Intermediate Digital Photography: A Thematic Journey
Conducted by: Gary Samson

In this course, participants will identify a theme and then create a body of work using their digital cameras. We will review and edit our photos and make recommendations about how to strengthen our ideas to create the most cohesive body of work. We will also review the themed work of other important photographers including Sally Mann, Paul Strand and Richard Avedon. Digital camera techniques will be discussed, including the use of the histogram for proper exposure, the differences between  jpeg and raw file formats, and the ways to create custom white balance settings for mixed lighting situations.

Gary Samson is recognized as an accomplished fine arts photographer and educator. In 1984 he received a fellowship from the NH Council on the Arts for his environmental portraits of New Hampshire artists and writers. His work is included in the permanent collections of the Currier Museum of Art, the New Hampshire Institute of Art, the State of New Hampshire, and the Art Galleries at the University of New Hampshire, as well as private collections. In the fall of 1998 his work was included in the exhibition Moments in Time: Master Photographs from the Currier Gallery of Art. In the fall of 1999, at the invitation of the French government, Mr. Samson exhibited a portfolio of his work in Andrezieux-Boutheon, France. 

Beginning in 1974, Gary held the position of University Filmmaker at the University of New Hampshire (UNH).  As Filmmaker, Gary has produced ten films reflecting the history and culture of the State of New Hampshire. These documentary and dramatic films have been aired locally and nationally on cable stations such as Cinemax, as well as on commercial and public television stations.  Photography and filmmaking assignments over the years have taken Gary to locations as diverse as Peru, Ireland, Labrador, Belize, Guatemala and the White House.

For over twenty years, Gary has extensively utilized 19th and 20th century photographic archives in the production of films and exhibitions about New Hampshire's rich history. His best-known films, A World Within A World: The Amoskeag Manufacturing Company and Milltown, are sensitive portrayals of Manchester's textile mills and the people who labored in them. In 1982 he organized and curated an exhibition on the Franco-American experience in New Hampshire, which has traveled throughout New England and to Canada and France. After producing a film on the life of internationally acclaimed portrait photographer Lotte Jacobi, Gary spent six years cataloging Ms. Jacobi’s archive of 47,000 negatives, donated to the University of New Hampshire in 1981.

Gary has also written several books on New Hampshire history including A World Within a World: Manchester, The Mills, and the Immigrant Experience and Capitol Views: A Photographic History of Concord, New Hampshire 1850-1930. In 2001 he was appointed Chair of the Photography Department at the New Hampshire Institute of Art in Manchester, NH, where he currently teaches.

West African Dance
Conducted by: Amparo Chigui Santiago
Live Drumming: Adewole Love

This class is a high-spirited, high-powered rhythmic dance experience and is for anyone who loves to dance. The class brings together body, mind and spirit in an energetic union of the music, dance and oral tradition of the people of West Africa. Participants learn regional songs and dances of welcome and praise such as: Lamban (Dance of Celebration), Mandjani (Challenge Dance), and Wolo Sodon Jon Don (Dance of Becoming Free). Each dance is accompanied by live drumming to provide participants with an understanding of the relationship between the dancer and musician and the common language they must speak in order to execute an African dance style.

Amparo Chigui Santiago (New York, NY) began her dance training in a District 4 program, which is now known as the Repertory Dance Company. She moved on to become a principal dancer with the internationally acclaimed Chuck Davis Dance Theatre Company, Fred Benjamin Dance Company, and Forces of Nature. Ms. Santiago has trained in many different forms of dance techniques, from ballet to African. She participated in intensive music and dance workshops in Brazil, Haiti, Senegal and with the Bolshoi Ballet in Moscow. She has toured throughout the Americas, Europe and Africa; performing with artists such as Miriam Makeba, C&C Music Factory, Alyson Williams, Tribal House, Urban Soul, Angelique Kido, and Cameo. In 1999, Ms. Santiago choreographed “The Shaneequa Chronicles” which premiered in New York City and won an Obie award. 

In addition to her job as Director of CAS/Ailey Camp New York, Ms. Santiago teaches workshops around New York City, she exposes her students to a wide variety of dance forms such as modern, jazz, ballet and hip-hop. Her workshops also incorporate elements of African, Caribbean and European cultural traditions. Students learn the importance of storytelling as a means of preserving cultural traditions. 

In 1988, Ms. Santiago was introduced to yoga and has since been committed to making it an integral part of her lifestyle. She has studied extensively with Sri Dharma Mittra and in 1999 she became certified in Prana Yoga under the direction of Dr. Jeffrey Migdow. She is equally passionate about teaching yoga as she is about being taught its ever evolving techniques. With a unique combination of experience and enthusiasm, Ms. Santiago creates a safe space for her students to discover themselves and become more aware of their bodies and the environment around them. Yoga is also incorporated as an effective tool to assist students in becoming better listeners and increasing their concentration. Currently, Ms. Santiago is a teaching artist for Alvin Ailey Dance Foundation’s Arts In Education & Community Programs.

Adewole Love (New York, NY) had the unique experience of growing up in a household where both his parents were performing artists. His father, Ronald "Balogun" Love, was a well respected African percussionist who exposed his son to the world of music before he could walk. His performance debut was at the age of four where he was a solo drummer at the American Dance Festival in Durham, North Carolina. He is trained in the art forms of West African music and has studied abroad in Africa, specifically in Guinea, gathering information and receiving equal acceptance and respect for his skills in drumming. Mr. Love has also performed in Europe. He is currently a faculty musician for The Ailey School, and the Alvin Ailey Dance Foundation’s Arts In Education & Community Programs. It is his light-hearted nature that makes it easy for him to draw from his life experiences in his music.

Mime: Exploring Movement and Silence.
Conducted by: Jackie Davis

As a lone figure on an empty stage, the great master of mime, Marcel Marceau, performed “The Creation of the World” in seven minutes, from the primal darkness, oceans, air, and earth, to Adam and Eve, the embodiment of the first human beings. In “The Public Garden” he portrayed over a dozen distinct characters, all interrelating with their surroundings and with each other. How can the movements of a single person evoke so much?

In this workshop, we will explore movement and silence through the art of mime as a contemplative experience. While we will learn some of the tricks of the trade (how to create objects in space; how to “walk on the spot”), we’ll also relate to the space around us as an enlivened substance that can support and portray inner images. “Homework” between sessions will include writing Haiku poems which we’ll intertwine with our movements, individually and collectively, and share with each other at the end of our week together.

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A childhood ballerina, Jackie began her training in mime at the Joy of Movement Center in Boston at the age of thirteen. For sixteen hours per week she studied the techniques of Marcel Marceau, Étienne Decroux, and Tomaszewski’s Polish Ballet-Mime Theatre. At fifteen, she moved from her childhood home in Chelmsford, Massachusetts to join La Compagnie de Mime in New York City, and at sixteen was teaching accredited mime courses as an adjunct faculty member of New York University’s Department of Undergraduate Drama. Jackie trained with the world’s most famous mime, Marcel Marceau, who invited her to attend his school in Paris, and while she never did get there, she studied with him in Ann Arbor, Michigan, the home of his short-lived international school of mime in North America. She also studied briefly with mime artists Claude Kipnis and Tony Montanaro.

In 1982 Jackie was hired to perform at the World’s Fair in Knoxville, Tennessee, where she met her future husband Rick Davis, a former clown from Ringling Brothers, Barnum and Bailey Circus. One year later, at age twenty-one, she was hired by Walt Disney World to perform as the resident mime at the French Pavilion in the newly opened EPCOT Center in Orlando, where she worked for nearly four years and produced over 4,000 performances.

Jackie left EPCOT to pursue higher education at the University of New Hampshire where she majored in Theater and in a program of her own design, Non-verbal Expression in the Arts. This course of study comprised American Sign Language, dance, choreography, puppetry, music history and theory, art history, drawing, sculpture, and an independent study in mask making and masked performance. While matriculated as an undergraduate in the UNH theater department, she created and taught a pilot course in mask and movement based on the techniques of Jacques Copeau and Bari Rolfe. The course was offered in collaboration with Sears Eldredge of Macalester College, who engaged Jackie to field-test his mask curriculum in preparation for the publication of his book Mask Improvisation for Actor Training and Performance: the Compelling Image. Jackie built eighty-nine masks for UNH’s production of The Oresteia by Aeschylus, winning her an honorable mention at the American College Theater Festival at the Kennedy Center. During her brief mask making career, she was commissioned to build masks for productions at the American Repertory Theater, the Hartford Stage Company, and the Shakespeare Theater at the Folger in Washington, D.C. She was awarded her Bachelor of Arts degree from UNH, with summa cum laude honors, in 1991.

As a performer, Jackie has combined traditional white-faced mime, puppetry, masks, juggling, comic dance, and acrobatics. For more than twenty-five years, she performed around New England and beyond, from an International Children’s Festival in Canada down to the International Busker’s Festival in Key West. Past audiences include Clearwater’s Hudson River Revival, Lincoln Center, First Night New Hampshire, children’s museums, libraries, elementary and high schools, rehabilitation centers, camps for deaf children, corporate events, film and television, and yes, shopping malls. 

At thirty-four, Jackie discovered the discipline of Spacial Dynamics, which explores and examines the interplay between the human being, movement, and space through a wide spectrum of activities: children’s games, athletics, folk dance, circus arts, and a series of meditative movement sequences called Bothmer Gymnastics. Jackie completed the five-year In-Service Training in 2001, then subsequently became an instructor of adults and teachers at the Spacial Dynamics Institute in New York under the direction of its founder, Jaimen McMillan. Jackie assists people in learning how to move in healthy ways and coaches them in body awareness, conscious movement habits, dynamic posture, and the interrelationship of movement and space. 

It was through her work in Spacial Dynamics that Jackie’s mime career was briefly re-kindled. During the summer of 2003, in collaboration with Juilliard pianist Gili Melamed-Lev, Jackie created a full-length mime performance entitled The Invisible Factor: Études in Mime and Music. This creative labor merged Jackie’s two major trainings in classical mime and Spacial Dynamics; mime was used to explore and affirm the Spacial Dynamics principles, while the latter served to illuminate and transform the quality and sensibility of the former. Approached like a master's thesis, several pieces were created during intensive studio sessions over a period of eight weeks and included research, artwork, journaling, body work, and countless conversations. 

In 2003, Jackie was awarded an Arts Education Grant from the Arts Council of Rockland County, New York, to perform The Invisible Factor: Études in Mime & Music, and to offer a mime workshop to the high school students of the Green Meadow Waldorf School. The workshop was entitled “Expressive Silence: Gesture and Movement as an Interactive Learning Tool.” 

Jackie is currently the movement education teacher at the Pine Hill Waldorf School in Wilton, New Hampshire, teaching grades 1-8. She is the founder and director of the school’s annual Hilltop Circus with middle school students. Hilltop was founded in 1996 and has been the impetus for a rich career branch for Jackie. She has worked for the nationally acclaimed Circus Smirkus summer camp, and she and her husband Rick direct the Silver Lining Circus Camp where she coaches tightwire, unicycling, stilt walking, rolling globes, juggling of all kinds, and clowning. Together they also helped found the American Youth Circus Organization on the national level, and locally they have formed CircusLearning, LLC, devoted to youth development through circus arts education. In the spring of 2007, Jackie will conduct a circus education workshop at the national convention of the American Alliance of Health, Physical Education, Recreation, and Dance (AAHPERD). And all of this is leading Jackie to pursue a master’s degree in education, with a focus on human development and psychology.

Jackie and Rick live with their two children in Temple, New Hampshire.

MUSIC WORKSHOP - 2007

Singing With Courage
Conducted by: Jon Arterton

“Singing with Courage!” Learning to sing freely with strength, ease and confidence is the goal of the Workshop. Inexperienced and experienced singers alike are gently guided to finding their voices through group singing, improvisation and vocal exercises in a safe and supportive environment. 

Since this is not a performance-oriented workshop, participants need not be experts at reading music. They simply need to be open to exploring their voices and confronting their fears. Along the way, many technical aspects of singing will no doubt be encountered, including breathing, relaxation, resonance, and registers.

Jon began his musical journey as a choirboy at Washington's National Cathedral where his father was a minister. He was twice a Tanglewood Vocal Fellow at the Berkshire Music Festival, and holds a Master's Degree in choral conducting and voice from The New England Conservatory of Music where he also served as Assistant Conductor of Choruses. He was the founder and vocal arranger of The Flirtations, the proudly gay a cappella group seen on HBO, Good Morning America and in the film Philadelphia. He toured with the group for a decade and performed all over Europe and the Americas, singing in such places as Carnegie Hall and Yankee Stadium. He also holds an MFA degree in Acting from Smith College, and appeared as an actor in many regional and Off-Broadway productions, and in The Utter Glory of Morrissey Hall on Broadway. Jon  moved from New York City to Provincetown at the very tip of Cape Cod in 1993. There he conducts The Outer Cape Chorale, a large non-auditioning community chorus he founded in 2002, and gives periodic Singing Workshops. He has given master classes at the Gay and Lesbian Choruses Small Ensemble Festival in Louisville, the Contemporary A Cappella Society Conference in Boston, and the Augusta Heritage Music Festival in Elkins, WV. He serves as the Director of Music at Provincetown’s U.U. Meeting House and performs multi-layered songs with his solo voice and a digital looping device called an Echoplex. He legally married the love of his life James Mack in April, 2005, and together they created Just Married ! (the Musical) which they have recently begun to perform regionally.

VISUAL ARTS WORKSHOP - 2007

Reduction and Jigsaw Printmaking
Conducted by: Elizabeth Cameron

Reduction and Jigsaw Printmaking
American Teacher honoree, Elizabeth Cameron will help students explore a printmaking technique developed by Pablo Picasso whereby successive layers are carved and printed from one linoleum block to create multi-colored relief prints. 

Up Front With Story Telling: Writing For Children
Conducted by: Elizabeth Levy

Writing for children demands honesty, humor and humility. It isn't easy, but it can be joyful. Whether writing fantasy, picture books, realistic fiction or non-fiction, children demand a good story, and they love characters. Throughout the week, we will do writing exercises designed to help us "layer" our work mixing the funny and the sad. As each of you works on your own individual project, we will also discuss the role of hope and optimism, and the difference, if there is any, between writing for children and writing for adults. Liz Levy will also supply a suggested reading list of some contemporary children's books and bring up some of her favorites for you to share. 

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Elizabeth Levy is the celebrated author of over 90 books for children. She is best known for her humorous mysteries, novels and nonfiction that combine humor with deeper themes of friendship and family. Her most recent books include Tackling Dad, (HarperCollins) a novel about Cassie, the only one on the Pee Wee football team who could someday qualify for Miss America, and The Vampire State Building (HarperCollins), a Sam and Robert mystery. Among her popular series are The Something Queer... and Fletcher mysteries, illustrated by Caldecott Award-winner Mordecai Gerstein, and Invisible Inc. (Scholastic) illustrated by Denise Brunkus (artist for the Junie B. Jones Series) and the beloved Sam and Robert monster books (HarperCollins.) She has won awards for many books including, If You Were There When They Signed the Constitution (Scholastic )and My Life as a Fifth Grade Comedian (HarperCollins), a touching and humorous story of learning about what is truly funny. Ms. Levy lives in New York City and travels extensively to visit schools and libraries throughout the country – and around the world.

AWARDS:

Georgia State Award, 2001 for My Life as a Fifth Grade Comedian

Maryland State Award, 2000-1 for My Life as a Fifth Grade Comedian

ABA Pick of the Lists 2000, Seventh Grade Tango

New York Public Library 100 Best Books of 1997, Virginia State Award Nominee, My Life as a Fifth Grade Comedian

Arkansas State Award, Runner Up, 1992, Nominated for Florida Sunshine State Award, New Mexico, Land of Enchantment Award, Nevada Award, Keep Ms. Sugarman in the Fourth Grade

New York Times Outstanding Books of the Year, 1977, Struggle and Lose, Struggle and Win: The United Mineworkers Story

Outstanding Science book for Children, National Science Teachers Association, Before You Were Three, 1977

More information about Elizabeth Levy can be found on her website at:
www.elizabethlevy.com

A musical look at love and same-sex marriage, with Jon Arterton and James Mack, legally married in Massachusetts in 2005. These two wonderful singers present a witty and poignant look at relationships, politics, the Bible, and the issue of gay marriage in America.

Jon Arterton was once a high school teacher and the founder of the proudly gay a cappella group The Flirtations. He now conducts The Outer Cape Chorale, Provincetown’s 120-voice community chorus. 

James Mack was once a licensed Southern Baptist minister and a men’s fashion executive in New York City. He now owns Snug Cottage, an early 19th century bed-and-breakfast in Provincetown. 

• Presenters:
• Nancy Horton
• Tim Gaudreau
• Charter Weeks
• Peter Randall
• Gary Samson

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