Serama Serenade

Michelle Glaros holds the R.Z. Biedenharn Chair of Communication at Centenary College of Louisiana where she teaches classes in digital film production as well as film, media, and communication studies. As the Biedenharn chair, Glaros also coordinates internships for Centenary College’s Communication Program.

Glaros is also a small-scale documentary filmmaker (that means she researches, writes, shoots, and edits her own work). Since moving to Louisiana in 2003, her films have been broadly focused on documenting folk practices. The documentary short, Rolly Hole (2007), is a short film that focuses on marble shooters in Kentucky’s Monroe County. This brief yet intense study of the folk game that provides the film with its title calls attention to the physical gestures, poses, and movements of players whose casual approach belies the carefully measured techniques deployed by champion players. As one of the few folk games played by adults, this ritual competition provides members of the Monroe County Marble Club Super Dome with daily leisure between shifts at the local mills and factories. In most American cities and towns such gathering takes place at local bars, but in dry Monroe County, rolly hole provides the men of the community with an important social catalyst.

Suspended Sediment (2011) explores Shreveport, Louisiana’s uneasy relationship with its past and the city’s desire to remake itself into a tourist destination. At heart, the film aims to examine the city’s struggle to establish a marketable cultural identity. Shreveport’s rows of abandoned shotgun houses form a central visual trope. These architectural structures represent a complex of ideas for the city, but most significantly they illustrate Shreveport’s inability to negotiate its past. These dwellings, abandoned and neglected, provide the film with a repeating metaphor: Shreveport is stuck, unable to collectively recognize its cultural past and shape its cultural identity. The community’s failure to capitalize on that past while chasing tourist dollars is curious and this documentary investigates that failure.

Serama Serenade (2015) focuses on a curious subculture in south Louisiana whose members devote their time to preparing small chickens for an annual beauty-pageant competition. In September 2001, over 100 tiny chickens struggled to make their way from Malaysia to Vacherie, Louisiana, bound to become the first poultry Cajun Kings and Queens. Imported by Jerry Schexnayder, these peculiar birds sparked keen interest in a handful of folks from South Louisiana who soon shaped them into fierce competitors. Told through a series of engaging interviews shot on location, Serama Serenade explores a fascinating folk practice in which multicolored, pint size cocks and hens face off in a matchup that measures both beauty and talent. Remarkably, these birds simultaneously face pressures to conform, to weed their variegated plumage out of the gene pool in order to meet American poultry standards. A love song to a curious folk practice, Serama Serenade is a quirky ethnographic documentary celebrating the Cajun Classic, the “superbowl” of chicken beauty pageants. Here exotic chickens compete to catch the judge’s eye, all the while struggling with pressures of assimilation in a foreign land.

Glaros originally hails from Florida, another state that has struggled with both the entertainment industry and the effects of mass media representation.