Sherece Sellem Photos
A still from “Gone Already.”
David Sepulveda of Westville sent in this report about Sharece Sellem, a city mime who will be performing an autobiographical play in the neighborhood on July 30.
By nearly any measure, New Haven performance artist and mime Sharece M. Sellem has enjoyed creative success. She recently performed at New Haven’s International Festival of Arts & Ideas and the Arts Council of Greater New Haven/CT Transit’s Exact Change, bus route event. Although “gospel mime” has emerged as a form of worship in some churches, traditional mime has largely fallen out of favor with the general public. Sellem’s coupling of mime with music may not be a new twist on the ancient performance art, but her passion and expressive ability has won her fans from coast-to-coast, rekindling new interest in the silent art form.
When not performing for audiences in New Haven and across the state, Sellem, a visiting artist at Davis Street Arts and Academics Interdistrict Magnet School in the city, teaches dramatic arts and is Director of Artistik Xpressions, an amateur youth drama group that has performed around New Haven.
In 2010, Sellem’s career got a boost after she was chosen to appear in a music video by R&B sensation Faith Evans, for her new song, “Gone Already.” West coast music video producers had launched a public search for someone who would be able to effectively interpret the pathos and emotional content of Evan’s soulful song. After being alerted to some of Sellem’s YouTube music videos, producers invited her to audition for the part. It was at her first live audition with Evans, the director and film crew, that Sellem drew both tears and applause for her riveting performance, landing a dream job with an artist she had admired for years.
Originally from Hartford, Sellem was raised, in part, by grandparents who were deaf and hearing impaired. Much of the unique interpretive movement she employs during performances today, is the result of learning to communicate with her grandparents through a kind of personal sign language. That is one of the details recounted in a new autobiographical playlet, “The Art of Adaptation” that she has written and directed for her own education benefit performance at Westville’s Lyric Hall on July 30. Billed as the “Silent Art of Learning” the formal benefit program will also feature “Sunny’s Secret,” a short, silent film by Sellem and musical offerings by Connecticut R & B artist “Greg J”.
Sellem performed in “Wide Open” a play at the Wadsworth Antheneum last year.
Friends and supporters in the arts community have come together to help close the gap in a scholarship award Sellem recently received from the highly selective Headlong Performance Institute, in partnership with Philadelphia’s Bryn Mawr College. The award, along with her creative response to financing, will allow Sellem to attend the accredited professional semester away training program designed specifically for those who seek to lead ambitious and sustainable lives as artists, and represents a bridge to the next phase of her career. “It’s a dream come true” said Sellem, whose undergraduate studies in media production at Atlanta’s American International University were derailed, when her ailing mother of five needed help in caring for Sellem’s younger siblings back in Hartford. With her mother’s condition now stabilized and a scholarship award in hand, Sellem sees a path to realizing her goals and dreams through a return to academia. “I want professional training to enhance my natural abilities and to learn more about my own craft. I also don’t want to be a hypocrite. Here I am teaching kids and stressing the importance of education — I need to set the right example” she said.
Sellem brought her Mime 2 Music workshop & lecture program to a Stamford public school.
Her plans include a move back to Connecticut after the program to finish her degree and to continue teaching and performing — though at a more professional level. “Ultimately” said the artist, “I hope to someday be founder and CEO of the “Sellem Center for Performing Arts” — housing artists from all over the world for six-month semesters, opening doors for amateur arts, maintaining a visual arts gallery, and a stage serving an audience of 1,000 or more for Broadway-like productions.” Judging from her body of work, and a demonstrated commitment to students and her craft, such an enterprise seems well within the realm of possibility — a dream that stands a good chance of being realized with the support of the very community she has entertained and enriched for years.