Buzz Networking Events!

In an effort to get all around the county and celebrate the artists that live and work in all corners of our fine landscape we are sponsoring 5 networking events, each quite different in form and fashion. Our current schedule has events planned in Ashfield, Royalston, Deerfield, Greenfield and Turners Falls.

Each event is open to all artists in Franklin County and we hope that you will take advantage of the range of locations and content to network with other artists from around the county. As most events involve some sort of refreshment it will be helpful if we can get a reasonable accurate count of how many people will be attending.

Please read the details of each event before deciding if you can/want to attend. We hope to be able to help with coordinating transportation when there are people offering to share a ride.

We want you to know one another as we believe it is truly valuable to collaborate as much as we can to share the talent of our area. The staff of Fostering Art and Culture is committed to making ART WORK in Franklin County.

August 8th – Buzz #1: Double Edge Theater’s ART & PLACE Conversations
Rural Voices-A Local, National, and International Conversation
Sunday, August 8, 11am-3pm
Double Edge Theatre, Ashfield

If metro-centric points of view are dominant in the arts, yet eighty percent of our country’s land is rural and one fifth of our people, aren’t rural communities really worthy of focus? Is there a different rural art or a different quality of place? How does art impact a rural community, culturally and economically? As in the initial ‘Art and Place’ Conversation, this August 8th Conversation will be open to the public.

Moderated by Caron Atlas with: Edyael Casaperalta, Rural Strategies; Amy Trompetter, puppeteer/director; Katharine Pearson Criss, Rural Strategies; Elizabeth Barrett, AppalShop; Rus Peotter, President of CISA/WGBY

The Fostering Art and Culture Project will cover the luncheon costs for the first 25 registered FACP artists who would like to attend this thought provoking event. Please RSVP to Becky at artandculture@gcc.mass.edu by Wednesday, August 4th to allow time for food preparation.

If you are unable to make it, the Conversations will be streamed online. More info on Art & Place here.

Double Edge Theatre has been profoundly affected by its 1994 move from Boston to the small town of Ashfield in Western MA. The move had its origins in economic survival and artistic freedom. Double Edge needed a financially feasible rehearsal space as a base from which to tour, and a place where the ensemble artists and international guests could live, work and sustain themselves. Today Double Edge is intricately tied to the community of Ashfield, the Berkshire Hilltowns and the Five College area. The theatre’s site includes two performance venues, hosting year-round cultural activities at its home and on tour. This is not a one-way relationship: the theatre’s cultural impact on its surroundings is evident in those visitors who would never otherwise have seen theatre, yet now consider it part of the fabric of their lives; in the students and teachers trained by the ensemble in the local public and private school systems; and in economic revenues of a million dollars a year in surrounding towns.

During the last two years, Conversations has developed as a series of two-hour live and web-streamed public cultural events. In March 2010, the first ‘Art and Place’ Conversation was held. The framework was to have local artists examine the role of ‘place’ in their creative process, and in turn question the effect of their art on the community. The Conversation was intimate and challenging, touching upon the nature of involvement between artist and community, and exploring the essence of what defines a community. The audience participated with fervor, raising questions of the artist’s role and responsibility for diversity and economic growth, as the foundation of trust-building between artist and audience.

It is Double Edge’s position that art in our society must reach beyond isolated accomplishment and establish a dialogue that is of and with the community.  Double Edge has named this phenomenon ‘living culture’ – culture that grows and develops in a genuine and multi-faceted relationship with its surrounding society. To this end, the ‘Art and Place’ Conversation was re-envisioned as a two-day gathering to explore fundamental questions – questions shared by everyone concerned with the arts and culture – on a local, national, international, and rural level.

Helena Norberg Hodges, a leading critic of conventional notions of growth and development, wrote in her brilliant essay, ‘Thinking Outside the Box,’ that the only sustainable response to the failure of corporate ‘monoculture’ is the creation of localized and therefore self-reliant economic communities.  As systemic corporate destruction prevails, it is the responsibility of the artist to manifest a vision of ‘local’ and understand how that vision may be applied to the global. When we insist on breaking through the homogeneity of global fashions and trends, we can begin to identify the unique dimensions of art that can be made within our own self-defined community.