Music & Stories to Enchant You!

Saturday, October 1st, 7:00 p.m. 
Dairy Center for the Arts
2590 Walnut Street, Boulder

THE STORY OF MUSIC, STORIES FROM HOME

with

Lauren Pelon & Gary Holthaus

Reservations (required): Call 303-444-7328, Tues.-Fri. 1:00-5:00,
or visit the DCA box office, 2590 Walnut St during the same hours. 

Award winning poet and essayist Gary Holthaus and internationally acclaimed musician Lauren Pelon team up to offer a unique new program called “The Story of Music, Stories from Home.”  Pelon sings in her lovely soprano voice and plays over twenty ancient and modern instruments ranging from lute, lyre, and concertina, to recorders, gemshorn, cornamuse, schreierpfeife, shawm,  pennywhistles, double ocarina, hurdy-gurdy, eagle bone flute, Kiowa courting flute, bowed psaltery, electric wind instrument and MIDI-pedalboard.  Holthaus tells real life stories from his boyhood in Iowa and what he has learned working as a commercial fisherman in Alaska, a wheat packer at Quaker Oats and a hoist operator at Iowa Steel and Iron Works, a retail clerk, teacher, professor and non-profit executive in Massachusetts, Alaska, Colorado, Montana, and Minnesota.  Both the music and the stories celebrate our sense of place, community, and home.

“The Story of Music, Stories from Home” will take place on Saturday, October 1, 7:00 p.m. in the Carsen Theater at the Dairy Center for the Arts.  The program is sponsored by The Stillpoint Center for the Humanities and Community and Picaresque II, a Minnesota non-profit.  It is free and open to the public, but tickets are required, and seating is limited. Reserve your tickets by calling 303-444-7328, Tues.-Fri. 1:00-5:00, or visit the DCA box office, 2590 Walnut Street during the same hours.

Lauren Pelon has performed throughout the U.S. and in China, Canada, England, Ireland, Scotland, Russia, Kazakhstan, Australia, and New Zealand.  She is noted for her versatile use of a diverse array of instruments, but Pelon has also won recognition for her singing voice, and for her compelling compositions and arrangements of music from many countries and cultures. 

Lauren has performed with symphony orchestras, The Philadelphia String Quartet, on Garrison Keillor’s “A Prairie Home Companion,” and at the Russian Institute for the History of the Arts in St. Petersburg, Russia.  She was the recipient of the 2001 “Artist of the Year” award from the Southeast Minnesota Arts Council, and 2010 Artist Initiative Award from the Minnesota State Arts Board. 

 Holthaus has three books of poems, three chapbooks, and three collections of essays, all of them rooted in the earth.  His prose has been cited in “Notable Essays” in 1994 and 1998, and he was a 1990 recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Individual Fellowship for Poetry.  In 2011 Holthaus was awarded an Original Works Grant from Southeast Minnesota Arts Council to work on a new and selected collection of poems.

His book of essays titled, Learning Native Wisdom: What Traditional Cultures Teach Us about Subsistence, Sustainability, and Spirituality was published by the University Press of Kentucky in 2008.  He worked with the Southeast Minnesota Experiment in Rural Cooperation to write From the Farm to the Table, What All Americans Need To Know about Agriculture, a book on farming also published by Kentucky.  Holthaus has most recently worked on issues of community sustainability with the Island Institute in Sitka, Alaska, and with the Pepperfield Project in Decorah, Iowa.

Together, Holthaus and Pelon have combined talents to create a surprising program of music from around the world and personal stories that will appeal to everyone.

Fall 2010, Charmaine Getz & Dick Kreck

Colorful Colorado Characters and Places was the final event in our 2010 Literary Series. At the beautiful Academy of Chinese Arts,  Charmaine Getz delighted participants with stories from her captivating book, Weird Colorado: Your Travel Guide to Colorado's Local Legends and Best Kept Secrets. If you haven't checked this out yet, you're in for a treat. And it includes a story on Stillpoint!

Dick Kreck spoke about his recent work, Smalldone: The Untold Story of an American Crime Family, providing more Colorado surprise and intrigue, brought to life by Dick's anecdotes and compelling photographs. Another engaging book for your list.

Stillpoint Center and guests appreciated the warm hospitality provided by the Academy of Chinese Arts.

                                        Charmaine Getz & Dick Kreck responding to questions