R&B.
Despite his classical success, Rodgers believed orchestras should transcend genre. “A G minor exists in classical, but it also does in jazz, hip-hop, rap,” he says. “You could be Mozart, Stevie Wonder, Pharrell, or Rico Wade; it’s all about the quality of that G minor.”
Rodgers chose Atlanta as Orchestra Noir’s home base. In 2016, the group debuted in Atlanta. He hoped 10 people would show up; more than 100 filled the small room. “The timing, with it being during the start of Black Lives Matter, made Orchestra Noir feel like a calling to create a new platform and make Black music shine,” he says.
News spread, and Orchestra Noir soon went national. In 2017, it appeared in a Migos music video for “Deadz,” and it’s now worked with artists such as Cardi B and 2 Chainz. After the Covid-19 pandemic, Orchestra Noir returned to touring. Rick Ross came calling in 2022, and Orchestra Noir performed his hits symphonically at Atlanta Symphony Hall.
Orchestra Noir will return to the road this fall, with “The Y2K Meets ’90s Tour.” It stops in Atlanta September 7 at the Tabernacle: Rodgers promises a showstopper. —Xavier Stevens
Shuler Hensley
City Springs Theatre Company
When Shuler Hensley was six, he took the stage as Fritz in The Nutcracker. His director was his mother, Iris, who also founded the Marietta School of Ballet (now The Georgia Ballet). Hensley performed there throughout his childhood, and at Westminster High School, he went from football practice to dance class, pirouetting with football pads still on his shoulders. Those roots blossomed into a career in New York City on Broadway: Hensley won a Tony Award in 2002 for his role as Jud Fry in Oklahoma, and he acted in the 2022 revival of The Music Man alongside Hugh Jackman.
Hensley still works on Broadway, but he moved back to Marietta in 2015. His mother spurred him to sponsor the Georgia High School Musical Theatre Awards, now named The Shuler Awards. In 2017, Natalie DeLancey, a friend he met at his awards show three years prior, came to him with the idea of a theater company for the new Sandy Springs Performing Arts Center. “Even though I had the awards, I wanted a more direct pipeline of talent from Atlanta to New York,” Hensley says. “A regional theater not only gave me the creative freedom to do that but also showed me the real meaning of what I do. I could have a relationship with my local community to give back to the arts.”
City Springs Theatre Company started in 2018, and three years later named DeLancey executive director and Hensley as artistic director. City Springs’ first production was 42nd Street, with Hensley starring as Julian Marsh.
Things slowed due to the Covid-19 pandemic, but the time allowed Hensley and DeLancey to grow other branches. City Springs now offers education programs and weekly classes for both company and technical roles. Hensley feels City Springs hit its stride over the past two seasons and hopes to build on that success when he directs his version of The Music Man from September 6 to 22. Hensley has recruited a choreographer from the Broadway rendition to mentor the Atlanta talent as well as a young set designer to reimagine the original look of the musical. “I’m really excited to put on a cornerstone of musical theater,” Hensley says. “With a community like City Springs, we can create a new way of looking at a show that’s special.” —Xavier Stevens
Alex Acosta
Soul Food Cypher
“The cypher is not a rap battle. Let me repeat: The cypher is not a rap battle.” That’s one of the first things that founder Alex Acosta emphasizes when he talks about his nonprofit, Soul Food Cypher. Initially intending to help children labeled “at risk” through photojournalism classes, Acosta noticed that they best expressed themselves outside of class, in “cyphers”—collaborative circles of rap, hip-hop, and freestyle meant to uplift participants and tell their stories. As emcees bounce lyrics off one another in the circle, they create not only communication and wordplay but also a sense of vulnerability and shared trust.
“The goal is to keep the energy going so you’re feeding the next person,” Acosta says. “So the cypher is a microcosm of the community, and it’s about feeding one another.”
He remembers one kid who rapped about the violence he’d experienced in his life, that he’d taken two shots to the leg and his cousin had taken two shots in the head. “I looked down and I saw two bullet holes in his leg,” says Acosta. “And that’s how I knew what he was rapping about was real.”
Soul Food Cypher began in 2012, when Acosta hosted small cyphers with his friends. The organization has now had more than 200 cypher events, been featured in a Sprite commercial, worked with the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, and started programs to help children learn lyricism and rap at Kindezi Schools.
Last year, the nonprofit introduced cyphers to the town of Marseille, France, the same country where the Harlem Hellfighters regiment during World War I first introduced jazz to Europe. It’s a full-circle moment for Acosta, carrying on the tradition of spreading Black culture and improvisation skills. The group’s last cypher featured awardees of the Mandela Washington Fellowship, a program meant to highlight social entrepreneurs from Africa.
In October, Soul Food Cypher will bring back the ATL Park Jam, an event with the BeltLine to highlight the vibrant role hip-hop has played in the city’s culture. And, of course, they’ll keep holding cyphers every fourth Sunday of the month at CreateATL, open for anyone to freestyle. —Naisha Roy
Paul Conroy
Out Front Theatre Company
A decade ago, Paul Conroy would hear friends in the queer community complain that they wanted to see a theater show, but there wasn’t anything they felt they could connect to. With two master’s degrees in theater directing and a husband who had just retired as a company dancer with Atlanta Ballet, Conroy was their go-to for advice on the arts. But he couldn’t always recommend a show. “In my mind, there was a hole in the market in Atlanta for the LGBTQ+ community to go and see these shows on a consistent basis,” he says.
Inspired by a trip to About Face Theatre in Chicago as part of his fine arts degree, Conroy opened Out Front Theatre in 2016 with the Georgia premiere of the musical Priscilla, Queen of the Desert. Out Front focuses on providing a comfortable space, both for its performers to express themselves and for the city’s growing queer population to feel represented onstage. The theater has put on productions of The Rocky Horror Show, The Ethel Merman Disco Christmas Spectacular!, and, in 2022, Kinky Boots, which sold out and received glowing reviews.
Despite starting out with a relatively small cast, the company was not afraid to kick off its run with extravagant shows. When it performed The Most Fabulous Story Ever Told in 2017, the theater received thousands of notes of backlash and even threats due to the play’s tongue-in-cheek religious content. However, it also received an outpouring of support from the community.
“We had a lot of local coverage, and the community was really supportive and we didn’t hesitate for a second—we just kept rehearsing, and we produced the show,” he says. “But to have that happen in our very first year was powerful. It showed, instantaneously, that we were doing something that was vital.”
Out Front was selected as a grand marshal for the 2022 Pride Parade, and it works with numerous LGBTQ+ groups around Atlanta. It also partnered with the National Queer Theater in Brooklyn to cofound the Queer Theatre Alliance, which now has more than a dozen theaters around the country as members. The company also has a full lineup planned for this fall, including productions of Hairspray and Murder on the Polar Express. —Naisha Roy
Najee Dorsey
Black Art in America
In 2010, Najee Dorsey sat at a roundtable of Black artists at the African Festival of the Arts in Chicago. For Dorsey, it was the normal talk; outside of a select few, they floundered for consistent gallery space and media presence. Dorsey thought about his own struggle and came up with Black Art in America, a website to hurdle the obstacle of exhibitions and promote Black art online.
For the two decades before, Dorsey had lived all nine lives of an artist. His work is mixed-media, employing a blend of collage and painting to explore the Black experience in the South. In 1998, he opened a gallery in Blytheville, Arkansas, where he’s originally from, next to a beauty salon. A former JC Penney in the next town over became home to Dorsey’s next gallery, with a cafe attached. He moved to Atlanta in 2005 for more exposure and found an exhibition spot in Underground Atlanta. Dorsey started to tour nationally for arts festivals, which took him to places like Chicago for exhibitions to hopefully find his way into museums.
Through Black Art in America, Dorsey could have an online gallery of his work and also display pieces he loved by Black artists from the United States and around the world. He sold art from the website, including garden sculptures made from painted PVC pipe that often depicted Black women, children, and farmers. The garden art exploded in popularity, with more than $350,000 in sales during the Covid-19 pandemic. Dorsey opened a 2,500-square-foot gallery in East Point in 2022 that specializes in Black art.
“Our caliber of Black art is like no other place in Atlanta, but also America,” Dorsey says. “I get a lot of satisfaction that when people come into the gallery, they feel like they are in a unique, sacred space, because they are. That impact is extremely important to me.”
Dorsey’s gallery, with a garden at its entrance, isn’t traditional. The inside is a colorful mix of portraiture, landscapes, sculptures, and prints from Black artists that Dorsey handpicks. It includes his own discoveries—such as Gerald Lovell, Marlon Hitchcock, and Theophilus Adewuyi— along with work from prominent Black artists such as Kevin A. Williams and Jamaal Barber.
Recent events include Landscapes for Richard Mayhew and the Atlanta Fine Art Print Fair, with highlights from the print fair showcased throughout the fall. In October, the gallery will host a group show, titled Masters: Past and Present, and outside, Dorsey’s first Garden Art Fall Festival. —Xavier Stevens
