meet me at the silo

How I Got Into Puppetry

2011-12-11T10:19:00.001-05:00

"How does a puppet come into being? It happens when someone sees an image of himself, or some aspect of the world, in the crooked glass of his imagination and gives it form, movement, and sound. Someone has the urge to bring his drawing to life and make it move and talk. Or maybe he thinks of a sound first and gives it shape and movement. Or it may be an intangible, like the force of the wind, that inspires him and he gives it a shape and character. The primitive urge still applies." - Bil Baird, The Art of the Puppet

Yeti puppet by Krista Dalby

Bil Baird's attempt to explain how a puppet comes into being could just as easily be a response to how a puppeteer comes into being. "How did you get into puppetry?" is a question I'm often asked. I usually give a short answer, one that is not very truthful but is efficient for cocktail parties or classroom conversations. I say that I tried out regular theatre and found it boring. It's not much of an answer. What follows is the rather long but far more accurate response.

From my Dad: "This is Krista's first puppet performance - she was about
4 years old - I brought a kit called DUSO (Developing Understanding of
Self and Others) home from grad school [he was studying Psychology]
and the world has never been the same."

Like many other North American kids in the 1970s, I grew up with the Muppets, who were as famous at that time as any other celebrity. When I watched Sesame Street or The Muppet Show I completely bought in to the fantasy, rarely considering that the characters were puppets, objects being manipulated by humans. These oddballs clearly had an influence on me, as I named my first pets after them; a trio of goldfish I called Ernie, Bert and Big Bird (epic misnomer).

I grew up in Calgary, and in high school our drama class took a field trip to Lunchbox Theatre, where we saw marionettist Ronnie Burkett perform one of his first shows, Virtue Falls; I've seen many of his other shows in the 20 years since. I loved drama class, but hated high school, so I dropped out.

Punch and Judy puppets by Krista Dalby

A few years later, I found myself in the theatre program at Mount Royal College, where I took classes in costume- and set-making, stage management, and a variety of others on the technical side of things. For an assignment in our props class, my class partner and I built an evil wasp marionette; it was pretty well-made, from what I can recall. I graduated from college and decided that I never wanted to do theatre again, and proceeded to spend a whole bunch of years working dead-end jobs, traveling, and partying. I wasn't doing a whole lot creatively, but I was writing.

Even sock puppets like to get their drink on.

Eventually I went to Concordia University in Montreal and got a degree in Creative Writing. I wanted to be a novelist. No, a short story writer. No, for real this time, a screenwriter. Or maybe a tv writer? Who was I kidding? Resistance was futile. The theatre dragged me back and I started writing plays. Most of them were pretty terrible, but then they started getting better.

After university I moved to Toronto, where I got a Real Job and paid off my student loans. One day I heard that artist Lisa Pijuan-Nomura was holding a puppetry workshop. I had no idea what to expect but soon discovered her beautiful vision: a flock of puppeteers would create small portable puppet shows in cardboard box theaters. During one of the famously fun Red Cabarets, we would simultaneously descend on individual tables and perform short puppet shows. I had never heard of anything like it but I'm adventurous and I was eager to give it a try. My show was about two formerly conjoined twins; one was about to depart for space camp and the other was having severe separation anxiety. The performances began and the cacophony was unbelievable, the delighted surprise of the audience and the energy of the puppeteers were a potent mix. I'd never considered myself much of a performer, but when I performed my puppet show, I was delighted to discover that it wasn't about me at all. My audience was watching these two freaky little dolls being moved around in a cardboard box. And they were riveted.

This was awesome.

The possessed look on my face says it all.

That was the night I fell in love with puppetry.

Milé reads a book to LittleMilé (puppet by Krista Dalby)

Some time before this I had fallen in love with a man. Two years later, Milé and I moved in together. He was living in a tiny third floor apartment (which we called The Shoebox) in Toronto's West end, and the day I moved in with him I met his downstairs neighbor, David Anderson. I knew that David was a theatre person, so I suggested that we have dinner and get to know each other. Our dinner date rolled around, and when Milé and I showed up, David was totally distraught; his producer had just quit, and he had a show opening in just a few weeks. As it so happened, I had just left my Real Job and had no immediate prospects, perhaps I could help him out for a few weeks? I was hired over dinner that night, and wound up working with David at Clay & Paper Theatre for the next four years.

David Anderson of Clay & Paper Theatre

Clay & Paper creates outdoor theatre, parades and festivals using a myriad of puppetry styles, from giant puppets to hand puppets, and everything in between. David and I wrote four plays together (soon to be five!), and I produced all of the company's shows and events from 2006 to 2010. This was where my true education in puppetry took place. David had been creating public space performances since the sixties, and there was no idea that was too crazy. Turn a wheelbarrow into a puppet herd of race horses? No problem. Form a bicycling-oriented puppet squad? Sounds perfectly reasonable. Burn twenty-foot skeleton sculptures in the park? Terrific! I wrote, I produced, I built, I performed, I led workshops, and over the years organized hundreds of people.

That's me walking my dead frog in a baby carriage,
representing The Fear of Species Extinction,
At Clay & Paper's annual Night of Dread

Thus it was that puppetry conspired to take hold of me. Meanwhile I had met young performer and producer Guy Doucette, who invited me to attend one of his shadow puppetry plays. I was instantly fascinated by the art form. Guy and I became fast friends and soon we were collaborating on shadow plays. I also met teacher Craig Morrison through Clay & Paper; he's a kick-ass designer, and soon he started collaborating with us, too. Over the last four years we've created half a dozen shadow puppetry plays, which have become increasingly complex and refined.

Shadow puppets from The History of Shadows,
designed by Craig Morrison and Guy Doucette

When I made a brief foray into the world of opera with Tapestry New Opera Works, of course my puppet-brain came with me, and I wrote two operas for puppets: The Shaman's Tale (composer Kevin Morse) with giant puppets and shadow puppets, and sock puppet opera The Perfect Match (composer Anthony Young) which was eventually made into a Bravo! short film.

Scene from The Perfect Match

I can't seem to quell this madness for puppets, and now spend a good deal of time doing puppetry workshops through ArtsCan Circle, the Ontario Arts Coucil's Artists in Education program, and at Small Pond Arts.

So there's the long answer to how I got into puppetry. Or perhaps, how puppets got into me?

Scary Clown says "BYE BYE!"
Puppet by Krista Dalby

Puppets Cool for School

2011-12-11T09:57:00.001-05:00

I've just wrapped up two weeks of working at Ossington Old Orchard Public School in Toronto. I worked with two elementary school classes each week, creating shadow puppetry shows that we presented at the end of the week. But the first puppets that we made together, our warm-up-the-imagination puppets, were monsters. I told the kids that these puppets were for the show Grandma and the Electric Sasquatch.

Shadow puppet monsters

And what, they asked, is Grandma and the Electric Sasquatch?
I belong to a shadow puppetry collective, and each year we create shadow plays that feature hundreds of puppets. Inevitably, not every puppet makes it to the final show. The abandoned puppets are collected into a folder with others of their kind. One day in the distant future our collective will stage the theatrical masterpiece Grandma and the Electric Sasquatch, featuring each and every one of these misfit puppets... and the monsters these kids made are now part of this mythology.

Bird puppet from Wolverine Invited the Birds to the Drum Dance, an Innu tale

The real shows that we presented were a little more curriculum-oriented: tales of early Toronto, pioneers, First Nations, and two Innu stories that I heard from elders in Sheshatshiu, Labrador. No sasquatches to be seen, but we did have dancing vegetables, flying houses, and long-legged hunters chasing giant beavers.

Beavers being hunted to extinction in Europe, driving the exploration of Canada

The Three Sisters: Corn, beans and squash, doing a little dance number for
a captive audience of First Nations people and some livestock

My two weeks at Ossington Old Orchard were made possible because I received an Artists in Education grant from the Ontario Arts Council. I'll be bringing shadow puppetry to four more schools in early 2012, tailoring my lessons to meet the classroom goals of each school.

Spot the Lieutenant-Governor of Upper Canada:
that's John Graves Simcoe on the left

Doing puppetry workshops in schools is immensely fun, but there is no mistaking that it is hard work; putting on multiple shows with up to 30 kids behind the shadow screen in under a week is kind of a crazy idea! But I love it, and these school workshops are a good fit for me as I have a lot of down time during the off-season at Small Pond Arts. Being an Artist in Education means I get to make my own schedule and visit other communities. I get to meet hundreds of kids, teach a form of theatre that is new to them, and infuse them with the love of puppets.

The Future: a flying house and a flying car, of course

The Artists in Education program is invaluable; it allows the kids of this province discover different art forms, provides professional development for teachers, and gives artists the chance to share what they love while making a living. Arts funding in Canada is increasingly under threat, and I am more thankful than ever that this program exists and that I can be a part of it.

Logo

2011-12-04T20:51:00.001-05:00

Click on the logo above to read a bit about what went into its creation.

I left a piece of myself behind (and a whole lot of puppets)

2011-11-21T21:11:00.001-05:00

Ijust returned from my second trip to Labrador with ArtsCan Circle. ArtsCan Circle sends teams of volunteer musicians andartists to remote Canadian Indigenous communities to make art and music with First Nations kids (you can read about my first triphere)... And I feel like I left a piece of myself behind.

Self-Portrait with Stick

Mytravel mates were David Anderson and Mike Stevens. David is the ArtisticDirector of Clay & Paper Theatre, where I worked for 4 years beforestarting Small Pond Arts with Milé. The stories David told me over the yearsabout his trips with ArtsCan were the reason that I wanted to get involved. Mike is a musician and the founder of ArtsCan; he’s such an interestingguy that a documentary about him, A Walk in my Dream, is premiering December 2, 2011 in Toronto.

In the days before thetrip, I was sewing like crazy, turning the fabric from this year’s silo banner into dozens of hand puppets.

While sewing I listened to Thomas King’s CBCMassey Lectures, The Truth About Stories, A Native Narrative. It is some ofthe most compelling writing I've ever experienced: hilarious, political, personal,and profoundly moving. It touches on theplethora of issues faced by First Nations people: racism, poverty, a cruel anddeeply unfair history… and was a perfect reminder of why I was volunteering to spendthe week in Sheshatshiu.

Kingwrites, "We maintain and tolerate poverty not because we believe adversitymakes you strong, but because we're unwilling to share." I’mno saint, but I do know how to share. So off I went.

We pulled into the school parking lot on Monday morning and there was acertain comfort in returning to this place. I knew where I was. I knew why Iwas there. Teachers remembered me, kidsremembered me. I quickly fell into theroutine. The kids loved the hand puppetsI’d brought, making them into fairy tale and comic book characters, affixingbuttons, fabric and the assorted bits that I'd brought along withme.

Arrangements weremade for an elder, Carolyn Andrews, to come in and tell a traditional story, inboth English and Innu-aimun; David and I would work with a Grade 6 class toturn the story into a shadow puppetry play. The grade 9 students whowere her audience fell dead silent while the old woman spoke. This classhad been making music with the looping equipment that Mike had brought withhim, and they would be creating the score for our shadow play.

Mike makes music with some kids using looping equipment

We brought along with usa couple of Flip video cameras. I'm notreally one to endorse products, but these cameras are so simple and sturdy thatI had no qualms about handing them to even the youngest kids and saying"Go make a video.". The cameras have a USB key that popsout so you can plug it right into your computer and watch videos backinstantly.

The sixth gradershad been out swimming when the elder had come in, so we showed them the videoI'd taken of her telling the story, Kautitikumat: The Caribou Hunters.

Wemade a list on the board of the images from the story, both characters and things,and we let the kids choose what they wanted to make. I love doingpuppetry with kids because it is so playful. It exercises the imaginationand kids of all skill levels can succeed. And by succeed I mean have fun.

The art teacher at Sheshatshiu Innu School,John Foster, is a great guy. I spent a few lunch hours at his place innearby Northwest River. His house on the shores of Lake Melville is abeauty of a spot.

David, Mike and I were staying inGoose Bay, about 45 minutes away. Thedays went a little like this: Hotel to school. Puppets puppets puppetsmasks puppets puppets puppets. School tohotel. Occasionally hotel to restaurant, or school to grocery store. Groceries in Goose Bay are expensive, but they do come with complimentarybingo cards.

Drivingdriving driving. Well, Mike wasdriving. I was the backseatpassenger, an hour and a half each day. Backseats are confining. You can see, but not see really well. Kind of like spending a week in someone else's community –you can only see so much, and most of the reality is hidden from view.

Thetrees whizz past me.

The week isso busy that it’s hard to even process it as it’s happening.

We performed theshadow play on Friday four times, presenting it to every other class in the school. I was really impressed by the kids' level of focus when rehearsingand performing the show, I know the repetition of rehearsals and shows can get boring. But these kids were totally on, totally present. I loved seeing them work together, helping each other to remember their cues.

And before I knew it, it was all over. The final bell of the week rang, students and teachers dispersed. As we were getting ready to leave the school a girlfrom the third grade came up to me with the puppet she’d made earlier that day. We talked about puppets; she wanted toknow what other types of puppets there were in the world, and when I would be coming back so we could make more. She hugged me a few times and we said goodbye; then as I was gettingin the car she appeared again, waving and yelling across the parking lot, “Goodbye, Miss!”. I waved back. A ticker tape parade and twelve marching bands couldn't have given me a more magnificent send-off.

The treeswhizz past me. I’m leaving, I’m leaving,and I’m leaving a piece of myself behind...

... and a whole lot of puppets:

I can't wait to go back!

Pecha Kucha

2011-11-01T18:58:00.000-04:00

A few weeks ago, I made a presentation about Small Pond Arts at Kingston Arts Council's Pecha Kucha. Pecha Kucha Night originated in Tokyo, Japan, as an event for young designers to meet, network, and show their work in public. Drawing its name from the Japanese term for the sound of "chit chat", it rests on a presentation format that is based on a simple idea: 20 images X 20 seconds. Artists show 20 of their images, for 20 seconds each. It's a format that makes presentations concise, and keeps things moving at a rapid pace.

It was an evening of presentations devoted to theatre, and I felt a little like the odd one out as the other 6 presenters hailed from more traditional theatre backgrounds; but everyone was very friendly and responsive to my presentation. It was a lot of fun and the fast pace really kept things snappy. A tip of my hat to all the artists featured in my presentation, including those I (doh!) didn't name: Trevor who puppeteered Punch, and musicians néGar, Kori, Shawn, Graydon and Lara.

You can watch my presentation below.

BONUS DRINKING GAME: Take a drink every time I say "Um." You will be loaded by the halfway mark.

What is an Artist Residency?

2011-10-29T09:18:00.001-04:00

Small Pond Arts is, amongst other things, an artistresidency. "Now what," youmight ask, as many people do, "is an artist residency?" At a minimum, residencies provide artists with space to createnew work. At Small Pond, we hope to giveartists much more.

"Supporting today’s artists in the creation of new work is essential to human progress — not as a luxury, not as a leisure activity, but as a vital and necessary force in society. Artists’ communities are not about retreat; they are about advancement. Advancing creativity. Advancing human progress. Advancing the way we examine the world." - artistcommunities.org

In the last year and a half, we have hosted more than 60resident artists. How they have usedtheir time with us is as different as the artists themselves.

Resident artists are given free reign of our beautiful 87-acre farm, located just outside the town of Picton, Ontario, Canada. If you have no idea how big 87 acres is, let’sjust say you could easily fit a neighbourhood or a small town within it. Artists are provided with a private bedroom orspace to camp. Starting in 2012 we willalso have a funky 1967 airstream-like trailer that will be available forrental. We have a barn that can be usedas a studio or rehearsal space from spring through fall; we also use the barn for performances and exhibitions. We have a workshop full of tools and suppliesthat is often a hive of creativity.

Plus, we have more fresh air, green grass, wildflowers and butterflies than you canshake a stick at.

The Small Pond vibe is casual and creative. We have few rules, relying on mutual respectand common sense to lead the way. We eatour meals communally, making room for camaraderie and conversation to blossom. We ask our residents to contribute one hourof chores per day – and other than that, their time is their own.

Some artists paint paintings. Others take photos. Some write plays, some make music, somecreate sculptures. Puppeteers create and performshows. Students make short films. Lots of our visiting artists do more than one thing. Many of them try something new. When they need a break they ride bikes, bakecookies, swing in the hammock, scope out Picton’s thrift stores, take naps,walk in the woods.

We invite resident artists to play an active role in ourfestivals and productions; we have at least one event per month between Juneand October.

They are welcome tocontribute artwork and installations to our artists’ trail. There are no creative limits – our farm is an expansive outdoor gallery to which anyone may contribute.

Milé and I are both artists ourselves, and our goal with Small Pond was tocreate the type of place that we’d want to run away to for an artistic escape.

Judging by the responses from our residents, I think we've succeeded. Here are what a few of them have had to say:

“I couldn’t have possibly imagined what this place would belike, and it blew all of my expectations away. The talented, awesome people who are drawn here fit perfectly into theamazing mould for community you have here.” – A.G.M.

“We had an absolutely amazing time here, we will definitelycount it in among our favourite trips. We don’t want to leave!” – N.M. & K.N.

“I’m so appreciative to have had this experience and get tosee the beauty & love you all put in to this home/center/haven. It was a beautiful week that felt socomfortable, warm & open – like being at the most familiar place I’d neverbeen.” – R.K.

“This has been an inspiring experience for me. The love and hard work that you’ve investedinto Small Pond is fantastic and really left a great impression. Thank you for having me!” – I.L.

We’re currently booking resident artists for 2012. Want to count yourself amongst them? For more info, please visit our website: http://www.smallpondarts.ca/residencies.htm...and start dreaming about the possibilities.

Scarecrow Festival

2011-10-14T21:42:00.000-04:00

This year Small Pond Arts took over the annual Prince Edward County ScarecrowFestival, previously run by our friends at Galloping Goat Gallery. Each year the festival's proceeds benefit a charity, andthis year we chose ArtsCan Circle,an organization that I volunteer with.

We held the event on the Saturday of the Thanksgivingweekend, and the weather was absolutely glorious.

There were a lot of things I loved about this event.

I loved the family vibe, so evident at Thanksgiving when families come together.

I loved the way people worked together. Making a scarecrow is just one of thosethings that is hard to do alone (and not nearly as much fun!). Nobody was crying or rushing or complainingor fighting – everybody was just getting it done, in their own time.

ArtsCan volunteer David Joyce (L), makes a scarecrow
with Executive Director Carol Teal (R)

I loved seeing people exercise their creativity. I don’t think there were too many in thecrowd that would call themselves artists, but everyone was forced to flex theircreative muscles to make their scarecrow.

No two scarecrows were the same, but each had its own kooky charm.

How can a barfing pumpkin be so damn cute?!?

There’s something kind of primal about building theselife-size images of ourselves, something that we all just know how to do…

Time to get topical: #Occupy Wall Street Scarecrow

And of course I loved raising money for ArtsCan Circle. If feels really great to have so much fun ANDget to make a contribution to an awesome charity.

A huge THANKS to our supporters this year: Picton Home Hardware, Second Time Around, County Photographer Phil Norton, Andrew & Emily’s No Frills, Honey Wagon Farms, George Emlaw, Galloping Goat Gallery, City Revival... we couldn't have done it without you!

See you next year!

SAVE THE DATE: Saturday October 6, 2012

Stickfest 2011

2011-09-27T17:23:00.000-04:00

This year's Stickfest was nothing short of amazing.

I absolutely love being part of something that brings communities together worldwide to celebrate and enjoy something so simple and common yet obviously beloved by nearly everyone...all for the low price of One Stick.

I designed the poster for the Picton event (once again proudly held at Small Pond Arts) this year and you can read about its creation on my own blog here.

Now on to the highlights:

The weather this year was gorgeous and there was as much going on outside as inside. Gathered outside (Canada's first!) Museum of the Stick, early birds clamoured around Budgie's latest offering.

Budgie and his daughter, Emerson, inspect the block of ice with sensitive instruments to see if they can detect what they suspect is inside.

Later in the day, Budgie accelerates the removal of his granite stick creation that was frozen within.

This zebra (featuring a stick tail and legs) was brought all the way from Africa to be shown for a limited time in the museum.

There was also a pair of x-rays from a Macedonian hospital revealing stickbones in someone's left and right hand.

This is what a cactus skeleton looks like. These sticks come from the Arizona desert.

This breadstick log cabin was built by Elizabeth Brandeis specifically for this year's Fest from breadsticks she baked herself.

Recently discovered, this poster from the 1996 Stickfest in Montréal, QC (designed and illustrated by Peterson Joseph) was included in the museum's gallery which showcased returning work by Niall Eccles, Carl Wiens, and children from around the world.

Speaking of children's art, this wonderful piece is by local budding artist Mylène Sayers.

Guy Doucette created a shadowy image that folks could literally get into and have their pictures taken.

Above is a kinetic sculpture by local glass artist Vanessa Pandos, which she created using sticks, glass, and a mirror.

Sticky notes! People wrote (and drew) their favourite stick and stuck them on the wall.

The Paint-A-Stick stations were a big hit with families again this year.

Hanging above this painting station is a colourful new stick mobile made by Krista Dalby.

Colin Frizzell, author of The Glory of the Stick, was unable to attend this year, but Guy Doucette performed a reading of that beautiful piece which has now become a mainstay of Picton's Stickfest.

Here I am setting a World Record for the Most Hickory Sticks in the Mouth. It was a gruelling challenge, but with a crowd of over 40 people enthusiastically helping me count the sticks as I placed them gingerly in my mouth one by one, I managed to insert a grand total of 93 hickory sticks. Next year I have to beat 100 (and maybe get the folks from Guinness to officiate).

Belleville chef Kenny Leighton brought his fryer and cooked up some tasty drumsticks and English sausages (served on sticks) for all. The sauce for the drumsticks was pretty awesome.

Here's Guy expertly helping out with the first-time stilt-walking adventure of artist Lisa Morris.

Tammy Thompson facilitated the piece above made by people in the Life Skills Program at PECI.

So that was a small sampling of the visual elements of this year's Festival of the Stick. What's a little difficult to show is the camaraderie between participants and attendees alike that is encouraged by this event. People from all kinds of different walks of life come together to celebrate something as old as trees and realize that, much like sticks, which, although they may be shaped differently from each other, behave differently regarding flexibility and strength, grow differently, sometimes appear strange and twisted, they're all still sticks...and we're all still people and we can come together to be creative and have some fun.

Now we look ahead to next year's grand Silver Jubilee as the International Festival of the Stick celebrates its 25th Anniversary*.

*Like the artwork above says: "That's our story and we're sticking to it."

Back to the Shadowlands

2011-09-01T13:20:00.010-04:00

There have been a few lucky moments in my life as an artist when I've been in the right situation at the right time, surrounded by just the right people to support me, allowing me to work at my full potential. The last couple of weeks have been such a time, as I worked with an incredibly talented and devoted group of collaborators, bringing two shadow puppetry plays to life: The History of Shadows and Doubt Seed, which we presented at Small Pond Arts.

Poster by Milé Murtanovski

We first came up with the idea of The History of Shadows last summer while were developing Doubt Seed (which I wrote about extensively here). Wouldn’t it be cool to tell the history of shadow puppets – with shadow puppets? And to take things one step further – what about the history of shadows themselves? The more I learned about shadow puppetry the more fascinated I became with its long and rich history. Why do we as theatre-makers choose to work in this obscure, ancient form? What is it that attracts us to telling stories with a palette of darkness and light?

Designers Guy Doucette and Craig Morrison in the Shadowlands

shad·ow·lands [shad-oh-landz] noun: A rare mental condition in which one is compelled to make shadow puppets for many consecutive hours, losing all sense of space and time. Often includes paralysis of the fingertips, bloodshot eyes, and prolonged delirium.

I started writing the script while Milé and I were in Arizona last winter. I’ve been writing plays for more than ten years and I am still astonished how some scripts can come so easily, while others can be so difficult. It took me six months to figure out what was going on in The History of Shadows. I immersed myself in research, turning up many fascinating historical facts and anecdotes to include, but I struggled to find the emotional content. Why did this story matter, and how would audiences be able to connect with it on a personal level? The answer clearly lay with the narrator, Professor von Luminous van Murk. I met with my collaborators numerous times over the months to try and unlock this puzzle. Finally, and not a moment too soon, it came to me. Despite all appearances of being a history lesson, it was ultimately a love story, and a tragedy, and these two elements would colour every aspect of the Professor’s lecture. I figured it out just in the nick of time, turning out a final draft from which the designers could design and our narrator could learn his lines.

I, too, spent my time in the Shadowlands. Beer helps.

The History of Shadows takes us on a whirlwind journey around the globe and through time, from the Incas of Machu Picchu to philosopher Plato, the shadow puppet masters of Indonesia, the hated Marquis Etienne de Silhouette, the trendy 18th Century shadow players of Paris’ Caveau du Chat Noir, and many others, demonstrating how the humble, ethereal shadow has shaped our world.

A young Professor Murk travels to Indonesia with Charlotte

Our artist collective is always trying to push the boundaries of our work and try new things. The design of the show by Craig Morrison and Guy Doucette was nothing short of brilliant. It was full of complex, layered and encoded imagery, that perhaps is only fully appreciated with a second or third viewing. It also explores meta-theatrical concepts, such as puppeteers controlling puppets who are puppeteering.

Murk puppeteers Murk and Charlotte

A Balinese shadow puppet comes to life when the eye is cut, therefore it is the last
detail to be added, lest the puppet be witness to its own creation

Being the writer and producer, it seemed like a natural progression for me to add ‘Director’ to my list of duties. In the past our collective has worked without a director, opting for a very democratic, collaborative creative practice. But all of us are interested in improving our craft, and the best way to do that is to have a critical eye on the proceedings. Besides, I realized last year after crawling around on the ground for a week, that I was getting too old to be a shadow puppeteer. My knees protested. My back ached. It was time to move out from behind the screen.

Speaking of screens, our friend David Riley built us a fancy new
shadow screen, which really upped our production values.

Trevor Jablonowski, dear friend and Small Pond regular, did a spectacular job of bringing the Professor to life in his role as narrator. His performance was by turns riveting, hilarious, and heart-breaking. When not performing, Trevor also delivers coffee, barefoot.

The History of Shadows is not exactly a light-hearted puppet show, and I think the audience was relieved when they found themselves watching a more fable-like show in the second half with Doubt Seed. There are some easy laughs in that play, and Guy Doucette’s energetic performance leaves the night on a high note.

Guy Doucette as Wes in Doubt Seed

We had three magical performances; the first two were outside, where the action was underscored by a chorus of a thousand crickets, and we used environmental projections to great effect. The last night of the show we moved indoors to the art barn as the weather was looking a little dicey.

Our performances were accompanied by brilliant musical guest Arlene Bishop, who also appeared recently at Cornography. I love it when we have girls with guitars roving about the farm like wandering minstrels.

Puppeteers backstage on opening night

Six months of planning, two weeks of intensive building and rehearsing while all living together at Small Pond, three nights of performances... and in a blink, somehow it was all over. We were so immersed in the experience of creating the show, were so swept away in the tide of creativity and camaraderie, that it was quite a shock to all of us to have to say an abrupt farewell. With reluctance the hundreds of puppets were carefully packed away.

The puppeteers and I all clung to each other, unwilling to let the magic end. Even now, days later, I miss them all so much. The sound of the crickets is deafening in the absence of their laughter. In the words of Goethe, and as was quoted in The History of Shadows, “Where there is much light, the shadow is deep.” My most profound thanks to my collaborators for shining such a bright light in my life. I can’t wait to do it all over again.

The cast and crew of History of Shadows and Doubt Seed, from left to right:
Front row: Trevor Jablonowski, Craig Morrison, Guy Doucette.
Back row: Krista Dalby, Mo Morrison-Brandeis, sandra henderson, Lauren Hortie.

Thanks to all our helpers - especially Marc Budgie Bourdon, Elizabeth Brandeis and Milé Murtanovski - and to the Ontario Arts Council and Canada Council for the Arts for their financial support.

Relish

2011-08-15T22:31:00.048-04:00

Live daringly, boldly, fearlessly. Taste the relish to be found in competition - in having put forth the best within you.
- Henry J. Kaiser

None so little enjoy themselves, and are such burdens to themselves, as those who have nothing to do. Only the active have the true relish of life.

- William Jennings Bryan

You may ask yourself,
"How did I get here?"

Krista and I just finished canning (in jars, actually) our first batch of "Pappy Relish," a Dalby family recipe I fell in love with while visiting her grandparents years ago. I'm happy to carry on this tradition, but happier to have learned how to successfully make preserves on my first attempt, confidently setting the scene for future canning projects.

But how did we end up with these jars of sweet relish?
Strap yourself in and set the Wayback Machine to December 2010...

Tiny miracles.

Just before Christmas, we attended the Busy Hands Craft Sale to visit a bunch of friends who had great homemade wares on offer, but, specifically, to get some seeds from another friend, Vicki Emlaw of Vickis Veggies. She had dozens of varieties of vegetable seeds, most of them heirloom varieties, and we scooped up a number of goodies...including cucumbers.

Freshly tilled.

Krista spent weeks out in the cold of March restructuring the garden to be roughly twice the size it was last year. I helped put up the chicken wire and then roto-tilled the soil to prep it for planting when it got warmer (see an action-packed photo in this post).

More tiny miracles.

Meanwhile, many of the seeds we bought were sprouting in our gardening shed, craning towards the faint light of early spring. Like last year we're using only water from our rain barrels (or from the well using indoor taps if we run a little dry like last summer) to water the plants, and we put used coffee grounds from Chesterfield's Homegrown Café and horse manure in the soil to fertilize it before planting (we'll eventually use compost from our bins once it's ready). We're not "certified organic," but we don't use any pesticides or herbicides, opting to grow our food as naturally (i.e. organically) as possible.

Socrates vigilant.

Under the protective watch of our scarecrow, Socrates, the transplanted veggies took hold and flourished, giving us mini-harvest after mini-harvest for weeks...

Sample bounty: July 16.

Clockwise from far left: scapes from the garlic we planted given to me by the Garlic Man; the zucchini that keeps on giving; perfect spinach; the red and green leaf lettuces are a daily harvest; cilantro; basil; beans; and shelling peas.

Sample bounty: August 6.

Heirloom carrots and tomatoes, and...cucumbers. Most of the food we're eating by now comes from our garden. We even managed to feed lots of hungry artists during Cornography with lots of fresh homegrown veggies.

Brookie picks a cucumber.

We're bound to be overrun by something: last year it was lettuce that we were giving away to anyone who visited; this year it's been zucchini, spinach, lettuce again, and recently, it's cucumbers, cucumbers, cucumbers. Delicious, healthy, hearty, gorgeous, crisp, but abundant cucumbers.

How do you solve a problem like cucumbers?

Like, seriously, we get this amount every four or five days.

"We should preserve them: pickle them or something," I said to myself.
"Shut up," I replied.
"No, really, how hard could it be? People have been preserving food for millennia."
"Shut up," I said again, hoping I would leave myself alone (I had paintings to finish!).
"Look, what about that great relish that Krista's grandfather makes? You love it! You could try making it yourself!"
"Hmm, relish..."
"Yes: relish."
"YES. RELISH."

The Pappy Trinity.

His recipe calls for onions, celery, and cucumbers as the main vegetable ingredients. The celery (and, of course, using only natural ingredients) helps to significantly distinguish this relish from, and elevate it above the store-bought stuff.

Here they are, chopped by hand (unfamiliar with our food processor, I was afraid I might end up chopping the veggies too finely with it; I wanted to better control the size of the chunks --and keep the learning-of-many-new-things-all-at-once to a minimum).

Bathtub of vegetables.
(measuring cup included for scale)

Add lots of salt and water for the brine, then refrigerate for 24 hours (or overnight, at least). This keeps the veggies crisp and gives you a whole day to realize and accept what you've just committed yourself to.

Rinse cycle.

Rinse the veggies thoroughly with cold water to get as much of the salty brine off them as you can. Make sure you don't knock over that dish soap into the veg mixture.

Division of overload.

There was too much for the pot, so I split it up to cook better (and make stirring easier). I didn't want the relish to be neon green (via food colouring), so I added turmeric for a yellowish colour (and extra flavour). Meanwhile, the jars were being sterilized in boiling water just out of frame.

Stand by for action.

Krista joined me during the cooking phase and our teamwork made the task of jarring the relish smoother. Plus, we like dancing in the kitchen.

Combien?

We sterilized six jars thinking that would be enough, but we put in two more at the last minute. The initial recipe said it would yield 16 half pint jars, but I increased the quantity of ingredients to use up as many cucumbers as possible (believe it or not, I managed to use up only six of them!).

Seven jars a-boiling.

We filled eight 500mL jars in the end (4L total), but only vacuum-preserved seven (the last one will have been eaten by us by the time you've finished reading this).

Yum.

As the jars cooled, they gave a distinctive and satisfying "pop" as each lid announced the seal was formed well and that that jar of relish would last for a year (or more!) in a cool, dark place.

So there it is. I wish you could taste it. In fact, I haven't tasted it myself just yet, since it's still hot; I'll have to wait until tomorrow morning.

The Small Pond Arts Canning Adventure (to use up all them damned cucumbers) will continue with Bread & Butter Pickles this weekend...

UPDATES:

21 August 2011:

Seven 500mL jars of Bread & Butter Pickles

(pearl onions: yes; cauliflower: no)

26 August 2011:
Seven 1L jars of Garlic Dill Pickles

04 September 2011:
(Twelve of) Thirteen 500mL jars
of Bread & Butter Pickles
(pearl onions: yes; cauliflower: no)

12 September 2011:
(bottom right) Six 1L jars
of Bread & Butter Pickles
(pearl onions: yes; cauliflower: no)
Location: The Pickle Cave

Corn Field of Dreams

2011-08-04T09:25:00.000-04:00

As part of our Cornography event we asked our audience to write down, on corn-shaped pieces of paper, their responses to "My dream for the future of food is..." These dreams were then paraded through the forest, accompanied by a young fiddler, and 'planted' in a field.

We called this The Corn Field of Dreams. I found the responses that people wrote very moving and occasionally hilarious. Here they are.

MY DREAM FOR THE FUTURE OF FOOD IS:

A food system that respects all life – both human and more than human
Stability. No one goes hungry.
That all food will be chemical free and completely organic.
Sustainability, less abuse of animals, more nutrition, less cutting corners, food is the basis of everything; we need to solve our food problems to solve all our problems.
A whole diet, community supported agriculture system.
To grow my own food, all year round, by way of garden and greenhouse. And to prepare all my own and my family’s food, without need to purchase prepared foods.
Millions of small farmers, homesteaders, backyard gardeners.
The end of Walmart and the fair compensation for the hard work of farmers.
Grow my own.
To be able to afford food.
Loootsss of Chinese (x 2! I assume they mean Chinese food?)

A garden for every home
Everyone growing their own goodness!
The onion recognized as the true hero it is.
?
(little kid scribbles)
No chemicals, no preservatives, all natural, only will (?) what you immediately need.
Slot machine spitting out delicious wheels of stinky orange cheese.
People able to grow enough good food for all. Real food. Not no-till genetically modified crops.
Sustainability, local organic food, enough for all.
One pill that provides all nutrition.

That all will have enough to eat their fill and reach their potential.
A society where everyone eats wild foods.
There will be enough for everyone.
Everyone has a garden, every child knows the feel of dirt and seeds and the joy of planting it and watching it grow, eating it and fully enjoying.
To have a brand new chocolate bar named after me!
To grow communities where no one is hungry and everyone eats healthy.

Less processing!
Healthy bacon!
To have food not fixed by chemicals, great in taste, healthy to eat.
Appreciated, happy farmers who are well paid and share their love of good food. Natural, tasty, wholesome food from the fields because farmers still feed cities.
To not have to go to the supermarket because we grow or exchange what we grow for things we don’t need + Monsanto closed down!
I want to own a dairy farm, make cheese, raise bacon honey and barley, eat a hot lunch at a long table and sleep and wake with the sun.
Make candy healthy.
I like to eat corn. Yellow corn on the cob.

Natural land and soil for planting millions of miles.
More for everyone at a sustainable rate. Possible? Meh, it’s a dream.
Natural, unprocessed, tasty, simple to prepare.
That multi-national corporations cannot continue to patent food and screw people over
No factory farms – only organic family farms.
Pay farmers better, shift subsidies to foods that are good for us, especially vegetables and eat less meat.
Unprocessed, fat free, natural.
To eat less corn and to plant more crops!
Local, natural, organic, wholesome, fresh, yummy.
Grown in Fiona’s garden.

Thanks to everyone for sharing their dreams. Let's keep dreaming together! To read more about Cornography, click HERE.

Cornography

2011-07-28T21:54:00.007-04:00

From the first time I stepped foot on the land that we now call Small Pond Arts, I saw a show happening here.

We visited the property for the first time in the fall of 2009 while searching for the perfect place for our dream to take hold. As we walked the paths in the woods, I saw not only myself here, but I saw future artists and audiences here. The shape and layout of the property would be perfect for a site-specific travelling performance. On July 24, 2011, this dream was finally realized with Cornography. My vision was for an afternoon of art about food, where audiences would be led from location to location to discover theatre, music, puppetry, installation and visual art.

illustration by Milé Murtanovski

I put out a call for submissions inviting artists of any discipline to respond to the theme of “our twisted relationship with food.” I have always been a lover of food, and the subject has been much on my mind since moving to the agricultural area of Prince Edward County. I’ve watched too many documentaries and read too many books about our modern food system, which is so deeply dysfunctional and fragile. Since we moved here we have grown closer to the food system; within our first year at Small Pond we started growing some of our own food, and after becoming friends with some local farmers we've gained a greater appreciation for the work that they do. There is so much to say on the subject of food that I wasn’t too surprised when almost 40 artists responded to the call with a dazzling variety of takes on the theme. As the months went by, the pieces of Cornography fell into place one by one, and the shape of the day took form.

A small portion of the bounty coming from the Small Pond garden

Out-of-town artists started arriving a few days before the show and Small Pond was once again a veritable hive of activity, with elaborate installations being built, rehearsals taking place, artwork being delivered, and much mowing of paths and performance areas. Then there were the preparations for the meal; if we were going to have 40 artists doing a show about food, we obviously had to feed them, and we had to do it in style. We planned for the day to conclude in The Great Artists’ Feast, a dinner party held in their honour.

Mary Macdonald working on her installation to make lasting

You never know how these things are going to turn out. All you can do is be as prepared as possible and hope for the best. The day finally arrived and the weather was glorious. All the artists showed up. And, rather importantly, so did the audience. The visual art was displayed in the barn, and the show began with a dozen visual artists introducing themselves and their work. The audience was then led to a Punch and Judy show performed by myself and Trevor Jablonowski, wherein the notorious puppet Punch falls in love with a cob of corn, much to Judy’s misfortune. The audience actually booed at one point – what a great compliment!

Punch and the Corn Cob

Everyone loves a puppet love triangle

Two artists from Florida, Rachael Kerley and Giang Pham, had arrived a few days previous on a week-long artist residency. Their sensual, interactive installation Sacrament, Wash, Passage, Altar took place in the ‘salon du silo,’ the garden area that surrounds the silo. It was a meditation on the grains of eastern and western cultures: corn and rice. At Sacrament people were given small bags of pop corn and Rice Krispie squares to munch on; at the Wash station they were offered (and often accepted) a corn oil and rice foot rub; in Passage they walked on a path of rice and corn; and at Altar they were met with an array of glass jars containing oil, water and grains.

Sacrament

Wash

Passage

Altar

Our good friends Bay Woodyard and Gavin North of Honey Pie Hives and Herbals performed a puppet-filled Travelling Medicine Show.

The Traveling Medicine Show

Children were led away to the Art Barn to make corn-husk dolls with Cynthia Dinsdale, and the DitchWitch Brigade from Toronto (Eve Wylden, Antje Budde & friends) presented an excerpt of their play called Miss Toronto Gets a Life in Parkdale.

Children of the corn

Eve Wylden in Miss Toronto Gets a Life in Parkdale

Local songstress Melissa Larkin performed next, filling the art barn with the sound of her tantalizing music and spoken word. The audience was then led to the spot behind our house, where Guy Doucette, Pat Larkin and Koren Bellman performed a musical puppet piece called Doctor Frankornstein and the Stalking Terror.

Melissa Larkin

Dr. Frankornstein and the Stalking Terror

In the back field our audience met Mary Macdonald and her installation to make lasting. Mary had been at Small Pond every day that week, mostly perched atop a ladder in our back field as she built a large cage of buckthorn branches. During Cornography people were invited to write their favourite foods on recipe cards which were hung from the structure.

Close-up of to make lasting by Mary Macdonald

I had invited local visual artist Chrissy Poitras of Sparkbox Studio to participate in Cornography, and was surprised and delighted when she told me she wanted to do a piece of performance art. For the performance we laid down a long runway of white felt in the middle of a tall field of grass. People were asked to take off their shoes and walk down the carpet to where Chrissy was waiting for them, wearing a white dress and blindfold. She then proceeded to eat a pomegranate as messily as she could. The audience fell completely silent, mesmerized by the scenario; a little bit of magic taking place under the big blue sky.

Chrissy Poitras just prior to her performance

Jeff Keary gave a lecture on the subject of salt and its insidious nature. Then Katy McIntyre led a piece we called Cornfield of Dreams. She passed out pens and paper corn cobs to people and asked them to finish the sentence “My dream of the future of food is…” Once they’d written their dream, they held them aloft and were led in a procession through the woods, passing young fiddler Luke Norton. The woods open out to a huge field where people "planted" their dreams atop stakes.

The procession of dreams. Photo by Phil Norton.

Luke Norton fiddles in the woods.

"My dream for the future of food is... a garden for every home."

Our final act of the day was Arlene Bishop, a musician I have admired from afar for years. Arlene’s music is quite simply spell-binding; lucky for us, she’ll be back at Small Pond August 26, 27 and 28 as the musical guest for our shadow puppetry play The History of Shadows.

Arlene Bishop

The Cornography performances and programming may have been over, but there was still one final act: we had to eat! Long tables were put end to end in the shade of the Manitoba Maple in the front yard, and an abundant buffet of local food (much of it from our own garden!) was laid out. The Great Artists’ Feast began, and it was so satisfying to sit back and watch all the artists sitting shoulder to shoulder with one another, breaking bread. The meal was put together by one of my oldest and dearest friends, Tanis De Sa Pereira and her two teenagers, Spencer and Sydnie. Not only are they great cooks, but having them play such an integral role in the day just added to the warm feeling of being amidst family.

The Great Artists' Feast

As you can imagine, it was a full, full day – full of energy and imagery and ideas, full of friends and laughter and surprises. Our community was incredibly receptive to Cornography; clearly we have touched on a subject matter which is vital and relevant to them. The quality and scope of the art was undoubtedly impressive. Therefore Milé and I have already decided that we will do it all over again; artists, start simmering your ideas and stay tuned for details about Cornography 2012, coming to Small Pond next July!

Krista and Milé give thanks.

Huge thanks to everyone who participated in Cornography, artists and audience alike. You have shown us what is possible, and we are forever grateful for all that you brought to the table.

Impromptu dinner table art by Celeste Hill.

Picton Picturefest

2011-07-17T12:43:00.006-04:00

Last weekend Small Pond Arts hosted its largest event to date, Picton Picturefest. The fledgling film festival was the brainchild of lifelong friends Peter Knegt and Jennifer MacFarlane, who grew up in neighbouring Trenton.

The brilliant poster that so beautifully captures the Small Pond Arts farm by Meagan Durlak and Sebastian Speier

Small Pond Arts was Picturefest headquarters, and over the course of the weekend some 70+ people camped in our woods, watched an outdoor film screening of The National Parks Project, enjoyed a concert by Kris Ellestad, chased fireflies and laughed well into the night around the roaring campfire.

Shooting a scene from Cirque du Foret in the silo. Photo by Maddy Pilon.

Amongst the merry band of cinephiles who descended on Small Pond were seven young filmmakers from across Ontario. Over the weekend they were mentored by established filmmakers and the group wrote, shot, and edited an extremely entertaining short film, Cirque du Forêt. Not only are Milé and I in the film, but it was all shot at Small Pond and includes some of my puppets as well as artwork from many of our resident artists.

Picton Picturefest 3-Day Film Challenge 2011: CIRQUE DU FORÊT

By all accounts the inaugural Picturefest was a smashing success. The screenings were well-attended, the community rallied behind the festival providing support and sponsorships, and to the relief of one and all, no major disasters presented themselves!

Outdoor film screening at Small Pond. Photo by Ian Lefebvre.

I first saw Peter more than a year ago at a Creative Minds networking event at Angeline’s, where he bravely stood up in front of a room full of strangers and pitched his (crazy?) idea of starting a film festival in Picton. I didn’t get a chance to talk to him that night, but as luck would have it, the following morning I saw him standing on the ViaRail platform in Belleville, as we both awaited the train to Toronto. I approached him and introduced myself, and in the months that followed he visited us numerous times as plans for Picturefest unfolded. Peter eloquently chronicles his experiences in his article, How To Start Your Own Film Festival: The Story of Picton Picturefest. Peter and Jennifer are a true inspiration; they are two amazing young people who had a dream and worked their backsides off to make it happen. Bravo, my friends!

Picturefest organizers Jennifer MacFarlane and Peter Knegt -
the newest members of our extended Small Pond family

We were thrilled to be able to provide our space as a venue to the Picturefest folks, secure in the knowledge that an infinite number of happy memories would be made here. We look forward to future Picturefests, and to all the other unknowns that lay ahead for Small Pond. Should you see us on the train platform of life, please do stop and say hello; who knows what magic we may be able to conjure together?

Barn

2011-07-11T15:12:00.047-04:00

Kris Ellestad rocks out.

On July 10 Small Pond Arts played host to Calgary's Kris Ellestad for the Picton Picturefest Afterparty, closing out four days of film screenings, youth workshops, parties, and merriment. Kris and his awesome band played in our Art Barn which had seen (and heard!) fabulous music nearly a year ago during Splashdown! --but this time it was on a fresh new cement floor. This renovation was a long time coming and involved a lot of very hard work by many helpful folks.

The Art Barn in the spring of 2010.

Prior to the reno, the barn (which hitherto housed horses) had already been put to use in several artistic ways: it was studio space for painter Amitesh Verma, it became a museum during Stickfest, and Krista held a lantern-making workshop in there during Culture Days last fall. The space was great, but the floor was uneven, having been chewed up by hooves and horeshoes over many years.

So we enlisted our friend, David Riley, for his expertise in construction and he told us the first thing we had to do was dig a channel around the inside perimeter of the barn. Great! How hard could that possibly be? How long could that possibly take?

As noted in this post, the soil in much of Prince Edward County is incredibly rocky, and digging deeply with mere shovels isn't always an option since you're likely to hit bedrock after only about two feet. So, to answer the first question above: pretty hard, buddy; and to answer the second: seemingly forever.

Honourable Barn Channelers.

Above is a montage of most of the helpful people who helped us dig the Barn Channel. Clockwise from top right: Krista, me, artist residents Nina Hartt and Kris Forge (Toronto), artist residents Urs (Germany) and Kim Thompson (Toronto), a few young ladies from the Otesha Project that camped overnight, and, dead centre, artist residents Catherine Mellinger and Joel Brubacher (Toronto). We thank you all.

Many of the rocks excavated from the channel were hauled over to our new outdoor bake oven site (more on that in the future).

Kingbirds freak out.

Babies need feeding.

Unbeknownst to us, a pair of Eastern Kingbirds (Tyrannus tyrannus (I'm not kidding!)) had made their nest in the downspout of the barn's gutter, but we decided to let it stay just in case there were eggs in it. Needless to say, that whole family (now with three chicks!) put up with a lot of noise during the reno.

String Theory in practice.

Several weeks later (we worked hard but intermittently...and we also concurrently began work on our bake oven!) we were ready to install the foam forms that would contain the concrete as well as insulate the floor against winter frost. Dave and I used a laser level to mark lines around the inside so we would have a consistent point to measure down from, ensuring the tops of our forms would be at the same height. String was strung to help with these measurements.

Formed forms.

This stage didn't take nearly as long as the digging, but it did require a relative degree of accuracy, if not absolute precision. I left the mathematics to Dave.

14 yards.

Believe it or not, after weeks of taking out dirt, we now had to put it back in. To stabilize the foam forms and provide a ground the cement can grab onto, we ordered a bunch of screenings (i.e. gravel) from local suppliers C.B. Fennel. That pile is 14 yards (I'm still confused about that measurement) and, apparently, too much --but we used lots around the outside of the barn (with cardboard underneath to prevent vegetative growth) and some will go into our bake oven, minimizing wastage.

In the last shot you can see the right hand door that we had to remove so we could get a good pour without having to over-customize the forms. This door slides inside the barn (the other on the outside) and will have to be cut shorter before we put it back.

The gravel channel.

Not shown above is all the gravel that had to be brought in and raked to cover the floor's surface, bringing the top of the gravel four inches down from the tops of the foam forms (minutes before the cement truck arrived, this was changed to three inches, requiring less concrete).

Here we go...

I can't remember the yardage on the cement, but it was significantly less than that of the gravel. Once again, Fennel's came through with the delivery.

Maximum insertion.

This is as far as Dennis, the cement delivery guy, could get into the barn, requiring somebody to haul the cement to the far corners of the barn in a wheelbarrow.

That somebody was me.

I'm not complaining, but a wheelbarrow full of wet cement is heavy --but it had to be done and I was up to the task. Another friend, Peter Blendell, came by to assist in the pour because he had even greater expertise in this than Dave. It was a day of glorious teamwork.

Action!

Cement waits for nobody so you have to work quickly, spreading it around to the desired areas, making sure it gets into all the nooks and crannies of the gravel. Dave and Peter did most of this, ankle deep in cement, but Krista (in the green boots) was there with a ready shovel, helping out.

Smooth operators.

Dave and Peter run the screed across the cement, smoothing it out. It's not as easy or as fun as it looks because wet cement is heavy and hard to push around.

Cemented into a corner.

We split the floor into two halves, making the pour more manageable; we did the far side first, then the near. It was actually kind of fun watching both Peter and Dave Spider-Man their way out of the tricky corners.

Almost done?

Nope. Although the floor looked pretty good even at this point, there was still one more task to perform...

Smoother operators.

Peter and Dave started, to show us how, then Dave, Krista, and I continued, then Krista and Dave finished the floor by trowelling the cement into as smooth a finish as we could manage. We're quite happy with the slightly imperfect, handcrafted finish.

Finished, but for the decorations.

The finished floor is more reflective, giving the space a brighter look. Also, removing the three non-supporting posts in the middle gives us more room to play with. Here Krista readies the stage for the band with her wonderful patchwork banner and paper lanterns.

My apologies for this hastily-patched-together panorama and for the lack of proper "before and after" shots, but you can click here to see the space as it was the last time we had musicians play in the barn.

Kris Ellestad rocks out (reprise).

The audience was outside and the weather was amazing (if buggy).

Beautiful music.

Seriously: go to his website and check out some tunes.

Low-tech music videos.

Local illustrator Carl Wiens had recently acquired a few reels of 8mm home movies and brought them (along with his gorgeous vintage projector) to show them on a makeshift screen on the sliding door to the right. The band couldn't see the images, but it was uncanny how, quite often, the music seemed to sync up with the movies, creating a score to decades-old memories, sometimes funny, sometimes poignant, always fun.

One small step.

We had about a wheelbarrow's worth of cement left over from the floor pour, so I quickly made a form out of some leftover wood and made a step to make climbing up to the Silo Patio a little safer.

Magazined

2011-06-21T18:28:00.002-04:00

So Small Pond Arts is featured in the 2011 summer issue of County Magazine. Neat! It's quite a substantial article --and look at that cover! (read more about that painting HERE)

At left is Krista with the big blue hands of a future giant puppet, and at right is me doing some gardening. Basically, business as usual at Small Pond.

LEFT PAGE: clockwise from upper left: my portrait of Ted Maczka from my recent Field to Canvas series; me in my studio/gallery, grinning like a doofus; me and Krista sitting in our outhouse; and my portrait of George Emlaw (also from F2C).

RIGHT PAGE: clockwise from top: Krista with her Punch & Judy puppets (and me sneaking a smooch); my watercolour painting of a skull on Yupo plastic; my oil painting, Fuel 2; and my portrait of John Nyman (also from F2C).

Top to bottom: me and Krista next to our main sign; Krista posing with out giant puppet, Bacchus; and another shot of me looking cheeky in the my studio/gallery.

Left page: another watercolour painting on plastic (which I'm using in my own blog's header. Right page: me inside another future giant puppet, our sugar shack guy (and in the background, our famous Silo).

Unacknowledged Legislators of the World

2011-06-07T15:39:00.004-04:00

Things are really going gangbusters here at Small Pond. Between Milé's multitudinous art openings (Field to Canvas featuring prominently amongst them) we’ve had some very cool residents coming through.

Portrait of George Emlaw, part of Milé's Field to Canvas exhibit,
on now until the end of 2011 at Angéline's Restuarant, Bloomfield

Négar Mokhtassi and Kori Okamura are a couple of musicians who came to Small Pond with the intention of writing some new songs and enjoying some R & R as spring blossomed in The County. They enjoyed the intense acoustics of playing music in the silo, and were even inspired to write us a theme song! When not jamming, they cruised around enjoying the beach and some of our favourite antique shops.

Joel Brubacher and Catherine Mellinger were the next residents to arrive. I know Joel from the puppetry community in Toronto. He came to Small Pond with the goal of making a whole bunch of new puppets, and his lovely lady Catherine spent her time writing (on a typewriter!) and working on some amazing collages.

Joel working in the great outdoors - the best studio of all!

Catherine collaging in the garage a.k.a. puppet studio

Joel and Catherine did some bike-riding (we've got a few loaners), enjoyed some tranquil moments in the hammock, and in the evenings taught us some awesome card games that got very intense… despite which we were still friends at the end of the week. They made a really cool installation on our artists’ trail; my prediction is that their “Theatre of Possibilities” will become a favourite photo spot on the property.

My sister Meagan in the Theatre of Possibilities

This past weekend we held a banner-raising party, and had a full house of people staying over, plus a good forty visitors. Friends, family and visiting artists enjoyed the celebratory atmosphere as we watched our young friend Jacob Wiens help raise the new banner by shooting arrows into the silo with the top ropes attached (read about last year’s banner here).

Jacob and the newly-raised banner

The banner raising was followed by a barbecue, an impressive and delicious silo-cake, and a very satisfying and hilarious piñata-smashing!

Silo cake by Vicky Roy of Chesterfield's Homegrown Cafe

After giving the little ones a chance...

... illustrator Carl Wiens successfully decapitates
the piñata with his mighty swing.

Last night 14 cyclists from The Otesha Project camped out in our woods. This group of young volunteers are spending their summer riding all over Ontario, living as a sustainable community and performing a play on environmental and social justice issues to schools and other community groups.

The Otesha Project rolls into the Pond

They helped us out for a bit with two of our current building projects: digging the foundation for our outdoor cob bake oven, and putting a new floor in the Art Barn, which will dramatically improve the building as studio and performance space.

Dig this: The Otesha Project crew digging the bake oven foundation

I love how people seem to universally connect with Small Pond. It’s a gorgeous spot, to be sure, but I’d like to think that they are drawn to the place for more than the wildflowers and the fresh air; I think creative people are drawn here because we freely grant them permission to be themselves, to find inspiration, and to be what they cannot deny: artists, creators, the unacknowledged legislators of the world. Being an artist is not always an easy path, but one that we fully celebrate here. No one is an oddball at Small Pond; we are a collection of beautiful misfits, and in our togetherness we discover that there is simply no other way to be.

Scythe

2011-05-31T11:24:00.021-04:00

I've come about the reaping.
Actually.

I wanted to get a scythe last year to cut down select areas of tall grass and plants around Small Pond, but never got around to it, leaving the hard work to the gas mower and nearly crippling it.

We already had an aluminum staff which was left in our garage by either the previous owners, or the ones before them (who knows?), and it was in pretty good shape, except for the broken, rusty blade and the nearly rust-sealed mount.

Pre-assembly.

Above is the aluminum staff with its two wooden handles (on the far left and middle); the ring mount where the dangly bit of the blade goes (it attaches to the far right end of the staff); the old, broken blade; the new 28" Garant blade made in Austria (still in its wrapping, including the red plastic safety guard); the new washer and nut; and the big wrench needed to put it all together.

Last year --for some stupid reason-- I wanted a wooden staff which wasn't so curvy because I felt that would be "more traditional," but soon realized that one made of aluminum would last longer, be stronger and lighter, and this extra-curvy shape was probably more ergonomic.

This is a test.

Of course, as soon as I put it together I had to test it. In the photo above, the curved line delineates the test area, cutting through grass that was two feet tall. The straight line is on the border between the tall grass and grass cut by the gas mower a few days before. On the bottom left, you can see the cut grass (which has to be raked, it's so long).

Using a scythe will reduce the wear and tear on our gas and reel mowers --but neither of them would be as effective on the tall stuff, anyway. It's also a pretty good workout.

Grass-cutting montage.

Swinging the scythe came fairly naturally to me (perhaps a genetically inherited trait from my farming ancestors), and it's not like a golf swing (not that I golf). There is the possibility of injury, so standing like I am in the last frame enables the blade to swing freely from right to left (it's a right-handed staff, by the way), and you need to make sure the blade swings away from you, following the line of your stance (again, see the last frame). If you don't swing in a diagonal to your hips, you could possibly swing into your left foot (and you'll need that foot for other things).

And now I'm off to cut some paths and clear space for parking...

Photographs of me by Catherine Mellinger.

UPDATE, 01 June 2011: After using the scythe to great effect today for a couple of hours, I've decided to officially name it Figaro, after the barber of Seville.

Second Spring

2011-05-14T20:27:00.004-04:00

This month we are celebrating the first anniversary of Small Pond Arts, and our second spring on the farm. When I look back on the past year, it is with surreal amazement that I take stock of all that we’ve accomplished. There is a confidence that comes with embarking on year two; there is a little less guesswork, a little less re-inventing the wheel.

I’m not going to lie, our first winter here was LONG, even though we went away for five weeks! Our 150-year old farmhouse is (not surprisingly) poorly insulated and drafty, and I wore a toque 24/7 from November through April. I missed the constant flow of friends and visitors, and had to mentally adjust to the solitude that comes with living in a seasonal community in the off-season. Of course this solitude has its benefits. Milé and I have both been incredibly productive, and have had the time to focus on our artistic pursuits. We seem to live a life of extremes; with the dawning of May we bid adieu to free time and embrace the madness of the busy season. There’s already been a steady stream of visitors, and the constantly-needing-to-be-cut grass reminds me that there won’t be much rest now until the fall when the cooler temperatures return.

Spring at Small Pond is nothing short of glorious. The flowers are coming up, the frogs are singing, the birds are building their nests, the rhubarb is daily doubling in size. It’s easy to be optimistic.

Although we’ve been hard at work over the past weeks, this spring the pace is a little less frenzied. Between the frequent rain showers, I’ve been spending a lot of time outside. I’ve continued hauling junk out of the woods, and have been arranging rocks and fallen logs to help give shape the Clearing and the Artists’ Trail.

I uncovered this cool stone wall, which turned out to be under several feet of dirt at the base of the old barn floor:

A few weeks ago some gale-force winds tore through the County, toppling our rather large and substantial outhouse.

The first step in raising an outhouse is acknowledging that it is tipped over.

This occasion called for an impromptu “outhouse raising party” – and we had plenty of friends show up to help us get the outhouse back in place.

Here we celebrate our achievement. Can you spot the puppet?

Over the winter months I’ve been reading a lot about food, and our pitifully dysfunctional modern food system. On July 24 we’re giving artists and community members the opportunity to express their own thoughts and feelings about food with Cornography, an afternoon of art featuring more than 40 participants.

Milé is also on the cusp of launching a food-related art show, Field to Canvas, a series of portraits of local farmers. I’ve been watching him paint these portraits for more than four months now, and they really are a homage to the people who grow our food. With fresh, organic, REAL food on our minds, this spring we doubled the size of our garden. We just finished building the fence around it, and the first veggies went in yesterday, with LOTS more to come.

Milé rototills the garden

In June we’ll be building an outdoor cob bake oven, inspired by my time with Bread & Puppet Theater and four years of working in Dufferin Grove Park with Clay & Paper Theatre. Not only are bake ovens a great symbol of community, this project is also helping us move toward sustainability by allowing us to bake without using electricity.

In August, the shadow puppets will return to Small Pond, with three performances of Doubt Seed and our new show, The History of Shadows. I can’t wait to have my amazing crew of collaborators back here at the farm so we can do it all over again!

We’ve got lots of residents booking their summer stays with us. I love meeting new people, and can’t wait to welcome this year’s resident artists (the first of the season arrive today!). There are still plenty of spots left, but if you are thinking of a residency this summer, you should think about contacting us sooner than later.

We have come so far, yet in many ways we are still at the beginning. We have so many things we want to accomplish and improve upon, and there are so many surprises around the corner. Who will we meet? What crazy projects will we dream up? If I had a crystal ball, I would throw it into the woods. I prefer to be surprised.

Finally, a huge thank-you to everyone who has helped us make Small Pond the dream come true! Friends and family, you have been capital-a Amazing, and we couldn’t have done it without you. Come visit us soon so we can show our appreciation in person!

PS - 'Like' our new page on Facebook by June 1, 2011, and you'll get a chance to win a one week artist residency with us! Just click HERE

Short and Sweet

2011-04-03T20:04:00.003-04:00

Last weekend Milé and I performed our first puppet show together. I've done a number of puppet shows with other people, but after seven years together, we are now officially a couple of puppeteers. Life and love can be full of surprises, and I'm so lucky to have a partner willing to embrace the weird world of puppetry with me. The piece was called Short and Sweet and was presented as part of Maple in the County, Prince Edward County's annual maple syrup festival.

Milé hard at work on character design

I wrote the script for Short and Sweet while we were in Arizona. The play's diminutive heroine, Theodora, must rescue spring from the evil hands of The Creeper, defeating a perpetual winter and ensuring the return of the all-important maple syrup. The design of the show mixes several theatre and puppetry techniques. I call it a ‘suitcase show’ – although there are technically no suitcases involved, just two antique wooden boxes. The boxes sit atop an old wooden ironing board, and contain the entire show. We think the "old-timey" vibe of our props goes well with puppetry. Banners unfurl from the boxes, bearing titles and painted backdrops.

Our puppets are two-sided cardboard puppets on small sticks, the tops of the open boxes are their stage. Milé designed all of the characters and banners, and I helped him paint and colour them.

Our cast of zany characters

There is one three-dimensional puppet, the terrifying Creeper, which we built several years ago (the genesis of this puppet is chronicled in Milé’s blog). Milé did a great job of puppeteering him and probably gave more than one little kiddy nightmares (sorry about that). The boxes are great for containing surprise elements, such as paper snow and leaves to be tossed in the air, and a small pair of cymbals which are used as aural punctuation. We had a great time performing for an attentive crowd of kids both young and old.

Milé spent the rest of the day stiltwalking and rescuing helium balloons stranded on the ceiling.

Meanwhile I was papier-mâchéing a giant puppet head with a bunch of kids. We had a lot of fun, evidenced by the river of glue flowing from the table.

Milé and I had sculpted the head in advance, using cardboard and one of my favourite tools,“the creech,” a.k.a. staple pliers; a few features were made from wrapping masking tape around bundles of stuffing.

Pre-mâché sculpture

Milé sketched a picture showing what the final puppet will look like. His name is “Shack,” and he’s supposed to be a sugar shack worker. Yet everybody seems to think this is just another portrait puppet of Milé… what do you think?

We had a chance to perform Short and Sweet a second time this past week, at a Picton fundraiser for victims of the Japan earthquake and tsunami. If you want to do something REALLY sweet, you can make a donation via the Red Cross; all you have to do is click HERE.

Vaporators

2011-04-01T00:07:00.007-04:00

“My fake plants died because I did not pretend to water them.”
– Mitch Hedberg

As I’ve mentioned before, we depend on our well for our in-house water so, to help conserve this precious ground resource as much as possible, we've been collecting rainwater in barrels to use on the gardens and the flowers outdoors. But last summer at Small Pond was a really dry one: by August our rain barrels were no longer full of sky water, and by September we started getting concerned about how long our well would hold out. Luckily, the well didn’t run dry, but, clearly, we needed to supplement.

Hail the new (used) water collectors!

We asked around and it looked more and more like we should consider getting moisture vaporators, which are usually found in arid climates but work just fine (better, even) in climates like ours, which can get pretty humid in the summer. We eventually found six used GX-8 models on Kijiji that were just in our price range and, as our tests of the units proved, in perfect working condition. Aside from a little rust and some carbon scoring, they were as good as new.

Krista scrapes away at some carbon scoring.

I make some minor adjustments.

As far as the weather was concerned, March may not have been the best time to install these beasts (the ground was actually quite workable, albeit cold and muddy), but considering how busy we’ll be in April and May –not to mention this summer!—this was the best time for us, as far as our schedules were concerned. It only took us one day per unit to install, anyway. We decided to put them all in the Pasture to make it easier to gather the water and also to keep an eye on them when the strong winds blow in case the heavy, in-ground bases should fail.

The first three are up and running!

The GX-8s are very quiet and pretty self-sufficient, using solar panels to power the condensers in the outer bars. They’re like giant de-humidifiers. The water that collects there is then filtered and funneled into a 60L holding tank near the bottom of the unit. That doesn’t sound like a lot of water compared to our rain barrels, but these things pull moisture right out of the air and can reach capacity in less than 24 hours, so we’ll have (at least!) 360L of cool, clean water every day –even if it doesn’t rain for weeks.

All six vaporators installed and
quietly humming in the Pasture.

Now all we need is a droid who can speak the binary language of moisture vaporators…

A Time for Renewal

2011-03-13T11:39:00.004-04:00

Milé and I just returned from an epic road trip, a five-week getaway that led us through ten states to the desert heart of Arizona.

Admittedly, it seems a bit strange to feel the need to escape when you are lucky enough to live in paradise, like we do. But come January, when paradise is frozen over and there is no apparent end in sight, it was time for us to get away and pursue some sunshine... and sunsets.

We had a gorgeous house to call home for the month in Mesa, just outside of Phoenix, so we loaded up the van with easel and canvases, sewing machine and puppet supplies, laptop and flip flops, and made a beeline for the border. Our timing couldn’t have been worse. Within the first day we were in the grip of the ‘Storm of the Century’ that was ravaging the United States. First we encountered an ice storm, which left our van covered in an inch of ice. We passed through St. Louis at rush hour, where the weather had completely shut the city down, leaving it eerily abandoned. On the highway, we passed car after car in the ditch. Then we started seeing the road signs that you never want to see: “UNSAFE ROAD CONDITIONS: SEEK SHELTER”. From our cheap hotel room in Springfield, Missouri, we watched the weather channel with dismay. The road we’d been planning on taking was closed. We chose a detour through the Ozark Mountains, which turned out to be a taste of wonder; the roads were mercifully clear and dry, but the bare trees were encased in ice; when the sun shone through them it was pure magic.

But it was a brief respite – through Oklahoma the roads were ridiculously dangerous, so we made an unscheduled overnight stop in Seminole. The next day we finally left the snow behind and entered the charming desert landscapes of New Mexico.

The drive down was not exactly a relaxing start to the trip, but we were so much the happier to arrive at our destination. After a first day of pure, blissful relaxation, we quickly got into a routine. Milé painted four paintings while we were there, including this gorgeous Arizona landscape:

'Near Lake Saguaro' - 36" x 48", oil on canvas, 2011, sold

I wrote an article for an upcoming issue of Horntrip Magazine, and penned a puppet show and a half. I sewed the image for this year's new silo banner (can you guess what it is?):

I also made 20 puppets in 4 different styles for an exhibition I have coming later this spring.

It was our first vacation in more than 2 years, so we didn’t forget to indulge ourselves. We went swimming. We ate in restaurants. We wandered around the desert and explored the art galleries of Scottsdale, and visited the Great Arizona Puppet Theater for an unforgettable puppet slam.

Puppet on display at The Great Arizona Puppet Theater

We were incredibly productive because of the lack of distractions. A few weeks ago, we celebrated one glorious year of living at Small Pond, and we love it completely, but when we’re at home there is always a mile-long to-do list; here we were free from all those responsibilities. We had the time and the space to work at our own speed, took breaks when we wanted, read books and watched movies. When you love what you do, it’s no hardship to work while you’re on vacation. But it’s also important to take time for yourself to do nothing, to let your brain relax and your thoughts meander with no purpose. I think that on this trip we found the perfect balance between work and play, and we’ve come home renewed, refreshed, and ready to dive in to all the great things that 2011 has in store for us.

Stunning Sedona

When we returned home a few days ago to our beloved Small Pond, I felt really good knowing that this place can provide just such an opportunity of renewal to other artists. All they need to do is make the time and we can give them the place to work, relax, find inspiration and refuel their creative engines; and take my word for it - renewal is a beautiful thing.

Two relaxed, happy artists visit the Grand Canyon

Return from Pikangikum

2011-01-23T14:02:00.004-05:00

I just returned from my second trip with ArtsCan Circle, an amazing charitable organization that sends volunteer musicians and artists like me to remote Indigenous communities to do arts projects with school children. We spent the week in Pikangikum, an Ojibway community of 2,400 people in Northwestern Ontario.

I’ve got to admit, I was a little nervous going there. From what I’d read on the almighty internet, Pikangikum had become notorious for its suicide rate – at one time deemed the highest in the world. There are serious problems with gas-sniffing in the community, and the violence that often accompanies addiction. But as tough as it sounded, I wasn’t going on a holiday, and I wasn’t going for me. This was an opportunity to bring some joy to kids who were probably in need of a little sunshine in the frozen heart of winter.

In Toronto I boarded a plane to Thunder Bay. Then I got on an even smaller plane to Sioux Lookout.

At last I boarded another tiny plane to Pikangikum. I’d never been on a plane so small – most schoolbuses are bigger – and I couldn’t remember if I’d ever been able to watch the pilots for the duration of the flight.

I was already getting the feeling that it was time to leave my ‘southern’ sensibilities behind. It was time to forget what I thought of as the ‘real’ Canada, and open my eyes to a different reality.

The school’s friendly vice-principal was waiting for us at the airport, and he drove us to the hotel.

At first it didn’t look so bad.

But sometimes the closer you look the worse things become.

I want to make it clear that I’m no prima donna , and I wasn’t expecting The Ritz-Carlton… but really? A busted toilet that you have to flush with a bucket? And you can just forget about towels, cute little soaps, or a television that emits anything other than a faint buzzing sound.

I gazed out the broken window at the OPP division across the street, the police trucks left idling 24/7, as the cops inside wait for bad things to happen without having to worry about starting up a frozen engine.

The worst thing about the hotel was knowing that it’s probably the most luxurious place to stay in Pikangikum. I had been told that we shouldn’t drink the water, but what I didn’t know was that most of the town doesn’t even have running water.

This is Canada. A highly developed and relatively wealthy nation in the year 2011 - yet there are more than 2000 people in this community – in my very own province - who are living in third world conditions. They cannot have a shower, cannot turn on a tap to wash their dishes, cannot give their children bubble baths, and they have to trudge to their outhouses in extreme cold.

And I was shocked by a busted toilet. Shame on me. Shame on all of us.

Snowmobile outside a school portable. I love the paper snowflakes in the windows.

In 2007 Pikangikum’s school burned down. It hasn’t been rebuilt, but has been replaced by a large complex of portables. The week we were there the temperatures plummeted to -36˚ Celsius, and the students shuffled back and forth between portables. Another school was supposed to get built, but apparently now there are other communities that are even more in need. Really?

On our second night, we trekked across the frozen lake to reach The Northern Store, the only retailer in town, that sells everything from food to furniture. A former Hudson Bay Company trading post, it holds a complete monopoly. A bottle of water costs $5. And this is the totality of their produce section:

But I wasn't there for the vegetables, either. I was there for the kids. Oh, the kids, the loveable, adorable kids. Me and my partner in puppets, Marty Hamer, approached the classes with gusto, creating both shadow puppets and sock puppets with hundreds of children.

Did I mention how awesome these kids are?

A lot of them were very shy, and very quiet. Some were more boisterous, and a few were positively cheeky. Many of the older kids wore decidedly tough veneers, but could often be persuaded into making jewelry, or into playing music with our other two ArtsCan team mates, Carol Teal and Randy Cameron.

On Thursday we did a show. The sixth graders performed The Cat Came Back with shadow puppetry. It was fairly hilarious and the kids really enjoyed themselves.

The view from backstage.

Carol and Randy sung some songs with the kids, several of which had been written by the classes that week, including the very catchy “Hockey, Hockey, Hockey” and “Baby You’re a Firework.”

Carol Teal (right) sings with two students; shadow puppets flank the stage.

Halfway through the week, I was asked to move to a different room in the hotel, as some other guests were arriving. The guy with the keys was out of town, so I was shown how to break into my new room.

As I said, sometimes the closer you look the worse things become. And sometimes you want to look away. But you can’t, and you shouldn’t. I’ve heard some people say that this is “Canada’s backyard” – as though these people are somehow separate from us. They’re not. They are the original Canadians. They love their children just as much as we love ours, and they are doing the best they can given their circumstances, having been trapped for centuries in our colonial web.

I can’t claim to comprehend the vastly complex problems that face Pikangikum and other First Nations communities, and there are certainly no easy solutions. All I can do is make art with their children, a small gesture of friendship and hope… and share what I’ve seen with all of you.

If you would like to support the work of ArtsCan Circle, you can make a donation.

Visit http://www.artscancircle.ca/ to find out how.

Hesperus

2010-12-18T11:09:00.018-05:00

It was the schooner Hesperus,

That sailed the wintery sea;

And the skipper had taken his little daughter,

To bear him company.

Blue were her eyes as the fairy flax,

Her cheeks like the dawn of day,

And her bosom white as the hawthorn buds,

That ope in the month of May.

The Skipper he stood beside the helm,

His pipe was in his mouth,

And he watched how the veering flaw did blow

The smoke now West, now South.

Then up and spake an old Sailor,
Had sailed the Spanish Main,
"I pray thee, put into yonder port,
for I fear a hurricane.

"Last night the moon had a golden ring,
And to-night no moon we see!"
The skipper, he blew whiff from his pipe,
And a scornful laugh laughed he.

Colder and louder blew the wind,
A gale from the Northeast,
The snow fell hissing in the brine,
And the billows frothed like yeast.

Down came the storm, and smote amain
The vessel in its strength;
She shuddered and paused, like a frighted steed,
Then leaped her cable's length.

"Come hither! come hither! my little daughter,
And do not tremble so;
For I can weather the roughest gale
That ever wind did blow."

He wrapped her warm in his seaman's coat
Against the stinging blast;
He cut a rope from a broken spar,
And bound her to the mast.

"O father! I hear the church bells ring,
Oh, say, what may it be?"
"Tis a fog-bell on a rock bound coast!" --
And he steered for the open sea.

"O father! I hear the sound of guns;
Oh, say, what may it be?"
Some ship in distress, that cannot live
In such an angry sea!"

"O father! I see a gleaming light.
Oh say, what may it be?"
But the father answered never a word,
A frozen corpse was he.

Lashed to the helm, all stiff and stark,
With his face turned to the skies,
The lantern gleamed through the gleaming snow
On his fixed and glassy eyes.

Then the maiden clasped her hands and prayed
That saved she might be;
And she thought of Christ, who stilled the wave,
On the Lake of Galilee.

And fast through the midnight dark and drear,
Through the whistling sleet and snow,
Like a sheeted ghost, the vessel swept
Tow'rds the reef of Norman's Woe.

And ever the fitful gusts between
A sound came from the land;
It was the sound of the trampling surf,
On the rocks and hard sea-sand.

The breakers were right beneath her bows,
She drifted a dreary wreck,
And a whooping billow swept the crew
Like icicles from her deck.

She struck where the white and fleecy waves
Looked soft as carded wool,
But the cruel rocks, they gored her side
Like the horns of an angry bull.

Her rattling shrouds, all sheathed in ice,
With the masts went by the board;
Like a vessel of glass, she stove and sank,
Ho! ho! the breakers roared!

At daybreak, on the bleak sea-beach,
A fisherman stood aghast,
To see the form of a maiden fair,
Lashed close to a drifting mast.

The salt sea was frozen on her breast,
The salt tears in her eyes;
And he saw her hair, like the brown sea-weed,
On the billows fall and rise.

Such was the wreck of the Hesperus,
In the midnight and the snow!
Christ save us all from a death like this,
On the reef of Norman's Woe!

The Wreck of the Hesperus
by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

I named this lovely and majestic Manitoba Maple "The Hesperus" early this spring (around about the time I took the picture at the very top of this post) without any intent to connect it to the ship in the poem by Longfellow or even the ancient Greek name for the Evening Star --the name just seemed to fit. One August morn even more so: unknown decades old, The Hesperus was downed by a storm in the wee hours of Monday 23 August 2010.

We like to name things here at Small Pond, but this was the only tree that was named, because, we figured, with 87 acres and thousands of trees, keeping track of them all would be...challenging. I didn't even name the 30-plus trees I planted myself. But this tree was special (I refer you once again to the very first image here), and it deserved a name.

Not having a chainsaw yet, we called the Black River Tree Company to chop it up into manageable portions, which I then moved to the side of the garage. Rolling and hauling each piece was my way of saying goodbye.

The Hesperus lives on, in a way, in the beautiful carvings of Peter Paylor (above) and the weird things we do here at the Pond (see Stickfest). And when we use it for firewood, it'll warm the friendly souls gathered around our fire pit --just a few metres from where it once stood proudly.

From Small Pond to ‘The Big Land’

2010-11-15T09:50:00.002-05:00

Since we moved to Small Pond, I haven’t had much of a chance to travel, but I recently had the privilege of spending a week in Labrador with ArtsCan Circle, a charitable organization that sends teams of volunteer musicians and artists to remote Canadian Indigenous communities to link creative artists with children and youth at risk. I was asked to go and make puppets with school children, and if there’s one thing I cannot resist it’s the opportunity to make puppets and share my love of the art form with anyone who will listen.

Lake Melville

This was my first time to Labrador, and my first trip with ArtsCan Circle. I had a fairly good idea what to expect, as my good friend David Anderson has been volunteering with them for years, and had shared a lot of his experiences with me. To get there I took a taxi to Belleville, a train to Toronto, a flight to Halifax, and another flight to Goose Bay. En route I met up with 2 of my fellow artists, Jessica Levman, former art teacher at Sheshatshiu Innu School, where we were headed, and Magoo, singer/songwriter extraordinaire. It was a long day of travelling, and we were all completely delirious and exhausted, so naturally the first thing we did when we arrived in Goose Bay was head to a surreal jungle-themed restaurant for fish and chips. Our bellies full of cod, we retired to our respective hotel rooms and passed out cold.

We were up early the next morning, and drove to Sheshatshiu, about a half hour drive. The landscape reminded me in some ways of Alberta, where I grew up, with tall dark pine trees and mountains on the horizon. The air was crisp and cold, and there was only a sprinkle of snow here and there.

View from the school.

The people of Sheshatshiu (population 1276) are Innu, and for most of them their first language is Innu-aimun. The Innu were one of the last Aboriginal people in Canada to give up much of their traditional way of life, and as can be seen with countless indigenous peoples across our country and throughout the world, such changes can have disastrous consequences. High levels of alcohol and substance abuse, domestic violence, and high suicide rates are a depressing reality. It would be naïve of me to try and encapsulate here the complex history of the Innu, but I think it’s fair to say that this community has experienced much grief and loss over the last 50 years. But things in Sheshatshiu are starting to change, and for the better; and ArtsCan Circle regularly visits this community to help be part of that positive movement.

That's me in the middle of the crush of kindergarteners and sock puppets.

Upon arriving at the school, Jessica and I made ourselves at home in the art room and became the self-professed puppet tag-team. Class after class streamed in and out of the art room, children from kindergarten through high school, and we made both sock puppets and shadow puppets with them. To our delight almost all of the kids responded to puppet-making with enthusiasm.

Sock puppet appeal reaches far and wide!

Kids that I thought were too old or too cool or too tough to like sock puppets could be found huddled around the hot glue gun meticulously affixing moustaches and eyebrows to their new companions. Kids that I thought were too young to appreciate the slightly-more-conceptual shadow puppets were eager to create representations of Labrador animals (Sasquatches and worms included). One group of seventh graders seemed particularly keen, so we decided to spend a bit more time with them and work towards putting on a shadow puppetry show at the end of the week.

One of many shadow puppetry classes.

To that end, we invited an elder to come in to the school and tell the class a traditional story. He told a story that had been told to him by his mother, “Wolverine Invited the Birds to the Drum Dance,” first in Innu, then in English. We then interpreted the story for presentation: who are the characters? What happens first? Second? Third? The students each chose a character to create, and in no time we had a whole flock of shadow puppets. We set up the screen and the projector in the classroom and I attempted to act as director. The rehearsals were rough and wild, but it was all process over product. Whatever happened when it came time to do the show, well, que sera sera.

Elder Penote Antuan tells a story to the class.

Mike Stevens, the fourth artist to join our merry band, arrived Monday night. Mike is the founder of ArtsCan Circle, and he is a musical phenomena with the harmonica. I had the chance to watch Magoo and Mike play music with kids thoughout the week, and I was blown away by the way they could totally capture the childrens’ attention and inspire them with music.

Magoo and Mike rock out with the kids in music class.

The week went on, and class after class partook in our frenzy of puppet-making. Friday finally arrived and I was wondering if any of the kids would actually show up to do the show; teachers had warned me not to get my hopes up. But sure enough, almost all of them were there, and we quickly got set up in the music room.

“Puppeteers, places please!”

The audience started arriving before the students had too much time to get nervous. Then the lights turned off, and we began the show.

The view from backstage.

The musicians provided some accompaniment, and three student narrators took turns at the microphone to tell the story. It was a beautiful thing to stand backstage and watch the singular focus of the fledgling puppeteers as they performed, all eyes cast on the screen, listening for their cues… it was a magical moment when it all came together, and you could see the pride on their faces when it was all over.

The title of the show in Innu.

Visiting Sheshatshiu was a life-changing experience. I know how much art has meant in my life, and it is such a pleasure to share it with children, especially in a community where the joy and hope that art can bring is so needed. It was an emotionally challenging week, but I was rewarded a hundred fold with smiles and laughter, rampant affection, and the gratification of seeing students succeed in putting on a show that tells a story from their own culture. I will never forget this experience, and I’m already looking forward to my next trip with ArtsCan Circle in January, this time to the community of Natuashish, Labrador.

A very, very happy young audience!

If you, too, want to be an agent for change, you can donate to ArtsCan Circle. Click here to find out how.

Survivor

2010-11-10T19:37:00.015-05:00

"It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change."
--Charles Darwin

We depend on our well for our in-house water so, to help conserve this precious ground water as much as possible, we've been collecting rainwater in barrels for use outdoors. We have three of these big blue guys and three smaller Rubbermaid bins (designed for ordinary garbage use) paired up with them, plus one rogue bin near the barn (rough estimate: about a thousand litres, combined).

That's a lot of water, but we had three vegetable gardens, nearly 30 baby trees, and many flower gardens that needed regular drinks, so when the summer got dry (with weeks between rainfalls), we had to prioritize: gardens first, flowers and trees second. At one desperate and troubling point we were drawing water from our well (via the bathtub) to water the veggies.

But we survived the brief droughts --as did the vegetables, trees, and flowers. However, a nasty byproduct of so much standing water is the proliferation of mosquitoes. They love it and they laid their eggs in our barrels every chance they got, producing grotesque squirming larvae which grew up into blood-sucking whiners. What to do?

Rather than resort to a potentially unhealthy chemical solution, I remembered what my good friend, Mike Teng, suggested: feeder fish. These little guys are cheap (a couple of bucks for a dozen fish) and are usually used either as food for bigger animals or as starter pets for kids. So I went to the pet shop and brought home a dozen and put in two fish per barrel.

The fish were happy and I was happy: for a couple of bucks I solved (part of) our mosquito problem with fish that were earning their keep by eating all the mosquito larvae while living luxuriously in giant barrels.

Then they started dying.

Every couple of days there was another dead fish. Was the rain water too acidic? Were birds pooping in the barrels? We still don't know. By the time we got down to three or four, I went to the pet shop again and got another dozen. I bought fish food to supplement their diet in case the mosquitoes took a break from propagating (fat chance!).

Still more deaths...until one last fish remained:

We kept referring to him (her?) as Survivor Fish. Since there was overlap between fish batches from the shops, I'm not certain if he's from the first group or the second, but I am certain he outlasted them all.

As October progressed, frost came more frequently in the mornings. Then ice. How could Survivor Fish survive the top 3-4cm of water in the rain barrel freezing solid? Well, cold water contains more oxygen and algae has been growing in the barrel for some time, so the conditions were still good for our little hero.

But the days are getting colder and I wanted to reward him with more than a dis-honourable and icy burial at the bottom of a rain barrel.

I decided to take him indoors.

I knew I would have to re-introduce him to warmer temperatures gradually, so my first step was to take him out of the big blue barrel (the one by our garage) and keep him in a metal bucket in the garage where it wouldn't freeze. He survived the night, so I took him outside and let him bask in the sunshine until just before sunset:

Then I took him inside to the Gallery where it's still pretty chilly:

He seems to be quite happy with the transition (note the algae from the barrel in the bucket) and has now been indoors for two days. I have no idea what the odds are of him surviving the winter, but he's beaten some hefty odds already, so I wouldn't put it past him.

This little guy is definitely a Big Fish in my books:

UPDATE (13 Nov.): Survivor Fish didn't last a week indoors. Four days after I brought him inside I found him floating in his bucket; he couldn't adapt, after all. So long, little buddy.

Budgie Lands at Small Pond

2010-10-27T22:31:00.001-04:00

Part of our dream of creating Small Pond was that artists would embrace the place as their playground. We have acre upon acre of magnificent forest, field, and fresh air, and we wanted to connect with artists who would know what to do when given such a space to play. It didn’t take long before we met Budgie – a Belleville artist who works in stone, glass, and ice.

Budgie waters his ice/fire sculpture... just your average night at Small Pond

‘Budgie’ is otherwise known as Marc ‘Budgie’ Bourdon. We met at ArteVino in June, where Milé had a bunch of paintings on display. Budgie visited Small Pond shortly thereafter – and has been a regular ever since. He drops by at some point about every other weekend, often with his adorable daughter Emerson in tow and his car loaded down with art supplies and tools.

We have many of his sculptures on display around our property, with a number of them located on the ‘arts trail,’ an enchanting path winding through the woods. Guy Doucette created the trail in the springtime, and since then we have been inviting artists to contribute works of art along it. Budgie jumped on this idea quickly, and soon contributed several stone ‘tree slugs’:

And this dance floor:

Emerson demonstrates how to 'dance like no one is watching,' as this sculpture instructs us to do

We’ve had a lot of events over the last few months at Small Pond Arts – the Splashdown Music Festival, the shadow puppetry play Doubt Seed, Stickfest, and most recently the SuperCiderSilo party; and whenever there has been gathering, Budgie has been there. When he wasn’t busy gifting the ladies with a piece of his gorgeous glass jewelry, he could be found hanging ice sculptures in the trees:

Or making ice sculptures, like this one in the fire pit (which he also built for us, swell guy that he is):

Budgie is currently working on a long-term sculpture project to be installed at Small Pond: a huggable memorial for Canadian soldiers.

His day job is at Campbell Monument and he has created 1,152 soldier memorials to date. Budgie is one of the warmest and kindest people you will ever meet, and pretty damn funny to boot, but he is not immune to the somber nature of his work. I think this sculpture will be a meaningful addition to our trail.

When Milé and I moved to Prince Edward County eight months ago, we knew no one. In the short time that we have lived here we have quickly found our tribe; a great number of people we can call our friends, and we are honoured to count Budgie and his daughter Emerson amongst them.

If you would like to contribute a piece of artwork to our arts trail, or visit Small Pond and create an installation, please get in touch by emailing info@smallpond arts.ca. Just don't be surprised if you find a Budgie in the woods!

Stickfest

2010-10-02T12:03:00.023-04:00

"Should you sit around waiting until something’s become a tradition, or shouldn’t you rather roll up your sleeves and get to work developing one?”
– Rainer Werner Fassbinder

In 1988 the citizens of Epping Forest, a small town in the UK’s Essex County, held their first celebration in honour of the common stick. With the slogan “Rectus Extra Vester Porta” (right outside your door) and beloved mascot Hickory Dick (designed by Niall Eccles), the festival was a sensational hit, attracting media attention across England. Eventually, more English towns caught Stick Fever and it soon became known as the International Festival of the Stick, with festivals throughout the UK numbering in the dozens. The rest of Europe soon followed, bringing appreciation of the lowly stick to more and more people each year, and by 1996, more than thirty-five countries were hosting stick festivals.

But not really.

We made it up.

We decided that the International Festival of the Stick would be an inclusive, community-oriented event that everybody could afford to attend, the price of admission being one stick. As an early-bird promo, when people visited us, we put a stick under their windshields that had written on it "This stick is your admission to Stickfest 2010 at Small Pond Arts”. Likewise, these stick invitations were left in mailboxes, at local cafés, etc. Our initial idea was that whoever brought that stick to the festival got a treat, but then we decided to just give treats to everybody. When someone arrived without a stick, that was okay; we gave them a stick.

Krista spent a week trimming branches from the fallen Hesperus to make the River Styx out of sticks.

Another outdoor stick-based installation was Caitlin Dalby’s beautiful giant nest. This was made back in May and is a permanent installation on our artists’ trail in the woods. People love climbing into it and having their picture taken.

The centerpiece of Stickfest was The Museum of the Stick in our barn where we featured all kinds of sticky items:

I made three drawings --using lipstick-- of musician Tony Levin playing the Chapman Stick.

Local illustrator Carl Wiens contributed an illustration of The Amazing Stick, encapsulating the versatility of sticks since their very beginnings.

My sister, Lena, had made some delicious mini sticky buns for all to enjoy:

Also in the food part of the display were a beef stick, Fun Dip with its famous hard candy Lik-A-Stix, and Hickory Sticks in all their salty goodness.

In a series of three shadow boxes were displayed a lipstick, a deodorant stick, glow sticks, incense sticks, matchsticks, chopsticks, a memory stick, a ChapStick, and a glue stick.

Krista’s Punch puppet is holding a slap stick, there’s a joystick, a traditional East Coast ugly stick, a pogo stick, a candlestick, and a beautiful talking stick carved by Belleville artist Peter Paylor.

Other museum items included a pair of drumsticks (the musical kind, not the part of a fowl’s leg…or the ice cream confection), another beautiful carved stick by Peter (this time a salmon carved into a piece from one of our own trees that fell over this summer), stickers, a walking stick, a didgeridoo from Australia, a yard stick, a rain stick, and an Olympic hockey stick.

Then there’s my favourite part of the museum: the Mascot Gallery. Children from all over created extremely imaginative interpretations of Hickory Dick. I really wanted to have a children’s component to the museum and I was so happy to receive and install so many amazing pieces of art.

We also set up a painting station where visitors could decorate their own sticks, all the while listening to sticky music on the stereo (including Gregory Hoskins and the Stickpeople, musicians playing the Chapman Stick (including Tony Levin), and, of course, Styx). Some of these painted sticks were later incorporated into the River Styx.

When the crowd was at a critical mass, we began the entertainment portion with readings. I was up first with a reading of The Trees by Neil Peart, Krista read her poem Sugar Maple, and finally, Colin Frizzell read a brilliant piece which he wrote specifically for this Stickfest, called The Glory of the Stick.

In the bottom right of the photo above is Dianne Lee, who created Stick Cozies, complete with instructions, for people to keep their sticks, well, cozy.

Installed outside the museum, Budgie assembled an ice sculpture incorporating sticks (pictured here with his camera shy daughter, Emerson).

After a while, folks gathered around the fire pit (fortunately no sticks were burned that day) and partook of carrot and celery sticks. Some people even took to whittling sticks and knitting.

Some people even learned to walk on big sticks.

We were really impressed that our community so willingly took to Stickfest and came out in such great numbers. We’re already looking forward to Stickfest 2011 – aren’t you?

Playing with Shadows

2010-09-13T17:50:00.002-04:00

Some time last year, a seed of an idea started to grow. From that small idea grew the shadow puppetry play Doubt Seed that we performed a few weeks ago at Small Pond Arts.

Doubt Seed is the fourth shadow puppetry collaboration between me and artists Guy Doucette and Craig Morrison. Our previous shadow plays were Wolf/Flow (a dark retelling of the Little Red Riding Hood), Leap Year Pudding, which involved more than 60 high school students, and Dreams A Go-Go, which we performed at Toronto’s Nuit Blanche and featured projections on a three-story building while puppeteers performed in the windows.

L to R: Mo Morrison-Brandeis, Craig Morrison, Guy Doucette, Sandra Henderson, Krista Dalby

For Doubt Seed we were fortunate enough to be joined by puppeteers Sandra Henderson and Mo Morrison-Brandeis, and benefited from the help of a number of volunteers who pitched in at the 11th hour to make it happen.

Volunteers hard at work in the puppet sweatshop

Make no mistake: puppetry is serious business. If watching theatre requires a leap of the imagination, then puppetry is the long jump of the theatre world. It is in this leap that the magic of puppetry occurs, where our hearts can be broken by the careful manipulation of sticks or fabric, where we can cheer for a heroic piece of cardboard, and where we can speak truthfully about things we couldn’t say otherwise.

Craig does some early morning puppet-cutting by the firepit

Shadow puppetry is a form of theatre that many people may be unfamiliar with other than in its most rudimentary form. It has a long, dignified and sacred history stretching back thousands of years and has been practiced all over the world. Shadow puppetry has been a particularly important form of theatre in Asia. In India shadow puppetry is performed in temples depicting scenes of the gods; puppets are crafted in reverent seclusion, sometimes incorporating the puppeteers’ own hair; puppets can remain in use for 100 years or more, and when they are retired, they are given a water burial, left to float away in the currents of a river. Serious business, indeed.

While puppetry in general seems to be in the midst of a renaissance, shadow puppetry has made recent appearances in a number of high-profile Canadian productions including Robert LePage’s opera The Nightingale and the concerts of singer-songwriter Feist. In a world of high-tech gadgetry, shadow puppetry is refreshingly low-tech, and has a sensuality that can only be achieved by raw human effort.

A scene from the show: Mr. Spinks, the elderly librarian, tries to prevent the local dogs from making unsightly deposits on the library's lawn

When Guy told me about a story he’d been writing called Doubt Seed, the story appealed to me right away and I got to work writing the script. Its rural setting and the story of a newcomer coming to town was one that I could identify with, having recently moved to Prince Edward County. My collaborators and I all have an appreciation for the macabre, and this story definitely had some darker elements. But like all of the plays that I have written, I felt there was ultimately a positive message to be told in Doubt Seed: the importance of building a strong community and sticking together to overcome our troubles.

Wes (Guy Doucette) meets the Old Peddlar Woman

In Doubt Seed the citizens of Wildgate learn to work together – and so it is with us artists. We have creativity in abundance and we have a powerful collective voice. We have the ability to bring people together, to make them laugh and cry and think. The week before we started building the show, a bulldozer had started demolishing a historic Picton landmark, a beautiful brick church on Main Street, much to the shock and dismay of local citizens. As artists we chose to reference this senseless destruction of local history in our play. Pictured here is a bulldozer/venus flytrap which apparently sprang from a doubt seed and is now eating the church for lunch.

In Doubt Seed, history makes a nice light snack...

And in reality, a historic Picton landmark is torn down, August 2010

Shadow puppetry is the prehistoric cousin of both film and animation, and can use a range of filmic techniques such as close-ups, wide shots, panning, cross-fading and so forth. Storyboarding is an important part of our development process.

Every good puppeteer needs to know how to chill out backstage for extended periods of time. Here, I demonstrate my advanced technique.

We wanted to ensure that we were not just illustrating the monologue of the main character, but carefully crafting our images to create a unique and visually strong piece of theatre. Early on in the process we made choices about the aesthetic, and divided up the tasks to capitalize on our individual strengths. Craig is a master of character design, and we decided that he would create all of the characters. When we had our first meeting at Small Pond in the spring, we decided that he would base the character designs on us! Thusly appearing in the play are me and Milé as the café owners Georgette and Gilles, Craig as the butcher, Craig’s wife Elizabeth as Anastasia, Guy’s dad Gary as the mayor, etc.

Elizabeth and Craig show off their portrait puppets, designed by Craig

The consistency of design served us well. Guy designed all the backgrounds and played our narrator, Wes, out in front of the screen. I designed a few things, as well as puppeteering, but most of my energy went into coordinating people, publicity, food, music, etc. We did 2 performances at Small Pond in August 2010, one night behind the barn and - when thunderclouds loomed - one night inside the barn. We couldn’t have been prouder of the finished show, it is some of our best work to date. Our evenings of shadow puppetry also featured the lovely and talented Anna Sudac, whose music perfectly complemented our show.

The mighty talented Anna Sudac

The best part of the whole experience was just living and working together on the farm during the creation and presentation of the show; sharing meals elbow to elbow at the dining room table, cutting puppets until our fingers were numb, bonding over late nights of bug-infested rehearsal, sitting around the campfire into the wee hours, and even midnight howling in the silo (you've got to try it!) - this is exactly what Small Pond is for: creation and artistic camaraderie. As the first theatrical production at Small Pond, we're pleased as Punch at how it all came together. Thanks to all the wonderful artists and volunteers, and to our audiences whose applause warmed our hearts.

Anna warms up the audience as the sun goes down

Flowers

2010-08-29T15:05:00.008-04:00

I thought it might be informative if I did a "six-month report" describing how I feel about living at Small Pond Arts in Prince Edward County versus living in Toronto, and for this "report" I decided to illustrate (and slightly customize) the lyrics of (Nothing But) Flowers by Talking Heads.

For best effect, click here (in a new browsing tab) and listen to the song while reading this entry.