Center springs into full gear

By Rebecca Petersen | The Daily Journal

Published Saturday, March 22, 2008

It’s officially spring. Hooray! It’s officially Easter weekend. We’re officially on our way to summer. I know. It sure doesn’t feel like it — except if you’re out of the wind sitting in the sun. The sunshine reminds us that there will be summer one day soon.

Plans are underway for 10 concerts in the park this summer. Musicians are lined up and include Frank Weibl, Simon Rowe Trio, Island Time, The Tickwoods, Swedish Midsummer Musicians, Nita Velo, Scott Gunvaldson and Alan Thompson, Joel Myhre and other local talents.

There will be a total of 10 concerts on Thursday nights in Roosevelt Park this summer, starting the week of June 10. Concerts in the Park are from 5 to 7 p.m. We’ve also lined up food vendors for all of them, including The Lions’ Pork Chops, Elmer’s BBQ, Dairyland, The Viking, Domino’s Pizza, Ten Mile Lake, and of course you can always bring your own picnic.

We’ve also got big plans for art classes for all ages at the college — for sure two weeks in June (June 16-26) and two weeks in July (July 14-25).

These will include a theater track with a choice of six to eight different theater classes, plus painting classes, drawing classes, clogging classes, juggling classes, handbell choir, music classes and more. We’re pretty sure In The Heart of the Beast Puppet and Mask Theater will be back doing puppetry for at least one week, maybe two.

The Theater classes will track directly with our summer theater productions — Robin Hood, directed by Sarah Helland; and The Wizard of Oz, directed by Scott Brusven.

Auditions will happen in the middle of May with a rehearsal schedule set for the summer. With the middle school auditorium under construction we look forward to doing theater productions downtown here at A Center for the Arts and out at the Community College.

So, with all of this planning, you can see why I’m thinking summer, plus, we have a couple of amazing programs on the schedule already. On June 17, thanks to a partnership with Security State Bank, singer/songwriter Ann Reed will be in town with a concert and hopefully some workshops about song writing. Ann Reed has been named MPR’s Minnesota Troubadour this year plus, she’s writing a new Minnesota State Song for the Sesquicentennial. Then, in July, on the 25th, one of my most favorite storytellers in the whole wide world — Kevin Kling — will be in town with his musician friend to do an evening of storytelling.

We’re also hoping we can plan a storytelling workshop around his visit. Both of these programs would fit nicely with the Humanities Forum we’re developing along with many other community partners. This leads to the perfect segue — We believe in partnerships and The Big Read is one more!

While The Big Read Kick off was last month — actually just a few weeks ago — Big Read activities continue through the middle of April. This weekend, in fact tonight, at 7:30, The Biddies help us celebrate Women’s History Month and The Joy Luck Club in their evening of stories and songs centered around “eccentric older women.”

Certainly you will find eccentric older women in The Joy Luck Club. Maybe the book helps us understand some of the reasons we older women become eccentric. (A Center Saturday Supper will be served at Barringer’s from 5 to 7 p.m.)

Next month, thanks to a grant from the Minnesota Humanities Center, we will culminate The Big Read project with a series of activities happening April 17-25. These include “Writing Your Autobiography” with presenters Joe Amato and Joani Ellison; Music Across Cultures and Generations with Music Historian and Cellist, Yali Yoo; and Flying Tigers — the movie, the book and the author, tying together the history of China during the time the mothers in the Joy Luck Club left that country. Whew! It will be a whirlwind weekend.

Rebecca Petersen is the director of A Center for the Arts in Fergus Falls.