Live Long and Prosper: the Power of Performance

Dr. Ruth E. Grauert -- otherwise known to her familiars as Reg -- was a choreographer, lighting designer, production stage manager, dance critic and, with her life partner Frances Reid, founder of Bearnstow, a camp on Parker Pond in Mt. Vernon, Maine.

Reg lived to be 101, passing away just a year ago on May 20, 2020.

You can watch and be inspired by her dancing at age 100 here.

Reg and her legacy bear strong witness to the power of performance in our lives.

I'm sad and embarrassed to admit that, despite our firm commitment to contemporary dance for 17 years at Opera House Arts, we were too busy to experience this place, and her, in Reg's lifetime.

Thanks, however, to an invitation from my Maine performing arts colleague Laura Faure, I had the amazing good fortune to visit Bearnstow a week ago. The camp had finished its sessions for area students in July, and was between workshops for adults with two dancers I much admire: Clair Porter on "Writing and Moving" and K.J. Holmes on "Combining Disciplines for Creative Performance."

Of the 17 people at the camp during my visit, several had been engaged with Bearnstow for many years. Two in particular captured my imagination: a woman, first brought to camp by her mother in the 1970's, on her annual stay with her own two kids; and the great human, dancer, and choreographer Bebe Miller, chair of the Bearnstow board -- who had also grown up there beginning in the late 1950's when her mother was the camp nurse from Red Hook, Brooklyn. 

I found the depth of the connections between these two, their families, and Reg and Bearnstow to be very moving. Like the long lives of the loons that proliferate on the camp's lake, the place's long history creates a rich humous, many layers of smells and vitality and creativity that hum with fertility through the buildings and the paths between them.

The place itself is, as one of the generational attendees noted, remarkable for its stillness. Like many traditional Maine sporting camps, as an example of which it is on the National Register of Historic Places, it is a congregation of small wooden cabins along a densely forested lake shore. From the water, the cabins are barely visible through the spruce woods that, as Bebe remembers, once mixed with many birch, the decaying white-skinned remnants of which line the pathways and litter the forest floor.

In contrast to this long steady stillness of purpose and being, the mainstream White U.S. culture that is my own heritage is so much about change, the "melting pot" that is Whiteness: about letting go of connections to one's past, one's language, and even one's ancestors. I've experienced this phenomenon as an adopted child working to piece together family histories of first generation grandparents and parents. So much is lost; the dirt beneath our feet unnecessarily thin.

But this land's native peoples, and those who were brought here as enslaved labor, know and acknowledge the power of ancestors. We gain depth when we know and love our roots, when we pay tribute to all those who made it possible for us to be here to create the newness we each create. We wouldn't be here without these ancestors and places, and how much more delightful to gratefully know and honor their stories and lives that we may, from the layers of accruing soil, create more complex and meaningful art and lives ourselves?

Reg's long life and the legacy she has left make all this visible -- she indeed lived long and prospered -- for those who wish to see with our hearts as well as our eyes.

Laura, Bebe, Molly, Alison, Peter and others are working to build on and to extend this legacy into the future, so we, too, as well as those who follow us may experience the deep, generous creativity that is Bearnstow Camp.

To learn more about Bearnstow and Reg, check out the Bearnstow Journal. Most recently, Maine journalist Bob Keyes wrote a great article on the camp in the Portland Press Herald.

#dance

#liveperformance

#bearnstow

#mainecamps