-
▼
2013
(38)
-
▼
August
(19)
- Ulster County Events in August 2013
- Dutchess County Events in August 2013
- Buddhist Economics 2.0
- Relating with Permaculture: Principle #11
- Relating with Permaculture:
- Inner Space for August 2013
- July 2013
- TEDxLongDock:
- Judy Wicks the BALLE Mama
- It’s All Here
- A New Call for Bread and Roses
- Three Year Anniversary
- Red Baron of Rhinebeck
- Peekamoose Restaurant and Tap Room
- JK Wine & Liquor
- Sensible Bliss
- Ellenville Regional Hospital
- Accord Feeds and Needs
- Augustine Nursery
-
▼
August
(19)
Powered by Blogger.
Followers
Blog Archive
Grab a copy of the newspaper each month in Ulster & Dutchess, or subscribe for home delivery.
People In Your Neighborhood
Vassar's Powerhouse Festival kicks off its 29th edition
by Philip Ehrensaft
 |
| Chloe Sevigny in Abigail/1702. © Vassar & NYSF / Buck Lewis. |
Industrial incubators are key organizations for local economic development. They offer low-cost space, communications facilities, and expert advice to young enterprises that will hopefully grow up into pillars of the regional economy. The Powerhouse Theater Festival, a partnership between the nonprofit organization New York Stage and Film and Vassar College, is a parallel incubator for the Big Apple's theater scene. Its mission is to provide a setting and resources where playwrights, directors, actors and staging specialists can develop new works, free from the usual commercial and daily living pressures. The development stages range from first readings of scripts in progress, all the way through fully staged productions of dramas and musicals.
Powerhouse began as a modest festival in 1985, presenting three staged plays and three script readings. The name of the festival comes from the conversion of Vassar's old electric generation plant into one fine theater. Now Powerhouse involves 200+ New York City theater professionals, plus 49 students following an intensive apprenticeship program. They live and work at Vassar College during June and July, and kick off a performance calendar running from June 21through July 28.
As one actress put it during a post-play discussion between audience members and performers, interchanges are one of the most attractive parts of the Powerhouse experience: Vassar College and New York Stage and Film have created a wonderful summer camp for the New York City theater world—a camp where actors can actively collaborate with writers and directors in shaping new works, as opposed to receiving a finished script and learning one's part. For authors, this brings us nicely back to Shakespeare's time, when such mutuality was the norm.
Powerhouse is spearheaded by two people: the producing director, Vassar's Ed Cheetham, and New York Stage and Film's artistic director, Johanna Pfaelzer. Cheetham is a local boy from Wappingers Falls who went on to study theater at Niagara University. He considers himself very fortunate, given the precarious theater employment market, to have landed this plum but very demanding job—and back home in the Hudson Valley to boot. It took long, hard work to get there: after graduating with a drama degree from Niagara University in 1987, Cheetham was hired as an assistant to Powerhouse's producing director in 1988, returned in 1991 as an apprentice director, then returned in various roles every summer from 1999 onward, and was named producing director in 2006.
Cheetham actually has two demanding jobs in the Powerhouse Festival. First, as producing director, he has to make the whole ball of wax work: the physical and administrative infrastructure, and the logistics of everything from housing artists to opening nights. If the theater world is anything like the opera world that I know, that can often be the equivalent of trying to herd cats.
Second, Cheetham also directs Powerhouse's intensive internship training program. Performances of three different plays are the public face of this program. This year, the 49 carefully selected interns will perform an ancient classic, Agamemnon by Aeschylus; Shakespeare's As You Like It; and a modern classic, Frederico Garcia Lorca's Blood Wedding. Behind the scenes, the interns are getting classes in all the dimensions of the theater world: writing, directing, stage design, the theater business and on. If they want to spend their life in theater, they see the full range of possibilities. The most important part of their training, however, is likely informal occasions like BBQ dinners where they can interact with the top professional writers, directors or actors taking part in the festival.
To my eyes and ears, intern performances were highlight events in the 2012 Powerhouse Festival, and that's saying a great deal, given the high caliber of the professional productions. These talented, hard-working student artists, directed by professionals who love to teach, bring exceptional energy to the stage. The internship performances are free to the public, all the more incentive to take them in.
Powerhouse interns are also trained in Soundpainting, Woodstock-based composer Walter Thompson's invention of a gestural vocabulary for directing on-the-spot composition of music, intertwined with visual arts, dancing and literature. Late Thursday evening Soundpainting performances start on July 4 at Vassar's Lehman-Loeb Art Center. We'll get a chance to see why this Hudson Valley invention sparked an international Soundpainting movement.
As Powerhouse's artistic director, Johanna Pfaelzer must read through a plethora of scripts and proposals before making hard choices about what gets on the festival calendar. That calendar includes two Mainstageproductions that are in the final stages of development, and ready after the 2013 Festival performances to shop themselves as candidates for runs on Broadway, or Broadway's Off and Off-Off variants.
Downtown Race Riot by two Broadway veterans, writer Seth Zvi Rosenfeld and director Scott Elliot, looks at the hard choices that an 18-year-old must make in the face of a Washington Square race riot compounded by tribal loyalties and petty beefs. When the Lights Went Out centers around six interwoven stories about experiences during the Northeast electric blackout of 2003. This is a debut for the Iraqi-American playwright Mozhan Marno; One of the six stories focuses on an Iraqi immigrant making her way across the Brooklyn Bridge, chasing memories of her lost son and homeland.
Bright Star, the first of two fully staged musicals for 2013, features bluegrass-tinged music co-composed by star actor Steve Martin, who also wrote the book. You best buy tickets early on for this musical set in the Blue Ridge Mountains. A Musical Inspired by the Brooklyn Hero Supply Company is based on characters created by Michael Chabon and Ayelet Waldman. A superhero's daughter does not want the cape passed on, and is ready and willing to exchange roles with an idealistic young Brooklynite who longs for super-herodom. Who else but Chabon would dream up something like that?
The Inside Looks series features two semi-staged workshops. Found is a musical loosely inspired by the life of Found magazine editor Davy Rothbart, who must choose between his cherished, wild road life of discovery, and settling down with the love of his life, a school teacher. Mother of Invention unfolds as an aging Dottie Rupp is moved into assisted living by her children. Mom's memory is failing, a mysterious stranger shows up, and the offspring start wondering whether the mom they thought they knew might have a very different history.
Powerhouse 2013 begins and ends with a weekend of readings of plays in first drafts. The Readings Festival has no admission charge, but the venue is small, so it's best to reserve a place in advance. This intimacy offers maximum opportunities to interact with authors, learn different approaches to making drama work, and offer feedback that improves their work.
If you are looking for a good at-home vacation in Stubborn Recession times, devoting your free time to the nationally prominent Powerhouse Theater Festival is a fine option. The same goes for anyone who loves theater or wants to discover theater. We have a national resource in our own backyard.
The Bard Conservatory Orchestra and its well-rounded education.
by Philip Ehrensaft
Of all the Bard College success stories, the rapid rise of the Bard Conservatory to national and international prominence is likely the college's biggest bang in the shortest time. In 2003, the Bard Conservatory was a promising idea for a new approach to professional music education proposed by Robert Martin, who was simultaneously an eminent cellist, a philosophy professor with a PhD from Yale, a vice-president of Bard College, and the president of Chamber Music America. Martin was inspired by the newly opened Fisher Center for the Performing Arts—providing the class act venue that is a necessary component of a class act conservatory.
Martin advanced two core ideas for creating a new Bard Music Conservatory: first, breaking with standard conservatory education, where accomplished young musicians are chosen directly from high school on the basis of highly competitive auditions, as well as the usual grades and recommendations. Conservatories then give them rigorous musical training, but little else. That's viewed as optimal for upping performance levels by youngsters who have already demonstrated their exceptional talents and willingness to work very, very hard. Stick close to your knitting.
On the basis of his own trajectory, Martin respectfully disagrees. He passed the admission gauntlet for an elite conservatory, the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, but also wanted to do a liberal arts degree at an equally elite liberal arts college, Haverford. Curtis discouraged the young Martin from such a perceived distraction, but he persisted and emerged five years later with two sheepskins in hand. Martin continued the same dual path, simultaneously doing things like playing cello in the highly reputed Sequoia String Quartet and earning tenure as philosophy professor.
Above all, Martin sees this dual path as the opposite of distraction for development as a musician. His liberal arts and then doctoral philosophy training upped his curiosity, reasoning capacity, and ability to see connections between things. That, in turn, advanced his understanding of the structure and meaning of the scores on his music stand, and how to communicate that understanding to audiences. He wanted to create a conservatory where every student would reap the fruits of multidisciplinary synergy.
That idea got a ready green light from Bard College's president and fellow polymath, Leon Botstein. After dual training as an historian and conductor, Botstein became the president of Bard College in 1975, at the ripe old age of 29. Botstein and Martin co-directed the rise of the Bard Music Festival, from a promising event at an exurban college into a major event in Greater New York's crowded, competitive music season. A working partnership was ready to go. Martin recruited yet another Bard polymath as the vice-director of the proposed conservatory, Melvin Chen—a classical pianist who also earned a Harvard PhD in chemistry.
The second pillar of the proposed new conservatory was pragmatic: it would be very expensive to hire high-level musicians as full-time faculty. Being located in the exurban fringe of the country's principal music market, New York City, presented an evident alternative: dip into NYC's deep pool of elite musicians, who would commute to Bard to give lessons. The Bard Conservatory's faculty is a who's who sampling of top Big Apple talent. To name but a few: Dawn Upshaw in vocal music; Shmuel Ashkenasi, Eugene Drucker and Arnold Steinhardt for violin; and Jeremy Denk, Richard Goode, and Peter Serkin for piano.
In the fall of 2004, the Bard Conservatory was still an embryonic proposal. Within just one year, the Conservatory opened the doors for its first cohort of 20 students in September 2005. In contrast to my alma mater, Oberlin, Bard Conservatory students are required to do a second, non-music degree. Martin learned that, while a majority of students admitted to Oberlin's conservatory expressed an interest in doing dual degrees, only 15 percent actually did so. The goal was to recruit students willing to take on the substantially extra time and work that had enriched Martin, Botstein and Chen, both as musicians and as informed citizens.
Now there are 90 carefully selected students, half from across the US and half from abroad. That's enough musicians to form the Bard Conservatory's full symphony orchestra, a young ensemble that quickly became good enough, guided by Botstein's baton, to dare a Lincoln Center debut in 2010. This May 22, the BCO returns to Lincoln Center for a concert presaging August's 24th edition of the Bard Music Festival, Stravinsky and His World.
Hudson Valley residents don't have to trek to Manhattan to hear what the BCO will perform at Lincoln Center. On May 11, they'll perform the same repertoire in the Fisher Center's acoustical gem, the Sosnoff Theater, starting with Stravinsky's seminal early piece, Feu d'Artifice (Fireworks), Op. 4. Fireworks showed such promise that the ballet impressario Sergei Diaghalev hired the young Stravinsky, still a student, to compose The Firebird. Then there's Prokofiev's Violin Concerto No. 1 in D, featuring one of Bard's prize faculty catches, Shmuel Ashkenasi, as the soloist. The concert wraps up with Shostakovich's bold Symphony No. 10.
May also brings 11 recitals by graduating Bard Conservatory students, and an opportunity to hear why they are getting admitted to graduate programs in America's big name conservatories. There will also be a four-part Chamber Music Marathon running on the weekend of May 3-5. The details can be found at the Conservatory's website, bard.edu/conservatory/events. You can also take the opportunity to see the brand new Bard Conservatory Building, made possible by a beyond-generous $9.2 million gift from Bard alumnus Lazlo Z. Bito.
Recent Entries
Recent Comments
©2009-2013 Country Wisdom News. Theme styling created by Ortner Graphics based on the Simplex News template by Solaranlagen.