Washington Revels

Principle Performers

Principle Performers
2006 Christmas Revels: An Early American Winter Celebration
For more information, contact: 202-723-7528; info@revelsdc.org

Mary Alice and Peter Amidon are versatile musicians and gifted teachers who are dedicated to traditional song, dance and storytelling. The Amidons are equally at home doing a concert of stories and songs for adults or children, calling a contra dance for adults or a community dance for all ages, leading harmony singing workshops with adults, or doing an elementary school residency of singing, storytelling or traditional dance. They perform and teach at schools, festivals, teacher conferences, and folk camps throughout the United States. They have recorded nine albums of songs for all ages. The Amidons recently released their songbook and accompanying CD: Beatitudes - Amidon Choral Arrangements.

Storytelling is a regular feature of Peter and Mary Alice's performances. Peter has been the featured storyteller at Pinewoods, Lady of the Lake, and other traditional song and dance camps. Mary Alice and Peter are both featured tellers at the annual Vermont Storytelling Festival. Peter Amidon has called contra dances and community/family dances all across the United States and in the United Kingdom. Peter is in increasing demand as a caller at contra dances and festivals throughout the Northeast. He is known for his clear, efficient and beginner-friendly walk-throughs, for his dynamic and musical calling style, and for his ever-fresh repertoire of consistently flowing and elegant contra dances and squares. Mary Alice Amidon combines singing, storytelling, movements, singing games and dance in her sessions with children and in her teacher workshops. She has a particular gift for enhancing picture books with background music, singing, storytelling and movement.

Dovie Thomason’s passion for sharing her Lakota and Kiowa Apache heritage through traditional and original stories began when she was ten years old and a teacher taught her history class that “Indians are extinct.” This desire to give people a clearer understanding of the often misunderstood, often invisible cultures of the First Nations of North America has brought this former high school teacher and university professor to powwows and Indian Centers throughout North America to the stage of Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre in London as well as castles in Belgium and cottages in Ireland.

Her well-crafted stories are “word-weavings” of personal memories, untold histories and ancient tales that speak profoundly across cultures and boundaries to the modern heart. Dovie’s gifts of humor, enlivening imagination and astonishing vocal transformations helps her audience become “comfortable with discomfort” and the journey toward true respect and reconciliation. Dovie appeared in the film The Call of Story: An American Renaissance and has been featured on National Public Radio (NPR), BBC in England and RTE in Ireland. She is chair of the Viola White Water Foundation for Native Culture and Education.
Steve Hickman (fiddle), one of the truly great performers of fiddle music, has electrified audiences for close to thirty years. Besides playing for numerous bands in the Washington, D.C. area, Steve has been a featured fiddler for the Fiddle Puppets and Evening Star, touring throughout the world. In addition to his fine fiddling and stage presence, Steve is renowned for his hambone antics (not to mention his handlebar mustache). Steve occasionally lives in King George, Virginia but spends much of his time traveling to play at dance workshops, festivals and camps throughout the country and the world. He is one of the world's leading authorities on the arcane art of hambone.

John Devine (guitar) from Berkeley Springs, WV is in constant demand as rhythm guitarist in a host of popular contra dance bands around Washington, D.C., Maryland and Northern Virginia. He has been a staff member at Buffalo Gap, and plays at dance workshops, festivals and camps around the country. He frequently teams up with Steve Hickman to play for dances.
Charlie Pilzer (bass) is a resident of Takoma Park, MD. Charlie's career has included performing, producing and engineering award-winning Celtic, folk and acoustic music. For over 25 years he has toured and recorded as a bass player with Spælimenninir, a Scandinavian folk group based in the Faroe Islands. He is well known as a dance musician (piano and bass) for New England and Scandinavian folk dances and has toured from Maine to Alaska. He has been on the staff at weeks for the Country Dance & Song Society and the Christmas Country Dance School at Berea College and has served as program director for the CDSS Family Week program at Pinewoods Camp. He is also is a founder of Azalea City Recordings. Charlie is the Artistic Associate for Music for Washington Revels and served as co-Music Director for their 2003 Christmas Revels production and directed several years of May Revels.

About the Washington Revels
An established non-profit cultural institution in D.C. for over 20 years, the Washington Revels is dedicated to reviving and promoting communal, seasonal celebrations. Featuring the music, dance, drama and folk tales of a particular place and time, each Revels production enables audiences of all ages to experience age-old cultural traditions that affirm and support our shared community. The Washington Revels is one of twelve affiliated organizations across the country whose parent organization, Revels, Inc. in Watertown, Massachusetts, was formed by John Langstaff, concert baritone, music educator and prize-winning author.

Dupont Circle Photo

Dupont Circle

Dupont Circle:

This circle was, and still is, the last I heard, the Mecca Point in Washington, D.C. for youth, demonstrations, and tourist focal points interested in the " Radical 70's. "

Here too I once stroll with my girl on my arm, enjoying a little sugar from her, err a kiss for those of you who are not Southerners, during the late 60s and early 70s.

Thus it is to no surprise this focal point must be included. Youth cultural life of DC and all. Moreover, the shops which have grown up around this point in Washington, DC's urban landscape eventually attracted an adjacent Hotel development. This location was then, as it is still grown zero for the best shopping within the entire belt of Washington, D.C.

So when you come here to visit, or as those who live in DC will tell you, it is a good idea that you bring your credit cards too!

RMC / KA

An Introduction:

Karen Holzberg, Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C and the Chicago Cultural Center, Chicago, IL

The exhibition embodyDISEMBODY brings together seven photographic and installation artists whose work addresses issues of corporeality. For each of these artists, the human form whether in presence, absence, or transformation is a vehicle for exploring the elegance of human existence. Their explorations range from core biological issues and consequences to the mystery of consciousness with all the beauty and fragility of simply being alive. The result is a dialogue between an anatomical view of the body and an emotive or metaphorical view of the body.
This exhibition thus speaks through the equal and eloquent codes of artist and scientist. At first glance, art and science may be viewed as two worlds hosting opposite poles of thought - or at least inhabiting opposite sides of the brain. In truth, they share a creative drive that has both intellectual and emotional dimensions. Both scientists and artists are similarly impassioned by intertwining spirals of ‘discovery,’ ‘experience’ and ‘meaning’ in our world. Yet there exists intangible aspects of living and being that neither art nor science working alone can fully impart. embodyDISEMBODY therefore explores a rich melding of the two.

embodyDISEMBODY reveals the intrinsic beauty in science, its methodology, its rituals and related accouterments. Instruments utilized in the process of scientific observation - glass vessels, precision gauges and scales - impart new realities when transformed into objects of observation themselves. An artist’s juxtaposition or isolation of these instruments gives as much power to their form as to their function, as much metaphor as empirical narrative. And just as scientists read and decode photographs, x-rays, and magnetic resonance images (MRI’s) to gain insight, so does the artist. This consequence of light and film can transform our views and perceptions of our own bodies, especially of the hidden worlds within. In fact, theorist Walter Benjamin once compared the camera to a surgeon’s knife in that the camera operated similarly on the human body by seeing it in fragments and was thus able to penetrate more deeply into its true existence and reality.

Visually, each of these artists utilizes photography in their approach to the theme of corporeality. For example, the x-ray images of Alan Stone and Sabrina Raaf communicate intimate yet anonymous testimonies of the interior structure of the body through the ethereal and sinuous lines of bone. When viewed by a non-scientist’s eye, these luminous sentinels of fragments can take on a lyrical and foreign beauty as well as metaphorical references to our physical being and ultimate temporality. In Karen Holzberg’s work we witness haunting physical and psychological studies of the emotive body through ‘kinesics’. As opposed to traditional scientific approaches, her work does not offer clinical truth or recorded reality but a felt and experienced reality: highly visceral and sensual representations of corporeal drama dissected into two groups, "Heads" and "Bodies." Debra Kaufman appropriates photographs from scientific textbooks documenting human subjects suffering from various physical diseases and maladies. On their bodies she collages faces of Renaissance sitters and thereby lends these deformed beings the poise of martyrs and saints. Kaufman’s compositions impart a new sense of beauty as well as aberration to her ‘models’ who customarily are subject to society's denial. Mary Jo Toles employs scientific processes in creating her art work including MRI’s and high-voltage photograms. Her richly toned images are tableaux or portraits primarily of brain sections - that central core of the human nervous system, home of the mind, seat of the self, sectioned, laid bare, and richly mapped. Holly Morrison’s work contains the most ethereal conceptions of the body. She uses photos of anatomy and other landscapes on which she paints in gouache, graphite, and ink with beautiful fluidity and coloring - rich crimsons and bone yellows - which suggest vital fluids and viscous elements. Her drawn lines vaguely outline human forms and ‘neural structures’ which seem to be both pushing forward and disappearing from the plane of the paper. Ilyse Soutine’s images represent the ultimate clinization of the body: the body as conspicuously absent, present only through the artifacts of institutional settings such as hospitals and prisons. She uses elements such as a box of tissue on a stainless steel table to represent, symbolically, human warmth and empathy but, visually, to emphasize their objectified and sterilized state.
Together, the works included in embodyDISEMBODY contain the resonance, the insight, and the empathy of artistic vision along with the inspiration and analytical tools of science. The result of this union is a penetration of emotional layers and bodily surfaces in order to find visual and intellectual meaning in the texts of corporeal existence.

"The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science."

Albert Einstein.

This should give you an initial attitude in which to view the ensuing spectra this blog is to introduce.

Yours,

Mr. Roger M. Christian