Category: Art & Theater

NH Maker Fest celebrates creativity

A 3D printer hums a colorful plate into existence; handmade hula hoops and a DJ spin in tandem while hands get messy on a nearby pottery wheel. Those are just a few things planned for NH Maker Fest, the New Hampshire Children’s Museum’s annual gathering of builders, tinkerers and creators in downtown Dover.

Launched as the Dover Mini Maker Faire in 2012, the event is packed with engaging activities and is constantly evolving.

“It’s such a hard pitch to make,” Neve Cole, the museum’s communications director, said recently when asked to describe the upcoming fest. “Every year it’s such a different group of people.”

This time around, more than 35 makers from across the region, representing a dizzying range of disciplines, are on hand. There’s ceramics and coding, escape room design and entomology, bubble choreography, along with 501st New England Garrison cosplayers roaming about in handmade Star Wars regalia.

Among the fresh additions this year is Mud City Clay, with pottery wheel demonstrations and hand-building sessions.

“We haven’t had clay in a while,” Cole said. “That’s going to be super fun.” 3D printing company Flamingo Magic is also new to the fest, selling reusable plates that visitors can watch being printed on the spot.

A hula hoop dance party will also be interesting. “Three like-minded individuals got together,” Cole said — sponsor Unravel NH, as part of its Petals + People gardening activity, DJ Avery Sol playing house music, and spinning creations from SMart Circles that are so much cooler than the mass-manufactured Wham-O toys of yesteryear.

A scientist will bring his collection of elements to the festival and walk visitors through the properties of actual physical samples, some radioactive, some mundane, all fascinating. Young authors will be on hand as well, who’ve written books or created arts and crafts to sell and teach.

Another intriguing new entry is a husband-and-wife team in the middle of developing an escape room, allowing festival-goers a fun peek behind the curtain of a creative project mid-construction.

“They’re bringing some of their props and the puzzles that they’ve created that will eventually be part of their escape room,” Cole said.

Longtime attendees may remember the foam party, but this year the museum is pivoting to a bubble dance party instead. It’s still interactive, still delightfully chaotic, but with a slightly different texture. “It won’t be quite as foamy,” Cole said, with the conviction of someone who’s possibly thought through the foam-versus-bubbles paradigm.

Cole has been with the Children’s Museum for close to a decade, and part of each Maker Fest is in her tenure. When Covid happened, the events were done online, and the pandemic experience provided clarity for moving forward. The museum now runs structured morning and afternoon play sessions, separated by a midday break.

Before the shift, Cole recalled, popular exhibits were sometimes five families deep on busy days, with no room to explore. Now, everyone has space.

“We wanted to make sure people had their best experience … plus it’s good for staff morale to have a break in the middle of the day, reset the museum, and start fresh again.”

The museum is growing, with a major addition due this fall. A 40-foot Luckey Climber, the same kind of dramatic net structure as the one located in the lobby of Boston’s Children’s Museum, will open in October. The project cost $750,000, all raised by the museum, and includes LED-lit platforms integrated into the safety netting.

Cole offered a caveat for prospective visitors: Maker Fest is a different kind of day at the museum. Some exhibits will be open, but the galleries won’t be running at full capacity. The event has more of a block party energy than a typical museum visit — louder, more crowded, organized around doing rather than observing.

There are also extras like multiple food trucks for an event that happens both inside and outside. “So if you’re looking for a regular day of playing in a museum, this might not be the best one,” Cole said. “But it’s also really fun, and you’ll get a lot of unique experiences.”

NH Maker Fest
When: Saturday, June 6, 10 a.m.-3 p.m.
Where: Children’s Museum of New Hampshire, 6 Washington St., Dover
Tickets: $5, childrens-museum.org

Featured photo: NH Maker Fest. Courtesy photo.

The Phil presents wide-ranging music

Folk Voices and Fantasies, an upcoming afternoon of classical music from the New Hampshire Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by The Phil’s Music Director Mark Latham, offers three works from three composers, each from a distinctly different corner of the world.

What binds together Igor Stravinsky’s Petrushka, Max Bruch’s Scottish Fantasy, and Carlos Chávez’s Sinfonía India isn’t style or era but instinct, Latham explained in a recent Zoom interview.

“The main connecting thread is composers using folk music from their native traditions,” he said.

For Petrushka, Stravinsky borrowed Russian folk songs and even a few German waltzes; most of its melodies weren’t his to begin with. Bruch did the same with Scottish reels and airs, and Chávez went even further, working not from memory or nostalgia but from within a living indigenous Mexican tradition.

To honor that, an orchestra member hand-built a traditional güiro for the performance. The notched hollowed-out gourd is usually played with tines and produces a ratchet sound. “Because the percussion element in the Chavez is very strong and uses a lot of Mexican instruments,” Latham said. “It’s trying as much as we can to use those instruments.”

It reflects a late 19th- and early 20th-century trend of composers “very interested to explore what was going on musically in their native arena,” Latham offered. “Bartok, for instance, was going out into the countryside before the advent of recorded sounds, actually notating local folk songs and that kind of thing … very early musicology.”

The concert begins with Stravinsky’s tale of a carnival puppet who turns out to feel things too deeply for his own good. It’s an exhilarating choice for an opener, and it concludes not with a bang but with a ghost: Petrushka, apparently killed, reappears hovering over the theater in the final bars, leaving the question of his humanity forever unresolved.

A superimposed C major and F-sharp major, called the Petrushka Chord, recurs throughout the work. It denotes the main character’s many dualities: puppet and person, ridiculous and suffering, knowable and unknown. The motif became a go-to for composers like John Williams, who used it for his “Theme From Jaws.”

Fifteen-year-old violin prodigy William Yeh solos on Scottish Fantasy. Yeh is a student at the Juilliard School in New York and last year’s Sempre Musick Competition winner. The Phil has collaborated with Sempre Musick for the past few years, Latham said. “These days, the Grand Winner plays their piece with the New Hampshire Philharmonic the next season.”

The piece is a back-and-forth that Latham described as a conversation. With the young soloist still developing his voice, it has its own particular texture — the orchestra takes its tempo from listening to Yeh, and shapes its phrases around his. “The soloist provides the main musical impetus, and then we answer.”

The evening ends with Chávez’s percussion finale and its offbeat sparks that, Latham said, “aren’t quite agreeing with the rhythm,” and a frenetic ending that inspires both audience and orchestra. “It’s like a rock drummer … ‘Let’s just go for it at the very end,’ right? It’s percussion going crazy.”

Latham has made the case throughout The Phil’s current season that classical music belongs to everyone. Folk traditions aren’t less powerful when they’re arranged for an orchestra, and the barriers people feel entering a concert hall are mostly imaginary.

“If people at a classical music concert would be more like a rock concert,” Latham said, “that’d be fantastic.”

Beyond that, he believes music is a salve for challenging times, remembering Romanian conductor Sergiu Celibidache’s observation in an interview with a French journalist 30 or 40 years ago. “Beauty is a stepping stone to freedom,” he recalled him saying.

Latham added that the act of creation is, more often than not, a political one.

“Some people say, ‘art for art’s sake’ — I’m not one of them,” he said, citing Leonard Bernstein’s words in the aftermath of his close friend John F. Kennedy’s assassination. “This will be our reply to violence; to make music more intensely, more beautifully, more devotedly than ever before.”

Folk Voices and Fantasies: Music Rooted in Culture and Imagination
When: Saturday, May 30, and Sunday, May 31, at 2 p.m.
Where: Seifert Performing Arts Center, 44 Geremonty Drive, Salem
Tickets: $5-$35, nhphil.org

Featured photo: Clockwise from top left Sean Williams, Pauline Berger, Margot Lasalle, Anna Multone. Courtesy photos.

Nashua International Sculpture Symposium offers access to artists

In front of a revitalized Civil War-era cotton mill, four sculptors are doing something unique: creating their work in full view of the public. Through early June, Pauline Berger of Germany, Margaux LaSalle of France, Anna Moultoni of Italy and Sean Williams of Barre, Vermont, are shaping stone into permanent public sculpture.

For close to two decades it’s been a rite of spring, and the longevity of the Nashua International Sculpture Symposium has changed the scope of the event’s debt to the city. This year the organization behind it has a new name: the Nashua Sculpture Project. It’s a subtle but telling shift in identity.

“We had 56 sculptures as of last year,” Executive Director Gail Moriarty said in a recent phone interview. “When I looked at them, it became pretty clear to me that we need to change our focus from just being three weeks in May to the care and preservation of our collection.”

So much outdoor sculpture, spread across Nashua’s parks and public spaces, represents an enormous civic investment and an equally large maintenance responsibility. The new organizational framework puts stewardship of its legacy alongside the annual event itself.

The Symposium remains the same, Moriarty continued, but what’s different is a focus on care and restoration for the rest of the year. It means expanded programming, including fundraising events, family classes, stone-carving workshops and the like.

“Art is everything,” she said. “The Nashua Sculpture Project is about art in every form.”

Annual sculptor selection was a peer-driven process, led by Artistic Director Jim Larson. It began with last year’s artists recommending sculptors for the current year. From a compiled list, the board considered individual portfolios, along with what Larson called “less quantifiable considerations.”

Speaking by phone recently, Larson explained what that meant. “We try to consider what Nashua needs, how these artists might enmesh into our community, and how they’ll serve Nashua. We try to create a group that will work well together … have similar perspectives in some ways, but also varying perspectives.”

This year’s guiding theme for the four sculptors is “Gathering Momentum.” It was chosen as a principle, not a prescription. Artists are free to interpret the phrase wherever their instincts lead them. For Larson, though, they are impactful words that reflect his convictions about art’s role in the present age.

“I and many other sculptors share this idea that artists today should be working at a scale that matches the level of destruction we see in the world right now,” he said. “If we are going to keep up with that, we need as much momentum and as much power and forward movement as we can muster. That’s what it’s about.”

All four sculptors this year will work in stone. It’s a deliberate choice and, for Larson, also philosophical for a symposium that requires materials built to last. A hundred-year maintenance-free lifespan is their stated goal, but the reasoning goes deeper than durability, Larson believes.

“We’re not making luxury objects for Nashua, we’re not trying to boost property values,” he said. “We are trying to make livable, meaningful artwork for people. That means we have to work with humble materials that are accessible, and stone is the most humble material we have. It’s just a piece of the ground.”

Larson encourages the curious to come out to see it happen, to experience what he considers a rare opportunity.

“It’s so hard to just have a conversation with an artist, because they’re not out in public working, and this is the chance,” he said. “If you want to go talk to an artist, just show up and they’ll talk to you. If you really want a long conversation, bring a meal and sit down and have dinner with them.”

For details on buying a meal for a sculptor, visit the Project’s website, or contact the organization for information on other ways to support the effort. Larson offered a final thought on why watching enduring art come to life is a valuable and truly enlightening experience.

“In America, manual [and] demanding labor is really rare to see. The widespread view of hard physical labor right now is that it’s an unfortunate byproduct of having to afford an expensive American life. But for these artists, this version of work is one of the most joyous things that they get to do.”

19th Nashua International Sculpture Symposium
When: Mondays through Saturdays, through June 3, from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.
Where: Picker Artists Studios, 3 Pine St., Nashua
More: nashuasculpturesymposium.org
Closing ceremony – Saturday, June 6, at 1 p.m.

Featured photo: Clockwise from top left Sean Williams, Pauline Berger, Margot Lasalle, Anna Multone. Courtesy photos.

Amoskeag Quilters Guild gathers for biennial bash

Every other year the Amoskeag Quilters Guild holds a two-day event to showcase the creative skills of its 160 members. On May 16 and May 17 at Manchester’s Memorial High School, 220 quilts will be on display, ranging from heirloom-quality masterworks to the earnest first efforts of brand-new quilters.

The latter aspect is important. It’s not a juried show — every skill level is welcome, among participants and viewers. This is a celebration of a community and its shared passion, according to the event’s chairperson; a joyous occasion for an organization that formed back in 1988.

“We’ve encouraged every member to put in a quilt,” quilter Kristi Parker said by phone recently. “We’ve got some people who’ve been quilting for 40-plus years and are very skilled, and there are others who’ve only been quilting six months. We’ve welcomed all levels of ability.”

That intentional inclusivity is part of what sets a Guild show apart from prestigious competitions. “When you go to a juried show, it’s like going to a professional basketball game,” Parker said. “You appreciate the players, you love being there, but most people aren’t ever going to attain that level.”

A Guild event, she continued, is an experience grounded in the possible. “You see amazing works and think, ‘I can aspire to that,’ and you also see someone who’s only been quilting six months. They’ve put their heart and soul into something, and it’s encouraging. Because you think, ‘I can do that.’”

Parker came to quilting in a roundabout way. Growing up in a rural town, she kept busy making clothes. In her teens she decided to make a quilt with collected fabric scraps.

“I had no idea there were rules or guidelines,” she said. “Traditional quilts are made from cotton, but my first one has everything from polyester and double knit to velvet.”

The hand-stitching of her childhood has given way to high-tech equipment like a long-arm quilting machine, a computer-guided, large-format device that’s transformed quilt-making in recent years. It was used to make this year’s raffle prize, a quilt that began as paper pieced blocks that individual Guild members worked on prior to assembly.

Speaking of high-end, a big-ticket prize at this year’s show is a $1,800 Bernina 335 sewing machine from Pintuck & Purl in North Hampton, a donation that wowed Parker.

“When they offered us that machine to raffle off, my jaw dropped to the floor,” she said. “If somebody wins it … they’ve hit the jackpot.”

Proceeds from the show benefit the New England Quilt Museum in Lowell, Mass. However, the raffle for the “Tastefully Tula” collaborative quilt raises funds in support of Kidneys for Kindness. The nonprofit organization advocates for organ donation, supports donors and raises awareness about kidney health.

Other Guild charitable efforts include Cases of Caring, with members making and donating pillowcases to local groups to bring to children, veterans and shut-ins. Every other year, the Guild hosts a workshop to mass produce them, and kits can be picked up at monthly meetings and returned.

There’s also the Quilted Gift program. Members receive pre-batted and backed kits for quilting and bouncing, along with other completed tops and quilts that members have finished and wish to donate. The Committee then distributes them to people in need. More than 850 quilts have been donated to various programs and charities in the past five years.

This cohesiveness is a big part of what draws Parker to the organization, and it has less to do with fabric than with people.

“One of my favorite parts of quilting, besides the creativity, is the community,” she said. “Having the chance to meet people, to develop friendships — that’s really what drives me.”

Amoskeag Quilters Guild Show
When: Saturday, May 16, and Sunday, May 17), 10 a.m.-5 p.m.
Where: Manchester Memorial High School, 1 Crusader Way, Manchester
Tickets: $10 at the door, free for ages 12 and under
More: amoskeagqg.org

Featured photo: Courtesy photo.

NH Renaissance Faire returns

Long before Danny Scialdone became general manager of the New Hampshire Renaissance Faire, he was better known as court jester Aspergillius Gleekman, mirthfully roaming the annual event. That’s not changed, and when Scialdone is called to answer a problem at the Faire these days, he still arrives with bells on.

It’s a visage not everyone is prepared for, he recalled in a recent phone interview as preparations for this year’s Faire in Fremont were underway.

“Some of the looks that I get from the people when I come walking up,” he said. “I’m like, ‘Hi, I’m Danny, how can I help you?’ and they’re like, ‘Oh, OK, you’re the manager? OK.’”

That blend of whimsy, warmth and genuine community spirit is exactly what the New Hampshire Renaissance Faire is all about. It’s why thousands of visitors make the trip each spring to step back in time, eat an enormous turkey leg, and lose themselves in a world of knights, aerial artists, fairies and more.

The Faire has come a long way since its founding in 2005, when it launched with a modest lineup of about nine vendors. This year roughly 170 merchants and performers will fill the fairgrounds. Many are traveling from across New England and the East Coast, with some coming all the way from Michigan, Ohio and beyond.

The growth reflects a hunger for the immersive, cosplay time travel experience provided there. “In the early 2000s, the only New England state that didn’t have a Renaissance Faire was New Hampshire,” Scialdone said, and founder Shannon McCracken-Barber from Farmington wanted to change that.

Scialdone came on board in 2012, a year after McCracken-Barber departed.

“It got to be a little bigger than I think she had ever expected it to get, and trying to run it all by herself was getting more and more daunting,” he said. To ensure the Faire continued, she urged the formation of a nonprofit. Three Maples Renaissance Corporation was born.

For curious first-timers unsure of what to expect, Scialdone’s advice is simple: just show up.

“It’s an amazing experience, and it’s hard to actually describe,” he said. “My recommendation is to come out and experience it. Even if it’s the only time that you ever do, I know you’re going to love it.”

The Faire is designed to be a fun family day out, reasonably priced for parents and kids to enjoy without stress. Archery instruction is one of many extras included with admission, offering the chance to learn from a professional bowyer and fire a volley of arrows at a real target. “It’s a very popular activity,” Scialdone noted.

For those who crave more spectacle, the Brotherhood of the Arrow and Sword sets up a fully authentic 15th-century knights’ encampment, complete with armor displays and live, unchoreographed sword fighting. Aerial artists are among Scaildone’s favorite participants, bringing a modern dash of circus flair.

Storytellers, period performers and roving characters fill every corner of the grounds. Scialdone also confirms drumsticks are still very much available, though he warns that as the day winds down so does the supply. “People can be absolutely devastated when our vendor runs out.”

Some of his best memories from past Faires have little to do with planned programming. Last year a soaking rain flooded part of the grounds. The staff referred to the resulting mess as Lake Complain, but two small boys dressed as dragons were overjoyed and spent the afternoon gleefully splashing through mud and puddles.

A crowd of onlookers laughed and filmed their spontaneous romp, turning a potential disaster into a fun memory.

“That’s the biggest take back for me,” Scialdone said. “Just getting to stand there and watch people have such a blast.” He’s also proud of the Faire’s success as a fundraiser.

Since the current team took over, the Faire has donated more than $700,000 to causes including the New Hampshire Food Bank, Meals on Wheels of Rockingham County, Exeter Hospital’s Beyond the Rainbow cancer recovery program, and several others. “Our entire goal and purpose of doing what we do,” he said, “is to help out people in need in New Hampshire.”

2026 New Hampshire Renaissance Faire
When: Saturdays (May 9 & 16) and Sundays (May 10 & 17), 10 a.m. – 5 p.m.
Where: Brookvale Pines Farm, 80 Martin Road, Fremont
Tickets: See nhrenfaire.com

Featured photo: Renaissance Faire. Courtesy photo.

For Free Comic Book Day, industry change means more for fans

It’s counterintuitive that bankruptcy would make a company’s big event bigger, but it happened when the distributor that launched Free Comic Book Day went bankrupt last year. The company that bought it, and with the trademark, promised to continue FCBD. However, one distributor, Penguin Random House, broke away and launched a rival version.

Fortunately, customers are the winners in this battle — both events will happen simultaneously. On May 2, stores will hand out titles from both FCBD and the newcomer, Comics Giveaway Day — no strings attached. Michael Boddy, the owner of Collectibles Unlimited in Concord, summed it up thusly: “It sounds different, but it’s going to be the same.”

Actually, it’s better. In 2025 two dozen titles were given away; this year at least 46 will be available for the event, created in 2002 to build interest in comics and, at the time, promote a new Spider-Man movie.

There are two huge events happening in the state, one spilling out from a store into a function hall with dozens of vendor tables, and another that takes over an entire downtown, with a festival’s worth of musical guests during the day.

Collectibles Unlimited

25 South St., Concord, 228-3712, collectiblesunlimited.biz

Hours: 10:30 a.m. – 5 p.m.

A Concord fixture since 1984, taken over in 2005 by Michael Boddy, offering comics, role-playing, board and card games, along with miniatures, paints, coins and bullion. Because the shop skews heavily toward tabletop gaming, FCBD is also a good chance to browse discounted board and role-playing game stock while picking up free comics.

Double Midnight Comics

252 Willow St., Manchester, 669-9636, dmcomics.com/freecomicbookday

341 Loudon Road, Concord, 715-2683, dmcomics.com/freecomicbookday

Hours: 10 a.m. – 5 p.m.

Held in The Factory on Willow event hall adjacent to its store, Double Midnight’s Manchester event is one of the largest FCBD celebrations in northern New England. There’s a large vendor floor, artist alley, cosplay contest, and panel/signing area, and the retail space is also open for shopping.

Visitors can grab the official free comics, meet creators like illustrator JK Woodward and Legacy of Valor’s Kurt Springs, check out movie cars like a Back to the Future DeLorean or a Jurassic Park Jeep or participate in the 15th annual costume contest, and watch Clemenzi Crusaders perform “the soundtrack of pop culture.”

“We invite everybody to come on down and experience the events — we go all out for this,” Chris Proulx, owner of Double Midnight along with his brother Scott, said by phone recently. “We love comics, and we want to have a good time … it’s a great event for families to drop in for the day.”

Double Midnight’s Concord location will also hand out official titles (with a per-person limit). It’s a convenient stop for those coming from the Lakes Region or anyone looking to avoid the larger Manchester crowd while scoring a free comic book or graphic novel like Chris Proulx’s pick from this year’s batch, Dungeon Crawler Carl.

Jetpack Comics & Games

37 N. Main St., Rochester, 330-XMEN (9636), jetpackcomics.com/fcbd-cgd

Hours: 10 a.m. – 7 p.m.

Founded by Ralph DiBernardo, Jetpack Comics launched one of the state’s signature FCBD celebrations. The event has grown into a full-day bash in downtown Rochester, with a mini-music festival and a late night afterparty. There’s even a custom city-only title: Dungeon Crawler Carl with a bespoke cover.

A citywide comic book scavenger hunt offers kids, teens and adults special titles at participating downtown businesses. Extras come with the purchase of a $10 Power Up Band. Benefiting Rochester Performance and Arts Center, it includes admission to the seven-band Rock n’ Roll Playground Festival and Curmudjun’s afterparty concert. At official FCBD host Rochester Opera House, there’s a vendor hall and The Turtle Den. Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird created Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles in nearby Dover, and DiBernardo premiered their first comic book at a convention in 1984. “We’ve had close ties forever,” DiBernardo said. “It’s like a big Turtle party.”

Merrymac Games and Comics

550 DW Highway, Merrimack, 420-8161, merrymacgc.com

Hours: Monday and Tuesday 10 a.m. – 7 p.m., Wednesday through Saturday 10 a.m. – 9 p.m., Sunday noon – 6 p.m.

As in past years, Merrymac’s giveaway is paired with creator appearances, including former Black Caravan co-publisher Rich Woodall, also known for his work on The Bloody Ring of Dracula, Gods of Brutality and others. He’s also worked on covers for Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Powerpuff Girls and Masters of the Universe.

Also appearing is Sara Richard, a New Hampshire-based artist and writer whose work includes comic book covers and book illustrations for DC Comics, Marvel, Dynamite Comics and other publishers, along with other illustration work for DC Collectables, StormKing and The Witch House in Salem, Mass.

Newbury Comics

777 S. Willow St., Manchester, 624-2842

99 Rockingham Park Blvd. (Mall at Rockingham Park), Salem, 890-1380

310 DW Highway (Pheasant Lane Mall), Nashua, 888-0720

The big New England retailer is listed as a participant on the FCBD website.

Pop Culture Cards Comics and Collectibles

66 Route 27, Raymond, 244-1850, popculturenh.com

Along with comic book giveaways, there will be regular gaming going on. At 10:30 a.m., author Mike Marks will sign copies of the first issue of Helsing Files, his detective and vampire thriller funded by a Kickstarter campaign.

Stairway to Heaven Comics

105 Gosling Road, Newington, 319-6134, stairwaytoheavencomics.com

Hours: 10 a.m. – 6 p.m.
Owner Brad Gile expects a “fun, festive atmosphere,” with guests including local creators HG Bradley and Jeff Lorentz (Skin of My Teeth, My Coworker is a Vampire) with Katie McMahon returning from last year. Luke Fletcher will show off Overpower, a game that’s been refreshed from its ’90s beginnings, and give away an Invincible card.

Featured photo: Photo by Zombie Leader of Carolyn and Christian Lopes as Jubilee and Wolverine browsing at Double Midnight.