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Rissman retirement party/concert to benefit Rescue Squad

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Randy Rissman

Randy Rissman

“It’s funny seeing that we all call him Randy and not Dr. Rissman,” says Cindy Cashdollar, the Grammy award winning steel guitar and dobro player. “I think that says a lot right there, because to me, he was not only my doctor but he was a friend and a confidant. None of us will ever have a doctor like Randy Rissman again. He’s probably one of the last of those kind of doctors. I don’t think that this health care system allows for Randy Rissmans anymore. We were all very blessed to have Randy in our lives.”

Rissman retired last December after serving Woodstock for 36 years. Now, at 8 p.m. on Saturday, June 25, there will be a Retirement Party/Concert for the doc at the Bearsville Theater, with all proceeds going to the Woodstock Rescue Squad. Performers will include Happy Traum, Cindy Cashdollar, Harvey Citron; The Beki Brindle Blues Band with Ralph Legnini, Eric Parker and Frank Ganci; Marc Black, Ralph Scala, Nancy Kame, Victoria Levy and more.

Luthier and musician Harvey Citron knows Rissman a long time. “I sent Randy a text and I said I feel like a man without a country. For some reason or other in all these years no matter what, I was always able to get to see him. Randy has always been there when we needed him so now it’s time to give back to this selfless member of our community.”

Rissman told of how it all came about. “The initial idea was built around people asking me well are you going to have a retirement party? I got the idea that if I am going to do this, then I don’t want anything for myself. I’m a caretaker of other people, my role in life is to help other people and to get them to believe in themselves and get them through their own problems. That’s what I have done all these years in Woodstock. I just decided why don’t I have a party and make it a Fund Raiser for the Woodstock Volunteer Rescue Squad who every single week of my life are there for me and the patients?” he says

Rissman contacted Sam Magarelli to make it all happen. Magarelli recalls getting a call from the good Doctor. “Randy called me and asked for help to make this happen. He wasn’t sure who to talk to. He knew that there were other layers as how to make this happen so he asked me to help him. Plus he’s known that I’ve been involved with the Woodstock Volunteers Day project and Randy said, ‘look this is a great fit to use your organization to put on this fund raiser.” Rissman and Magarelli agreed that this was indeed the perfect fit. “The Rescue Squad was thrilled that Randy was going to use this personal event of retiring to have them have a benefit for their program. Randy was my doctor for many years and we’ve been friends for quite a long time. He’s a wonderful community person that has always thought about how he could help the community and always valued the community, and here in this significant part of his life, moving from his active part of his medical career and life into his retirement, I thought that it was very generous of him to provide an opportunity for the Rescue squad,” Magarelli says.

The show is going to be broken down into two parts. Excited about the event Ralph Legnini, the musical director of the project explains, “I was one of his first patients. He was on Rick’s Road then; we go way back. Aside from being my doctor for so many years, like he was for so many others in the community, we were friends. The first half of the show is going to be an esoteric mix of bunch of different flavors of music, so we are going to have some opera, jazz, country, a blend of four or five different styles of music. The second half will be your rocking and grooving band playing.” The second set will also include some guest artists and of course a few surprises.

The “rocking and grooving band” that will open the second set will be The Becki Brindle Blues Band consisting of Ralph Legnini, Frank Ganci and drummer extraordinaire Eric Parker. Becki has just released her new CD All Kinds of Becki on Random Chance Records, so she’s sure to play a few bluesy tunes from her new release. Some of the guest artists include Harvey Citron, Marc Black, Nancy Kamen, Charles Lyonhart, Victoria Levy, Ralph Scala and Woodstock’s own Happy Traum, who remembers recently getting a call from Rissman. “When Randy Rissman called to ask me to play in a special retirement celebration concert I said Yes! without hesitation. Randy has been an important and beloved part of our community for decades, and I believe I was among his first patients here. The best part is that the proceeds are going to the Rescue Squad, our invaluable helpers in times of need. Leave it to Randy to do the right thing on all counts.”

Rissman has been so much more than a doctor to all of us. I also have had him as my doctor until his retirement last December. I knew about Dr. Rissman long before he ever treated me, since he was my friend John Herald’s doctor for many years. What is apparent is that Randy is interested in the individual, not only as a patient but as a person. “I get involved with people’s personal lives, it matters who the patient is. On so many levels it’s very important to know who the patient is and who the families are, what’s going on in their lives, where do they come from? Where are they at philosophically, spiritually? Who is this person that I am treating? Because it matters how you treat them,” Rissman explains.

The Woodstock Rescue Squad (Woodstock Fire Department Company No. 5) consists of about 60 volunteers who are on call twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. “These people save people’s lives and put out fires, they rescue cat’s out of tree’s, calm people down in the middle of the night who are having a panic attack. They don’t have to do this, yet they do. Our money could mean somebody’s life or death,” Becki Brindle says.

Rissman has a vision for the evening. “I imagined this is something we can do as a yearly event,” he says. “You never know if it’s you that’s going to be calling the Rescue Squad and they will be there for you.

“Here’s an organization in small town America and they work together for the common good of all people. I am really looking forward to shout out to the community, hey let’s recognize these people. Let’s do something for them now and let’s have fun doing it.”

 

The Randy Rissman Retirement Party/Concert will be at 8 p.m. (doors open at 7:30 p.m.) Saturday, June 25 at the Bearsville Theater, 291 Tinker Street, Woodstock. General Admission is $20, preferred seating is $35 and VIP seating (including a Champagne Reception at 7 p.m.) is $75. All proceeds will be to support the Woodstock Rescue Squad. See bearsvilletheater.com for information, or call 679-4406.


Maverick and the summer openings

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(Photo by Dion Ogust)

(Photo by Dion Ogust)

The Maverick Concerts season opens this weekend with a Young People’s Concert by Elizabeth Mitchell & Family on Saturday, June 25, at 11 a.m. That evening at 8 p.m., Actors & Writers presents a reading of Laura Shaine Cunningham’s screenplay “Sleeping Arrangements,” based on her memoir.

Then the Big People’s concerts kick off on Sunday, June 26, as the Escher String Quartet plays works of Beethoven, Bartók, and Dvorák (his great Op. 106, not the usual “American”). All these events take place at the Maverick Concert Hall off Maverick Road in Woodstock. If you’ve never been there before, just drive down Maverick Road until you see the Maverick Concerts sign. Next week I will have a full season preview. Maverick schedules are available all over town. Take one and mark it up with your favorites.

As in recent years, the Maverick Hall was the scene of a pre-season performance by Ars Choralis, under the direction of Barbara Pickhardt, on Saturday, June 18, and Sunday the 19th. The hall was packed on Sunday, as I presume it was on Saturday. This program was entitled “Música Hispánica: Then and Now,” and covered a range from 12th century Spain to living Brazilian and American composers. The big piece on the program, about 20 minutes long, was the “Misa Criolla” by the Argentine Ariel Ramirez. It was one of the first masses composed in a local language after that practice was authorized by the Second Vatican Council, which may account for its celebrity, since the music is entertaining but nothing special. This performance, extremely well sung, was greatly enlivened by a glamorous percussion quartet led by the estimable Karen Levine, using what looked like a variety of folk percussion instruments. I also enjoyed the brief motet by Fernando Sor, known for his pioneering guitar works. Guitarist Greg Dinger must have gotten a kick out of singing one of the solo parts! A movement from a baroque mass by Zipoli was also particularly beautiful; a choral arrangement of a well-known tango by Piazzolla seemed not very necessary. Sometimes Ars Choralis performances can seem rhythmically stiff, but this concert got off to a bouncy start with a psalm setting by Ernani Aguilar and stayed on track throughout. The whole afternoon was entertaining.

For once I got to hear the whole three-concert series of the Hudson Valley Chamber Music Circle, which presents high-octane concerts at Bard College’s Olin Hall every June. The season began on June 4 with a rare area appearance by the Emerson String Quartet, which was once a regular presence at Maverick until it got too popular. This was my first chance to hear the ensemble’s new cellist, Paul Watkins, a superb player, and to see the Emersons’ new practice of standing while playing (except, of course, for the cellist). The program opened with Schubert’s Quartet in A Minor, D. 804, known as the “Rosamunde” because Schubert reused a theme from his incidental music for that play. Some of my music friends complained that they found this performance dull, but to me it seemed wonderfully subtle and emotional. The Emersons have long been known for their Bartók playing, and this version of his Fourth Quartet was powerful and miraculously well played, with a very wild finale. I wasn’t quite as happy with Brahms’s String Quartet No. 2, Op. 51, No. 2, which I’ve sometimes heard played with greater and more appropriate weight, but this was still distinguished playing.

The music directors of this series, Jaime Laredo and Sharon Robinson, like to perform in it when they can, usually as members of their long-running part-time trio with pianist Joseph Kalichstein. (Next season they celebrate their 40th anniversary!) Their concert on June 11 was interestingly arranged in reverse chronological order, beginning with the Trio No. 2, “Tatiana’s Dream” (inspired by Shakespeare) by David Ludwig, who was present to introduce the piece and then to receive enthusiastic applause. This 21 minute piece has five movements based on the five acts of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” but I was content to hear it as pure music, full of imaginative effects and very well scored for the trio. I was particularly impressed by Kalichstein’s exquisite delicacy in the Scherzo. Shostakovich’s Trio No. 2 is one of his, and the 20th century’s, masterpieces. Unlike a recent performance I heard in Saugerties, this one was full-out intensely emotional from start to finish, and in the second movement these greatly accomplished musicians roughened their tone to suit the music. The piano, lid open, sounded powerful but never swamped the strings. Brahms’s Trio No. 1 (actually a very late reworking of an early piece) was thoroughly satisfying, the Adagio memorably beautiful.

The Calidore String Quartet, which concluded the series on June 18, has collaborated in performance with the Emersons. It has a list of credits and accomplishments which runs several paragraphs, and it recently was the first winner of a new $100,000 prize from the University of Michigan. But I wasn’t very happy with this concert. A nagging discontent soon resolved itself as I realized the articulation of the cello (very clear) didn’t match that of the first violin (very slurry). This difference remained obvious throughout the works of Mozart, Rachmaninov, and Mendelssohn, and I kept thinking that the cellist was right and the violinist wasn’t. The ensemble’s precise coordination was up to contemporary (very high) standards but the discoordination in articulation really bothered me. Also, it’s kind of interesting to know that the young Rachmaninov tried writing a string quartet and completed two of the movements, but they’re not really worth an audience’s time.

I evaluate the success of my summer partially on the number of Aston Magna concerts I get to. The season opened on Friday, June 17, at Bard’s Bitó Conservatory Hall, a smaller and perhaps more appropriate venue than Olin Hall for these concerts, which sometimes play to distressingly small audiences. I have no idea why, since they represent a gathering of some of the world’s best early music players and singers.

I might have ordered this concert, “Love and Lamentation: Monteverdi’s Legacy in Rome” differently. It started with music by the giant Monteverdi and continued with three decidedly lesser early Italian baroque composers: Biagio Marini, Marco Marazzoli, and Luigi Rossi. That’s OK, I’d never heard of them either. The two vocal works of Monteverdi, excerpts from his “L’Orfeo” and the famous “Lamento d’Arianna” (all that remains of a complete opera) were simply gorgeous music. Nell Snaidas sang the first item, Kristen Watson the second, with different but equally beautiful voices and equal command of style. After these masterpieces, the other composers seemed quite minor, particularly the generic sadness in the “Death of Euridice” excerpt from Rossi’s “Orfeo.” However, as always with Aston Magna, the performances enlivened all of the music, being very well played and well balanced and as stylish as anything you could hear anywhere in the world. Watching Laura Jeppeson play baroque violin and viola da gamba is a treat in itself. Hearing her playing is wonderful too, but I have seldom seen a performer who gives off such a palpable sense of pure joy while performing.

Jeppesen has a major role in next week’s concert, “The Trio Sonata,” June 24 at Bitó. It includes music by nine composers, including a newly-composed piece by Alex Burtzos for baroque instruments. These concerts start at 8 p.m. and they are preceded by pre-concert talks at 7 p.m., which can be enlightening if the speakers remember to project clearly.

Bard has loads more music coming up this summer but I’ll have plenty of chance to write about it later as this column now goes bi-weekly for the summer.

Photography Center offers free workshop for youth

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cpw-VRTIf there’s one person that has a pulse on the heroin problem in town it’s Provisions’ Emily Sherry. Ms. Sherry’s “A Different Delicatessen” is on Tinker Street a few doors down from CPW, The Center for Photography at Woodstock. When Georgia Landman, CPW’s workshop manager became aware of the kids in town that were suffering from what seemed to be a heroin addiction upsurge she decided to do something about it. “I have been in touch with Emily at Provisions and any time that there are events like Harold Reilly’s funeral we talk about it.” Harold Reilly was only twenty-four years old when he died from a heroin overdose last December after just being released from a local rehab center. His memorial service drew a massive crowd at the Woodstock Community Center. Harold’s picture hangs on the wall in Provisions above their cash register. “After speaking with Emily and becoming aware of all the problems in town, it triggered something that I definitely wanted to do, something with what we are able to offer, being photography, to help these kids,” says Landman. “The article that I read in the Woodstock Times, which ran shortly after Harold’s death, ‘Coping with Kids and Drugs on Tinker Street,’ really brought me to tears. I never knew that Emily was involved that much. I drove home after reading that article and that’s when I started to think we should at least be able to do our little part and give something back,” Landman said.

Utilizing it space and expertise, CPW will offer two photography workshops for up to twelve students each, free of charge. “All the kids need to do is write one paragraph about what they like about photography and give us one image, either something that they took or by an artist that they admire so we can think about it a little bit before we give out the money. The kids will be able to take the workshop for free that would normally cost $275 if their parents are non-members of CPW or $250 if their parents are members,” Landman said.

“These youth programs are designed so that any of these kids coming from any circumstance can apply,” said Sarah Anthony, the CPW workshop coordinator. “The really wonderful thing about photography…is that really anyone and everyone that we have ever met that has rolled through the Center for Photography has had a life changing moment because of photography…It’s giving these kids an outlet to express themselves safely and beautifully…”

Each work shop will be conducted over a four-day period from Monday through Thursday. The deadlines for the scholarships have been extended until June 26. The first workshop, Photozines and Me, with Jeannette Rodriguez-Pineda will be July 18-July 21.  Lola Flash’s workshop, The Camera as Your Weapon, will be August 29-September 1. “This is something that I wanted to do for years,” says Flash, who teaches art and photography at the Green School in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. “CPW contacted me this year and asked me to be a part of it. I felt really excited when they called. I love the teenagers. It’s challenging but yet it’s the last chance that you can get them before they go out into the big world and they’re out on their own…hrough art you can teach them a lot of different life skills”

Photographer and teacher Rodriguez-Pineda is a mixed media artist and a co-founder of Hunter Photo Collective, a group of photographers based in different locales internationally. She was an Artist-in-Residence at CPW in 2010.

“We will have equipment ready and Lola is going to start very non-threatening, low key with the most basic principles of photography by doing a photogram, only to bring home the fact to those kids that you don’t need expensive equipment and you can still be creative and still be able visualize what you are feeling or thinking up,” said Landman. “We will actually have the best equipment available that Lola will also use so it’s a little bit of everything. She’s going to definitely encourage them to use their cell phones if she feels that that is their best outlet, or if they’re frustrated that they do not own a DSLR (Digital Single Lens Reflex) camera.

“CPW is a magical place, we spoke with Emily this morning and she is so excited about getting this thing going. She has such a big heart,” Landman said.

The photos will be exhibited after both workshops are completed. Rodriguez-Pineda’s class will have its show July 21 and Flash’s show will be September 1st. Each exhibit will last for one day.

“Then all of their friends and family can come in and partake in the festivities and admire their work and the kids can get to talk about it and have the full experience of having their work be seen and admired in a gallery which is a totally gratifying experience all around,” said Anthony.

 

 

To take the workshop, submit at least one paragraph about why you like photography, accompanied with one image by either you or your favorite artist and email it to  scholarships@cpw.org  before Sunday, June 26. Or bring it directly to the Center for Photography at Woodstock, 59 Tinker Street, Woodstock. For more information, call 845-679-9957.

Maverick Concerts begins its second century

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(Photo by Dion Ogust)

(Photo by Dion Ogust)

When I went backstage during intermission of the first regular season Maverick Concert, I spoke with members of the Escher Quartet. Reading through the ensemble’s bio in the program, it seems as though returning to this little theater in rural woods must be small potatoes for an ensemble with such credentials. This decade-old ensemble has already performed successfully throughout the United States, including a residency at the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center. Both Pinchas Zukerman and Itzhak Perlman invited the Eschers to perform in their summer festivals. They have played for the famous BBC Proms, at the Kennedy Center, and in Geneva, London, Paris, Perth and many other world music centers (adding Berlin and Hong Kong this season).

Yet when I asked the members of the ensemble if there was anything special to them about playing at Maverick Concerts, they practically tumbled over each other in their eagerness to answer. I couldn’t even write down who said what. “It’s our favorite place to play,” said one. “Beautiful, and unassuming. Inspiring to play for audiences who have been coming for decades,” said another. A third added, “It feels like a pagan cathedral of music,” which could wind up being a good advertising slogan for the series.

Maverick Concerts is moving enthusiastically into its second century this summer. With only one exception — the August 14 program by Trio Solisti, which duplicates material from Maverick’s first season — every classical music program of the summer includes at least one 20th or 21st century composition, often more. On August 21, the Borromeo Quartet will offer a world premiere, “Mountain Interval” by Russell Platt. While this composer is the twin brother of Maverick’s Music Director Alexander Platt, previous works of his played at Maverick have demonstrated conclusively the worth of his music.

I asked Alexander Platt how Maverick’s 101st season would be different from the previous century’s worth. His answer: “Only that it will be richer and more diverse than ever before. From the Pacifica Quartet playing Beethoven and Shulamit Ran, to the Enso Quartet playing Dutilleux and Ginastera, to the Danish Quartet playing Norgard and Shostakovich, to the Horszowski Trio playing Joan Tower and Robert Schumann; from jazz artists like Arturo O’Farrill, to Julian Lage; from world-music offerings from our old friend and Indian raga-master Steve Gorn, to the Iraqi-American fusion master Amir ElSaffar, whose CRISIS Suite, commissioned by the Newport Jazz Festival, I’m much looking forward to….and of course our Chamber Orchestra Concert on August 20th with Adam Tendler, who made such a profound impression last summer in Henry Cowell and John Cage…I can’t wait for it all to begin.”

Platt highlights the forthcoming string quartet ensembles, of which we have seven more coming. One of the most exciting will certainly be the Enso Quartet concert he mentioned, which will celebrate the 100th anniversaries of two 20th century giants, the Frenchman Henri Dutilleux and the Argentine Alberto Ginastera. The Dutilleux may be a bit on the “challenging” side but it’s exceptionally beautiful music. Ginastera’s First Quartet comes from his most popular folkloric period and is certain to be an audience favorite. The Jupiter Quartet joins with pianist Ilya Yakushev on July 3 for Shostakovich’s great Piano Quintet; that concert also includes works of Beethoven, Schubert, and another great 20th century master, György Ligeti. (You know his music, whether you realize it or not, if you’ve ever seen the film “2001.”) The ever-popular Shanghai Quartet plays on July 10, bringing works of Mendelssohn, Grieg, and the neglected British master Frank Bridge, the teacher of Benjamin Britten. The Danish String Quartet, which made a fine impression last summer, arrives on July 31 with music of Shostakovich (his moving last Quartet, No. 15), Mendelssohn, and the Danish master Per Norgard. On August 21 the Borromeo String Quartet adds to Russell Platt works of Haydn and Beethoven. The following Friday (most unusual, so mark your calendars) the St. Lawrence String Quartet makes a welcome return to Maverick with quartets of Haydn, Schumann, and the contemporary American master John Adams. After the Enso Quartet on August 28, the season will conclude with the excellent Pacifica String Quartet in music of Mozart, Beethoven, and the Israeli-American composer Shulamit Ran.

Three trios will perform, an unusual number for the Maverick season. On Sunday, July 17, the Horszowski Trio (named for the great pianist Mieczyslaw Horszowski who once played with the Hudson Valley Philharmonic, teacher of one of the members) plays music of Joan Tower along with Schumann and Beethoven. On July 24, Latitude 41 plays more Shostakovich, also Haydn and Mendelssohn. And that recollection of Maverick’s first season by Trio Solisti occurs on August 14.

Piano recitals haven’t been common at Maverick in recent years but this summer we have two of them, both special events. On August 6, Simone Dinnerstein — once a Maverick regular, now a star — plays a special benefit concert including works of Bach, Schubert, and Philip Glass. And the Friends of the Maverick concert, another benefit, features Pedja Muzijevic in works of Haydn, Schubert, and another great American master, George Crumb. The annual Chamber Orchestra concert on August 20 will include a mini-recital as pianist Adam Tendler plays Aaron Copland’s late masterpiece, the “Piano Fantasy.” The orchestra will play Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto No. 3 and, with Tendler, the Keyboard Concerto No. 4, and another Copland rarity, the Nonet for Strings.

Wind quintets have been lamentably rare at Maverick in recent years, but Imani Winds returns on August 7 with a typically varied and stimulating program including music of Scott (a member of the group), Rimsky-Korsakov, John Cage (an early piece from when he was still writing actual music), the great Frederic Rzewski, and Ravel. Duo-pianists Frederic Chiu and Andrew Russo, who gave us a thrilling performance of Stravinsky’s “The Rite of Spring” last summer, return on September 3 with works of Debussy, Ravel, and another Stravinsky ballet, “Petrushka,” again in the composer’s own arrangement. On August 27, violinist Lara St. John returns, with pianist Matt Herskowitz, in a program of “wild traditional gypsy tunes from the Jewish diaspora” in contemporary arrangements.

That last might be classified as a “crossover” program, and leads us to the rich offerings of “non-classical” music at Maverick this summer. The Arturo O’Farrell Quartet performs “Afro-Latin jazz: on July 2, preceded by a Young People’s Concert the same morning at 11. Amir ElSaffar and the Two Rivers Ensemble continue the jazz series on July 16, followed by pianist Vijay Iyer on the 23rd and pianist Fred Hersh on the 30th. Hersh will be joined by the great soprano saxophonist Jane Ira Bloom, her first local appearance, I believe, since she played at the Kleinert-James Center decades ago. Jazz at the Maverick concludes on August 13 with the Julian Lage Trio. But don’t forget the excellent (and highly popular) Indian flute of Steve Gorn on July 9, and Happy Traum & Friends on Sept. 10. And there are performances by Actors & Writers on July 29 (works by Mikhail Horowitz!) and Sept. 9 (“The Curse of Batavia,” an original musical with book & lyrics by Maverick’s own Katherine Burger). You’ll find even more information than this at www.maverickconcerts.org.

It seems that the Maverick season is beginning earlier and ending later every year. This is not a complaint!

Mount Tremper Arts goes year round

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mta-HZTMount Tremper Arts (MTA) has announced a shift from its usual seven-week summer festival of weekly performances and artist residencies to an almost year-round schedule of monthly events and month-long residencies. The new format will allow for intensive collaboration with New York City performance spaces and a more consistent relationship with the upstate community, said the organization’s executive director, Matthew Pokoik.

Programming is proceeding under the name Watershed Laboratory as MTA explores “what it means to be located in the Catskills, the influence of the land and the locale on the artists who work with us,” said Pokoik. “The watershed is a complex ecosystem and interchange between two places.” Water from the Catskills proceeds downstate to become drinking water for New York City residents, who then come upstate to refresh themselves in nature and support the local economy. Performance art follows a similar cycle through MTA.

While Catskills residents sometime chafe under the restrictions imposed by the city to protect its drinking water, the same regulations help preserve the natural beauty that attracts visitors and brings income to the community, observed Pokoik. Artists are among the city dwellers drawn to the serenity of the mountains, a key element of facilitating the creative process during an MTA residency. “We’re the headwaters,” said Pokoik. “Like the waters of the Ashokan Reservoir, the performances created here will travel down to the city and hopefully on to international venues,” as many past projects have done after incubation at MTA.

And the place is critical to the incubation process, freeing the artists from the distractions of daily life in the city. “Cell phones don’t work here,” observed Pokoik. “Artists get a 24/7 group focus, making dinner together, living together.” At MTA, they work in an almost monastic setting, up on a plateau above the Old Plank Road that connects Phoenicia with Mount Tremper, furnishing a sublime view of the Mount Pleasant ridge. Artists stay in a big white farmhouse that, according to Pokoik’s research, may have belonged to a farm devoted to raising horses and mules for local bluestone quarries of the 1800s. Now a vast vegetable garden supplies fresh food for the visiting artists. The studio next to the farmhouse was designed with the simplicity of the Shakers in mind, patterned after early American barns and churches, with their values that Pokoik calls “deeply hopeful.” Under the rafters and peaked ceiling, the sprung floor offers a blank canvas for performers to move and experiment in the space that will be used for a public presentation at the end of their residency. After the show, performers and audience can sit around a bonfire beside the garden to chat.

“The experience strengthens the sense of community among the artists,” said Pokoik. “And despite the romantic idea of the lone artist genius, innovation happens in tightly knit communities.”

MTA offers opportunities that are not easy for avant-garde performance artists to come by. A typical performance project can cost $60,000 to mount, without the potential profit that a visual artist might anticipate from the sale of a painting. Ticket sales recoup only five to ten percent of the cost of developing a show. “We do our best to find as much money as possible for a production,” said Pokoik. Now nearing its tenth anniversary, MTA has built up funding streams through grants from such entities as New York Foundation for the Arts and New York State Council on the Arts; private donations; and rental of the grounds for weddings. In October, they plan to launch their second Kickstarter campaign.

Each month-long residency is organized in partnership with a New York City theater, pooling resources to identify promising artists, leverage financial support, and provide marketing exposure. The first artists to arrive for the Watershed Lab will be the duo DarkMatter, who use poetry, comedy, fashion, and storytelling to describe navigating the world as young trans South Asians. Their work is devoted to “delivering stinging critiques of the personal and political while also imagining new ways of being and resisting together,” says the MTA website. In Manhattan, DarkMatter have performed in festivals at the Public Theater and Lincoln Center, among other venues. Their residency is co-sponsored by Abrons Arts Center at the Henry Street Settlement, and their MTA production is scheduled for Saturday, July 16.

The August 13 performance will feature the Obie award-winning innovative theater group 600 Highwaymen, in partnership with the Public Theater. Their work, The Fever, investigates the very processes of decision-making, negotiating relationship, and telling stories about those events.

One of the challenges in sponsoring this kind of work is that avant-garde theater is not the most popular or accessible art form in the modern world — but Pokoik feels its innovations are vital to our culture. “Joseph Campbell said mythology is the foundation of a healthy society,” he mused. “In the contemporary world, artists create that foundation. They become part of the American mythos and how we view the world.” With the pace of change ever accelerating, the insights generated by cutting-edge art can help us recover when those changes knock us off-balance again and again.

Although MTA has become more established and stable, Pokoik is confident the organization’s devotion to radical, ground-breaking work will persist. He also expects the year-round performance schedule will establish a firmer relationship with the local community. He remarked, “We’re not going to disappear for ten months of the year any more.”

 

For more information on Mount Tremper Arts, see http://mounttremperarts.org. The first summer performance, #ItGetsBitter by DarkMatter, will be held on Saturday, July 16, at 8 p.m., preceded by a 7 p.m. Art-B-Q. Tickets are $20. MTA is located at 647 South Plank Road, Mount Tremper.

Strong start to Maverick season

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(Photo by Dion Ogust)

(Photo by Dion Ogust)

Maverick Concerts’ classical series got off to a rousing start with two strong quartets (not a typo!) On Sunday, June 26, the Escher Quartet started things off with a superlative performance of Beethoven’s first published string quartet, Op. 18, No. 1 in F. The playing was so accurate you could have taken dictation from it, not only the notes but also the dynamic markings. (This was particularly true with Beethoven’s sforzandi, a startling sudden accent the composer was fond of.) The ensemble’s powerful sound made the music seem like late rather than early Beethoven, and that’s not a bad thing; he was, after all, the same composer throughout his life, and once he reached his maturity he was writing one profound masterpiece after another. The naive directness of the slow movement was particularly affecting, but this performance was outstanding throughout.

Last year the Eschers played Bartók’s First String Quartet at Maverick. This year they brought us his Second, and they told me they hope to complete the cycle of six over the next four years. I’ll be standing on line waiting to get in for the rest of the series. This performance began with a very direct reading of the opening Moderato which stressed its melodiousness despite the hail of dissonance surrounding the melody. The Allegro moderato capriccioso stressed its dance elements, while the way the dissonance of the Lento repeatedly dissolved into song made Bartók sound as lyrical as Beethoven. The concert concluded with Dvorâk’s next to last String Quartet, Op. 106 in G Major. The quality of this masterpiece justifies my frequent claim that Dvorák is a drastically underrated composer. If the piece has a fault it’s the composer’s characteristic discursive quality, but this performance brought the music together vividly with precision and warmth, very mellow when required. An outstanding afternoon!

On July 3, the Jupiter Quartet brought pianist Ilya Yakushev along for Shostakovich. The program began with the last of Beethoven’s Op. 18 Quartets, No. 6 in B Flat, providing an interesting contrast with the Escher performance of the week before. The Jupiters also played early Beethoven with big sound, but this group sounded more respectful of the traditional approach to early Beethoven Quartets, that they are directly descended from Haydn and Mozart. Still, this was a vivid performance with wide dynamics, large sound, and an amazingly fast tempo for the Scherzo. Probably the hit of the afternoon, though, was the String Quartet No. 1 of György Ligeti, still probably best known for the use of his music in Stanley Kubrick films (especially “2001”) but by now widely acknowledge as a 20th century master. This piece, written shortly before Ligeti escaped Hungary in 1956, has strong roots in Bartók and Hungarian folk idiom, but it’s definitely a generation later than Bartók. The Jupiter Quartet’s interpretation stressed the traditional elements in this music and also its considerable humor. To say that it won over the audience would be a drastic understatement. At the end the applause was blended with chants of “More Ligeti! More Ligeti!” (He wrote only one more string quartet but there’s plenty of other chamber music we could hear.) I could have gladly taken a break here but before intermission we also got Schubert’s famous and rather radical “Quartettsatz,” a powerful movement that the composer apparently couldn’t figure out a way to follow. Again it was quite well played.

Shostakovich’s Piano Quintet (in G Minor, Op. 57) is a kind of strange duck. It opens in a grimly tragic mood and ends almost frivolously. The players combined for a performance of real character, including Yakushev making brittle sounds and the strings greatly roughing up their tone in the Scherzo.

Saturday, July 9, the bansuri flute master Steve Gorn offers a program of Indian ragas with three colleagues at 8 p.m. (not always the time for Maverick Sunday programs so take note). On Sunday the popular Shanghai Quartet plays music of Mendelssohn and Grieg along with a work of the underplayed British master Frank Bridge, remembered mostly as Benjamin Britten’s teacher. Then on July 16, Jazz at the Maverick presents Amir ElSaffar and the Two Rivers Ensemble, again at 8 p.m. On Sunday, the 17th, the Horszowski Trio offers an intriguing program of music by Beethoven, Schumann, and the greatly honored Bard composer Joan Tower. You will find lots of information on this series atwww.maverickconcerts.org.

Alas, tornado warnings prevented me from getting to Aston Magna’s Mozart concert at Bard on July 1, but I’m determined to get to the season finale on July 8. The program is called “J.S. Bach: Sacred and Secular,” and includes one cantata of each type along with the Orchestal Suite No. 3. The wonderful soprano Dominique LaBelle, a highlight of past Aston Magna seasons, is one of six fine singers who join the ensemble of period instruments at Bard’s Bitó Conservatory Building at 8 p.m., with a pre-concert talk at 7. Check www.astonmagna.org/calendar for more information. Later in July you’ll have a rare chance to see Mascagni’s opera “Iris” at Bard (July 22, 24, 29, & 31) along with three performances by jazz master Wynton Marsalis, two with his octet (July 23/24), the third with the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra (July 30). Check details and ticket availability at www.bard.edu/news/events.

Beppe Gambetta plays Ashokan

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GAMBETTA_SQIn these post-packaged years when people no longer buy media in piece goods but prefer electronic sources…a pretty decent sized audience still prefers good old hand made music on wooden instruments, and fine players can be heard nestled into the niche with the misnomer ‘Americana.’ And we can trace the lines of the great flatpickers back to Doc Watson, who first began picking fiddle tunes on the steel string acoustic guitar back in the 1950s, and who begat the great Clarence White, and thus Tony Rice and Dan Crary, Norman Blake, Russ Barenberg, who have carried the lineage onward to players like David Grier and Bryan Sutton, and younger generations who can blind and dazzle you with their prowess.

And so it happens that another who surely belongs in the pantheon, but with a different sensibility, a European feel, will be performing in our midst when Beppe Gambetta takes the stage at 7:30 p.m. Sunday, July 10 in the Conservation Hall at the Ashokan Center, 477 Beaverkill Road, Olivebridge. He’ll also stay around for the week following for the Center’s Acoustic Guitar Camp, featuring world class players giving workshops on gypsy jazz and swing, slide, bottleneck blues, swing and ragtime; fingerstyle blues, alternate tunings and a host of other styles played on the flattop boxes.

The literature states “Starting from the early studies of his American mentor Doc Watson, Beppe brought his flatpicking approach to a more modern development of plectrum guitar style, based on complex strumming, crosspicking and the use of open tunings.”

“We’ve became sort of transnational,” says Gambetta, by phone a few days ago, through a most musical Italian accent. “We live five months in Europe and seven here. We go back and forth every couple of months, try to get the best of both sides. We enjoy our friends in the musical scenes. But it takes a lot of energy, I have to play a lot of notes…

“After the concert, I will continue to be at Ashokan for the guitar workshop. You meet with the community of guitar aficionados. This is important for me because I wrote a big book, the flatpicking source book. In English, it came out from Music Sales. I tried to put in a book, not only all the usual technical exercises and suggestions, but I tried to talk about the passion and love for music. There is not a precise recipe to talk about loving music but you can try with perspective and stories you can tell. It’s a challenge, a big book. Everything you do with passion…I hope it will be received with enthusiasm.”

We talk about his style of flatpicking and how it almost sounds like a fingerpicked style, veered away from what we’ve come to know, coming from Bluegrass and the mountains.

“It comes about the fact that in Europe it was really difficult to be a professional musician playing American flat picking style. To move around in Europe with a band was not simple. So I decided to follow the example of Dan Crary and Norman Blake and now in more modern time David Grier, sometimes Doc Watson, the father of flatpicking. So I decided to develop the style that was started by these great fathers of the music. It’s a big challenge because the pick is just one source, so it’s more difficult to generate the arpeggios. I had to develop my own style to make me capable to be a solo flatpicker. I have a lot of freedom to move in every direction I want. Technically in the style you have the single notes and the strumming, and the possibility to do cross picking, to do arpeggions. It’s a style you sometimes find in Celtic music. Down, down up technique. I sort of invented some new techniques, sort of a harp style or floating.”

Gambetta also has a deep connection to Woodstock.

“For me, particularly Bill Keith was the first American artist I could see in Europe, the first to bring traditional Bluegrass to Europe. I guess it was 35 or 40 years ago. He was courageous, he put together his band with other Woodstock players. I love to talk about him, because for the whole European scene he was the ambassador.

“I admire Bill Keith so much for his new invention. He was the first who was able to move on from Scruggs style. The whole scene of Woodstock was the first example of this fabulous synthesis, taking the old style and moving it on to modernity. Keith was strongly rooted in the traditional style and taking it to another place.

“Also John Herald, was a fantastic picker, with Greenbriar Boys, but used his knowledge of traditional style, wrote unique songs. I love generally when songs are immortal, when they express some concept that touches people a long time after. And this is the pure form of poetry. Not every artist has this capability. I think John Herald was one of the artists that had this sensibility.” Just last year Gambetta and Tony McManus recorded a beautiful version of the Herald song, “Slightly Go Blind.”

“That’s why I’m excited to do this concert in this area. Give a little tiny modest celebration of these great artists. Bringing the roots to modernity to a new level and expressing our hope for society through art and music.

“I was not only friends with them, but also with Artie Traum,” he sighs. “A lot of artists that are not around any more, but influenced me and touched me deeply.

“I also know Happy, we met on different occasions in Europe…” Gambetta has done two instructional videos for Happy Traum’s Homespun Music Instruction.

Besides being excited about his Woodstock connections, Gambetta also loves to bring his own music to the table. You will not be disappointed.

“In my concert I will play a development of my artistic work. After falling in love with the American roots, I decided I would play with my European roots. I had to leave some influences in what I play and I went deeper into roots of both sides of the ocean. I had good response with an album with David Grisman, about Italian American immigrants and their roots. Now I have a new systhesis, American roots with European passion, sort of following a journey through my life.

“I always use some special tunings. In the beginning being a solo payer, I use sort of half regular tunings and half special tuning.. DADGAD [an open guitar tuning] brings you to a cliché. It’s good to play variations so the sound is not the stock of the cliché.

“I love to use open tunings because I’m a solo player and it’s really nice to turn the page after every tune and change the sound. And with open tunings I’ve invented special chords.”

Gambetta’s excitement is contagious. “Everytime you play in a new place you are meeting with the community. Though I have so many friends, I never played in the area of Woodstock. I’m particularly happy.”

If you’re not sure, you can check him out in numerous Youtube videos. And then you will be.

 

Beppe Gambetta will perform a concert at 7:30 p.m. Sunday, July 10 in the Conservation Hall at the Ashokan Center, 477 Beaverkill Road, Olivebridge. Tickets are $15 for advanced general admission ($20 day of show); $10 Youth Ages 13-25 and Seniors; $5 Ages 5-12; Under 5 Free. See http://ashokancenter.org/ashokan-center-events/ for ticket information, or write info@ashokancenter.org or call 845-657-8333.

For more information on the Acoustic Guitar Camp, July 11-15 at the Ashokan Center, see http://ashokancenter.org/.

Review: ‘False Documents’ by Peter Lamborn Wilson

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False-Documents-SQThe cover of False Documents shows two commedia dell’arte characters — medieval Italian clowns — dancing audaciously above the surface of the moon. I was surprised to discover that this literally illustrates a scene from the story “Lunar Mansions or, The Whole Rabbit” which concludes the collection. Set in a prison on the moon a couple centuries in the future, “Lunar Mansions” consists largely of individual prisoners recounting their semi-tragical life stories, while feasting on extravagant meals catered by their host Wali al-Taha, “poet and fat flautist.”

False Documents is the selected fiction of Peter Lamborn Wilson, anarchist, theological scholar, artist, poet and local historian. (Wilson lives in the Hudson Valley.) Almost all the pieces in this volume are portraits of communities, in the tradition of Looking Backward: 2000-1887 by Edward Bellamy, the novel in which a man named Julian West falls asleep in 1887 and wakes up 113 years later in a perfectly egalitarian society (in Boston, Massachusetts!). “Pastoral Letter: A Fragment,” a memo from the fictitious Sion County, a rural paradise of hippies, “Amish-type farmers,” a small Iroquois reservation and a band of Anglican Benedictine monks (at the Monastery of St. John-in-the-Wilderness) could be a blueprint for a Catskills utopia:

The county capital, Sion City (pop. 18,000 or so), has the plastic rural highway fast-food sprawl and rundown 19th century backstreet gloom of any similar sad place in the bioregion — but in a way this is mere camouflage. The fast-food franchises have been bought-out by whole-food/organic collectives, which are funded by the County. Still they use names like Tastee Burgers or Salad Bar & Grill…The Public Library consists of four pink double-wide mobile homes, but contains amazing collections. It’s as if the whole town were a disguise.

The Sion County experiment began with a conspiracy of “hemp growers and smugglers” and the libertarian faction of the local Republican Party, creating a cash-rich county with progressive values: marijuana socialism!

Those of us who have read Nietzsche with pleasure and have idly wondered, “Could his ideas succeed in the real world?” will enjoy “A Nietzschean Coup D’état,” the history of a state based on the principles of the prophetic German philosopher. Wilson recounts the tale of the Autonomous Sanjak of Cumantsa, which controlled a tiny corner of Romania for two years, beginning in 1918. A small Nietzschean study group seized power and governed through a system called “Councilism,” based on a council with one member from each Cumantsan ethnic group. The governing body redistributed land seized from the aristocracy, legalized smuggling, and organized an impressive concert series. The (proposed) Cumantsa Constitution was a collection of quotations from Nietzsche, such as: “What good is all the art of our works of art if we lose that higher art, the art of festivals? Formally, all works of art adorned the great festival road of humanity, to commemorate high and happy moments.” “A Nietzschean Coup D’état” is a delightful history, even if it is imaginary. (One might call this genre “speculative utopianism.”)

Jorge Luis Borges suggested that instead of actually writing a book it would be better to imagine the book and review it; Wilson does just this in “Incunabula: A Catalog of Rare Books, Manuscripts & Curiosa,” a hoax-brochure of obscure literature — such as “The Sacred Jihad of Our Lady of Chaos.” Reading this “catalog,” one slowly recognizes that all its books and pamphlets suggest ways to escape this universe in a trans-dimensional vehicle known as the “Egg.” As “The Sacred Jihad” says: “to vanish without having to kill yourself may be the ultimate revolutionary act.”

Wilson is returning to the origins of fiction-as-hoax, in the tradition of Gulliver’s Travels and Robinson Crusoe. His social utopias include vivid characters like Emory Cranston, half-mad “proprietor” of the Incunabula Catalog, and Nestor Makhno, an anarchist revolutionary who resembles a Ukrainian Robin Hood: young, fearless, and spontaneously generous. (Makhno was a real person, who appears in the story “Nestor Makhno and the Elixir of Life,” based on a true anecdote.)

The most rhapsodic, literary work is the mock-medieval romance “Glatisant and Grail: An Arthurian Fragment” by the Chevalier Isador de Boron. (Wilson claims to have translated it.) For example: And Palamydes struck steel and flint, kindled a small fire, and ordered the boy to pour out wine mixed with cool streamwater; the Saracen keyed his voice to the indigo drone of night insects and nightjars, whippoorwills, nightingales and owls; and began to speak.

Sir Palamydes the Saracen is a mysterious black-robed figure “of Babylonian lineage,” a master of alchemy and seeker of the Holy Grail. In this age of Islamophobia, it’s comforting to read a volume of Islamophilia. (Wilson is not being “politically correct”; he honestly admires Islamic culture.)

An anarchist always seeks a better world, even if she has to invent it. Wilson envisions a multifaceted revolution against gender, war, work and capitalism — plus people who are just no fun. The purpose of False Documents is to transform intellectually curious hipsters into daring anarchist pirates. There should be a label on the cover: “Warning: After Reading This Book, You May Quit Your Job!”


‘Comedy of Errors’ at Comeau

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Members of the Bird-on-a-Cliff cast at the Comeau. (photo by Violet Snow)

Members of the Bird-on-a-Cliff cast at the Comeau. (photo by Violet Snow)

Before Orphan Black, before the Olsen twins, before The Patty Duke Show, Elizabethan audiences laughed their arses off at the misunderstandings arising from mistaken identities in The Comedy of Errors. Humans have a long history of fascination with stories about identical twins. Like all Shakespeare’s plays, The Comedy of Errors revolves around fundamental human questions, in this case: What is the nature of the Self? How do others’ views of us affect our lives? Who am I really, if I can be mistaken for someone else?

Just ask Christina Gardner, who looks a bit like me. She is often addressed, in complete seriousness, as “Violet” on the streets of Woodstock. We both find our doppelgänger status funny but unnerving.

You don’t have to think about these existential problems in order to enjoy The Comedy of Errors, as presented by Woodstock’s Bird-on-a-Cliff Theatre Company. This summer’s production runs from July 15 through August 7, Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays, at 5 p.m., on the outdoor stage at the Comeau Property.

The play is based on Menaechmi by the Roman playwright Plautus, but Shakespeare expanded on the theme of twins by adding a second set. As two young men named Antipholus, twins separated at birth, blunder through Syracusa being mistaken for each other, their servants, twins named Dromio, exponentially multiply the confusion, since even their masters can’t tell them apart. Slapstick and puns heighten the humor, and of course, there’s a happy ending.

When asked why Bird-on-a-Cliff chose to do The Comedy of Errors, co-director David Aston-Reese replied, “We like to keep it light. We don’t want to see 13 dead people at the end, while there are mothers and children in the audience.” On the other hand, the play begins with a threatened execution, reminding us of the darkness beneath Shakespeare’s humor.

Nicola Shearer co-directs, as she has for several seasons, freeing Aston-Reese to make his appearance onstage as the Duke, who frames the action at the beginning and end. “Olivier could direct himself,” observed Aston-Reese, “but he had 12 stage managers.”

The current production marks the 21st anniversary of Bird-on-a-Cliff’s annual Shakespeare festival. “I never get tired of Shakespeare,” said Aston-Reese, who co-founded the company with his wife, Elli Michaels. “The language is so great. And I’m just beginning to absorb Elizabethan culture and to understand the legal system,” which underlies so many of the plots, at a time when London Bridge was lined with spikes bearing the heads of people recently executed.

As Monday’s rehearsal was about to begin, town supervisor Jeremy Wilber passed by to hand Michaels a letter from China. On Wilber’s recent trip to Beijing, he brought along Shakespeare posters donated by Bird-on-a-Cliff. His hosts wrote to thank the theater and offer hospitality if the actors would like to perform in China. “Who wants to go to Beijing?” called out Michaels, crossing to the stage in the wild russet wig of her character in the play, a courtesan.

The rehearsal, covering the second act, began with Joe Bongiorno, who plays one of the Dromios, advancing through the audience shouting Elizabethan epithets over their heads, along the lines of “Thy vile canker-blossom’d countenance!” and “Nature made a foul blot with thee, scambling, outfacing dog-ape!” — demonstrating the Bard’s extravagant nimbleness with insults. Then actors, in 1970s dress, confronted each other onstage, with Jose Torres, as Antipholus of Ephesus, mistaking Scott Schutzman for his own Dromio. Justin Waldo, dressed identically to Torres, plays Antipholus of Syracusa, confounding William M. Sanderson as Angelo, to whom the other Antipholus owes money.

Frustrations mount, along with accusations of madness and knavery delivered by Julie Szabo, playing Adriana, the wife of Antipholus, and her sister, Luciana, played by Lucy Ann Miller. Rounding out the cast are Tad Richards, M. Furé Julé, Robert Sheridan, Kevin Kraft, and Rhonda Joseph.

Starting August 12, Bird-on-a-Cliff will switch to more modern comedy with four weekends of Severely Fractured Fairytales, written by Aston-Reese and Jerry James, also on the Comeau Property stage.

 

Bird-on-a-Cliff Theatre Company presents The Comedy of Errors from July 15 through August 7, Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays, at 5 p.m., on the outdoor stage at the Comeau Property, 45 Comeau Drive, Woodstock. Admission is free, and donations are invited. Feel free to bring a blanket or chairs and a picnic. For more information, see http://www.birdonacliff.org or call 845-247-4007.

Local Elders’ lives in song

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Colette Ruoff

Colette Ruoff

Like a clearing in a forest, an unusual event on the weekend offers a step away from this year’s underbrush of police shootings, Brexit, missing State Department emails, impending threats of economic collapse and World War and other harrowing preoccupations into a deeper view of human society as it exists in our own neighborhood. At 4 p.m. Sunday, July 17, at the Woodstock Music Lab, 1700 Sawkill Road, former site of the Zena Elementary School, Sage Arts of Rosendale will present a concert honoring a selection of eight Woodstock seniors who have teamed with local musicians to celebrate their lives in song.

“Songs have a way of penetrating us; going through the mind and into the heart,” explains Colette Ruoff, Sage Arts founder and president. “That’s why I’m doing this. Art is a means of inspiration. That’s why we started this off. We’d like to use other art forms as well. I think this is the most powerful way to transmit a message from an elder to the community.”

Energy feeds ambition and the first spark of energy in this direction came from a ‘vision quest’ Ruoff undertook in 2012 after years of coaching leadership to members of large corporations. Traditionally a spiritually maturing process or ‘rite of passage’ well known in Native American cultures, a Vision Quest ideally aligns an inner sense of essence with one’s outer world of work and life.  “It was a shift in my thinking,” Ruoff recalls of her own journey. “As part of it, I felt this calling to step into a role that was more from the heart and would be of service to community. So, that’s what happened to me.”

A few months later on a business trip to New Mexico as consultant to a non-profit, she came across a community-outreach project started by Molly Sturgis, a composer-in-residence at the Santa Fe Opera House which involved poets and composers working with residents to transform their life stories into original musical pieces performed by a local college choir. That became the beginning of a turning point for Ruoff, igniting a spark which would incubate for over a year before she congealed her Sage Arts ideas in October of 2013. With Sturgis coming up from Santa Fe to help with organizing her core team, Ruoff lifted off Sage Arts with a fund-raising concert the following spring and set up training songwriters for the work.

The first concert in May of 2015 drew a Standing Room Only audience to the Marbletown Community Center and a flood of wild acclaim which included an anonymous grant of $20,000 through the Rudolf Steiner Social Fund.

“We still don’t know who saw what we were doing and approved it with that very generous contribution but it’s been our life’s blood, allowing us to continue and conceive these projects; the one focusing on elder farmers of the region in April and the Elders of Woodstock this Sunday.”

In an age dominated by remotely packaged and corporatized entertainments, an event subtitled “A people’s history of American culture” in a town with solid legacy of achievement in the arts promises significant stimulation of cultural recognitions meaningfully delivered from our past; a feast of reflection for elders, artists and audience. Jerome Taub, a 91 year old elder with acting experience who will offer his own rendition of the song produced with his songwriter, Elizabeth Clark, is one of these living time machines set to gift us with personal glimpses of a world the community has traveled through.  “The song tells about my life as a child,” Taub reveals, noting it also recalls the drama of marrying his first wife in a hospital room after his father suffered a heart attack shortly before their long-scheduled wedding day. “I’m now in my third marriage. My current wife is also in her third marriage. We met about 20 years ago and have been together ever since. The three women I’ve been married to are all in the song.”

Although the songs are mostly performed by the artists, Clark, a harpist, vocalist and composer for the Hudson Valley’s Mamalama orchestra, auditioned Taub’s suggestion that he perform their collaboration himself and approved the idea.

“Talking about a lot of things I’ve been through in my life brought back memories I haven’t thought about in a long time which have remained with me,” Taub said. “Since my discussions with Elizabeth about various things that happened many years ago and in practicing the song, the return of these old memories has been very pleasant, actually.”

Award-winning songwriter Kelleigh McKenzie (pronounced ‘Kelly’), who came on board for the Farmers project and is working with visual artist elder Lois Linet for this one, describes the collaborations as a fascinating and emotion-provoking process of drawing out stories and inner life experiences and pulling together whole life perspectives. Ruoff equates it with a string of pearls wherein the stories are the pearls and the songwriters are looking for the string that holds them together. McKenzie searches for notable phrases in how the stories are related to use as key tones in her “palette” for composition.

A long time area resident born in Oregon, McKenzie relishes the ‘real folks’ element of the folkish endeavor she elaborates with a banjo she began to learn as a requirement for a character she was chosen to play while studying acting in college. Although her role was to play badly, she took to the instrument with enthusiasm afterward, noting that although she was raised in Oregon, grandparents on both sides were from the deep South and, fueled by admiration for Pete Seeger and Steve Martin, she soon discovered that she had the “hillbilly music gene.”

Classically trained multi-instrumentalist Bonnie Meadow, who stylistically embraces a musical range from blues and show tunes to the classics and slyly humorous folk, has pieced together memories from Virginia Snyder, a former choir member and soloist to voice Virginia’s thoughts to her departed husband, Clarence, who was a choir director and organist, into a classical piece for four-part choir, soloist, and piano. Meadow finds exhilaration in the challenge of the process, terming it almost ‘sacred work’.

“You can’t fake it. You have to find it,” she says. “It feels very good to be involved with it and I get so much out of doing this work. It’s a wonderful thing that we do for elders and for musicians and for the community. I’m proud to be part of it.”

Seeing this as a way to help heal some cultural wounds of modern society, Colette Ruoff credits a study of indigenous communities and her resonance with the way they honor nature, life and their elders as an aid in bringing her Vision Quest awakening to realization. “I’m passionate about changing the way we perceive our elders…to see them as a resource; to see them as a repository of valuable life experience who can inform us of who we are as people,” she declares. “We can carry the story forward as we live our lives. How do we benefit from their earned wisdoms? How do we expand and learn as a culture, as a society by putting them in the center to honor them? Because, doing that, we honor ourselves, we honor life itself, all of life, not just human life. There’s a real problem in our society and I see that the marginalization of elders and discounting of their value because they’re not pretty anymore, is connected to the disgraceful way we dominate and disrespect nature.”

Woodstock, perhaps surprisingly, has the largest number of elders in Ulster County, Ruoff points out and has been hugely supportive of Sage Arts from the start. “So, I see this all connected…I didn’t see that at first. I didn’t know why I was involved with this,” she laughs. But it’s come out. It’s revealed itself to me over time as I’ve been living it because I can’t not do this. I’m compelled to do this. It doesn’t feel like that much of a choice.”

 

Woodstock elders who have contributed recollections to this event are Stewart Maurer, Virginia Snyder, Jerome Taub, Pete Denehey, Anni Tucker, Jocelyn Sarto, Nita Chandler and Lois Linet. Songwriter-performers, besides Meadow, Clark and McKenzie will be Sarah Perrotta, Jude Roberts, Sarah Kramer-Harrison and musician/novelist Robert Burke Warren. Concert  Director is Julie Last and accompanying musicians include Fooch Fischetti, Lou Pappas, Russell Boris and members of the Mamalama band and Ars Choralis Choir.

 

Songs of Life will open with a reception at 4 p.m. Sunday, July 17 and the concert will be 4:30 p.m. to 6:30 p.m., at the Woodstock Music Lab, 1700 Sawkill Road in Woodstock. Suggested donation for tickets is $15 in advance and $20 at the door. For seniors, tickets are $10 in advance and $15 at the door and for children under 18  tickets are $5. Tickets are available at www.brownpapertickets.com or at the door.

Acts of Utopian art

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Mark Robbins in front of the Arthur & Janet C. Ross Library at the American Academy in Rome. (photo by Gerardo Gaetani)

Mark Robbins in front of the Arthur & Janet C. Ross Library at the American Academy in Rome. (photo by Gerardo Gaetani)

In 1988, artist and architect Mark Robbins, while visiting Woodstock’s Byrcliffe Colony of the Arts for a summer residency, built an installation entitled “Utopian Prospect” in front of Eastover, one of Byrcliffe’s buildings. The structure, still in place after almost 30 years, was recently repaired under the direction of architect Les Walker, whose son Jess, as a teenager, helped Robbins build the installation.

Now president and CEO of the American Academy in Rome, which sponsors one of the world’s most sought-after residency programs, Robbins will speak at the Byrdcliffe Theater on Saturday, July 23, at 4 p.m. He will describe his youthful creation and discuss how residencies for creative people benefit both artists and society.

Robbins was six years out of graduate school and installing his art in East Village galleries when he received a grant to create a site-specific project at Byrdcliffe. “I became interested in the history of Byrdcliffe as a utopian art colony with deep American roots,” recalled Robbins.

Going back to the 1850s and 60s, there were two basic strands of thought about how to create a utopia, Robbins explained. One theory espoused a return to nature, which would allow people’s essential, natural goodness to emerge, apart from the degrading effects of industrial civilization. The other branch of thought favored setting up new, humanistic rules for conduct and organization of the social group.

Byrdcliffe straddled these two concepts. Founder Ralph Whitehead subscribed to the ideas of John Ruskin, who believed personal, productive work, using the hands to create meaningful products, was the ideal basis for a community that included equality of the sexes, a radical notion in 1902. The location Whitehead chose for his utopia was the landscape that had fueled the Hudson River School of painting, with its approach to nature as spiritual inspiration.

Robbins created an artwork that allowed the viewer to experience both aspects of Byrdcliffe’s utopian dream. One part of the installation is a cinder-block wall, roughened on one side and containing two windows. “I was influenced by the old foundations of ruined houses at Byrdcliffe,” he said. “If you walk around, you find rough rubble walls and the remains of chimneys. The creation of a wall allowed me to think about the way we frame views of ourselves.” Looking through the windows of his wall from one side reveal views of the distant mountains, while the opposite view frames the buildings of Byrdcliffe.

A second structure resembles a chimney with a sort of weathervane, a piece that spins, with arms that hold a small window at one end and a mirror at the other. “When looking at the piece moving in the wind, sometimes you see your own reflection,” said Robbins. “If you’re looking toward the hills, the reflection includes the house behind you.”

His lecture will include photographs taken during the period of the piece’s construction. Les Walker, who supervised the recent repairs, said it has taken on “a medieval look. The metal parts are rusted, and the concrete block has aged. It looks better now than it did 30 years ago.”

Since 1988, Robbins has gone on to a number of high-profile positions in the art world, including first Curator of Architecture, 1993-99, at the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio, director of the Design Arts program at the National Endowment for the Arts, 1999-2002, dean at the School of Architecture at Syracuse University, 2004-12, and Executive Director at the International Center of Photography, starting in 2012.

In 1996, he was awarded a Rome Prize, allowing him to spend a year in Rome under the auspices of the organization he now heads. He credits that experience, enriched by access to the history and culture of Rome, with crystallizing his understanding of his career, which is a hybrid of art and architecture, and helping him to move forward in both worlds. In Rome at the time was poet and essayist Mark Strand, also a prize recipient, who often visited his studio. “It was great to have discussions with him, to talk about each other’s work,” Robbins remembers. “Scholars and artists got to mix and learn from each other. It was such an open environment.”

His lecture will address how both the Rome experience and his Byrdcliffe residency launched him into other work. “I’ll talk about the ways in which arts colonies help to fuel the future of our culture here in America and, we hope, around the world,” he said. “Our artists and scholars need support, which often seems like a luxury, something we should do only when everything is perfect in the world. That attitude loses sight of the impact from visual art, music, literature, art history, which all allow us to participate in the world in deeper ways and make life more satisfying. It’s not a luxury, it’s essential, and support is more and more difficult to come by.”

Robbins gave the example of composer David Lang, who received a Rome Prize in 1990. He later started Bang on a Can, an innovative group that supports experimental work and brings together musicians from different countries — often from places immersed in conflict — to play together in orchestras. The co-founders have written, “We started this organization because we believed that making new music is a utopian act.”

 

Mark Robbins will speak at the Byrdcliffe Theater on Saturday, July 23, at 4 p.m., in an event sponsored by the Woodstock Byrdcliffe Guild. Attendance requires an RSVP to info@woodstockguild.com.

Pollock-Krasner officials honored by Byrdcliffe

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Jackson Pollock

Jackson Pollock

Jackson Pollock ran off an eastern Long Island back road 60 years ago next month and died among gnarled trees. He was still making money from his drip paintings of several years earlier at the time, but struggling with alcoholism. His wife and fellow artist Lee Krasner was in Paris at the time, giving him time for his womanizing and anger. She lived on another 28 years, nurturing his legacy while growing her own art and reputation and caring for their joint estate. She died in 1984.

The Woodstock Byrdcliffe Guild celebrates the ongoing impact of these two epochal artists at 5:30 p.m. Saturday, July 23, at its annual gala, where Charles C. Bergman, Chairman & CEO, and Kerrie Buitrago, Executive Vice President of the Pollock-Krasner Foundation will be honored with the arts organization’s Whitehead Award, named for the arts colony’s founders.

“Lee had no children,” Buitrago said this past weekend at her Maverick Road home, where she’s busy preparing for a special brunch the morning of the gala, introducing the Guild to her foundation’s supporters. “Her attorney, Gerald Dickler, asked her what she wanted to do with her money and she said she wanted to give it to worthy and needy artists.”

Starting with $10 million in cash and another $10 million in art, the Foundation has spent the past 31 years working to “stabilize and to strengthen the careers of artists, not to mention their personal lives as they do their creative work.” In total, that’s added up to 4,148 grants totaling $65,071,174 to artists in 77 countries, including 42 Lee Krasner awards of $90,000 over three years to 42 artists.

Starting with 9/11, the Pollock-Krasner Foundation has also been making grants to organizations that directly support individual artists. At first the efforts were designed to aid individual artists uprooted by the World Trade Center tragedy, where many had studios. Later, following hurricanes Katrina and Sandy, more awards were given to help with artists affected by those massive events.

Since 2006, the Woodstock Byrdcliffe Guild has received $168,000 in grants aiding its annual Artists in Residence program at Byrdcliffe.

The organization came into the foundation’s sights after Buitrago visited friends in Woodstock 21 summers ago, then decided to rent a space at Byrdcliffe — The Forge — for half a decade. After buying her Maverick Road home, she then joined the Guild’s board of directors for several years. Her son, Oscar, is now on the board…and in charge of putting on this Saturday’s gala and awards ceremony, which will include music and an art auction, at the Bear Cafe.

She says she was hired for her job based on her previous work with the United Nations and several major international firms, in Brussels and Paris, bringing to the foundation both administrative ability and a background in international investment.

Bergman, who worked with the foundation as a consultant before taking on his present position, also sits on the philanthropy committee of the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, serves on the Board of Directors of the Children’s Radio Foundation, and also works with the Fund for Park Avenue, the Alliance for Young Artists and Writers, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts.

Buitrago notes how PKF grants have no hard deadlines, even though most applications tend to be submitted in September and January. Once an anonymous committee made up of museum and art world professionals make a first cut — and those not making it that year are contacted — program staff then work with applicants on their budgets, working over income and expenses for each artist, while also fine tuning their plans. “It’s like a personal finance course,” she said. “We work very closely with our applicants.”

Unlike many grants, PKF money can be awarded more than once, as many in the Hudson Valley have found. “We learned that an artist’s circumstances don’t always get better,” she said, pointing out how grants don’t go to artists with their own trust funds, or heightened levels of sales. “Also, that their work changes, and such change needs support.”

While artists’ needs are key to PKF grants, they are not paramount. There are also funds available just for emergencies.

Asked about the changes she’s seen in art and artists over the past 30 years, Buitrago simply notes that “the art has shifted and we have shifted with it” before speaking about the ways in which the foundation has kept showing its Pollocks and Krasners over the years, to ever-better effect as requests come in to see the work in tandem.

So how large a role do Woodstock and the Hudson Valley play in the Pollock-Krasner Foundation’s giving profile?

Buitrago speaks about the growing numbers of artists working out of Brooklyn, but then sends a list of nearly 100 names, not counting the scores whose main address is still in New York City. The Krasner awardees include Mary Frank and Raquel Rabinovich; augmenting it this past year is a new Pollock Award for creativity with an eye to societal impact, given this past Spring to photographer Gideon Mendel for his portraits of flood survivors around the world.

And then there’s Byrdcliffe and the Guild, which shares the foundation’s organizational support along with such institutions as the Aldrich, the Aspen Institute, the MacDowell Colony, the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice, the Vermont Studio Center and Tate Liverpool.

“Byrdcliffe selects candidates for its Artists in Residence program, funded by the foundation,” Buitrago said. “It allows us to allow artists to become part of this great tradition of Byrdcliffe, including the town of Woodstock. The experience of being there, and here, can be life changing. This program, this place, can allow one to become a risk-taker in their art…It’s like a rite of passage.”

As is all that the foundation Buitrago and Bergman will be honored for this Saturday does, keeping Lee Krasner’s wish to support artists alive, along with the creative life she and husband Jackson Pollock came to symbolize through their fevered creative lives, and now long after.

 

The 2016 Woodstock Byrdcliffe Guild Gala honoring Charles Bergman, Kerrie Buitrago and the Pollock-Krasner Foundation starts at 5:30 p.m. on Saturday, July 23 at The Bear Cafe…but is officially sold out. Earlier that day, there will be a 4 p.m. Artist Talk and Dedication with Mark Robbins, president and CEO of the American Academy in Rome, at the Byrdcliffe Theater… for which space is still available.

See www.woodstockguild.org for more info. For more on the Pollock-Krasner Foundation see www.pkf.org.

Cherry’s Patch to open at Playhouse

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Ron Scott Stevens (photo by Dan Barton)

Ron Scott Stevens (photo by Dan Barton)

The Woodstock Playhouse will delve into its only summer drama when it presents Cherry’s Patch for one weekend, with performances at 7:30 p.m. Friday, July 29 and Saturday, July 30 and 2 p.m. Sunday, July 31.

The play is written by Ron Scott Stevens, who once again is a local resident after having lived in Woodstock in the late 1970s and early 1980s. He moved back here in late 2015.

Cherry’s Patch is set in a Brooklyn Firehouse and brings to light a respect for and awareness of firefighters; humanizing the heroes, that we might appreciate the invisible struggles of their lives and the disruption of order in the firehouse spurred on by cutbacks and politics.

It’s the story of a cowardly lieutenant who causes a heroic captain’s death, after which the firefighters in the company’s firehouse decide to deal out justice themselves.

A portion of the proceeds for Cherry’s Patch, which made its debut at the SoHo Playhouse in 2006, will be given to the support of local firefighters and their families in our community.

“When I was promoting boxing,” said Scott Stevens, “the person who sang the National Anthem for me was a firefighter, Vernon Cherry. He would come in uniform and he worked out of a firehouse in downtown Brooklyn. He became a friend.

“I had an office at Gleason’s (Gym, a boxing establishment near Cadman Plaza in Brooklyn), I met a firefighter from the rescue company, Lt. Patrick Brown. Soon after I met him, I was watching the news on Ch. 5 and he was on the roof of building in Manhattan — he was engineering a rope rescue. They rescued two guys back to back, the first back to back rescue in NYC fire history.

“Vernon Cherry told me he was an artist, he showed me a patch on his sleeve, it said Fire Under the Bridge. I said that was a good name for a play, Cherry’s Patch. So I started to imagine a play about a fire engine company. I did a lot of research, rode with different companies in the city.

“I finished about half of it and put it down. And then 9/11 happened…at that time Patty was a captain in a ladder company, in Greenwich Village. Vernon Cherry was a firefighter in Ladder 118 in Brooklyn. They both responded to 9/11 and they both died.

That’s when I knew I had to finish it.”

Scott Stevens, who has had six of his plays produced, has had quite a varied career…or careers. He grew up in Manhattan, north Miami, Florida and came back to Brooklyn at age 13. He graduated with a BA in English from Hofstra University in 1969, drove a taxi, dropped out of law school, worked as a water ski instructor, waiter, and like many of his generation, found his way to Woodstock in 1975.

“When I lived here I was active in sports, I was the softball commissioner, and got us into the gym at Onteora to play basketball. I worked for WDST and HVTV (Hudson Valley Television, which was then doing local access broadcasting in Kingston) doing play by play, selling ads…I had a column in Woodstock Times, ‘Homer’s Corner’ about local sports.”

He worked in many restaurants: the Woodstocker, Katz’s Deli, The Bear Chinese restaurant…but “I needed to get out of here, my friends were professionals, dentists, or lawyers. Everyone was accomplished and I’m waiting on tables…”

So by the end of 1980 he was back in the city. “What am I going to do? And a light went off, and it said ‘Boxing.’ So I tried to get broadcasting work. I ended up back in Brooklyn. I got a job as a waiter, I was 31. I changed my name, they had a Ron Rosenberg working in broadcasting, they don’t need a Ron Rabinowitz. My two brothers were Scott and Steven, so I took their names.”

“Boxing is the sport of the underdogs, and I figured, I’m an underdog. So I started hanging around the gyms. I went to Gleason’s when it was on 30th St. between 7th and 8th, told them I was a writer, broadcaster…Went to a Main Events, Duva show in New Jersey and I saw the ring announcer in a tuxedo. I thought, I should become a ring announcer. I’ll get seen. Nancy Sciacca, a promoter hired me as a ring announcer, and I got licensed. Slowly work started to come in, as well as working a boxing writer. I got a job as editor of a magazine, Boxing Today. And I got my promotional license. Jack Barnett, wanted me to ring announce and matchmake the show. So I made a show for him. Eventually, I ended up as promoter, matchmaker for my own companies. In 1998 went to work for Cedric Kushner, I was licensed in 15 jurisdictions, I worked in California, Vegas, Florida, Atlantic City. I did that for four years until 2002. Travelled everywhere, making shows. It was just like theater, making shows.

“But boxing was in disarray. New York State had no chairman. Jerome Becker was a commissioner, chair of another state agency. Thought if he brought me in, an educated boxing guy, could get Governor Pataki to make him Chair. So he brings me in, December, 2002. In March 2003, I get a call from Governor’s office. Now, I knew that job. I was director of boxing, but I couldn’t stand the politics, pettiness. I got a call from the Governor’s office asking me to come to Albany for interview, where I met with the appointments officer and Aileen Long. They learned of my boxing background, writing, matchmaking promoting — I had interacted with Commission for 20 years by then. He calls me the following day, talks for another hour. Another call came in offering me the job — as Chairman of the New York State Athletic Commission. They did background checks..no problem, and made me acting chairman in April, 2003, pending Senate confirmation. I was reappointed in 2006… me, a Democrat, in a Republican administration. I was a two term chairman. During my time, we went from 17 events a year in the state to 40 — more events than any state without casinos. There were no serious or critical injuries while I was chairman. No scandals. The boxing community was growing again. I came out of that world, I understood that world.

“I was there until end of 2008. Politics drove me out. Spitzer kept me, but David Patterson became governor and I was out as Chairman, but stayed on as a commissioner until October 2008.”

Since then, Scott Stevens has worked for Jay Z’s Roc Nation Sports as a commissioner, for Star Boxing as assistant to the president; for Darko Boxing as matchmaker and for Ring Promotions.

He also wrote and produced three other plays. And is working on more..

Cherry’s Patch holds a special place in his heart. “It’s a drama, but out of my imagination. At the time I was writing it, there was a hue and cry about women in the Fire Department. More women were getting into the companies…so I introduce a probationary firefighter, a woman. Use her to replicate the things we’ve been reading and hearing about. I begged borrowed and stole from all the things I read and heard about.

“Patty Brown was a celebrated firefighter. He was the one who said, ‘we’re going up…’ and they went up 36 floors and never came back. For the purposes of the play, I put Patty and Vernon Cherry in an engine company, even though they were both in ladder companies.”

And he’s excited about the production at the Woodstock Playhouse. “I think it’s great. It’s an opportunity, Randy (Conti, director of the play and Executive Director of the Playhouse) and Doug (Farrell, Playhouse Manager) have been great. They don’t do this very often, but they like the play enough to do it. They’ve been marketing it well and they’ve been inclusive to me. They’re doing what they promised to do. I was at the first reading and they asked me for feedback. I saw Guys and Dolls, and though it was terrific.”

And he’s sure of his priorities at this point. “Playwriting is as important to me as anything. I’ve got a body of work now,” says Scott Stevens. “When people ask me my profession, it’s playwright.”

 

Tickets are available for the Woodstock Playhouse production of Cherry’s Patch at woodstockplayhouseboxoffice@gmail.com, or at www.woodstockplayhouse.org/. Seats are $40 for Golden Tier Seating; $36 for Blue Tier Seating; $32 for Blue Tier Seating. All seating is reserved.

The Woodstock Playhouse is at 103 Mill Hill Road, Woodstock. For more information, call 845-679-6900.

Songs of healing at Phoenicia Voice Fest

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At the 2013 Festival of the Voice. (photo by Dion Ogust)

At the 2013 Festival of the Voice. (photo by Dion Ogust)

“If people were going to concerts more and bathing in art, there would be less mess in the world,” said Maria Todaro, the co-founder and executive director of the Phoenicia International Festival of the Voice. “I see how we transform people, and that’s why I’m motivated to do this work.”

Always inspired by the healing power of music, Todaro, an opera singer, is especially interested in working with young people. This year’s festival, running from Thursday, August 4 to Sunday, August 7, highlights the theme of Shakespeare and the British Isles, with an abundance of youthful energy brought to performing and running the events.

The opener, on Thursday, August 4, on the main stage in Phoenicia Park, will be “Rock the Beatles!” Students from the Paul Green Rock Academy will take on some of the most vocally challenging selections from the Beatles’ psychedelic era. With Todaro recently taking on the job of vocal coach at the academy in Woodstock, John and Paul’s lyrics will resonate splendidly off the ring of mountains around the stage.

Todaro also has private voice students, and she has chosen five promising young singers to be featured in a Master Class. They will work one at a time with a master singer to refine a single vocal piece. Audience members will see what is involved in the complex process of developing a voice. Included are Phoenician resident Tori McCarthy, currently directing Oklahoma! at STS Playhouse, and powerhouse baritone Chris Vallone, who appeared with the multitalented McCarthy recently in the musical drama The Last Five Years at STS.

At the festival, Vallone has a supporting role in Kiss Me Kate, and McCarthy will be singing in the ensemble. The star of Cole Porter’s adaptation of the Shakespeare classic, The Taming of the Shrew, will be Miss America 1981 Susan Powell, now a highly respected opera singer who made her Carnegie Hall debut earlier this year. She will play opposite her husband, Richard White, who voiced the villain, Gaston, in the Disney film Beauty and the Beast and has performed on Broadway.

The opera this year will be Verdi’s Otello, with Shakespeare’s tragic hero performed by tenor Limmie Pulliam. When Todaro and her husband, Louis Otey, heard Pulliam sing, “We both cried,” she said. “It’s one of those voices that you hear one note, and your entire body shakes.” With the Metropolitan Opera’s focus on HD productions of its operas, a physically large singer like Pulliam tends to be overlooked, and Todaro feels the Met has sacrificed spectacular voices in the process. “Someone like Pavarotti might not have been able to make a career today. Here we reconnect with that concept that voice is first. I love Limmie’s physique. Otello is a general, and his corpulence makes sense for a warrior.”

Desdemona will be sung by Eleni Calenos, a Greek soprano whom Todaro calls “the hottest number on the planet. She just got rave views in Tosca.” Iago is Daniel Sutin, an international performer who recently sang at the Met in the title role of Wozzeck. Singers from local choirs auditioned for the chorus of 100 people that will appear onstage, including Bennett Elementary School music teacher Harvey Boyer, who also heads this year’s “Working with Masters” day camp for kids.

A few weeks before the festival, the camp will immerse 40 children in intensive study of jazz and classical music, at the Emerson Inn in Mount Tremper. “Harvey is building a treble choir to start in the fall,” said Todaro. “Between Harvey and Paul Green, we’ll have classical, jazz, and rock orchestras and choirs, with some kids in all three.”

Sing Out!, a youth choir from Connecticut, will perform Friday evening on the outdoor stage. They will also join the choir for Otello, with the children’s voices adding a distinctive color to the sound.

The festival also nurtures young people who might want to become arts administrators. Twenty-five young interns help with production, marketing, and finding housing for the artists. “A huge investment in youth is part of our mission statement,” said Todaro. “I’m already planning my succession. We’re training young people in their 20s to take over by their 30s.” Maria Whitcomb, one of last year’s interns, is spending this summer on scholarship at the Janklow Arts Leadership Program at Syracuse University.

The festival will close with young Celtic musicians brought over from Ireland and Scotland, singing traditional musical forms in their native languages. The ensemble An Crann Óg, is from Donegal, a region where Gaelic is still widely spoken. Award-winning soloists will also perform.

The Shakespeare theme will be elaborated with a talk on Hamlet by veteran Shakespearean actor, director, and teacher Carey Harrison, who will also dramatize Tennyson’s “Enoch Arden,” accompanied by the celebrated Justin Kolb, performing the pyrotechnics of Richard Strauss on piano. Lauren Flanigan will sing American composer Thomas Pasatieri’s Three Shakespeare Monologues, bringing to life Juliet, Lady Macbeth, and Desdemona. The Cambridge Chamber Singers return with Elizabethan period music. To explore the background of famous Shakespearean works, try out the morning Latte Lectures at the Parish Field, addressing Otello, Kiss Me Kate, and Muse of Fire, a production by local young Shakespearean actors.

 

 

The Phoenicia International Festival of the Voice will be held August 4-7 at the Phoenicia Park and in other venues around the hamlet. Most tickets are $25 to $35, with $5 admission for youth 18 and under, and some events are free. To see a complete schedule and to reserve tickets, visit http://www.phoeniciavoicefest.org.

Moving the Water(S) at Kleinert

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Ashokan Fugues by Margaret Cogswell.

Ashokan Fugues by Margaret Cogswell.

Moving The Water(S): Ashokan Fugues 2016, the world class multi-media installation by West Shokan/New York City-based artist Margaret Cogswell that’s been filling the Kleinert/James Arts Center gallery for the last month in Woodstock, and runs through August 15, had at least a portion of its origins in two very local experiences.

“Driving across the old ‘Lemon Squeeze’ by the reservoir got me thinking of all those who were displaced by the building of the reservoir,” notes Cogswell, whose installations have been supported by various grants, and shown in museums across the nation in recent years. “My husband and I moved up here in the early 1980s when he got a job as a studio assistant to [noted Minimalist artist] Al Held, who split his time between New York City and Boiceville. We didn’t want to live on his compound so we ended up renting and then buying a cottage in West Shokan.”

Her new work continues a flow of similar installations she’s been working on for over a decade now. Enter the Kleinert and one’s immediately swallowed in by the sounds of water and voices, two looped series of videos, multiple sculptural components that include metallic facsimiles of New York City water towers and oversized umbrellas hosting a number of giant green balls, and even a quieting section of atmospheric watercolors. Somehow, though, it doesn’t feel assaultive, or confused, but contemplative and thought-inducing. Much like any presence of water can do.

The artist explains how her research-based installation “explores the link for over the past 100 years between New York City’s unquenchable thirst and the people in the Catskills Watershed and their mountain streams.” She adds that earlier “Fugue” pieces on rivers visited the Mississippi and Cuyuhoga among other water bodies, and an earlier version of this Ashokan-inspired and reflective piece showed two years ago at Cue Foundation in New York, back when this exhibit’s curator — Woodstock Guild executive director Jeremy Adams — was in charge there.

“I came up with the idea of the fugue [a classical musical format made great by Bach and modernized by Glenn Gould] as a way to bring disparate voices and ideas together,” she explains. “I want to be able to take the viewer to another place; I want to transform narrative into a poem.”

Cogswell talks about the ways in which many approach art in a literal fashion, seeing only what an image is, or should be, rather than what it can be. Similarly, she worries about being too “elitist” or inaccessible. All of which have been tackled through well-thought-out elements of Moving The Water(S): Ashokan Fugues 2016.

There are artist statements and other materials available at the Kleinert. In particular, the artist worried about those green balls…which she says came about as a means used in videos to demonstrate the movement of water.

“I found a lot of people wanted to know what they were…I tried telling them to relax and listen to what you’re thinking. You can put it together; it’s a layered experience,” she adds. “But with a bit of help, learned from my years as an educator, I can also play to my other wish: to tickle people’s imagination and let them trust that imagination. I don’t want to take that away from the viewer.”

The idea of the fugue, Cogswell adds, is more than the integrating of two distinct musical themes, but also a psychological description for a certain state of being: a loss of awareness of one’s singular identity. Just as the timing for this current exhibition, as well as an upcoming one in the New York City Public Library system on the site of the former reservoir that quenched Manhattan’s thirst in its earlier years, plays off the coming centennial of the mighty aqueduct and reservoir system next year.

“I take three to five years to put these pieces together,” she adds. “I get lost in the research, and then I work with what I find.”

In those findings, and this manner of fugue, rises new poetry…and music.

 

Moving The Water(S): Ashokan Fugues 2016 will be on view at the Woodstock Guild’s Kleinert/James Arts Center gallery through August 15.  Visit www.byrdcliffe.org for further information


Art From The Ashes – (burned and saved)

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Yale Epstein and salvaged artwork.

Yale Epstein and salvaged artwork.

Yale Epstein, whose retrospective-like From The Ashes – (burned and saved) exhibit in the solo gallery space at the Woodstock Artists Association and Museum runs through this month, is standing at the site where his home and studio burned this past April. A pile of plastic bags and mottled art works leans against a tree, more charred paper pieces sit on tables and boxes under a series of tarps. He explains how he’s been coming here daily, sorting through what’s remained of his 60-plus year art career, planning new works, and his new home and studio, which insurance requires must be built within two years of the conflagration being covered.

Epstein wants to explain how his WAAM show — which juxtaposes calligraphic works on paper with mixed media abstractions, early acrylic paintings and even a self-portrait from his student days up against a dramatic wall of burned works — had several curators beyond himself and Sylvia Leonard Wolf.

“The first curating was taken care of the night of the fire,” he says, describing the middle-of-night scene where he and those on hand, including neighbor Dr. Neil Ratner, got what they could out from the blaze.

The second curator, Epstein adds, was the fire insurance company rep who started pulling items out of the house and studio’s remains, suggesting they be saved. Then came contractor Doug Ostrander, who became adept at spotting works on paper and framed pieces while bulldozing the site for future use.

The artist pauses before showing what was salvaged, some of it cut for future collage purposes as part of work he started in on in recent years, printing photos over older art works. Then he shows off what didn’t make it on to the “sculpted by fire” wall at WAAM…cracked and charred photo portraits of a young girl and old sadhu taken on trips to India, a blackened box of coloring pencils, completed wax and crackled paint surface paintings lent added lustre and burnish by the spring tragedy.

Seen alongside the fire wall in the gallery, which includes an easel, a giant charred photo portrait of an orthodox Jew smoking a cigarette, and a triplet of blackened and curled prints on the wall — each piece described as “transformed” — one gets a sense that Yale Epstein’s about to start making something worthwhile from his misfortune.

“I never know what direction I’m going to go in with a piece,” he says at his Wiley Lane homesite. “But I do see something emerging with this material.”

The phenomenon of artists gaining new vision from fires that take their life’s work is not new. There’s a book on it, On Fire by Jonathan Griffin, that looks at the experiences of ten artists who’ve lost studios, including Columbia County’s Catherine Owen. The author explores a number of responses, from guilt and loss to a sense of rebirth and renewal.

In Woodstock, we spoke with the abstract painter Melinda Stickney-Gibson, whose move to the Phoenicia area was prompted by a 1986 loft fire in Chicago.

“Everything burned up. Both our dogs died. We were above a metal plating factory and it blew up; parts of the building flew for blocks,” she recalls. “We moved in with friends out in the high desert above Palm Springs, in California, and then came east.”

Stickney-Gibson noted how there was some earlier work in galleries at the time, but all she wanted was to start anew. Only after she assembled new pieces for an exhibit did her gallerist point out how the new art was on lead and steel…things that didn’t burn. Later she started painting large again…on fire doors.

“It wasn’t a decision, it was what I did,” she recalls. “There was an absolute, complete sense of freedom that enveloped me after I lost everything. I think of it often, how you have to make the work you want and all your greater plans don’t matter. It was horrible but it was liberating.”

Epstein, fresher into his own stages of recovery, is quick to talk about how he had to find replacement art for an exhibit with a printed catalogue set to go to press in the week following his April fire. And he speaks about his struggle to find work at galleries, or in collections, for other commitments over the past three months.

That, he admits, was a struggle. But somehow, like Stickney-Gibson, he’s found something liberating when he shifts from the business of art to its ongoing creation.

“When I first started sifting through works for this WAAM exhibit with Sylvia I started thinking something was wrong with me,” Epstein says, adding how he felt separate from his art work in a profound way, no longer experiencing it the way he did when constantly immersed in its making, or surrounded by it. “I realized I’m really me even without the art. That was a revelation.”

Also, with Wolf’s help, he started to realize how fire had worked as a partner in his artmaking, taking works to areas he could never have gotten to on his own. As with the smoking photo, or the transformed easel and paints, or the triplet of scarred and twisted paper pieces.

Now, Yale Epstein is looking to explore more deeply into the materials he’s gained from the fire’s transformative help. He’s enjoying working with a camera in new ways, recalling his years as a student at Brooklyn College in the 1950s, when art was bursting into new territory all over New York City and the world.

“I’m turning a corner based on what’s here,” he summarized.

Talk about what the great Irish poet William Butler Yeats once termed “a terrible beauty” in all things changed, “changed utterly.”

Summer Salon at WFG

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Bombay Washday by Harriet Livathinos.

Bombay Washday by Harriet Livathinos.

Seven women artists of the Hudson Valley are featured in the Summer Salon Show at the Woodstock Framing Gallery on Mill Hill Road. A sense of summery brightness — with a dash of dark humor — unites the wide but balanced variety of art that will remain on the walls through October 2.

“I love to bring together works that are very different but complement each other,” said gallerist Sneha Kapadia. Instead of keeping each artist’s pieces in a cluster, she skillfully mixes them, putting, for instance, Mariyah Sultan’s lively abstracts beside Anna Contes’ shimmering landscapes, allowing them to correspond and contrast in intriguing ways. “After all,” Kapadia pointed out, “in most people’s homes that’s what it will look like. This is a show I’m going to live with for six to eight weeks, and that’s how I like looking at my art.”

What could be more summery than laundry on clotheslines? Paintings by Harriet Livathinos show street scenes from Italy, Barcelona, and Bombay, evoking vacation travel and bright Mediterranean (or Subcontinental) light. The forms of the sharply delineated cityscapes are echoed in some of Sultan’s pieces, with dark rectangles suggesting doors and windows among a chaos of lines reminiscent of graffiti.

In a totally different vein, Katherine Burger’s collages depict alternately whimsical and menacing relationships between dolls and teddy bears. They find a parallel in Elin Menzies’ depictions of Red Riding Hood, who having made friends with the wolf, is living an idyllic existence in the woods. Other pieces from Menzies’ varied repertoire include dreamlike images of mer-teenagers in seashells on a beach.

Gladys Brodsky bridges the figurative and the abstract with still lifes that range off into Kandinsky-esque shapes in vivid colors. In a different style, Anna Contes’ landscapes play with light and texture, creating nearly abstract surfaces with Impressionist effects.

Trees and mountains take center stage in paintings by Woodstock Times photographer Dion Ogust, who is enjoying “breaking out of the mold of photography. Since it went digital, I’m spending so much time at my desk.” Curious about the transition, Kapadia visited Ogust’s studio and decided to build her summer show around the bright, frothy landscapes of the Catskills.

Kapadia is happy with the current selections. “I always know what I’m going for,” she commented, “but I’m never sure it will work until the day I install. It’s nerve-wracking, but it’s a lot of fun watching it come together.”

 

The Summer Salon will be on display through October 2 at the Woodstock Framing Gallery, 31 Mill Hill Road, Woodstock. For more information, see http://wfggallery.com.

Race, Love, and Labor at CPW

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Photograph by LaToya Ruby Frazier.

Photograph by LaToya Ruby Frazier.

When the current exhibit of the Center for Photography at Woodstock’s current artists-in-residence program, “Race, Love, and Labor,” first opened at the Samuel Dorsky Museum of Fine Art in 2014, the nightly protest actions in Ferguson, Missouri were but a couple weeks old. Black Lives Matter was still primarily a hashtag, founded in response to the murder of Trayvon Martin in Florida a year earlier, and not quite a movement.

“It is impossible to separate the history of photography from the history of labor, love, and race in America. A reflective look at the collection shows that a critical function of photography, through a vast range of aesthetics, is the labor of becoming and the work it entails — on the land and within our inner worlds,” wrote exhibit curator Sarah Lewis in a statement for the show’s catalog. “They [these images] function, as Frederick Douglass once reminded us, as images that both record what is and conjure a sense of what could be. What does it mean to work in this lineage? These photographs, each the gift of a moment in time through a unique residency, show us where a future path may lead.”

The exhibition — which stays up at CPW through October 16 and then moves on to Stony Brook University this coming winter, was designed to acknowledge the power and creative rewards reaped by CPW’s Woodstock AIR Program since its founding in 1999, including the over 100 artists of color who have spent time here, progressing their photo work. The images, many by artists who have since gone on to great acclaim and honors, including major museum shows and grant awards, comes from the Center’s permanent collection, stored at SUNY New Paltz’s Dorsky Museum.

What’s on view has a subtle way of unsettling one, seeing bodies squeezed in under Byrdcliffe structures, hinting at what the Underground Railroad must have been like, of flight from any instance of slavery. There’s a wall covering Black Panther days in the early 1970s in Albany and Peekskill. Great portraiture that explores elements of patriotism and personal/familial identity; Deana Lawson’s striking takes on the nude, updated.

How have things shifted since the exhibit first saw the light of day?

For one, its curator, Lewis, has moved on from years as a curator at MOMA and the Tate Modern, and authorship of her well-respected book about the creative process, The Rise: Creativity, the Gift of Failure, and the Search for Mastery, to become both Assistant Professor of History of Art and Architecture and of African and African American Studies at Harvard University and a noted essayist for New Yorker and other publications, including the recent guest editorship the “Vision & Justice” issue of Aperture.

Then there are those career leaps…including Xaviera Simmons’ winning of a coveted Robert Rauschenberg Award for the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, and LaToya Ruby Frazier’s winning of a MacArthur Genius Award.

Most important, though, is the way Race, Love, and Labor resonates fresh in this summer of increasing racial divides, of Milwaukee and Baltimore, Dallas and Minneapolis; Obama’s final rising and Trump’s various whistlings.

“Published in the last year of the Obama presidency, this issue marks a time of unparalleled visibility for an African American family on the world stage. Yet this era must also be defined by the emergence of the #BlackLivesMatter movement, the stagnated wages of working-class citizens, and growing impatience with mass incarceration,” Lewis writes in that Aperture intro from this summer, culling what’s shifted in two years. “We live in a polarized climate in the United States; sociologists tell us that people now congregate, live, worship, play, and learn with those like themselves more than ever before. Save for constructed societies, we come into close contact with those who do not share our political and religious views less and less. How we remain connected depends on the function of pictures — increasingly the way that we process worlds unlike our own. The tool we marshal to cross our gulf is irrevocably altered vision. The imagination inspired by aesthetic encounters can get us to the point of benevolent surrender, making way for a new version of our collective selves.”

Also vastly different is the physical context this new iteration of this exhibition is in, with current CPW artist-in-residence Jared Thorne’s installation “Clyde Ross” filling the adjacent Kodak Gallery enigmatically yet with great emotional effect.

“The work is really an extension of my longstanding work to explore black experiences in America with a specific focus on the nation’s cultural and structural responses to black bodies – blackness not as a construct or an idea but as a literal and physical presence upon the American landscape,” the actor/artist writes of his work, and its greater context. “For those who understand that the current cultural fascination with the interactions between police and black communities is reflective of a deeply historical rather than a strictly contemporary phenomenon, the next question is not ‘for how long has this been going on?’ but rather just ‘how? How is it that many of the same struggles described in Emancipation still echo so strongly across the centuries — to 2016 — in Ferguson, Cleveland, Sanford, Baton Rouge, Staten Island? As my art continues to evolve, I’m anxious to see how our government responds to the current state of unrest.”

Or as the Center for Photography at Woodstock’s executive director Hannah Frieser, who has come to her job long after this whole cycle was first initiated, has put it: “The topic is as relevant and timely as it could be due to current events in politics and daily life. Sarah Lewis did a splendid job in combining the work of a small group of artists into a dialogue that will still be important in ten years. The exhibition addresses issues of race in a social context, but does so with a multitude of voices in a way that encourages introspective thought rather than explosive reaction.”

 

Race, Love, and Labor will be on view through Sunday, October 16 at CPW galleries, 59 Tinker Street in Woodstock. Call 679-9957 or visit www.cpw.org for more info.

In Town: Byrdcliffe’s Legacy

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George Ault, Autumn Hillside. Watercolor on paper. From The Historic Woodstock Art Colony Collection of Arthur Anderson, part of the Byrdcliffe Guild’s Handmade In The 20th Century show opening Saturday, August 20.

George Ault, Autumn Hillside. Watercolor on paper. From The Historic Woodstock Art Colony Collection of Arthur Anderson, part of the Byrdcliffe Guild’s Handmade In The 20th Century show opening Saturday, August 20.

The Woodstock Byrdcliffe Guild is opening its Handmade In The 20th Century: An Ode To Nature & Place exhibition with an opening reception, 4 p.m.-6 p.m. Saturday, August 20 at the Kleinert/James Center for the Arts, 36 Tinker Street, Woodstock. The reception will be preceded by an informal discussion with collectors and lenders to the exhibition at 3 p.m. Saturday, August 20 at the Kleinert.

The exhibit takes the nature-inspired work done at the early Byrdcliffe Art Colony and relates its influence to the twentieth century. Curated by Sylvia Leonard Wolf, Tina Bromberg, and Karen Walker, it will showcase work by the original denizens of the Byrdcliffe Colony as well as artists and artisans who lived in the Hudson Valley between 1900-1999 including George Ault, George Bellows, Robert Chanler, William Hunt Diederich, Robert Ebendorf, Mary Frank, Milton Glaser, Philip Guston, Yasuo Kuniyoshi, Doris Lee, Judy Pfaff, and Carl Walters. There are approximately 200 pieces in the show, including important furniture and ceramics from Byrdcliffe’s permanent collection. Whether functional objects or unique art pieces, the works in the exhibition illustrate a spectrum of accomplishments in both fine art and design from the artist’s colony founded in 1902 by Ralph Radcliffe Whitehead, Jane Byrd McCall Whitehead, Bolton Brown, and Hervey White. Artworks created at the colony during its first decade are held in museums including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

The exhibition will run until October 9. Gallery hours are Wednesday – Sunday, noon-6 p.m. or by appointment on Tuesday, 10 a.m.-5 p.m.

The opening reception is open to the public.

For more information, see woodstockguild.org or call 845-679-2079.

Woodstock Museum Film Festival returns

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Still from Pin Up!

Still from Pin Up!

The Woodstock Museum on Bach Road in Saugerties is a “living museum,” says co-founder Nathan Koenig, who along with Shelli Lipton created an environment there that celebrates the Woodstock experience beyond memories of that famous rain-soaked music festival of nearly 40 years ago. A living museum, says Koenig, is about not only the historical artifacts on display (which include a psychedelic bus), but also enhances the culture of a living colony of the arts.

In doing its part to contribute to the cultural life of the region, the Woodstock Museum has sponsored an annual film festival every year over Labor Day weekend since 2000. This year, the 17th annual Woodstock Museum Film Festival will expand to fill an entire week, with films shown Tuesday, August 30 through Monday, September 5. Screenings begin at 6:30 p.m. each night, with the exception of the final day — Labor Day — when the first film starts at noon.

Admission to any or all of the 38 films in the festival is free (although donations to the nonprofit Woodstock Museum are welcome). There are two theaters showing the films simultaneously — the same film in both theaters at the same time, largely to accommodate an overflow audience in the primary theater — but Koenig says that, when it comes time for the question-and-answer session with filmmakers afterward and audience critiques, the audiences of both theaters will be able to participate equally.

The theme for the festival this year is “Reality,” which of course can be interpreted in a number of ways. Most evenings there will be screenings of five films, with four screened on Saturday and ten on Monday. With nearly 40 films to choose from, highlights probably depend on one’s taste. But to offer a teaser, opening night on Tuesday includes Drifters, the story of an Egyptian orthopedic surgeon who enjoys surfing and driftwood carpentry. Daniel Friederich — Luthier d’Art tells the story of a cabinetmaker and musician who is considered by some to be the greatest classical guitarmaker.

On Wednesday, Exodus to Shanghai is an account of a Chinese consul who issued exit visas to 10,000 Jews in 1938 Vienna. Something about Silence is intriguingly billed as the story of a character unfolding, unraveling and uncomprehending.

Save the Bees on Thursday makes the point that if bees disappear (as pesticides are contributing to), humans will have only four years of life left. TWU Local 525 Memorial Beam is about the journey of a one-ton artifact from the World Trade Center as it is shipped to Miami. Thursday also is the night to see The Runaway, about an outlaw on the run for 30 years who tells his story before his execution, and The Healing Field, about challenges to conventional healthcare with non-invasive, ancient healing techniques.

Friday features Pin Up! about the American phenomenon of pin-up girls and The American Death, about dying in a culture uncomfortable with how to handle it. Saturday will highlight Body & Sound, the tale of Sergio Arturo Calonego, who plays acoustic guitar and talks about the relationship between a musician and his instrument. 1984 Riding into Hell will cover the 1984 rock scene, world news and pop culture.

On Sunday the festival will screen five films that include The Lover, introducing a wife’s memories about an obsessive love, and Escapes, in which a young woman loses her father and embarks on a journey revealing the essence of life. (Hint: running away isn’t the answer.)

Finally, Monday’s ten films begin at noon with The Leaping Place, about an elderly woman journeying to a mysterious tree hidden in the depths of an ancient cave. September Sketch Book uses old-school animation techniques to show sequences of flags from around the world, and Begone Dull Care is an upbeat animated short set to 1980s music: “a dance of tightly timed abstract paintings and pixel art.”

Along with the film screenings, visitors can experience events throughout the festival that include a nightly outdoor light show by Jim C., accompanied by music, and a campfire with visitors welcome to play acoustic instruments while sitting around it. In past years people have camped on the grounds over the course of the festival, but Koenig says that the property is full to capacity already this year. If the weather cooperates, people are welcome to swim in the eco-friendly pool — a beautiful 50-foot expanse of water cleaned with hydrogen peroxide to be non-toxic — that features LED lights at night, with underwater speakers playing music for a “kind of trippy” swim, adds Koenig. In addition, no one will go hungry, with a café on site offering all kinds of tasty-sounding edibles to enjoy.

And again, admission is free.

 

Woodstock Museum Film Festival, Tuesday-Sunday, August 30-September 4, 6:30 p.m. Monday, September 5, 12 noon, free, Woodstock Museum, 3 Charles Bach Road, Saugerties; (845) 246-0600, www.woodstockmuseum.org

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