The word "cosplay" is a portmanteau of “costume play,” and the activity's participants—cosplayers—wear costumes and fashion accessories to represent specific characters.

For playwright Shavonne Coleman, cosplay is a way to open the doors of creativity to children and put them on the road to being superheroes.

Eastern Michigan University Theatre is presenting the world premiere production of Coleman’s Cause Play on April 3-6, with school matinee performances on April 7-8.

Last year a staged reading of Cause Play was presented in May at EMU in collaboration with Ann Arbor Spinning Dot Theatre as part of the TYA BIPOC Superhero Project. That collaboration continues with the premiere of the fully acted production.

Coleman is an alumna of EMU and an associate professor of theater at the University of Michigan's Department of Music, Theatre, and Dance.

Cause Play centers on three middle school students, Zuvi, Zipper and Aaron, who meet at an after-school cosplay club at the Southwest Academy Magnet Middle School in Detroit. They discover their talents in creating costumes and adopting identities with the goal of attending a Comic Con—as well as developing their secret powers along the way. Coleman said there were changes made following the staged reading in response to the audiences who wanted the students to go to the Comic Con.

The party was going on too late, with people milling inside my Ypsilanti group house way past when my roommates and I wanted them there. Gentle prods of "Time to go home" and "Get the hell out" were unheeded by the bad-beer masses, so it was going to take a sonic bouncer to clear the joint.

That's when we played Devo's "U Got Me Bugged" at energy-dome-shattering volume, utilizing the CD player's repeat function for the maximum annoyance we could wring out of a song that runs 2 minutes and 49 seconds. I don't recall how many times we played "Bugged"—a modular-synth squelch-fest revealed on the then newly released Hardcore Devo: Hardcore Devo: Volume Two, 1974-1977, which collected demos and experiments from the Akron, Ohio surrealists who were still years away from the mainstream success of 1980's "Whip It."

But I do remember "Bugged" worked like a can of Raid made from waveforms, making our unwanted guests (and perhaps some wanted ones) scurry off into the night.

Sasha Gusikhin founded NeuroArts Productions in response to a tragedy.

Luke Balstad was Gusikhin’s best friend, and a straight-A student at Harvard, but he also knew that he needed mental help assistance. Balstad was in therapy, was honest and open about his bipolar condition, and was attended to by a supportive network—but it still ended with him dying by suicide in 2022.

Balstad was being treated with medications—he tried at least 10—and therapy in the standardized modern way, but Gusikhin believes that let her friend slip through the cracks.

“No amount of checking in on Luke would have been able to save him," says Gusikhin, a University of Michigan senior double majoring in biopsychology, cognition, and neuroscience along with voice performance. "He had all of this care and yet there was all this impression with this one size fits all, this ‘let’s try this, and that, and that.' When we do that we are never attuned to: ‘What if this medication [causes a] toxic reaction to that person’s brain chemistry?’ It’s very dangerous, and it can cause very dangerous situations and even loss of life in this case.”

Gusikhin's NeuroArts Productions organizes multidisciplinary arts events to promote mental health education and reform.

Stories in author and University of Michigan professor Greg Schutz’s new short story collection, Joyriders, demonstrate “how fragile things are.” The characters “share the terror and joy of having learned a life was a thing that could change.”

The short stories in Joyriders track characters who are coping with the course that their lives have taken. The stories take place in both the Midwest, including Wisconsin and Michigan, and rural Appalachia, including North Carolina. They also reveal how the natural world may be its own character in this collection.

For the characters, life sometimes moves very quickly. The story, “To Wound, to Tear, to Pull to Pieces,” brings a young woman who hears about her high school acquaintance’s affair from the distance of an observer. However, she has had her own liaison with an older man, and subsequent heartbreak. She reflects:

In truth, though, it’s not the initial meeting I typically find myself trying to remember as much as the moments that soon followed—sweeping apperceptions of opportunity and risk, and then choices made so suddenly and completely they seemed like they could never be unchosen.

Clarity on what happened requires retrospectively parsing out the events of one’s life.

Fagin the Thief comes with content warnings for all sorts of sinister actions: abuse, death, swearing, and crime, including property theft. Yet readers may find themselves on the side of Jacob Fagin, the thief and Jew at the center of the crime ring, in this take on Charles Dickens’ Oliver Twist.  

Author and U-M alum Allison Epstein, who lives in Chicago, will debut her third historical fiction novel at Literati Bookstore on Monday, March 3, at 6:30 pm. She returns to Literati after sharing her previous book, Let the Dead Bury the Dead, there as well.

The main character, Jacob Fagin, who prefers to go by his last name, takes to a life of crime like a fish to water and quickly learns the ropes. When he begins stealing, he is enamored with the opportunities that it provides:

Michigan has its unique qualities, and author John Counts infuses them into his short stories in Bear County, Michigan.

Counts takes a page from William Faulkner’s writing by centering each story within a fictional county. Set in northern Michigan, the characters hunt, work blue-collar jobs, get hooked on drugs, coexist with the wildlife, spend time on the water, and go to a nudist resort on the lake.

Counts, who is based in Whitmore Lake and a journalist and editor for MLive, will read from his new collection at Literati Bookstore on Friday, February 28, at 6:30 pm.

The short stories in Bear County, Michigan study how life deals the characters tough hands and how they react. In the story “The Hermit,” Karl loses the love of his life:

Ann Arbor's Peter Siers was born in 1961.

Ypsi's Kenji Lee graduated from U-M in 2019.

But the drummer in his 60s and the saxophonist-bassist in his 20s have teamed up for two cross-generational jazz showcases in different parts of Ann Arbor.

Siers and Lee recently started the Ann Arbor Jazz Workshop on a revolving date every month at the Elk's Lodge, 220 Sunset Road. The duo is encouraging everyone from high school students to longtime musicians to join the session, which next occurs on Saturday, March 22. Doors open at 5:30 pm, the jam starts at 6 pm, and then the Pete Siers/Kenji Lee Quartet performs at 8 pm. Cost is $10.

Just a few days later, Siers and Lee are at it again across town with a new concert series at Mothfire Brewing, 713 West Ellsworth Road. Starting March 26 and continuing every Wednesday from 5-8 pm, a local jazz group will perform at the Pittsfield Township pub known for its locally brewed IPAs, sour ales, pilsner, and dark beers as well as the food trucks that operate in its parking lot.

The first three concerts will feature: 

Brazilian pianist Heloísa Fernandes first played in the Kerrytown Concert House in 2014. She's returning to Ann Arbor for the second time on Friday, February 21, but this will be the third time she's played for the venue.

Like many clubs during the pandemic, Kerrytown Concert House hosted concerts on its YouTube page featuring artists performing at home. On July 11, 2021, Fernandes performed a solo 50-minute set from her living room in São Luiz do Paraitinga, a city in the eastern part of the state of São Paulo, Brazil. The local connection that brought together Ann Arbor and São Paulo was Musica Extraordinaria, an artists' representative org run by Tree Town's Michael Grofsorean.

The video below gives you a taste of what you'll hear when Fernandes physically returns to Kerrytown for a solo concert that will serve as something of a warm-up to record her next album. Fernandes spent most of this American tour in a quartet, exploring the jazz-classical-Brazilian hybrid she's explored her whole career. But after playing in Ann Arbor, Fernandes will go to Chicago for one more concert and to record her latest solo album, Dream of the Waters, which will be a mix of older originals and a new series of works inspired by a 2023 stay she had in the Amazon forest. 

Check out her 2021 virtual Kerrytown Concert House show below: 

From the outside, Ann Arbor conjures the image of a pastoral place. It’s in the name, suggesting a shady nook of trees and hedges and daisies.

For those with ears tuned to the bellicose joys of distorted guitars, drum battalions, and the expression of unfettered frustration, however, Ann Arbor is where punk rock began. A pair of brothers named Asheton eschewed formal lessons for more physical forms of musicality back in 1967, resulting in a band called The Stooges and coloring the history of this otherwise-typical college town forever.

Countless malignant youths have tried to re-create that magic in our tiny burg ever since. Ann Arbor sired other noisy acts who put their own stamp on the form, some who broke beyond our borders and many who didn’t, but loud music remains our birthright. Since 1995, a band called Mazinga has been coming together to conjure heavy sounds out of the ether, with regular hiatuses taken to weather the vagaries of fate, negotiate the cruel realities of an underground music economy, and recharge creative batteries with outside projects.

The four townies in question include drummer Donny Blum, vocalist and lyricist Marc McFinn, guitarist Chris “Box” Taylor, and bassist and in-house graphic artist Big Tony Fero, aka Rubber Wolf. Beyond their duties in Mazinga, all of them have helped move and shake local heavy culture in other area bands. Taylor in particular doubles as mastermind of the annual punk/metal/noise pageant Fuzz Fest (the 10th installment will be this August) and served time in local acts Blue Snaggletooth, The Avatars, and Powertrane.

In January, the University of Michigan Organ Department launched a new recital series in conjunction with St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church, 306 North Division Street in Ann Arbor near Kerrytown. The Division Street Pipes concerts happen every Thursday at 12:15 pm and the free 30-minute shows feature students and faculty performing on the church's exquisite organ. Attendees are welcome to bring in their lunches, too.

Upcoming performers include:
February 20 - Nicholas Welch, BM student
February 27 - Ben Sidoti, BM student
March 6 - Ye Mee Kim, DMA student

The series continues until April 24 (with a break on April 17 for Maundy Thursday). Visit the announcement page for more info.

Below is The Division Street Pipes's debut concert from January 16 featuring the playing of master’s student Oliver Steissberg: