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.
