Production of “Applause” on Ideastream Public Media is made possible by funding by Cuyahoga County residents through Cuyahoga Arts and Culture.

Coming up on “Applause” a love for the Cuyahoga keeps this couple paddling together.

A photographer reveals his love of the panoramic camera.

And a young quartet gives love back to its alma mater.

Hello and welcome to another round of “Applause”, my friends.

I'm your host, Ideastream's Kabir Bhatia.

Now, today I'm dressed as an explorer because we're going to explore a little bit beyond the usual realm of arts and culture, because at one time, the Cuyahoga River was synonymous with pollution.

But today, it's considered one of the region's greatest recreational assets.

It took the work of many people more than 50 years to clean up the river, though one couple has been a constant drumbeat for safe water quality.

Now in their 80s, they're still out paddling and lobbying for the beautiful Cuyahoga River.

We are in the upper watershed of the Cuyahoga River upstream of Eldon Russell Park.

And just look at this glorious place.

It's hard to believe we're less than 30 miles from the city of Cleveland and that even we're in Northeast Ohio.

It's just a paradise for wildlife.

It's very diverse.

We have the river, we have wetlands, perfect environment for a biodiverse bird and animal and fish population.

We met, Harold, you were probably what, 32?

I was like 30.

Well, I was stricken from the start.

Hard-headed, intelligent, attractive, shorter than me.

Yeah.

And I think both of us feel that we bring out the best in each other.

And that doesn't always come out in the canoe.

You know, there's a lot of discussion about who should be doing what, but I think it's been wonderful.

It's looking like far left.

Where?

How do we get through far left?

I don't see the open channel.

Right where we're pointed.

Oh, I meant this way.

Yes.

I grew up in various places in and around Cleveland, Ohio, and as a kid I was very interested in all things outdoors.

And how I got to water was that it was a place that was avoided because It was too dirty.

So that is how I came to know a little bit about the river, and I came to know that you were advised not ever to put your toe near the river.

There were many fires on the Cuyahoga River.

We didn't know how unusual it was until, you know, the entire world started reacting, saying, you know, when rivers are burning, people are in trouble.

So it was more the results of the river burning than the burning itself that influenced me.

In the late 1980s, a small group of us got together and sat around our kitchen table, and the people there were interested in recreation, they were interested in the chemistry of the river, they were interested in health, they were interested in education, they were interested in art.

So that's how we came to be Friends of the Crooked River.

A lot of our role has been support of projects and policies.

We had been involved with dam removal since 1996 when the Ohio EPA did a study study of a 20-mile section of river, and what they found from that study is that the reason aquatic life, the fish standards weren't attaining in that section was not because of discharges, but because of barriers in the river, specifically dams.

And so as a consequence of that study, the river community led by Ohio EPA started looking at removing dams.

So we removed the Kent Dam.

Once that dam was removed and people saw the benefits, the local benefits, and those benefits were that they could still fish the river, but they could also paddle the river, and they found out, as other communities did, that the river was a real benefit to the community.

So they kind of— all these places where dams were, these communities rediscovered the value of their waterfronts.

Well, I prefer the headwaters up here.

The rest of it's fun too in a different way, but-- great blue heron.

The Middle River and the Lower River can be exciting to paddle, but this is just very refreshing and calming.

And the current is so slack that you can paddle upstream and downstream from the same place.

And my favorite part of the Cuyahoga River is wherever I am.

If you're a paddler, it's a river for everybody.

Up here in the watershed is a great place for inexperienced beginner paddlers.

you go a little bit further downstream and you have to have some skill in order to maneuver the boat in current.

We have this part of the river up here that is as pristine as you can get.

You can paddle through the national park.

I mean, There's something for everybody.

So utilities, industry, they had to grow their thinking to accommodate what we have today.

And it wasn't easy, but we found a way to go through, and now we have a resource we can be proud of.

And it is a place that is no longer shunned.

The river is a place that people go for solace, for recreation, for enjoyment.

Northeast Ohio claims the Cuyahoga River as one of its best quality of life places, as opposed to what it was in the beginning, a shame and a disgrace.

And we also want to remind people that we're not the only generation that's ever going to be here, and resources are finite, and the future generations deserve to get the benefits of all the hard work we've done.

And I never want us to think that the river is clean enough.

As a matter of fact, we need to find better ways to protect the river.

It doesn't matter how long it took for people to come to the river.

As long as they got there and are happy there, the river will be happy in return.

The Marshes are proof that you're never too old to follow your dreams or to make an impact.

Same for our next artist.

This 70-something photographer from Cincinnati is sharing his panoramic view of America.

I've been a photographer ever since I was a little kid.

I started taking photographs when I was in grade school.

So just a little kid with a Brownie camera.

Maybe 35, 40 years ago, I started photographing storefronts 'cause I always thought it was very interesting to get a picture of a storefront window that had a display in it, but also there was a reflection in the glass which showed what was behind the camera.

So you had kind of 2 pictures in one.

And I think right around that time, I thought about, well, what if I had a panoramic camera and I could photograph something directly in front of me and also something to either side of me and to the rear of me?

Lately, the last 20 years or so, I've been shooting photos with a panoramic camera.

That's a camera specially made to take a picture in a 360-degree angle.

I've always been attracted to the built environment.

I've always enjoyed photographing buildings and bridges and viaducts, overpasses.

Then when I switched to color photography and panoramic photography, I continued that.

I discovered a lot of really great buildings around the country And I set out to photograph as many as I could.

When you look at some of my photographs, you'll notice that they're not taken at an eye level.

They're kind of a bird's-eye view.

Panoramic photography has kind of taken off lately with cell phones.

People discovered you can set your cell phone as a pano and make these wide pictures of everything in front of you.

One of the shortcomings of that is when you look at a lot of those pictures, half of the pictures are above the horizon and the other half are below the horizon.

So you have a lot of pictures of stop signs and pavement and parked cars.

So it kind of clutters up the image a little bit.

And I've discovered that if you could raise a panoramic camera up 10 or 15 feet, you can avoid a lot of that.

The camera uses just regular Kodak roll film.

It's motorized, and it— when you turn the camera on, it goes in a circle, and at the same time, the film unwinds and moves through the camera.

So the camera movement and the film movement are synchronized.

I started maybe 25 years ago.

I'd go to California and I'd take as many photos as I could of different things, maybe some art museums, some libraries, some movie theaters.

So if you do that over 20 or 30 years, you'll have enough photos for 10 different books.

Movie theaters are very interesting because they were designed as being a place for people to escape to kind of a fantasy land away from home.

I did a book of Las Vegas, and if you've ever been around there, the casino owners have spent millions and billions of dollars to make the buildings attractive because they want to kind of pull you in.

Found that the most interesting architecture is usually in the big cities and concentrated on going to Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, New York.

I found a few gems in small towns as well.

There are some interesting libraries in Little towns that you've never heard of.

After a few years, I realized that Frank Lloyd Wright was a pretty big presence in the world of architecture, and I discovered that he was going to be a project all to himself.

He had a career that spanned about 70 years.

He was a real workaholic.

He died at age 92.

And he still had several unfinished projects on the drafting board.

In fact, one of his most well-known buildings is the Guggenheim Museum.

Frank Lloyd Wright built 11 structures in Ohio.

There's a doctor's office building in Dayton, and the rest are houses.

I started photographing the Westcott House probably in 2005 when I first met Marta, and it was handy because it was only an hour and a half drive from Cincinnati, so I could visit it at different times of the year.

I could take photos in the fall, in the spring, with winter snow.

I'm still doing panoramic photography, although I've kind of slowed down in the last few years.

I just produced a book on significant architecture of America civic buildings.

So I've photographed a lot of statehouses, city halls, county courthouses, the U.S.

Capitol Building, and the Supreme Court.

And that was my Ohio 250 and America 250 project.

I've enjoyed traveling around the country taking a lot of different photos of mostly well-known architecture.

And some not so well known.

And my hope is the viewer gets a sense of the building in its entirety.

A lot of times when somebody takes an architectural photograph, they usually back up in the corner to get as wide a view as they can, but you don't see what's on the left or right or behind you.

So when you put the camera in the middle of the room and make a 360-degree degree photograph, you see everything all at once.

And that's a little bit different way of viewing it.

Another passion project dates back to 2018 when Cleveland's LatinUs Theater launched as a Spanish language troupe.

Today it's thriving inside the Pivot Center along Cleveland's West 25th Street with its own black box theater.

LatinUs Theater Company started in 2018 when, you know, myself and other group of people got together and, you know, decided to finally make our own company, Latino Hispanic company theater in Cleveland.

And, you know, we were talking and we said, well, it's gonna be the first one 100% Latino, you know, in Ohio, actually.

This theater is in the heart of a very predominantly Latino community.

You know, this, this has been known as a lot of things, but it's always been home to a large Puerto Rican Caribbean population.

And so, you know, to have a theater right here in like the middle of all of that It's been awesome, you know, because the people that come here, it's it's really cool when you can give them a show in their language.

So we started doing really, I think, one show per year.

We have been growing up, and now we're doing three shows per season.

We have our big show on September October.

That is when we celebrate the month of the Hispanic heritage.

And the ensemble of actors, you know, varies, but stable, I would say maybe we are 4 or 5 actors.

But it's kind of hard to find people that speak Spanish because all our shows are in Spanish.

I graduated from the High School of Art in Havana, Cuba.

I'm Cuban.

And when Sandor called me, I was in my native town, Cienfuegos, and he said, I'm inviting you to come over to Cleveland to act in a play.

And I asked, in the winter?

It's gonna be cold.

Well, I'm a professor at Kent State University in the Department of Mathematics, and I did theater for a while as a young man back in Venezuela where I grew up.

And when the opportunity came up and Monica asked me to participate, I When I get the chance, I like to participate, and it's a lot of fun.

Rick Foran, who is the owner of the Pivot Center, he was very gracious and invited us to the space.

In the radio, we were having this interview by a program from NPR.

It was made on the Happy Dog Restaurant, and in there they asked me what Latinos needed really to continue growing, and I said, well, we need our own space.

Space because right now we are just going all over Cleveland and it's very hard to be a traveling company and moving everything, set and people and everything that is needed to different places, different colleges where we were presenting.

So Rick Foran heard that interview on the radio and the next day he offered me the space of the Black Box Theater here in the building on the first floor.

It had been a bunch of people helping us, you know, giving the support, believing in our work, giving us the money, the foundations, Cleveland Foundation, Gund Foundation, and Cuyahoga Arts and Culture, and a couple other more that have been adding to our list to be able to have our dream come true.

You see a lot of American people coming to see the show using the captions, the supertitles, and I'm happy about that.

Because in Miami it's more, in my experience, it's more separated.

It's not like this.

I see a lot of Americans coming to see the show, which is very nice, and of course Latin people.

Here in the middle of a neighborhood that is a very well-established neighborhood with many Puerto Rican people and people from other parts of Latin America, the public that we get is very diverse.

So we get many people that are professionals that have come from anywhere in Latin America, but we also get people from the community.

And so far it's been a great experience.

This play that we are showing right now, Gloria, is not what we used to present.

We like to bring classical theater from our Latin America and even from Spain that have, you know, a theme, that have a purpose, that have in-between lines something to tell about our story, about, you know, South American countries that have suffered from these governments who have been ruling like dictators.

They have been dictators and how people have suffered.

So, so far we have, I think, 11 plays that we have done, and we have been in this space, the black box, during the last 2 years, you know.

So, but then slowly, you know, as the company keeps growing, I started learning that there were things that were complicated for us to keep up, you know.

Even though, you know, it is a small theater, we have a small budget compared with other theaters, and we are really new, 5 years only, we pay everybody.

We pay the actors, we pay the technicians, we pay everybody.

I'm not an actor, I'm a gastroenterologist, you know, so they needed one actor to play a small role that is the one that I accepted to take, you know.

This is my first time, as you say, and most likely it's going to be the last one.

But I really enjoyed being with this fantastic group of actors, you know.

I learned a lot from them, from the director, from the team, you know.

So it was fun to be on the other side of a play.

LatinUs Theater presents the Cleveland Latino International Film Festival.

September 11th and 12th.

On the next round of “Applause”, immigrant voices sing out as we introduce you to a Northeast Ohio trio honoring their West African roots.

For us, it's our homeland, and we want to bring people back to that joy again because we had such a beautiful childhood there.

There's something special about it.

The Zerbo Brothers' songs describe the beauty of their homeland, Burkina Faso despite its current dangers.

All that and more on the next round of “Applause” Okay, we've got something special to share as our show closes.

First, you get to see me again, but also let's enjoy this riveting performance by the Oberlin Orchestra.

It features award-winning ensemble the Poesis Quartet made up of recent Oberlin grads making a stellar return to campus inside historic Finney Chapel.

Production of “Applause” on Ideastream Public Media is made possible by funding by Cuyahoga County residents through Cuyahoga Arts and Culture.