Twilight by the marsh, and the full throated roaring of the bull frogs, very different from the first quavering of the little tree frogs in the earliest spring. A bittern somewhere, pumping, as it is usually said; to me the sound is more like a cart rattling over an old corduroy road. A sense of the passing away of spring; of the lengthening of the days to a point where the heart aches, surfeited with too much light. A feeling that all about one trees are rushing out their leaves to full maturity, the last spring flowers are bursting everywhere from spathe and scale and bud and bough, too numerous now to remember--not so sweet, so frail, so few as those first classic little blooms, bluet and harbinger-of-spring, and purple cardamine. Wild flags elegant in deep water. Little stridulations, pluckings on chitinous strings from the orthopteran insects, that remind one of summer, nay, of autumn itself. And in the trees tanagers, and black-billed cuckoos calling "scurrilous, scurrilous," in that sultry way of theirs.
Already the room of life is too full for us to sort out its occupants. Before we learned anything about them the spring beauties have vanished; I stand where I picked them in March, and cannot find them. The bloodroot lifts its little seed pods up, above its leaf now grown great and thick and waxy. Tomorrow I may not find it. Everywhere, blooming and leafing, mating and spawning; already crying and death.
More information on our Almanac For Moderns project and the work of Donald Culross Peattie can be found here.
Much like The North Dakota Rural Arts Initiative we highlighted a few weeks ago, The Idaho Dance Theatre is a forward thinking arts organization that is not only operating out of its home theater in Boise, but also making a concerted effort to bring their work to rural regions of the state.
The IDT was formed in 1990 after dancers Fred and Marla Hansen (both former dancers with the American Festival Ballet) traveled to Jackson, Wyoming to perform with dancer/choreographer Carl Rowe. The warm reception generated by that performance and a second one in Boise inspired the three artists to begin the process of setting up shop in Idaho, and fulfilling a vital artistic and cultural need. Twenty years into their project, the IDT has become a beacon in the region's art scene. Here's how the Idaho Dance Theatre describes their current mission:
IDT creates and performs educational outreach and rural touring to introduce dance to a wide spectrum of people throughout the state of Idaho and in the Northwestern region of the US. It is important to us that all people are introduced to dance as an art form, no matter where they live. Creating dance audiences in the future is important to the survival of all performing arts groups, and part of our mission includes performing in the schools and communities where we live.
Our goal is to have all people experience a dance concert in their lifetimes. While not everyone may become a fan, we do believe that once they experience a performance they will become a better person for it. We strive to maintain the most professional performance at the most reasonable price that we can. Our performances are in an intimate theatre at Boise State University where we are in residence. Our residency agreement affords us rehearsal and perfoming space, but no financial support. Join our efforts by coming to our show - and bring someone new. Introduce them to your local contemporary dance company...where local dancers are afforded the chance to perform at a professional level without leaving Idaho!
The Idaho Dance Theatre works in affiliation with Boise State University to offer new programs each season--and a visit to their dancers' bio page reveals one of the most beautiful facets of this groups success: many of the dancers are Idaho natives who have been given the opportunity to pursue their craft without having to leave their home state. This program stands as a stellar example of how a single arts organization can address and help correct--beyond the stage--many of the concerns native to rural america.
Below is one short clip of the Idaho Dance Theatre's work, but there is more to be found on Youtube.
This is an artform from five-hundred years ago in Italy. How is that relevant now? It's relevant because we can create on stage, without the permission of television networks or movie studios. We can create stories that reflect the concerns, the desires and the pain of our audiences. We can reach out, without permission to tell stories we would not be able to tell in the major media. The theater is absolutely vital to the survival of free expression in America.
- Tim Robbins, accepting Dell'Arte's 2009 Prize of Hope
The small town of Blue Lake, California is the homebase of the Dell'Arte International--a theatre company with a vision all to itself. Approaching its fortieth anniversay, Dell'Arte are "a committed community of artists who model and share in a sustained ensemble artistic practice," with a mission that is "international in scope, grounded in the natural living world [and] inspired by [their] non-urban setting." From that imperative, they both honor the commedia dell'arte tradition and renovate it for contemporary use, presenting a touring company, acting workshops and youth programs, as well as an impressive series of outreach projects in the surrounding community.
Though they offer a regular schedule of performances, their principles converge in dramatic fashion every summer during the Mad River Festival. Each year the local community is joined by theatre fans from around the globe, as Dell'Arte performs their work alongside troupes from a number of other countries. This year Klinke, a contemporary circus show from Italy, as well as Los Payasos Mendigos, will perform--though a visit to their site will reveal many more performances and events than a single paragraph here could condense.
The Festival will also highlight Blue Lake: The Opera, a piece conceived by Dell'Arte to celebrate the Blue Lake's centennial:
On the 100th aniversary of the founding of Blue Lake, Dell'Arte takes us back to the wild days of Blue Lake's birth in 1910. Hogs in the streets, rowdy logging camps, mysterious Odd Fellows, gunfights, fires, housewives and socialists--and three tired schoolteachers in charge of 190 students--how could love possibly survive in a place like this? But it did, even when the great fire of 1911 tragically and spectacularly took down the Odd Fellows Hall...
And so... we open the 20th Mad River Festival with Blue Lake: The Opera. Nearly every word will be sung in this story based on actual events--both lurid and lyrical--in the early life of Blue Lake. A ribald blending of styles and influences, as quirky as Blue Lake itself, mixing the earthy sounds of folk music with the full-throated coloratura of classical opera, and featuring some of the finest singers in Humboldt County, alongside sheep, chickens, pigs and a milk cow.
What was spawned 100 years ago has hatched into the "peaceable hamlet" we know and love today. The machine guns may be gone from city hall, the gambling palace has a new hotel, the sewer system is still working--but what new visions await us in the next 100 years, that we seed today? As Shakespeare said, "What's past is prologue, what to come in yours and my discharge..."
Though there hasn't been much video or photo stills released yet in conjunction with this project, Tim Gray, the opera's musical director, has made available streaming demos of the songs as well as pdfs of the sheet music, so you can learn "The Woodsmen's Chorus" or "The Bear's Lament" before attending the show.
For further investigation, included below is a video compilation of the various facets of Dell'Arte International:
Last week, in our coverage of The Black Banjo Gathering, we mentioned the extraordinary Down Home Radio Show. With the weekend approaching, we thought it would be a good time to return to the Show and to the work of its founder Eli Smith. Grab a cool drink and get comfortable: you'll want to spend some time wading your feet in all this great music and all these resources.
Like Nathan Salsburg and Lance Ledbetter, Mr. Smith is an integral part of a new generation of musicians and folklorists who are using twenty-first century technologies to both preserve traditions and to get the word out about artists who are carrying them forward. There's no better testament to how these tools can bring together urban and rural communities than Mr. Smith's Brooklyn Folk Festival, which is running all this weekend at The Jalopy Theater. Featuring thirty-one artists over this long weekend, the Festival is covering an amazing gamut of musical forms, offering "old-time music, blues, pre-blues, jug band music, New Orleans jazz, folk style songwriting, Greek, African and Mexican folk music and dance with concerts, workshops, and a Sunday afternoon square dance."
Many of the artists on stage this weekend have already been introduced to audiences by The Down Home Radio Show, which can be downloaded for podcast or steamed online. It was founded in 2006 by Mr. Smith and, in the early episodes, was co-hosted by the late Henrietta Yurchenco, a visionary ethnomusicologist and broadcaster who brought the likes of Leadbelly, Bob Dylan and Woody Guthrie to audiences. This excerpt from the Show's introductory press release seems even more prescient today:
Down Home Radio will make this music, often drawn from obscure field recordings or other out of the way sources, readily accessible to the general public. “Listen at the roots, with a mind for detail. Given this information, you will no longer accept stereotypes of or fall for clichés about our cultural past. Let this program be your introduction and a continuing guide to this trove of material. For musicians and fans of music alike you will find a fresh and clear perspective in your evolving appreciation and critique of music,” said Smith.
In times of crisis such as the Great Depression of the 1930’s and the world revolutions of the 1960’s folk music, both as a mirror and a hammer, has come to the fore and played an important role in cultural movements and movements for social and political change. Today, as we are once again in an economic and political crisis, Down Home Radio hopes to offer traditional vernacular music as both a spring board for innovation and as a candid lens with which to view, appreciate and participate in our culture.
The lens metaphor has recently been applied literally, as Down Home TV has become a component of the Show's online presence. Below is one segment with Jerron "Blind Boy" Patton filmed by Chris Low:
There's almost five years worth of radio shows on the site. Mr. Smith's most recent conversations have been with George Gibson, a banjo player from Eastern Kentucky (see his recordings for June Appal and his contributions on Dust-to-Digital's amazing Art of Field Recording, Volume II) as well as with Clifton Hicks, an extraordinarily talented young banjo player from North Carolina.
Aside from all of these projects, Eli Smith is also a member of The Dust Busters, an old-time string band that is "influenced and inspired by the direct fusion of Scots-Irish and African music that took place in Appalachia, the Western states and the Deep South from the earliest colonial times through the Second World War." Check out their myspace page for a generous selection of streaming songs.
Here's a nice video that speaks to how the established generation of advocates for folk culture are engaging with the next: as The Dust Busters were rehearsing for an appearance on WNYC they were joined in Washington Square by John Cohen, of the legendary New Lost City Ramblers (also see our post/video on his participation in The Madison County Project).
My cousins all live outside of Detroit and it is not uncommon to hear from them horror stories of just how devastated and blighted the city has become. Surely, we are all familiar with Detroit’s economic problems and urban decay – it has been the butt of jokes for generations and after the onslaught of this most recent recession, the images and stories of just how it is in one of America’s former industrial powerhouses have been nothing short of astonishing. With an unemployment rate in Michigan at about 15% – 5% above the national average – and a housing market that has tanked, the area has become victim to all sorts of real estate speculation, as some homes cost as low as $5000. This blog seems to be a get-rich-quick-at-Detroit’s-expense scheme, while other – one would hope more responsible – outlets have pushed the same idea.
The end result is that a great deal of Detroit land is embarrassingly cheap and thus easily repurposed. And this is potentially good news. As such, some bright lights have advocated remaking the city entire, in addition to rethinking the design and function of cities in general. Micro loans have become popular in the area and futurists like Jerry Paffendorf have applied such financial tools to more grand projects like “Loveland,” where anyone in the world can buy an inch of Detroit for a $1 with the aim of creating community owned and operated public spaces. (More on this not entirely comprehensible project here and here.)
But perhaps the most exciting idea has been the serious proposal of expanded and extensive urban farming. The idea is controversial, as it would require converting large amounts of public and private land (currently there is over 40 miles of vacant city land) being converted to essentially farmland, graded, raised and laid out almost in the manner of Macchu Picchu to accommodate the urban terrains.
John Nantz has the vision for such a project (see above), but the city and its constituents have been wary of putting so much public space in the hands of a single, corporate entity, rather than in the control of the community.
While it is dangerous to be overconfident in the hopes for these grand urban farming ventures (see tip 6) in the face of such economic odds, these projects and ideas could potentially change how we think about not only our urban landscapes, but also our rural ones. One need only consider the immediate paradox that as we continue to industrialize the countryside and its crops, the cities would have access to fresh, local produce. Perhaps, in some strange irony of historical significance, from the ashes of the heart of American industrialism will come a return to the farm and the land.
Lavinia Nelson's Basket Stand in Mt. Pleasant, South Carolina, 2006 by Brian Crockett
There's a whole history behind these baskets, it's not just a basket. You have this tradition that's been handed down from generation to generation in their families, which goes back over three hundred years. So it's more that just a basket. You have a whole culture, a whole family, a whole connection of Africa and South Carolina, a whole history behind it.
Grass Roots: African Origins of an American Art traces the parallel histories of coiled basketry in Africa and America, and explores the contemporary evolution of an ancient craft in a global economy.
Featuring baskets from the lowcountry of South Carolina and Georgia, as well as from diverse regions of Africa including Senegal and South Africa, Grass Roots examines the origins of the African-American coiled basketry tradition on American shores, from the domestication of rice in Africa two millenia ago, through the Trans-Atlantic slave trade and the Carolina rice plantation, and then into the present day. Organized by the Museum for African Art in New York City and co-curated by Enid Schildkrout (Chief Curator, Museum for African Art) and Dale Rosengarten (Curator and Historian, College of Charleston), Grass Roots highlights the remarkable beauty of coiled basketry and shows how a utilitarian object can become both a masterwork of fine craft and a container of memory and collective history.
Last week we also discussedThe Mid-American Arts Alliance and their collaboration with Dave Loewenstein on The Mural Project, and lo and behold, they've also worked with the NEH On The Road program to produce the two videos below. In the first, Dr. Rosengarten offers context for the art and a narrative on the project's development; in the second clip, Nakia Wigfall discusses her personal connection to basket arts. She's a fifth-generation basket-maker from Mt. Pleasant, South Carolina, and also the director of the Sweetgrass Cultural Arts Preservation Society.
Was it worthwhile for a mayfly to have been born, to have been a worm for weeks and a bride or a bridegroom for one day, only to perish? Such is not a question to which Nature will give the human mind an answer. She thrusts us all into life, and with her hand propels us like children through the role she has alloted for us. You may weep about it or you may smile; that matters only to yourself. The trees that live five hundred years, or five thousand, see us human mayflies grow and mateand die while they are adding a foot to their girth. Well might they ask themselves if it be not a slavish and ephemeral soft thing to be born a man.
More information on our Almanac For Moderns project and the work of Donald Culross Peattie can be found here.
