Wednesday, February 16, 2022 — 5
Arts
The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com

There 
aren’t 
many 
bands 

that can successfully combine 
a traditional rock instrumenta-
tion with saxophone, violin and 
acoustic piano, but Black Coun-
try, New Road have made a name 
for themselves precisely by forg-
ing those elements into a truly 
one-of-a-kind sound. Last year, 
the band teased their potential 
with their debut album For the 
First Time, a chaotic and noisy 
work that combined sprawl-
ing compositions, mesmerizing 
instrumentals and gritty vocal 
performances into a mind-bend-
ing, futuristic rock piece. It’s 
difficult for any band to follow 

up on an album as over-the-top 
as their previous one, but with 
their latest release, Ants from Up 
There, Black Country, New Road 
diversifies their sound without 
compromising what makes them 
one of the most fresh and unique 
rock bands today.

The 
instrumental 
prowess 

that has always been central to 
Black Country, New Road’s iden-
tity is once again on full display 
on Ants from Up There, even 
as the band plays with differ-
ent musical textures across the 
album’s 10 tracks. The noisiness 
that defined their debut record 
is still present in some songs 
on Ants, such as “Haldern” and 
“Basketball Shoes,” which fea-
ture all of the band members 
playing at once. However, the 

band also finds new ways of mak-
ing a powerful sound without 
simply relying on thick instru-
mentation. 
The 
nine-minute 

song “Snow Globes” has one of 
the most intense climaxes on the 
entire album thanks to Charlie 
Wayne’s ridiculous drumming, 
which swells up to eventually 
drown out the delicate repeating 
musical ideas in the saxophone, 
piano and violin.

Just as the band has evolved 

their ability to be loud and hec-
tic, they also show songwriting 
growth. There are songs where 
this is obvious, like “Mark’s 
Theme,” 
a 
beautiful 
instru-

mental featuring an emotion-
al saxophone solo and piano 
accompaniment. But most of the 
time, the revamped songwriting 

is more subtle. By avoiding the 
abrasive sounds they previously 
embraced, the band is able to 
create pleasant, accessible songs 
that are still engaging. One 
example of this is “The Place 
Where He Inserted the Blade,” 
a seven-minute track influenced 
by late-career Bob Dylan that 
has more than enough variety 
to stay engaging — but not too 
much where that it undermines 
the song’s strong sense of har-
monic direction.

For as many new directions 

Black Country, New Road take 
that pay off, the album’s biggest 
weakness is that it’s a little too 
safe most of the time, particu-
larly compared to their ground-
breaking debut. The klezmer 
melodies and irregular rhythms 

the band mastered on For the 
First Time are teased on the 
album’s very short intro track, 
but after that, they are sel-
dom present as the band tends 
towards standard Western har-
monies and rhythmic patterns. 
Many fans will probably prefer 
this album for that reason, but 
even if For the First Time was 
uncomfortable to listen to at 
times, its moments of irregular-
ity served as points of interest 
that feel missing on new good-
but-not-great tracks like “Chaos 
Space Marine” and “Good Will 
Hunting.” The album is gener-
ally at its best when it’s pushing 
musical boundaries, even just 
on the short, dissonant outro to 
“Haldern,” which serves as an 
audible reminder of the cost of 

the band’s new, safer style.

Ants from Up There is a bit-

tersweet album: Just days before 
it was released, Black Country, 
New Road vocalist Isaac Wood 
announced his departure from 
the group. Wood’s distinctive 
vocals and lyricism were inte-
gral to the band’s innovative 
sound; replacing his impact will 
be impossible. With Wood’s 
departure, Ants from Up There 
serves as the end of an era for 
the band, a brief time that will 
be remembered fondly thanks 
to this album and its predeces-
sor. Whatever the future holds 
for the individual musicians of 
Black Country, New Road, this 
album shows that each of them is 
oozing with musical talent, and 
their futures are bright. 

‘Ants from Up There’ pleasantly concludes the first era of Black Country, New Road

In an ideal world, ‘The Fallout’ wouldn’t exist. 

In our world, it has to.
Process over product: A 

preview of the student-run 
production of ‘Dogfight’

Content warning: gun violence and 

school shootings

I still remember the exact date: 

March 16, 2019, when my friends and I 
were studying in the Hatcher Graduate 
Library. It was a Saturday, the day before 
St. Patrick’s Day. I remember this because 
on our way there we’d passed fraternity 
houses filled with students celebrating 
“St. Fratty’s Day.”

We’d talked about leaving the library 

and getting something to eat at South 
Quad, but any thoughts of tendies or soft 
serve left our minds as we started see-
ing the messages sent to org group chats: 
There was an active shooter in Mason 
Hall.

I had gotten the first text, but I waited 

to tell everyone else about it until they 
had also gotten one (something that they 
relentlessly tease me about now). But 
the truth is that I was in a strange state 
of denial, a clouded sense that it couldn’t 
be real, or maybe a sliver of desire that 
if I pretended I hadn’t seen the text, it 
wouldn’t be true. But soon enough, there 
were more texts from more sources, and 
the problem became something I couldn’t 
ignore.

We all packed up our stuff. We were 

on the fourth floor, so we started climb-
ing stairs — up to the eighth floor, since 
we figured that the higher up we were, 
the safer we would be. The eighth floor is 
small, mostly offices and a hallway, with 

two entrances. My friend had a thick belt 
that we used to keep one door locked, and 
we latched the other one with the power 
duo of a bolt and a laptop charger tied 
around a bar sticking out of the frame.

Other people in the building had the 

same idea. People started joining us pret-
ty soon after we’d arrived. I saw two girls 
I knew from an org we were in; I never 
talked to them about it later. In total, there 
were probably 25-30 people crammed 
into that little hallway, leaning against 
the walls, staring out the windows.

We listened to the police scanner, 

heard them speculate about suspects 
and apprehend them. We gasped as they 
heard them talk about a suspect heading 
towards the UGLi. (I later heard stories 
about people holed up in the basement of 
the UGLi who were hiding behind tables, 
listening to the police scanner and think-
ing that that was the moment they were 
going to die.) Some kid tried to pick the 
lock to get into one of the offices in the 
hopes that we could hide in there, where 
it was less exposed. People around me 
were calling their parents, their boy-
friends and other loved ones, staying on 
the line while we waited.

I’ll spare you the tension, because the 

truth was that there was no shooter. A 
group of people had popped balloons in 
a Mason classroom that, muffled and 
distant, sounded like gunshots. But we 
had no way of knowing that. We were up 
in that hallway for about 45 minutes, lis-
tening to the scanner, waiting for some-
thing to happen. We heard officers on the 
scanner checking every floor of Hatcher 
before they finally made their way up 
to us. They knocked on the door, stared 

blankly at our makeshift laptop charger-
defensive measure and escorted us out.

In a post-Columbine world, grade 

schools all have lockdown drills — safety-
based plans for handling an active shoot-
er or suspicious person or any other kind 
of active threat. I have distinct memories 
of sitting stock-still in my classroom in 
elementary school, with the lights off and 
a couple dozen students clustered in a 
shadowy corner, away from the windows. 
The worst part was when the principal 
and other admin would come by and rat-
tle the doorknobs, checking to make sure 
they’d been locked. Still, there was always 
a gasp in the room, and I would lock eyes 
with some of my classmates long enough 
to know that we were all thinking the 
same thing: that maybe it was an intruder, 
and that the drill was no longer a drill but 
had morphed into reality. It was terrify-
ing to think that you were next.

Throughout my thirteen years in the 

public school system, there were moments 
that brushed against the idea of a real 
school shooting. Group reading time in 
first grade turned into an impromptu 
lockdown when a man a few streets over 
began threatening to kill himself with his 
firearm. There was a football game my 
freshman year of high school when our 
principal came on the loudspeaker before 
the game had started to announce that 
a nearby high school had experienced a 
school shooting earlier that day. When 
I was a senior, my high school had three 
bomb or gun threats within two weeks, 
all hoaxes, but overwhelming enough 
that the district canceled high school 

classes for a day in the hopes that every-
thing would reset.

But for the most part, school shootings 

were something that happened Some-
where Else. It was the tragic thing you 
saw on the news, the thing that made 
people gasp and then say, “This time 
things will change.” Every high school’s 
name has an effect, but it’s an effect that 
seems to fade with time, until we forget. 
It always felt like everything went back to 
normal immediately after the moment of 
silence had ended — not because it wasn’t 
tragic, but because it was routine. These 
were not my schools, not in my home-
towns; the victims were not my friends, 
or my neighbors, or my teachers. We, the 
mostly unaffected, could move on as if 
nothing had changed.

The week after the “shooting” on cam-

pus, I found myself getting into strange 
conversations with people about what 
had happened. I started to realize that my 
experience was somewhat unique com-
pared to the wider university community: 
It was a Saturday, and there were maybe a 
thousand people in buildings around the 
Diag. To most people, they could forget 
about the incident as soon as the weekend 
passed; for me, it stuck with me for weeks 
at the front of my mind. “Hi, I’m Kari 
Anderson, I’m a freshman, and my fun 
fact is that I sort of thought I was going to 
die in Hatcher last month.”

Because things are different when 

you’re the one who is affected. Even if the 
“shooting” itself was fake, the fear was 
absolutely real. That hour I spent on the 
top floor of Hatcher, sitting on the hall-
way floor and listening to the police scan-
ner, was a blur of emotion, but the main 

one I remember was uncertainty — both 
“what’s going to happen?” and “what am 
I supposed to do now?” My friends and I, 
and the rest of the people hiding on the 
top floor of Hatcher, were escorted down 
the elevator by officers holding the largest 
guns I’ve ever seen in my life. We walked 
out of Hatcher that day and headed off 
campus to a friend’s apartment. Later 
that day, I went back to my dorm and ate 
cake that my RA gave me. We stood in the 
tiny kitchen eating cake and talking about 
how balloons could cause so much dam-
age.

Because that was the thing I kept get-

ting stuck on. The shots were never veri-
fied by DPSS. No one sent out any security 
alerts. All of the communication was done 
through students frantically texting 
friends and org group chats. The word 
traveled about an active shooter in Mason 
Hall, and so the students who were on 
campus that day, the post-Columbine 
generation, acted accordingly. None of 
us — the students on campus, the people 
attending the vigil on the Diag that day, 
the officers making their way through 
every single building on campus — ques-
tioned whether it was real.

25 years ago, school shootings weren’t 

even a thought. Now they’re an expecta-
tion.

It’s been almost three years since that 

moment. Most of the students at Michi-
gan don’t remember that it happened, 
and even fewer who were actually there 
are still on campus. People don’t men-
tion it often, if at all. Enough time has 
passed that we can joke about it. But for 
me, there’s still a part of my Michigan 
experience that will always be stuck with 
the time that I sat in Hatcher for 45 min-
utes and contemplated my own mortality 
while a team of law enforcement officers 
scoured every single building on the Diag.

In all of my close calls, it was the closest 

I’ve ever come to a school shooting. And it 
wasn’t even real. We walked away from 
that moment shaken up, alive and deeply 
confused. Theoretically, it was just about 
the best case scenario. But I can’t help 
but think of the kind of place we’re living 
in. We all instantly jumped to the worst 
possible conclusions because that’s life in 
the United States: the only place where 
school shootings are the expectation.

That’s where “The Fallout” comes in 

— a 2021 South by Southwest Film Festi-
val entry that was just given widespread 
streaming access on HBO Max. The film 
tackles the issue of school shootings 
head-on with unflinching clarity. Many 
critics are focusing on “The Fallout” as a 
definitive Gen Z movie — not just because 
of the way that the characters speak and 
interact with cell phones but because of 
how they see the world. We are one of 
the first generations where school shoot-
ings are not an unthinkable scenario but a 
potentially real threat. Kids in the United 
States grow up going to school with metal 
detectors, security guards, lockdown 
drills and the ever-present hope that their 
high school won’t be the next one trend-
ing in the news.

***

The beginning of “The Fallout” is a 

normal school day. Vada (Jenna Ortega, 
“Scream”), the main character, brushes 
her teeth, squabbles with her sister Ame-
lia (Lumi Pollack, feature debut), and 
drives to school with her best friend Nick 
(Will Ropp, “The Way Back”). Vada hap-
pens to be in the bathroom with Mia Reed 
(Maddie Ziegler, “The Book of Henry”), 
a near stranger who she goes to school 
with. Then they hear shots, then screams, 
and they rush to hide in the stall.

The entire shooting is over before the 

10-minute-mark of the film, shown only 
through what Vada and Mia hear in the 
bathroom. The rest of the film is devoted 
to what happens once the coast is clear — 
because what do you do next when things 
aren’t life-or-death anymore, but you’re 
still stuck in the trauma of thinking you 
were going to die?

Based on the 1991 film of the 

same name, “Dogfight,” the 2012 
musical, was an instant success. 
Originating as an Off-Broadway 
production, the heart-wrenching 
show has now been performed 
across the world and translated 
into various languages. Although 
Music, Theatre & Dance alumni 
Benj Pasek and Justin Paul craft-
ed the music and lyrics for “Dog-

fight,” it has never been performed 
at the University of Michigan until 
now.

“Dogfight” follows the story of 

Corporal Eddie Birdlace, a Marine 
who has just one free night before 
being deployed to Southeast Asia. 
To pass the time, Eddie and his 
best friends, Boland and Bern-
stein, compete to see who can find 
the “ugliest” woman to bring to a 
party (a.k.a dogfight) where she 
will be judged on her appearance. 
When Eddie meets Rose Fenny, 
however, his perspective on this 
degrading game — and on love — 
shifts. In an in-person interview 
with The Michigan Daily, musical 
director Andrew Gerace, a Music, 
Theatre & Dance and LSA senior, 
called “Dogfight” “a story of love 
and loss and terrible error and 
redemption.”

Even those who know the show 

“will leave the theatre surprised” 
agreed Gerace and Director Jules 
Garber, a Music, Theatre & Dance 
and LSA senior.

“If you just know the music, it 

sounds like it will be a happy story. 
But when you add the text it is a lot 
heavier,” said Gerace. 

On why “Dogfight” was selected 

to be performed now, Gerace, who 
is majoring in political science, 
explained that “The Vietnam War 
and the conf lict in Afghanistan 
had similar lenses. I saw compar-
ison photos of the U.S. military 
leaving Vietnam next to the U.S. 
military leaving Afghanistan. For 
me, it felt like an appropriate time 
to reconsider how we view war, 
conf lict and the U.S. military.”

In 
an 
effort 
to 
respect 

“Dogfight”’s heavy material and 
develop an effective piece, the 
producers employed a mantra of 
“process over product.” The cre-
ative team worked to approach the 
show with a DEI-focused and com-
munity-care approach — serving 
as an example for all students who 
work with heavy artistic material. 
Working with a DEI Coordinator 
helped actors come to “language 
agreements” 
about 
problematic 

lines their characters say to ensure 
comfort on the actors’ behalf. As 
stated by Gerace, “Dogfight’’’s 
text is inherently f lawed … there 
are things not acceptable in 2022 
that were acceptable in 2012.”

Producer Allie Kench, an Engi-

neering 
graduate 
and 
current 

Business Graduate student, noted 
that “It has been a priority to focus 
on the process at the forefront and 
letting the product follow. A pro-
cess that has all the elements like 
DEI work, like intimacy coordina-
tion, making sure that every team 
member feels supported that will 
ultimately create a great process.” 
Kench also shared that as the 
show has “scenes and moments of 
assault. I saw the production as an 
opportunity to create a larger dia-
logue on assault.” Accordingly, she 
helped to bring a Sexual Assault 

Prevention and Awareness Center 
(SAPAC) workshop called “Michi-
gan Men” on harmful masculin-
ity to the cast and team. SAPAC 
agreed to modify the workshop 
so that the team could talk about 
“both (the cast and teams’) expe-
riences 
(regarding 
masculinity) 

at Michigan … but also the char-
acters, the content of the show 
and the story. It was twofold” said 
Kench. 

When asked what differentiates 

this version of “Dogfight” from 
others, Garber shared that “Being 
a non-binary person leading an 
incredibly male-dominated cast … 
brings a lot to (the) show and makes 
it a vastly different production.” 
Further, they said the creative 
team was “making an intentional 
choice to have different inter-
pretations of the characters than 
people normally see presented.” In 
their directing, they made certain 
to deviate from the version of Rose 
that is often “copy and pasted in 
most productions.” Further, Gar-
ber said “It’s different watching 
a 28-year-old play a boy going to 
war than watching kids between 
18-22, the age these kids (in the 
show) were going to war. You real-
ize they are kids … that they were 
sending kids to war. This makes it 
hard to watch, but it adds some-
thing you don’t get in (all produc-
tions of ‘Dogfight.’)” 

Challenging the ways in which 

“Dogfight” 
is 
often 
performed 

while maintaining a staunch com-
mitment to dramaturgy, this pro-
duction is sure to be exciting, 
tear-jerking and meaningful. A 
bold exploration of masculinity 
and war, this student-run produc-
tion “Dogfight” is a testament to 
how great art can be made through 
a thoughtful process.

“Dogfight” will be performed at 

the Arthur Miller Theatre on Feb. 
11 and 12 at 8 p.m. and Feb. 13 at 
2 p.m. All admission is free and 
seating will be filled on a first-
come-first-serve basis. Those hop-
ing to see the show are advised to 
get there early! Audience members 
should be aware of the sensitive 
and potentially triggering subject 
matter of the piece. “Dogfight,” in 
particular, grapples with themes 
of masculinity, assault and racism.

Pictures provided by Jack Zeile

Design by Lindsay Farb

KARI ANDERSON

Daily Arts Writer

NICOLE APPIANI
Daily Arts Contributor

JACK MOESER
Daily Arts Writer

Read more at MichiganDaily.com

