“We live on land long trod. We admire the landscapes the deer ran upon, the natives named and cared for, and our ancestors escaped to. And the landscape allows the dreaming.”
Earlier this month, Double Edge Theatre hosted one of its Sunday morning “Conversations,” an ongoing series of dialogues with artists about their work. This one, titled “Art and Place,” featured a panel of non-theater artists who live and work in this area: a poet, a sculptor, a musician, a filmmaker and a circus artist—all of them women, as it happened. They discussed their work, shared examples of it, and talked about the sense of community they feel in the place they do it.
More than just a panel discussion with Q&A, the conversation frequently flowed out into the audience to involve the local community members and fellow artists who crowded into the common room at The Farm, the theater’s home in rural Ashfield. Moderated by Nan Parati, proprietor of Elmer’s Store in Ashfield and herself an artist, the dialogue included commentary by scholar/author Leo Hwang, Associate Dean of Humanities at Greenfield Community College. The series is curated by Philip Arnoult, director of the Center for International Theatre Development.
All the panelists, as Double Edge’s founder Stacy Klein explained in her introduction, are artists who chose this “place” as their artistic home. Only one of them, Elsie Smith, co-founder of the New England Center for Circus Arts in Brattleboro, was originally from the area. She grew up in Huntington, the daughter of hippie-era homesteaders, and returned to the region after touring the world as an aerial acrobat. Most of the artists came to the Valley and the hills from elsewhere, drawn to the country life or the academic/artistic ferment or the gay-tolerant atmosphere or all of the above.
All the speakers testified that living and working in this place supports and nourishes them— artistically, socially, personally, spiritually—and that being part of the area’s arts community helps them do their art. Mary Clare Powell, a Greenfield-based poet and teacher, said she loves being here “because money is not important.” She recalled attending a barn raising and being deeply impressed by the pitching-in spirit and sense of mutual support.
The title “Art and Place” notwithstanding, most of the women acknowledged that their art is not specifically about the place they live in. The exception was independent filmmaker Julie Akeret, whose work focuses on the region’s people and places. Several of her recent films look at the impact of the arts on children in inner-city Springfield, and her latest project-in-process is a documentary for WGBY Public TV about Double Edge.
Akeret was also the exception among the panelists as being someone who didn’t intentionally seek this place out. Sixteen years ago, she was happily living and working in New York when her husband got a job here, and she didn’t want to leave the city. “My work was there, my friends were there. They said, ‘Real art is made in urban areas,’ and I believed that.” Once settled in Leeds, however, her attitude slowly changed. “In a different place, you start hearing and making different stories. And now my films reflect on what is happening here. Besides,” she added, “getting [financial] support is much easier here than in New York.”
The panelists presented samples of their work by way of introduction. Easthampton-based mixed-media artist Lynne Feinberg, for example, showed a short video demonstrating the range of her work, from carved bas-reliefs to whimsical dolls. Mary Clare Powell shared two poems that are about this place: “At Annie’s Garden Store” and “Greenfield Community College at 63.”
Elsie Smith, who toured her trapeze act with Cirque de Soleil and Ringling Brothers before returning to New England, said she still jets around the world but lives “off the grid” when she’s home in Vermont: “Since I work in the air, this place is an important, literal grounding for me.” She feels anchored by her local arts community and strives to “give back to it by giving time, giving gift certificates to fundraisers” and other gestures of gratitude.
One audience member, director/producer Linda McInerney, spoke afterward of her recurring amazement at the sheer number of artists living and working “right here in River City. The creative collective is not just airy faerie, but is a bunch of actual people, and they are finding ways to communicate to each other on all kinds of planes. The only way I can work through creative challenges is in walking meditation along Pocumtuck Ridge or the Deerfield River.”
From the Outside In
Ann Hackler is co-director of the Institute for Musical Arts in Goshen, a music workshop and summer rock ‘n’ roll camp for girls, dedicated to “extending the feminine in the arts.” A graduate of Hampshire College, she and her partner, musician June Millington, came here from northern California in 2001. Hackler said they were struck by the difference between there and here. In California, she said, people are enthusiastic and offer to help, but rarely get specific. “Here, if they want to help, they offer real skills and they follow through.”
Hackler said that as a lesbian couple, she and Milligan were attracted to the area partly for its gay community. She attributed the area’s multicultural mix to the fact that “we’re all outsiders. It’s about where you feel comfortable.” Stacy Klein responded that comfort was hard to find in Double Edge’s early years in Ashfield. She recalled that after she moved her company here in 1994, it took a long time for them to be accepted by a suspicious, sometimes hostile rural community that equated artists with loose morals, funny ideas and “cults.”
At first, she said, when they were trying to generate audiences for performances at The Farm, she would tell the company, “Invite all your friends around here,” and they would say, “We don’t have any friends around here.” Now, she said, they feel accepted by and integrated into the local community, some of whose members are now actively involved with the theater’s productions.
Besides the locals’ mistrust of big-city artist types, there was overt anti-Semitism in the early days, Klein said. To that, an audience member from Springfield responded that racism still cuts deep in this area: “How come no brown people live here? People in Springfield don’t even know about the hilltowns.” Parati, herself a comparative newcomer, observed, “We all come here with a sense of adventure, wanting to create, and we run into people who don’t want to change.”
At intervals during the discussion, Leo Hwang tied the threads of conversation together, finding common themes. He noted that for many of the artists, this area seems to present “a sense of possibility. Opportunity opens up and enables things to happen. You fall in love, with someone, or with a place, and build a relationship between your art and your place that’s like a marriage.” He also observed that all the artists on the panel are also teachers. “You’re doing something that creates social change. That’s social action, changing lives.”
Hwang is involved with the Fostering Art and Culture Partnership, a collaboration of artists and organizations in Franklin County that’s engaged in expanding the area’s “creative economy” by facilitating cooperation, increasing cultural tourism and fostering wider arts participation in the community. Reflecting on the panelists’ histories of involvement in the arts over time, he mused, “There are fantastic things happening throughout our region, some of which we don’t notice till we’ve been here 15 years.”
Now entering its 17th year in Ashfield, Double Edge Theatre continues its Conversations series on March 28 with a dialogue between Martha Coigney, former director of the International Theatre Institute/U.S., and Anne Bogart, the ground-breaking director and actor-training guru. That weekend also features a performance of two short Double Edge works, Republic of Dreams and The Disappearance, which the company will present during its May residency at the Grotowski Institute in Poland.
