Improv on Immigration: Gabriela Montero Rocks Maine

Immigration. It is the hottest and most critical issue of our era.

Pianist and Venezuelan ex-pat Gabriela Montero knows this dearly enough to have built a performance around what she called "a very emotional theme." Montero's unique program, "Westward," was presented by Portland Ovations as part of an extended focus, commemorating Maine's bicentennial of statehood, its people and places, past, present, and future.

"I'm an immigrant," Montero said from the stage at Hannaford Hall Saturday afternoon, January 25, 2020, in introduction of her improvised score to Charlie Chaplin's classic silent film, "The Immigrant." "Being an immigrant is something you carry with you all your life, it never leaves you."

Fully attending to her words and music in the packed house were not only those one might expect to see at a classical music concert featuring the works of Prokofiev, Stravinsky, and Rachmaninoff--three Russian composers/pianists who fled "westward" to the United States as a result of the Russian Revolution of 1917.

The rapt, enthusiastic audience also included University of Southern Maine music students; and Portland High School students and their mentors from the Portland Mentoring Alliance program, participants in Ovations' new pilot for greater ticket accessibility, O2 Community Tickets.

"This was fantastic," said Jennifer Cook, PMA's Program Coordinator as her students, most of them immigrants as well, swirled happily around Montero after the concert, snapping photos and acquiring her autograph.

Montero's performance was preceded by an Ovations Offstage panel discussion, "The History and Impact of Immigration in Maine," in partnership with the Maine Historical Society on January 18. Panelists Maulian Dana, Tribal Ambassador, Penobscot Indian Nation; Tilly Laskey, curator, Maine Historical Society; Alain Nahimana, Executive Director of the Greater Portland Immigrant Welcome Center; Colin Woodard, journalist and historian, author of The Lobster Coast and American Nations, among others drew the full arc of immigration in Maine, beginning with the impact of the first white settler-colonists from France and England on the region's native peoples. And just prior to the concert, pianist Laura Kargul delivered a lecture-demonstration on the renowned improvisational skills of some of the greatest classical composers including Bach, Beethoven, and Chopin.

"I do believe Chopin invented jazz," she said, in reference to the composer's Ballade No. 4. "If anyone had brains in his fingers, it was Chopin."

"When I improvise it is something new that will never happen again," Montero said before launching into an audience-suggested improv on the "Star Wars" theme.

The well-received programs were made possible by the generous support and kindnesses of two former Ovations' nonprofit trustees: Susan Goldberg whose family fund, the Susan and Jerry Goldberg Fund, underwrites Ovations' piano concerts; and Jane C. Wellehan, whose bequest provided the foundation for O2 Community Tickets.

#ExperienceOvations #Maine200 #ImmigrationInMaine

Are We Merely Visiting?

I am in the midst of this undeniable privilege: traveling to explore other places and communities in this world. For a week of rest and relaxation and learning, Judith and I chose an island further down east from our home in Deer Isle, ME, and journeyed to Prince Edward Island.

PEI is an island community home to approximately 135,000 souls and, like Deer Isle, hosts a robust fishing community -- although theirs is both more regulated AND more supported by the Canadian government, making Canadian lobster the primary competitor to our Maine crustracean. Additionally, there appears to be a somewhat robust bluefin tuna fishery here at this time of year, complementing the potato harvest. The red soil and long beaches make this a beautiful place, and we pass by field after field of potatoes newly harvested and awaiting the wheat, oats, and barley that will come next. The potatoes love the red, iron-rich soil and Irish Cobblers and other potato varieties are much beloved. With the decidedly Celtic lilt in the people's voices, it is easy to imagine a time when no ocean divided Ireland, Scotland, and Canada's Maritime Provinces.

Yet all over, too, we see how the economic consolidation of agriculture -- where once a 75-acre farm could support a family, now potatoes are grown on 1600-acre farms, just as in the U.S. midwest -- is creating gaps and shifts in the traditional island ways. Potato fields are given over everywhere to tourist cottages and second homes. And the Canadian government, either sensing or responding to these shifts or both, is a huge supporter of cultural tourism; which on PEI means Anne of Green Gables.

The beloved book by the native PEI author has an entire tourism trail named for its various locations, complete with actors dressed as Anne and a huge visitor center hosting bus loads of international tourists at the House of Green Gables. It's quite astounding.

As we drive, however, it is difficult not to wonder: are we merely visiting this earth, or living on it? As we have allowed our economies to develop uncontrolled, they at times appear to be eating us up rather than serving us. The truth is, the way native peoples once lived sustainably on our shores for thousands of years was never the colonial plan. British colonists in particular were in service to an empire on which "the sun never set" and from the time they set foot on these shores created economies that were about exports: exporting livestock (and enslaved peoples) and timber to the British colonies, in the West Indies or England; importing the rum and sugar and other goods they then needed to survive on their own. Colonization is about acquisition and consumption and the white narrative of North America is defined by this.

The House of Green Gables.

The question now remains for us to face and future generations to experience: now that we've eaten it all up, exported most of it and destroyed the rest (the deforestation of this island and much of the Maritimes is, as in parts of New England, a sad sight to behold) -- do we re-learn how to sustain our human (not just individual) selves and this world? Or will we be content to be merely visitors to this beautiful planet? And if the latter: how temporary will we make our visitation? how much of a foot print will we leave, how quickly will we consume what remains? Will we leave sustainable places to live for the generations of humans who could follow?

Falling in Love with Lubec: Vacation Fall 2019 Day #1

 “My worst day on the water is better than your best day in a cubicle somewhere.” - Ralph DeWitt, pilot boat captain, Eastport Harbor as quoted in Galen Koch’s project, The First Coast

Vacation Day #1. We make the drive down east along Maine’s Bold Coast. Completely rugged, wild, and poor. Destination: Lubec, Maine’s easternmost village from which the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Bridge arcs gracefully across the narrows to Canada.

Lubec is our first stop to see Galen Koch’s The First Coast exhibit and sound walk. Galen has been traveling in her renovated Airstream mobile digital studio along Maine’s coast to capture some of the voices of these hard-working remote communities in which people are struggling to maintain their traditional, sustenance-based ways of living: fishing, clamming, harvesting. She’s done a terrific job capturing these actual voices. Listening to them, seeing the accompanying photos by Greta Rhybus, and then exploring Lubec with Galen’s sound walk is a magical afternoon.

 Judith and I immediately fall in love with Lubec. It’s experiencing a bit of a renaissance since we first came through, 10 or more years ago, en route to Campobello. During that visit it seemed all the wooden, Gothic-style former smokehouses and canneries were collapsing into the water, where two large salmon farm pens lurked like sharks’ mouths waiting to swallow up the native fish. I can’t remember seeing a person on the street during that visit. Today there are people of all ages walking, the restaurants are full!

There is something magical about these end of the world places. You can feel how it could again be just you, the water, the land. Not about jobs, or going other places; not about cars or money. Just about being a part of this glorious planet.

There is an old church here for sale. It makes our eyes gleam with dreams. It’s in worst shape than the Stonington Opera House even was when we first stumbled upon it. But we can see what it might be. A new kind of community and cultural center, one centered in relationship to Maine’s indigenous communities and crossing borders of all kind. Small and simple, an end-of-the-world outpost where our stories can be told, shaped, imagined, reflected, re-told, archived in authentic ways. Another place where we can gather in community to learn.

A place of staying put. A place for introverts and artists. A place of growing and gathering berries. A tough place, too, where the huge fierce tides and the harshness of the climate compete for human lives. 

What is Avalon to Us?

Performance photo courtesy Opera House Arts.

Ah, Avalon. The magical Isle of Apples. Where King Arthur goes to heal, and from the mists of which he will come again. Sounds heavenly, no? Imagine the sweet crisp smell that is apple in salty, misty air.

The problem for us moderns, in this 50th anniversary year of Woodstock, is that we've yet to get ourselves back to this garden. When patriarchy crushed matriarchy, Christianity crushed the Druids, and life became about nothing so much as conquering and consuming to show who was right and called by God we lost an awful lot.

The newly commissioned, world-premiere, site specific performance "Avalon," written by Melody Bates in collaboration with the work of sculptor Peter Beerits at his unique sculpture park, Nervous Nellie's Jams and Jellies, and produced and presented by Opera House Arts at the Stonington Opera House, wants to remind us of what we have lost--and to what we still might get back.

Beltane: the celebration of the beginning of summer, when the cattle were driven to field, great fires were lit, and our ancestors danced around the May pole. This evolved into the Christian feast day of Pentacost, marked by the tongues of those same great fires signaling the arrival of the Holy Spirit in the apostles after Christ's death.

There's no question that something holy becomes visible to us as life is reborn in the blooming of the spring fields.

Our shadow selves -- Mordred in legend and play, he who is ultimately responsible for killing the King Stag, Arthur -- are very visible in "Avalon." How easy to indulge the adolescent, narcissistic shadow, how difficult to keep it at bay. Yet at the end of this play, it is Mordred whose speech holds the biggest moment of truth for attendees: it is not he, he points out, (or Trump) who is responsible for the blood tide of war in which we live. Our choices -- each and every one, small as well as large -- make the tide. Giving more life to Mordred, our shadow selves, is a part of our collective will -- or lack thereof. And Mordred (played smartly by Shawn Fagan) is real, and therefore loveable, as well.

Neither the wizards nor the Druids (nor later, the native Americans) knew how to defeat the bloody tide of the Anglo-Saxons. Their relentless, irregular warfare -- their ability to commit genocide and still consider themselves Christians, in combination with their hatred of women -- drove civilizations and their peoples into the ground from which we have yet to emerge. We are stuck in a blasphemy of unholy leaders: men who, like their slave-holding kin before them, will let no life go unscarred, no lie be untold, in their quest for power and personal gain. The sad, lost culture in which we try to honor each other and the earth is one of taking rather than giving.

We need, collectively, to dream a better dream -- and wake to join the dance that brings it to life.

"Avalon" points the way. And for those of you who simply want to be a child again, and play in the magical woods: come wander.

Avalon
an Opera House Arts at the Stonington Opera House world-premiere production
every evening at 5:30 p.m., now through August 25
Nervous Nellies Jams & Jellies
Sunshine Road
Deer Isle, ME

Making Different Choices

The Taunton River in southeastern Massachusetts.

The picture of the Taunton (pronounced Ton-Ton by the native tribes of this area) River to the right is familiar to any of us who grew up in southeastern New England: a gently tidal, brackish waterway lined by salt marshes and once teeming with fish and life -- and now subject to marinas and both the intentional (dumping) and unintentional (boats, roads, etc.) pollution that is the hallmark of white settler colonialist development in the 21st century.

The Taunton River was one of the most sacred to the Wampanoag people, who resided here for thousands of years prior to the unchecked immigration of British Calvinists, a.k.a. Puritans, who assumed rights to what they called the Massachusetts Bay Colony.

Lisa Brooks' new history of what we know of as King Philip's War, "Our Beloved Kin," gives us -- based on a careful reading of historical documents, primarily land deeds, as well as a knowledge of Wampanoag language (part of the Algonquian language family) -- a new, more balanced perspective on the white European immigration to this continent and in particular to this place.

Growing up in southeastern CT, the only histories we were provided were those told by the white settler colonists themselves -- Miles Standish, John Winthrop ("The City on a Hill"), and the various victors of numerous native extermination campaigns. One of the most notable of these, which I knew nothing about as a middle and high school student in Mystic/Stonington CT, was the slaughter of more than 700 Pequot women and children by Captain John Mason (for whom Mason's Island in Mystic is named) when in 1637 he set fire to their Pequot Fort overlooking the placid Mystic River -- less than a mile from our house.

I could go on about the mistaken impression, repeated in the Wikipedia entries on the Massachusetts Bay Colony, that King Philip's War was a native uprising against the colonists and that the natives were "soundly defeated." But you should really read "Our Beloved Kin" instead, which includes a digital companion and, for the Mainers reading this, informative sections on the Wabanaki coast of Maine as well as the Wampanoag's and southern tribes northern migrations to and through Maine as they attempted to escape the colonists.

What I want to convey in this piece instead is the devastation our white settler colonialist ancestors have wreaked on southeastern Massachusetts and Rhode Island. If the fact that New England is not a "hot spot" in climate change is not enough for you, take a drive through these once sacred places and try to remember what the natural world once looked like here. It is next to impossible to do so, the development is so extreme.

Roads roads roads and "private" property prevent one from reaching the Taunton and myriad other rivers -- once teeming with fish and used for sustenance fishing by the Wampanoag. The traffic is intense, and there is barely a field or marsh or square foot of earth without a house, a mall, or a disheveled, suffering little town such as Taunton itself. One does not sense happiness here and most are speeding through it at 80 mph to reach the Cape.

This is what we've wrought over 400 years. The devastation not only of this continent's native peoples but of the earth they once so well stewarded. When the Puritans arrived, they brought with them livestock and an English patriarchal culture inimical to native stewardship of agricultural fields, forests, and waterways. The Wampanoag's practiced crop rotation and field maintenance that allowed them to thrive here for thousands of years. The Puritans livestock trampled these fields, and with the subsequent fencing off of paddocks and "private" property the migration of wildlife was severely crippled.

Climate change is but one symptom of our broken planet, and it is every one of our choices as to how we live that impacts how we proceed. We can all take some simple steps to try to reverse the damage we as white settler colonists have wrought upon this continent -- and on ourselves, and the future of the planet for our descendants. The choices are ours and need to be made every day in regard to all the things we take for granted and to which we feel entitled. And while some of these choices may seem to be a privilege: yes, they are. And we all need to be activating whatever privilege from which we may benefit to improve our culture and save our planet.

* Eat real, not processed, not chemically treated food. Food is sacred (for the Christians out there reading this: think last supper!)

* Do not waste food -- we have so cheapened food with subsidies and processing that many no longer hold it sacred. Food waste is the largest contributor to climate change.

* Drive less

* Stop flying

* Stop buying -- particularly unnecessary containers, plastic, styrofoam, etc. Remember that your power as a consumer is critical to what the market does or does not produce.

* Reuse what you can

* Recycle what you cannot reuse

* Run for office

* Vote in every election as if your life and the lives of others depends upon it: it does. Vote only for those candidates who recognize the need for change in American consumption and culture if we are to save our planet. Vote only for those who treat everyone around them with respect. Vote only for those who believe in being of service to others.

Every choice makes a difference. And our choices are ours. Not always easy to own, and still: ours.