Peace Out!
Saturday October 16, 2004
7:00 PM – 12:00 AM
Center of Creative Arts (COCA)
524 Trinity Avenue in St. Louis, MO

Coalition of the Hopeful
Peace Out! shouts back
Riverfront Times
SAT 10/16

Hey, remember that debate last week? The one where the male, middle-aged, Caucasian, Yale-educated millionaire who's running for president sparred verbally with the male, middle-aged, Caucasian, Yale-educated millionaire who's running for president? That was great. But what about the rest of America? When do the women, the minorities, the young and the old get their say? When do you get to talk?

At 7 p.m., as part of Peace Out! at the Center of Creative Arts (524 Trinity Avenue), that's when.

Peace Out!, a multimedia event rooted in the power of the Word, is, as the name implies, devoted to the idea of peace. Organized by poets Deborah Stoddard and Joan Lipkin, Peace Out! seeks to provide an outlet for creative resistance to war. From the thousands of works available at www.poetsagainstthewar.org, Stoddard and Lipkin selected twenty poems that they felt represented a journey toward empathy, then invited dozens of area artists, choreographers, musicians, dancers and actors to interpret these verses on stage. A host of St. Louis' progressive social organizations and arts groups quickly came aboard, but the core organizing group remains entirely female. Lipkin claims that's because "Women just get things done," an assertion that anyone with a mother can understand.

Still, one gender doesn't mean one voice: Lipkin believes that the country as a whole is "suffering a loss of imagination that pre-dated, but was exacerbated by, 9/11," and Peace Out! welcomes everyone who wishes to rectify that loss. In addition to the mainstage performance of the twenty selected poems (aided by projected images graciously provided by dhTV and KDHX [88.1 FM]), a St. Louis Poetry Salon hosted by Word in Motion takes place in COCA's dance studio, allowing local poets to speak their own minds. Taking the idea of inclusion even further, Peace Out! encourages everyone to add their seventeen syllables to the discussion in the Haiku Corner. Think of the entire evening as a debate with many parties, each given the opportunity to say their piece.

Admission is $10, with a $5 option for seniors and students, and free to all veterans. Call 314-995-4600 for more information. -- Paul Friswold