Shelton Hull
Words by Shelton Hull
Barbara Colaciello is a local legend whose ties to Northeast Florida go back decades, and that legacy continues with the fourth season of Untold Stories, which begins on Thursday night, Nov. 7 at 7:30 p.m. at the Florida Theatre. Presented jointly by the Florida Theatre, the series takes the classic oral tradition and recontextualizes it for the modern aesthetic. Speakers that night include artist/yoga teacher Linda Altman, bartender/musician Augustus Wolfe Barnas, author John Cappellear, artist Melanye Rodriguez, author/teacher Madalina Tanase and USMC veteran poet/musician Fenton Reese, who is also curating the music for the event.
All this comes together under the direction of Colaciello, a “Folio Weekly” cover girl in October 2017. The New York native once worked for Andy Warhol at “Interview Magazine,” which was basically the publication of record in New York City’s underground culture of the 1970s and ’80s, along with The Village Voice, the country’s original independent alternative newspaper, the precursor to this paper and countless others. Her older brother Bob Colaciello was the editor from 1971 to 1983, and then he joined Vanity Fair in 1984. Barbara spent those years living, working and playing alongside some of the most potent creative minds of their generation, or any other: Jean-Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring and Fran Leibowitz. East Village, SoHo, Studio 54, Times Square before Giuliani.
After moving to Florida with her family, Colaciello found new circles to run in, and those circles found a new person to revolve around. She figured most prominently in local theater, most notably at Players By the Sea, playing a big role in boosting the signal of an already-potent spoken-word scene that featured creators like Al Letson, David Girard, Larry Knight, Nestor Gil and Willie Evans Jr.
When she opened BABS’LAB, in association with CoRK, having her own space opened the door for broader exploration of the form, and she quickly built up a base of talent and fans that grew beyond the intimate, black-box setting of the lab. Enter the Florida Theatre, which not only embraced her vision but amplified it. Untold Stories is a collaboration between Colaciello, the Florida Theatre and WJCT Public Media, which has recorded all the shows for its own podcast series, one of several available on their platforms.
The first of four sessions in this season of Untold Stories takes place on Nov. 7. Each event features a sort of naturalistic theme, starting with “Wave”. The subsequent sessions occur on Feb. 27 (“Cloud”), May 29 (“Trail”) and July 31 (“Root”), all at 7:30 p.m. Each event includes five storytellers, each one drawn from different disciplines and demographics, all of whom are new to this stage, most of whom fall outside the realm of what might typify “spoken-word” in its most traditional sense.
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