Coming Up in THE GOOD NEIGHBOR SERIES…
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Sat., April 21st, 2012 – ConVal Poets: Allie Umstadt, Emeric Szep, and Emily Tyler
Donations encouraged
The Good Neighbor Series will be hosting, Allie Umstadt, Emeric Szep, and Emily Tyler, three ConVal High School students to read poetry at the Sharon Art’s Center exhibition Gallery Saturday, Apr. 21st from 7:30-8:30pm. Doors will open at 7.
This event is free and open to the public. We will be providing light refreshments and beverages.
Prior to the reading, these students will be engaged in a four-week writing workshop with Zachary Green, Gallery Assistant and Poetry Curator for the Good Neighbor Series, as well as Jason Lambert, English Department Leader at ConVal. The workshop will give emphasis to exploring new forms, poets from a variety of schools and lineages, critical engagement and discussion of writing poetry, and how to read aloud.
“Working with these students has been an absolute pleasure. They all have been strongly dedicated to each other and poetry, providing great insights. I think its safe to say they are happy to have this opportunity to present their work,” Said Zachary Green.
Poets: Allie Umstadt (Dublin)
Emeric Szep (Peterborough)
Emily Tyler (Bennington)
Allie Umstadt is from Dublin, NH. She is a sophomore at ConVal. She enjoys writing and reading poetry, particularly talking about it. She aspires to be a novelist. Allie believes there are lots of different ways to look at any one poem, and it’s interesting to see what others have to say.
Emeric Szep is 18 years old. He currently resides in Peterborough, NH. He will be graduating from ConVal high school this June and is planning to attend UNH next fall. Emeric enjoys spending time playing doubles tennis even though he has no clue how to play and wasting his final days of school away in the newspaper office.
Emily Tyler is 17 years old and a junior at Conval high school. When Emily isn’t writing poems, she is daydreaming or dancing. You could say dance is her first love but sometimes that just doesn’t cut it, sometimes she needs solid concrete words to express herself. Solid but abstract, just the way she likes it.
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Wallace Shawn’s “The Fever”, Saturday, April 28, 2012, 7-9pm
Wallace Shawn’s Obie winning play, “The Fever” will be presented at the Sharon Arts Exhibition Gallery on Saturday, April 28th at 7:30pm. Tickets are $12/$10 seniors & students. Reservations at (603) 924-7676. “The Fever”, which actor Jerry Levy describes as a “grotesque comedy”, explores the failure of the humanistic middle class to relieve the suffering of the poor they sympathize with. Unwilling to sacrifice their addiction to exotic travel, gourmet food, fine plays, art movies, beautiful paintings and opera so that others might have the necessities of life, Shawn asks whether the arts inspire us to act on our sympathy for the poor and whether we have the right to enjoy the “good life” when so many others cannot.
In “The Fever”, a well-educated life loving man or woman encounters poverty, torture and rape while traveling in a third world country. An epiphany about the connection between our anti-hero’s privileged lifestyle and human suffering throws him or her into a feverish confrontation with life’s contradictions.
This nightmare of self-discovery becomes an agonizingly personal critique of the consequences of global capitalism—more relevant today than when ”The Fever” was first performed by Wallace Shawn in 1991. In this period of renewed activism, the play will educate and enlighten some, and offend others, but will not fail to foster needed discussions of the very issues that are motivating so many of the “99%” to occupy Wall Street and thousands of other places throughout the U.S.A. and around the world.
Jerry Levy, perennial performer of Howard Zinn’s “Marx in Soho”, and Thomas Griffin, director of “The Fever” and artistic director of Brattleboro based Acting On Impulse Theatre Company collaborated for 3 years to prepare Wallace Shawn’s play for performance. Both actor and director have grappled with “The Fever” in a very personal way. They ask the audience to consider its important message.
This production of “The Fever” opened in Brattleboro in December of 2010 and has since toured California, France, The Netherlands and Scotland. At a time when protests throughout the world question the validity of global capitalism what should be our priorities? Perhaps Wallace Shawn raises issues we should consider in a way that no one else in theatre does.
Past Events in THE GOOD NEIGHBOR SERIES…
- Jan. 21st – Poetry reading by Heather Christle and Christopher DeWeese
- Feb. 4th – Annie and The Beekeeper’s w/ Garth Stevenson
- Feb. 25th – Poetry featuring Ted Powers, Wendy Xu and Mark Leidner
- Mar. 3rd – Sayon Camara Drummers
- March 24th – Poetry reading by Tyler Flynn Dorholt, Thomas Cook, and Joanna Novak w/ more TBA
- Sunday, April 1st, 2-4pm – On Common Ground: Dance and Music in Collaboration
- Saturday, April 7 – David Kontak and his incredible hand-crafted musical machines