We're All Touched By the Same Water: Arturo O'Farrill, Son Jarocho, and Us

So much more connects us than divides us. 

Like...water. Water divides our continents, our states, our cities, our nations. And it connects us. Not only does it run through our places and our planet, it runs through our cells.

Cuban-American pianist Arturo O’Farrill reminded us of this last night during a free concert at @Bowdoin College here in Maine that I was highly privileged to attend. Sharing space in the same room with these fantastic Afro-Latin musicians and the audience was, as O’Farrill noted, sacred. One of the finest parts of the evening was watching the musicians wordlessly communicate with each other on stage: their eyes. Their gestures. Their smiles. Their music. Their bodies. We were, briefly and for this one moment, never to be repeated, bodies together in that room. We were, briefly and for that one moment, breathing the same air. 

O’Farrill is a soft-spoken, energetic, sweating teddy bear of a man, son of the great Cuban musician Chico O’Farrill and father to two successful musicians, Adam and Zack. We had the great pleasure of meeting and hosting the O’Farrill family when the boys were quite young for a week in Stonington when O’Farrill appeared at the Deer Isle Jazz Festival, as part of which he was in residence at Haystack Mountain School of Crafts. I chased him into the backstage elevator after last night’s concert, to be rewarded with a giant hug all the way down. #blessed

Arturo reminded us of all that we share in his brief comments between extended stretches of music. Music is a language, he said. It connects us to mother Africa and to each other, trans-migration, cross boundaries. He told us about a new project he had recently completed, a documentary of which is scheduled to appear this month: Fandango at the Wall, in which he gathered musicians on both sides of the wall between San Diego and Tijuana for a jam session that built upon son jarocho music: Veracruz sound, “a venerable 500-year-old Afro-Mexican musical tradition.”

“Sound is not stopped by a wall,” O’Farrill reminded us lightly. Later, he told us that at a concert in Washington, D.C., he was making similar comments and a woman in the audience told him that music and art should not be political. “But music has always been political,” Arturo said, again in his calm, mild voice. “All of jazz. Nina Simone. Folk traditions. We have always used music to communicate about what matters to us.”

You can come experience some authentic son jarocho music on March 19 in Portland, when Portland Ovations brings the Los Angeles bad Las Cafeteras to PortCity.  Their enthusiastic style crosses musical borders, and will bring the world to Maine that evening, welcoming us all home here from wherever we may start.

O’Farrill’s 18 piece Afro-Latin Jazz Orchestra mixes players young and old and, despite its traditions, features three female brass players as well. With five saxophonists, four trumpets, one bass and three regular trombones, three percussionists, a bassist, and O’Farrill on piano the Jazz Orchestra finesses an amazing range of modalities, treading softly and sweetly on ballads prior to blowing the doors off the hall with the four trombonists coming to the edge of the stage to rock out a grand finale of New Orleans tradition in “Iko, Iko.”

Hey now. Hey now. How has art transformed YOUR heart and mind today?

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.

Love Field

I fly in and out of Dallas from its originally airport, Love Field -- where President Kenndy''s Air Force One landed and departed on his deadly visit here in November 1963.

I was 26 months old. A year younger than the President's son.

I don't remember the assassination itself, but watching the funeral on TV is my first real memory.

My mother had taken us to visit her dear friend, Pat Regan, at her tiny Cape in downtown Old Saybrook, CT.

Pat had all the shades pulled down in her living room, creating a deep gloom around her black and white TV. She and my mother sat at the kitchen table just outside the doorway to the room, where they could keep an eye on where they allowed me to sit, transfixed, before the ghostly, flickering screen. The gray images were vague and shifting -- more dream than reality.

The dark, riderless horse with its backward facing boot is the image most lodged in my memory. John John's sad, obedient salute. And my mother and Pat crying behind me. I didn't understand then what had happened, but I knew it was very sad and ran to hug and be held by my mom.

It didn't take me long to understand. My generation was raised in the shadow of political assassinations. Within four years, four of our progressive leaders -- those trying to transition us from the World War II generation to a new era in which our nation might build its own equity across race and gender and spread its immense prosperity to create global equity as well -- were gunned down. Malcolm X (1965). Martin Luther King, Jr. (1968). And Bobby Kennedy (1968). 

The second Kennnedy death sent progressivism reeling -- not knocked out, for the anti-war and feminist and desegregation and gay liberation movements continued. We have continued slowly on our evolutionary path to consciousness as human beings. But our leadership was significantly derailed and has yet to fully recover.

Rather than a President encouraging our leadership and engagement and philanthropy and giving voice to hope -- "The American people expect more from us...For the world is changing. The old era is ending. The old ways will not do..." -- we got a President who resigned before he could be impeached for obstruction of justice around criminal attempts to influence an election in his favor. That was in the 1970s, yet today we find ourselves in an oddly deja vu situation, with a "mob boss" style President fearful that if held accountable for his dishonest tactics then the legitimacy of his presidency will be in question. As it is and should be.

"History, after all, is the memory of a nation." -- President John F. Kennedy

It is Easter weekend and the beginning of Passover. The memory of our nation has much for which to seek reconciliation and to make amends. When will we give up our addiction to those who will lie, bully, and strong arm voters to maintain their power and move fully and joyously toward these different values?

The memory of our nation is one of white brutality. One cannot travel across these beautiful prairies without mourning the wanton destruction of its native inhabitants. The U.S. Army used "total warfare" to wipe out the tribes,  their horses, and their sacred sustenance: the buffalo. "Total warfare" included the use of many tactics that would be prosecuted as war crimes today, from dawn raids on sleeping villages of non-combatants to the decimation of food sources to starve entire peoples.

Kennedy was no saint. He, too, was a child of privilege and he, too, felt entitled to use his privilege to his advantage.

Yet at the same time he also understood his privilege as a duty to make the world more fair and prosperous for others. He made plenty of mistakes in this work -- seeing Communists everywhere as the enemy and engaging U.S. Troops accordingly, for instance -- but his enduring legacy is to ask each of us,  and especially America's young people, to ask "not what your country can do for you, ask what you an do for your country...ask not what America will do for you, but what together we can do for the freedom of man."

Leaps of Faith

When I was growing up in the 1960s and 1970s, art was everything to me. No matter how small or how ill fitting or unsafe my family's world seemed to me to be, I was able to move beyond it by plunging my nose into a book, listening to or playing music, picking up pen and ink and drawing.

I was one of the lucky ones. While I was one of millions of babies in the post-WWII era born into traumatic circumstances and given up for adoption, I landed in a loving home: a white, round-faced, red-curled baby with plenty of meat on my bones in the U.S. during a time of great prosperity.

Azam Ali and Loga Torkian of the Montreal-based music ensemble Niyaz were not so lucky. As children, they became, as Ali said during a reception last night at Coffee by Design in Portland, “forced immigrants” thanks to the Iranian Revolution.

Few Americans understand the long-standing world tragedy represented by the western colonization of Iran for oil. Iran is the former Persia: a country of great geostrategic importance, yes, given its size and location and petro-resources — and more importantly home to some of the world’s oldest civilizations. Persians were once referred to as the "first Historical People" -- because the empire they ruled from Persepolis was the largest the world has ever seen, connecting over 40% of its peoples.

“Pre-colonization there were so many ethnic and religious cultures and music [in Iran]," Ali said during her comments. "Most of which were lost to colonization. What is the Iranian identity?”

Niyaz's music -- a part of Ovations' "Seeking Resonance" series exploring artists and art inspired by or connected to spirituality -- will take us to these many, many worlds outside of Portland.  The band has, in their own words, "created a 21st century global trance tradition by seamlessly blending medieval Sufi poetry and folk songs from their native Iran and its surrounding countries in the Persian Gulf, with rich acoustic instrumentation and state-of-the-art modern electronics."

"Art became the homeland that we no longer had," Ali said.

She believes it is art that can connect us in our increasingly global and secular societies. "To thrive in a secular society," she said, "Art becomes the shining light. Art is where people go to church."

Seeking resonance.

Ali and Torkian's families, like so many world citizens, were forced to take a leap of faith and leave their homeland.

Mary Allen Lindemann, CBD's vibrant founder and an Ovations' board member, opened the evening by reading a poem written for her by a local poet: a woman who types her poems on an old-fashioned typewriter while sipping coffee at CBD.

"...we are all on our way somewhere./how can we know/how can we know where the wind,/i mean water, will carry us." wrote Katherine Ferrier on February 14, 2019 in "Leap of Faith."

How can we know. Where do we each find our resonance.

"...sometimes the practice is to leap/to leave what we know/and let the world open us/until we are river, and the sea/ that welcomes all wandering water/back home," Ferrier concludes her poem.

Often we have to leave what we know to find ourselves welcomed anew.

As Azam concluded her remarks: "And on that note, I hope I can take you to church tomorrow.”

Portland Ovations was proud to present Niyaz at PortCity Music Hall last night, March 15, 2019. For more information on the ways Portland Ovations brings the world to Portland and home back to many of its peoples, see www.portlandovations.org.

The Trocks are Coming, the Trocks are Coming!

MONDAY, MARCH 4--Last night I got to do something I love to do: sit in the dark, surrounded (mostly) by strangers, watching a movie. It is especially lovely to do this -- what feels like such a commonplace luxury -- in a small venue and community like Portland's SPACE Gallery.

Having handed out show info, greeted patrons, and introduced not only the film but the film's raison d'etre -- the Trocks are coming! the Trocks are coming to Maine via Portland Ovations! March 28 - 29 -- I'm sitting in the second row alongside a colleague who happens, similarly to the movie's subjects, to be a dancer who is also an excellent comedian.

We've both cried four times at least during Rebels on Pointe, a documentary of Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo -- the first documentary, in fact, of this notoriously fun and skilled male drag ballet company founded over 40 years ago, rising out of Stonewall and Charles Ludlam's Ridiculous Theater Company. Any evening on which you are moved to tears multiple times by art is a great night.

I can't remember now all the scenes that moved us to tears; there were many. Maybe one time it was the young, beautiful dancer from Cuba (Carlos Hopuy) describing how he and his family (and, basically, everyone) were starving during the 1990's; and how much he wants his mother, also a dancer, to be able to get out of Cuba to come see him dance. Maybe it is the sweet faced dancer-turning-educator as he heads into his 40's, going home regularly to northern Italy between tours to visit his dad, who has Parkinson's disease. Maybe it is when the first young Trocks couple gets married -- something neither Trocks' Artistic Director and retired dancer Tory Dobrin nor I thought we would ever see in our lifetimes. Most likely for me, it is when Dobrin talks about losing half the company to AIDS during the epidemic period of the 1980's-90's -- including his own partner. I remember too well when gay men were dying all around us, every day.

And that's one of the amazing things about the Trocks: their history spans a remarkable 40 years of gay history as an integral part of their own. The up's and down's of the dancers, the support of their families, the company's growth and evolution, their rock star status in Japan: it's all within the context of queer history and male dancers in drag satirizing one of our most elite performing arts forms -- ballet.

The comedy and satire the Trocks bring to ballet ironically "normalizes" what has become, for too many, an inaccessible form. They bring ballet down to earth both with their incredible skill on pointe and their commentary on the form itself -- and of course, their humor. Broad understanding is best fed by laughter.

SPACE Gallery's screening of Rebels on Pointe was a generous collaboration with Ovations in the run up to the Trocks' arrival, and was sponsored by Maine AARP. Portland Ovations presents Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo at Merrill Auditorium on Friday, March 29. As part of our Ovations Offstage (O2) community programming around the performance you can also take advantage of the following activities and events:

Wednesday, March 27: 

• 12 p.m., University of New England: Aging with Grace and Movement -- Health Challenges Faced by the LGBTQ Community, a collaboration with UNE and SAGE. FREE.
• 7:30 p.m., Austin Street Brewery: Drag Queen Bingo with Cherry Lemonade

Thursday, March 28:

• 5 p.m. FREE Intergenerational, LGBTQIA Movement Workshop with the Trocks

Friday, March 29:

• 7 p.m. FREE pre-performance lecture, "Dancing Queens, How the Trocks Satirize Classical Ballet," with former Trock dancer and Maine resident Roberto Forleo, Merrill Auditorium
• 8 p.m. PERFORMANCE

Remembering the Freddies, My Queens

Freddie (Endrich, Jr.) was my mother's most beloved first cousin. She adored him. He called her Maisie, and bought her daybooks every year, in which she faithfully recorded the weather, as well as whether or not my father or brother were at home.

When I was growing up, during the 1960's and 1970's, Freddie was the most gentle soul I knew. He sported a thin mustache above his ever-amused lips, and a beret. In 1959, our statewide paper called him a "beatnik" and reported on how he wished to conform with no one. Unlike the rest of the men in his German family, he spoke in a soft tenor. And he was educated: not only had he been to college (his father, a plumber, had a sixth grade education like most of our family from that generation) but he had been around the world, serving in Korea, teaching at the American University in Beirut for many years. He brought me home a copy of Aesop's Fables from that sojourn, a book I held, and will always hold, dear. The tortoise and the hare?! The lion and the mouse?!

We will, we will, rock you. - Freddie Mercury and Queen 

Freddie loved my long, 1974, 13-year-old platinum hair. Somehow I had genetically mimicked the Swede who had adopted me, while with its length rebelling against parental authority all in a single act. Freddie took it as a sign of my Bohemian/artistic temperament. I was his, and he was mine.

I just gotta get out of this prison cell, one day I'm gonna be free: find me somebody to love.

Freddie had a former tenement house in the Lower East Side, south of Houston, which was a slum when I moved there in the mid-1980's. It's difficult now for people to envision NYC as it was then; so much dirt, so much crime, so much violence. The building in which Freddie lived with Basil and their twin dobermans and monkeys-in-the-shower recently sold for millions of dollars. It makes me laugh until I cry -- and I know it would him, too, if he were still around.

We are the champions, my friends. And we'll keep on fighting, 'til the end...

Freddie died of AIDS on February 12, 1988. He was 58 years old. He'd been gay for as long as any of us had known him, bringing his partner, Basil, to Christmas at my aunt's in New Jersey where he knew he'd be tolerated by a Catholic family focused on love. I couldn't find an obituary for him, and I am trying to locate his sculptures and papers in light of the recent death of his younger brother.

Freddie Mercury -- like my Freddie, a queer man who lived on the cusp of a transitioning society -- died of AIDS three years later, in 1991. There was no telling, in those days, who would die when.  Some of those diagnosed died within weeks or months. Others are still here, amazingly and against the odds, to tell the tales. This year's Oscar-nominated film for Best Picture, Bohemian Rhapsody, tells Mercury's tale remarkably well, and re-plants the band's splendid glam-rock ear worms in our heads where, with luck, they live on as reminders to us all. The holocaust is not over, with more than a million people around the world dying of AIDS every year. And there is something about Bohemian Rhapsody, as a song, that always felt eerily prescient to me..."sends shivers down my spine/body's aching all the time...gonna leave you all behind..."

But life still goes on, I can't get used to living without you by my side. I don't want to live alone...I've got to break free.

I moved into the queer world of NYC in 1985, my partner Kathryn and I staying with Freddie and Basil on Eldridge Street and also at their cottage in Cherry Grove. We had stepped into a holocaust. Our pretty, smart, creative and beloved boys were dying every hour of every day of every week. Our lives were filled with visits to St. Vincent's and memorial services. But when my Freddie died, his illness was kept under wraps. I did not even get to visit him in the hospital. Suddenly, he was gone -- like so many others.

We cannot count the dead they are so many -- but we can remember them. I remember Freddie, his soft voice, his intellect, his laughter, his desire for pleasure and for joy, his sculptures made of neon light. Freddie wanted us all to be free. And we can continue our fight for a future in which the Freddie's do not die in their quest for pleasure and freedom.

These are our birthrights as humans, challenging to achieve though they are; and it is not god who punishes us in our quests for them. Long live our struggles for pleasure, and for freedom. Long live Freddie Endrich, and Freddie Mercury. I am so grateful to you both.

#ActUp. #FightBack. #Silence=Death.

Whitey on the Moon

Close to 50 years ago, Neil Armstrong was the first man to land on the moon.

This landing — only the first of six that occurred between 1968 and 1973 — is an all but forgotten scene from American history. It’s importance to us lies more in its context than it what it achieved.

The “one small step for man…one giant leap for mankind” and President Kennedy’s desire to prove that Americans could do things precisely because they are difficult fell prey to a meaningless yet deadly war in Vietnam; a string of political assassinations of progressive leaders; race riots; domestic bombings and the National Guard shooting of students at Kent State; President Nixon’s impeachment and resignation — and most recently to reality TV.

The “space race” was just that: an hubristic enterprise by white American men, spending billions of dollars of public money to beat their Russian counterparts to the moon while America burned.

African-American musician Gil Scot-Heron captured the sentiment at the time with his poem and song, “Whitey on the Moon:” “I can’t pay no doctor bills / but Whitey’s on the moon… / No hot water, no toilets, no lights / but Whitey’s on the moon…"

Armstrong’s landing might have imbued us with a reverence for our planet and its solar system. Instead, it became just another victory march for white Americans, plowing forward, as Armstrong’s wife Janet says (her fear-based anger well portrayed by Clare Foy in “First Man,” the recent Damien Chazelle film epic of Armstrong’s flight, now playing at Opera House Arts), like “boys with balsa wood toys.” The program persisted through loss after loss of astronauts killed as test pilots and, most famously, three burned in their capsule before the takeoff of Apollo 1 in 1967. After which, we were rewarded with many shots of other astronauts planting the flag -- along with a bit of scientific research.

There just wasn't much to find on the moon itself. As Armstrong put it before he even went, what we might get was, at best, most likely to be a clearer picture of ourselves in context from outer space — one we perhaps should have had already. Armstrong himself came back from his first flight beyond the atmosphere in amazement at how thin it was.

That was 50 years ago. Little did he know that oversized U.S. fossil fuel consumption would make our atmosphere even thinner and more fragile in the years to come.

Despite the awe and positive impact sparked by the Apollo voyages' famous “blue marble” image of the earth from outer space, we’ve continued to exploit the planet more than steward it. We've continued to be distracted by political mayhem, and remained unable to invest in solving the problems of the most needy right here in our own country. In all of this, we follow in the all-too-large footsteps of that first “whitey on the moon."

Dahlov Ipcar's Joyful Visions at Bates Museum of Art

Sheep of Insight, oil by Dahlov Ipcar
in the exhibit "Blue Moons & Menageries"
Bates Art Museum through October 6

One of the great pleasures of working in the arts -- well, really, of being human -- is making time to see a lot of it. Performance, concerts, films, exhibits: we each have the chance to exult in the human imagination and creativity.

This is perhaps particularly important when the news of our day to day lives is as dark as it has been of late. If you, like me, are a citizen of the world's richest nation -- a country which makes up 5% of the world's population and consumes 25% of its energy resources -- you'd expect the default value to be one of generosity.

Unfortunately, that does not seem to be the case. Rather, our default appears to be fear. Which on the ground is translating into a new "zero tolerance" policy for immigrants and asylum seekers at our southern border. More than 2,000 children have been separated from their families in this ignominious action, an attempt by the President to bully Congress into passing the immigration legislation he wants.

Let's be 1,000% clear: separating children from their families is an act of torture.

In the meantime, I, while speaking out, sending money, and planning to put my body in the streets to protest the regime that is now running our country, was also able to enjoy my first world privileges and take in this exciting new exhibit at the Bates Art Museum today.

"Dahlov Ipcar: Blue Moons & Menageries" is brilliant to behold. In color, yes, but most importantly in the maker's internal vision of life.

Like every Mainer I've ever met, Ipcar's vision is completely her own. Unique. Visionary. Her animals have third eyes. The painted insides of their bodies often represent the worlds around them. Looking at these paintings, I could feel the expansive peace that rushes in and opens out when one looks into one's own mind to see such images.

She seems to have expressed her magical vision of the world effortlessly, in uncountable paintings (some oil, some watercolor); wood block prints; soft sculptures; textile collage; needlepoint; drawings; books...and farming.

Continuing to make art to her final days, Dahlov Ipcar lived in Georgetown, Maine, off of Bath, until she was 99 years old.

THIS is what it means to be an American. Here is empathy and compassion, for the world via animals, extended far beyond the individual self. This is why we create.

Go make some art. And, failing that, get to Lewiston to see this exhilarating, inspiring, joyous exhibit.

Ragtime is Our Time

Racism? Immigration? Musical theater?

Yep. You can catch all three in intimate relationship right now in the musical "Ragtime" at the Ogunquit Playhouse through August 26.

Among the many high performance treats of summer in Maine, the 85-year-old Ogunquit Playhouse, on the National Register of Historic Places, with its legacy of being "America's Foremost Summer Theatre," is surely near the top.

Especially when history nicely synchronizes itself with the theater's production calendar, as it does currently with its production of "Ragtime," based on the 1975 E.L. Doctorow novel of the same name.

It's the story of a talented black musician, humiliated by some working class white men, who seeks his revenge in a bomb-throwing, hostage-taking kind of way.

And, as a parallel narrative, an oppressed Jewish immigrant who makes good in America's nascent film world and marries up.

The face of Lady Liberty graces the
Ogunquit Playhouse's production
of "Ragtime."

The production opens with a gloriously giant mask of the face of Lady Liberty gracing center stage, a talisman for the audience to reflect upon before the actors arrive.

You can't make this stuff up - I mean, wait, you don't have to. It's all in our headlines, right now. Don't forget, this season had to have been planned and cast at least a year ago. The fates of current events are shining on "Ragtime"'s relevance.

A child of the tumultuous 1970's myself, I love that "Ragtime" is oft described as "a unique adaptation of the historical narrative genre with a subversive 1970s slant" -- by which its describers mean that it's author wielded a distinctly politicized, progressive point of view.

The musical's beating heart is a score based in the gorgeous genre of music of the same name, which, with its melding of African-American jazz to pop, came to define the U.S. during the opening of the 20th century. But its story is pure National Book Award winner Doctorow's.

In an effort to educate middle-class white Americans on our history, Doctorow wrote several pastiches, bringing together motley assortments of historical characters to provide us with a snapshot of the political and social history and turmoil that defined the U.S. during the 20th century.

"Ragtime" was his first in this genre, bringing together to the page and later to the stage the anarchist activist Emma Goldman; the pop-culture, Hungarian immigrant sideshow hero Harry Houdini; the "notorious socialite" Evelyn Nesbit, lover of murdered architect Sanford White; financier/robber baron J.P. Morgan; and black, turn-of-the-century politician Booker T. Washington. Its protagonists are the African-American ragtime pianist Coalhouse Walker, modeled on a 19th century German novella of a similar name; the Jewish immigrant artist, Tateh and his daughter; and the eponymous "Mother" -- who surprises with her fierceness.

You can't watch this musical -- even without the subliminal reminder of Lady Liberty looking out over the audience during the pre-show and entre'act -- without your heart swelling for America's oppressed groups -- its immigrants, its former slaves -- to be victorious over the wealthy white family from New Rochelle against whom they are based. So for those of you who prefer Republican policies on these matters: come prepared to be transformed.

Yet as with any good and true story, the conflicts are not easily resolved. Will the musical's underdog protagonists -- Coalhouse, Tateh --  triumph in the end? With the use of violence, following the radicalism of Goldman; or of political persuasion, in the mode of Booker T. Washington?

That is for all of you not only to witness at the Playhouse, but to play your own supporting role for in our country right now, as we circle back around on these yet-to-be-resolved issues of the who, what, why, and how of being an American.

The High Performance Events of Summer

Summer in Maine displays the full diversity of the state’s many marvelous ecosystems—including the performing arts, which bloom with the energy and color of dinner-plate dahlias -- and, like dahlias, are extremely temporal. I’ve been lucky to immerse myself in a number of high quality, diverse performances in the last three weeks alone.

Vaudevillian Thom Wall at Celebration Barn's
Big Barn Spectacular in July.
Photo by Michael Menes.

I made the not-as-far-as-you-fear trek out to South Paris in western Maine to take in, for my second time, Celebration Barn’s Big Barn Spectacular. The Barn is a centerpiece of Maine performance history, founded by internationally-renowned mime Tony Montanaro and extending his legacy to generations of Maine mimes, jugglers, clowns, and eclectic performers who return here each summer to hone their crafts and delight audiences. This year’s Spectacular featured several Barn / Cirque du Soleil alumni, the most astounding of which was juggler Thom Wall, acclaimed as “a master of modern vaudeville.” Thom balanced stacks of many glasses and other breakable things (such as balloons) on the edges and points of knives themselves balanced on each other and held in his mouth…yeah. You have to see it. And personally, I fell in love with a new act by old Maine friends Mike Miclon, Executive Director of Johnson Hall; two of his sons, Shane and Collin; the Barn’s Executive Director Amanda Houtari and several others — The Buckfield (ME) Synchronized Swim Team. Again, its vaudeville: you have to be there. So head west, to Celebration Barn, before the summer is over!

Next I headed Down East to Stonington: also not as far as you might think (if you were a New Yorker with a summer place in the Hamptons or the Catskills, you’d be making trips of this length every weekend). There, at Opera House Arts at the 1912 Stonington Opera House, on the National Register of Historic Places (for which I was founding Executive Director until 2015), I took in an original performance of the nation’s longest running and arguably most beloved Off Broadway musical: The Fantasticks. The song “Try to Remember” is what most remember from this twist on several Shakespearean classics, notably "Romeo & Juliet;" and established Shakespeare in Stonington co-founder and director Julia Whitworth (who “moonlights” as an Episcopal priest) brought her usual smarts and a few plot twists to the show that gave it more of a feminist edge than you might expect.

Finally, in a two-for-one hat trick of a week to end July and ring in August, I caught both a staged workshop reading of Maine playwright John Cariani’s newest, cul-de-sac, at Portland Stage; and Bates Dance Festival’s original, site-specific commission, Mill Town, at the Bates Mill in Lewiston.

Playwright John Cariani and Director Sally Wood at the
Portland Stage workshop for John's new work.
Photo by Aaron Flacke.

The former - a typically-Cariani, fast-talking, dialogue-driven, humorous take on the American obsession with happiness (and its fall outs) — is a tribute to the work of Portland Stage and its Affiliate Artist Program in the development of original Maine theater. This is the only way high quality new plays come to us in a finished form - they must be workshopped: heard by and responded to by live audiences for the playwright to understand whether the script works or not. The staged reading, well directed as always by Affiliate Artist Sally Wood and with terrific acting by AA Abby Killeen, was followed by a lively feedback session with highly engaged (read: opinionated) audience members: just the ticket for John to work on the next iteration of his script, which will join Almost, Maine, Last Gas, and Love Sick among his published works.

A scene from the prelude to Mill Town in the courtyard
of the Bates Mill.

Mill Town, directed and choreographed by Stephan Koplowitz, holds the honor of being the finest all around performance I’ve seen in Maine in a long time. In a fitting tribute to outgoing 30-year Artistic Director Laura Faure, to whom it was dedicated, Mill Town used Lewiston-Auburn’s, and the Mill’s, history and artifacts to propel Bates Dance Festival dancers through and around the mill’s remarkable spaces. The original music, choreography, video, scenic and lighting design, and of course performances gave us, the audience, an extremely special and intimate way (despite there being more than 200 in attendance) to witness and experience this place. From the opening tableaux of young dancers, in costumes reminiscent of Bates Mill workers clothing, to the six small performances on the third floor and the grand finale on the fourth, this was an evening of magic that I was glad to have shown up for.

Still to come; Ragtime at the 85-year-old Ogunquit Playhouse; and Orgelfest 2017, a celebration of Portland’s famed Kotzschmar Organ with retiring municipal organist Ray Cornils and the Kotzschmar Festival Brass.

Yes, there are lobsters and lighthouses on the coast, canoes and camps on the lakes, hikers and hills in the west. And strung throughout all of these, like the glass floats on a Japanese fishing net, are Maine art, performance, and historic cultural venues. Be sure to add these to your summer collection. Remember, with live performance: you have to be there. Locate a place, travel to it, and experience it. I can guarantee that, like me, you won’t be disappointed.