Pat Greene is Bungalower Media’s first sponsored Resident Reporter. Greene has joined our team as our Arts and Culture Correspondent, supported by the efforts of Interstruct Design + Build, an award-winning Orlando-based design and build firm.
Jonas Van den Bossche (Bandcamp) and Emma Branch (Bandcamp ), a.k.a. Hesitant Waitress recently performed at the Nook in the Milk District and I got a chance to talk to Jonas and Emma before the show and also talked to Rachel Kinbar, Jonas’s wife. Kinbar and Van den Bossche run a venue out of their home called The Dining Room.
I became familiar with Emma’s performances during my friend Sarah Purser’s parties when we were neighbors on the once legendary downtown street Hibiscus Court. The street may have been the most Bohemian street in Orlando.
Sarah, a longtime opera singer and the education director for Opera Orlando would host regular parties, as I mentioned and Emma was one of the singer-songwriters who really stood out to me. In 2009, she left Orlando to go to school in Nashville.
The first time I saw Jonas play was for a Dining Room (Instagram) show. The two met in 2010 in Estonia. Van den Bossche is Belgian. Kinbar is from here. She is a visual artist and musician. They had neighboring studios. He was working as a sushi chef in Estonia.
The couple has played and shown their art, bringing in several underground pillars, such as Tatsuya Nakatani, Klimchek, Wade Mathews, and Jill Burton, and several locals, such as Beatriz Ramirez-Belt, Thomas Milovec, Derek Dunn, and others.
Van den Bossche has played all over Europe and many spots in the USA and is a multi-instrumentalist guitarist who ranges from ambient noise to free jazz and improvisation. Hesitant Waitress is Emma Branch’s solo project. It began in 2020. She writes about what she experiences and feels.
After graduating high school in 2006, she began writing and performing songs. Influenced and inspired by Cat Power, she has her voice; you can hear the influence. If you read some of my previous pieces, you will notice a writing pattern about DIY house shows. I didn’t intend to go down this path. I don’t like the idea of either/or choices. We need official venues, and we need DIY spots.
United Arts (Website) is currently bridging the two by funding performers to pop-up in designated areas in downtown Orlando and artists working in empty storefronts. Spark! Arts features artists in temporary studios. Read more about United Arts being engaged to activate the downtown core HERE.
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