Category: Art & Theater

Folk show featuring banjos and ballads

By Zachary Lewis
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Jeff Warner presents Granite Staters with songs from America’s past. He will be performing his program “Banjos, Bones, and Ballads” in Brentwood on Sunday, Nov. 10, and again in Lake Sunapee on Monday, Nov. 11.

“I’m working right now with New Hampshire Humanities in what they call their Humanities to Go program,” Warner said. “I get to do maybe 20 programs a year for nonprofit organizations under the aegis of the New Hampshire Humanities. I have four programs for them that I do since I’m an old-time musician or a folk singer, as you will.”

Each program features a specific theme of traditional music. “One is on old-time songs for kids, one is on old songs of New Hampshire, one is what I call ‘Banjos, Bones, and Ballads,’ which is an overview of American traditional music, and … logging songs and the history of logging in the Northeast. I’m New York City-bred, but I’ve been living in New Hampshire since 1997.”

The love of folk music was alive in his home when he was a child.

“I was raised by two people, my family, Anne and Frank Warner … who from early times in the ’30s were interested in collecting American traditional folk songs in rural eastern American places like the Outer Banks of North Carolina and the mountains of North Carolina,” Warner said. Their musical archaeology drove them through the country. “They also found a great number of old songs from loggers in the Adirondack Mountains and then specifically to my program ‘Songs of Old New Hampshire’ here.”

One source was particularly valuable in New Hampshire.

“They met a woman named Lena Bourne Fish in Jaffrey, New Hampshire, in 1941. She had been born in 1879 and knew hundreds of old songs without being able to read music. She just knew them from memory … she learned in her family and community,” Warner said.

“So I worked with her repertoire that she taught. I work with that repertoire and other songs that I have learned about New England culture and New England history to form a program, ‘Songs of Old New Hampshire,’ that features Mrs. Fish as the central part in the songs that she sang, old world ballads and new songs formed in America.”

Warner can perform a capella, the way many of these songs were originally sung, or with accompaniment.

“I add on to it with old-time instruments that I play, which include banjo and guitar, English concertina, and a bunch of what I call pocket instruments, which are old-time instruments kids used to play, like bones and spoons.”

His “Banjos, Bones, and Ballads” program is a favorite.

“Banjos, because that’s fun. Bones, because it’s one of the instruments that I play, representing old-time instruments that didn’t cost a lot of money that people used to play, including kids,” Warner said.

“I love to show kids what other kids might have played in 1800 or 1900, including spoons and a little metal instrument you play with your teeth…. Little things like that that were simple and fun and kids used to play and I can play them and show them how to do it”

Warner has a clear purpose for what he does, he said, “wanting to make sure I give people a sense of how old-time songs were conveyed by word of mouth in days before radio and phonograph players, and how people tended to learn from their families and then sing the songs in their community, so that the big folk song revival, which happened in the 1960s and all, becoming commercial music with the Kingston Trio and Bob Dylan and all those, is a rarefied thing. Mostly these songs have just stayed on past an oral tradition, changing as they go from community to community and state to state, and becoming representative of those communities and states whence they came.”

Banjos, Bones, and Ballads
Hosted by Brentwood Historical Society
When: Sunday, Nov. 10, at 2:15 p.m.
Where: Brentwood Historical Society Museum, 140 Crawley Falls Road, Brentwood

Hosted by Sunapee Seniors
When: Monday, Nov. 11, at 1 p.m.
Where: Lake Sunapee United Methodist Church, 9 Lower Main St.

nhhumanities.org

Featured image: Jeff Warner. Courtesy photo.

Positive Street Art event includes Burns doc preview

By Michael Witthaus
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The role of technology was an important element of Leonardo da Vinci’s genius, and it’s the focus of an upcoming event at Positive Street Art in Nashua. The free session will guide attendees in the use of camera obscura to create drawings. It will also include a 25-minute preview of Ken Burns’ new PBS documentary, Inside the Mind of a Genius.
First clearly described in da Vinci’s Codex Atlanticus, a 12-volume set that included diagrams of flying machines, camera obscura was a tool that employed the reflection of light through an aperture to make art in perfect perspective. The Dutch master Johannes Vermeer is said to have used it as an aid in his realistic paintings.
If an object “is illuminated by the sun and a small hole is drilled in the wall of a room in a building facing this, which is not directly lighted by the sun, then [those objects] will send their images through this aperture and will appear, upside down, on the wall facing the hole,” da Vinci wrote. “You will catch these pictures on a piece of white paper.”
Four artists will lead the proceedings: Amara Phelps, Seana McDuffie, Cecilia Ulibarri and Yasamin “Yaz” Safarzadeh.
They have diverse backgrounds; Phelps fronts alt-rock band Cozy Throne and is also a freelance writer, McDuffie is an ex-Marine and self-described “vibes stylist,” Ulibarri is Positive Street’s co-founder, and Safarzadeh is a painter, writer and the coordinator of Inspired By Leonardo da Vinci.
In a recent phone interview Safarzadeh explained the event, offered in partnership with PBS. It’s part of an ongoing series that aims to spark creativity through “watching a film of the chosen famous artist and/or joining a creative painting session to explore inspiration through the artist’s/culture’s style and history,” according to an ad on the organization’s website.
“We’ll be leading them into making these viewfinders, and then having them go find their own setting within this scene, whether it’s people or the geometry of the architecture, so they can really take these tools that scientists and Renaissance men were using, and use them themselves. Maybe these powers of observation can then influence them in their lives.”
Safarzadeh looks at camera obscura as a path to creative intersectionality. “People really do themselves a disservice by not pulling the maths and the sciences into their artmaking,” she said. “We could really strengthen our creative economy and our practices by … dispelling some of this.”
It’s wrong to call it a cheating tool, she continued. Camera obscura is a means to an end, and the human eye will always capture more than technology can.
“You look at the Vermeer, those shadows, those hues, it’s because he looked at it through this camera obscura,” she said. “This breaks down a really scary notion … a crowd of people, a person sitting, or whatever. The audience will capture in their viewfinder, in their little pinhole, break it down into a much simpler structure that they can then document.”
This method builds a bridge that goes both ways. It helps artists who are challenged by mathematics, and the more analytical types who are trying to find their way to creativity. For someone who is mathematically inclined, camera obscura can help them find their way to art by understanding the role of their discipline in art.
The event continues Positive Street Art’s mission of bringing art to a wide range of people. One reason there are four instructors is to allow groupings; each cluster reflects different outlooks, with no more than a dozen in each. “We serve so many different demographics,” Safarzadeh said. “You need to discover your own voice through the materials … it’s going to be based on the individual, what’s going to come out of it.”

Inspired by Leonardo da Vinci
When: Friday, Nov. 8, 6 p.m.
Where: Positive Street Art, 48 Bridge St., third floor, Nashua
Tickets: Free (donations accepted) at tinyurl.com/3pjsvsbp

Featured image: Camera Obscura Diagram, c. 1646 by Athanasius Kircher (from WikiMedia Commons)

Edgar Allan Poe’s thriller gets a detective thriller adaptation

By Zachary Lewis
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Jack Neary is an experienced playwright who has adapted many horror stories for the theater, like those of Frankenstein and Dracula. His resume is filled with film and television experience, including Law and Order and the film Black Mass.

Neary spoke to the Hippo about his upcoming adaptation of The Fall of the House of Usher presented by the Players’ Ring in Portsmouth starting Thursday, Oct. 31, and running until Sunday, Nov. 17.

“Many people have read The Fall of the House of Usher by Edgar Allan Poe,” Neary said, “and it’s a very dense, spooky, just the kind of story that you can take many, many different ways, and there’ve been many variations of it on film, on stage, so I decided to make it accessible to a theater audience.”

By placing the story in a familiar world Neary is able to bring the audience in at the beginning. “Which I think is very important,” he said. “By setting it in Boston, Massachusetts, in the 1930s and making it a bit of a detective thriller … I’m able to tell the story and take advantage of all the very horrific aspects of the story that Poe created.

Do not expect goblins on this Halloween opening night, but the horror will still be real.

“It’s not really a supernatural story. It’s not that kind of a Halloween story. The horror is very personal, very human,” Neary said.

His Poe adaptation had been alive for some time before Neary decided to devote time to it again. “It’s been around for a while, but I haven’t worked on it myself for about 20 years. I haven’t directed it myself for a long time.”

Neary understands the craft inside and out. “I’ve adapted. I think, because I started out as an actor and then evolved into directing, and in the meantime I started as a playwright, I think I have a pretty good understanding of how to tell a story on stage. And if the story has already been told by a writer, I think I have a pretty decent awareness of how to take what the writer had in mind, what the intention was, bring it to the stage and then provide it with the kind of tension and suspense that these stories need.”

He has also adapted a lot of children’s plays. “I think I’m more a man of the theater than I am of anything else.”

He feels at home at The Players’ Ring. “I’ve been fortunate enough to work with folks who, while they do have day jobs, they really could be professional actors. For some reason I just have been able to work with folks who are that good,” Neary said.

He mentioned The Players’ Ring’s leader, Margherita Giacobbi, who is the Executive Director. “What Margherita has been able to do at The Players’ Ring is to create a really diverse schedule of plays,” he said. “They do a lot of brand new things. She has been able in the two or three years of her stewardship to bring a variation of audience demographics to The Players’ Ring,” he said.

Neary likes to put on his plays for everybody.

“The stuff that I write is really mainstream audience oriented. I don’t go out on a limb too, too far in terms of experimentation or anything like that. Although Usher kind of does take a couple of steps in that direction in terms of the storytelling.”

The Fall of the House of Usher
Where: The Players’ Ring Theatre, 105 Marcy St., Portsmouth
When: Thursday, Oct. 31, through Sunday, Nov. 17. Halloween opening night: 9 p.m. Shows at 7 p.m. on Thursdays; 7:30 p.m. on Fridays and Saturdays; 2:30 p.m. on Saturdays and Sundays.
Tickets: $29 general admission; $26 for students, 65+, military and first responders.
Info: playersring.org
A Players’ Ring email described the show as PG-13.

Featured image: Jocelyn Duford and Thomas Carnes in The Fall of the House of Usher. Photo by Ben Bagley Media.