Honoring Paul Sills January 7, 2009

Paul Sills

I was writing a grant a week ago looking for a brilliant, pithy way to describe the power of story. How it speaks to us. How it feeds us. Why we need it. I googled the name of a man who I think is a master of story, creator of Story Theater, and one of the dearest and most influential people in my life, my teacher Paul Sills. That’s when I saw his obituary.

I cried and cried, but, as any mother of a two-year old understands, deep sadness is not a luxury I could dip into long. And now, a week later, sans funeral, sans ceremony, sans gathering of all the people who loved him to trade stories -- which all must have happened in June when he passed, I write my own story, my own eulogy of Paul Sills, who taught people to fly on the wings of intuition.

Intuition? Of what insubstantial stuff does she speak? Ah, listen closely, and I will try to describe this illusive and most powerful gift he would cultivate in what must have been many thousands of students during his long and incredible life.

The key to intuition is focus. That's it. I just taught you the secret to penetrating the heart of the Universe. But, of course, focus is not something learned and comprehended through the mind. It is an experience practiced over a thousand hours and then, maybe, just maybe, the feeling of effortless flight, the feeling of riding with ease a most magnificent wave takes over. This is the exhilaration of surrender to the intuition through focus.

Paul Sills taught people how to focus through the playing of theatre games. Improvisational theatre games. Sounds easy, huh? Sounds like fun? It was also painfully difficult. Sometimes excruciatingly so. The actor doesn’t have the opportunity of practicing his craft alone-unobserved. They are in front of thirty or so people day after day stumbling, bumbling while Paul sat in the corner chewing on a toothpick coaching, “focus,” or a slew of other phrases like “feel your feet”, “follow the follower” etc. which all were variations on the same instruction…focus.

Paul also invented an art form called Story Theatre which played on and off Broadway. Clive Barnes, writing about it in The New York Times, said it brought back “magic and innocence to Broadway.” Studying the Story Theatre form with Paul at The New Actors Workshop started my love affair of adapting stories for the stage. And now, almost twenty years later, his influence, continues. The reason why Circle of Stones is performing Gilgamesh this year (the oldest written story in the history of civilization) can be traced back to Paul and the influence of his ground-breaking work on Story Theater.

All there is to say now is thank you, Paul, wherever you are. Thank you and I love you. I loved how you called me dear. Like a father or a grandfather. I loved how the world felt magical and mysterious and awesome when you were in the room. Thank you for being who you were-it has shaped so much of who I am and what I do.

Love, Pana

Pebble Theatre Rocks Allentown September 28, 2008

This summer Circle of Stones had the great pleasure to work with 77 elementary and middle school children in our children’s outreach program, Pebble Theatre.  It was our goal to give children an experience of learning math, grammar and history that was not only fun, but a memorable experience that would give them a sense of pride and accomplishment every time they thought about it.

If you, dear reader, cannot comprehend math, grammar and history as being exciting and fun, we hope you will have a listen to one of the songs Circle of Stones composed for one of our three original hip hop operettas performed in Allentown this summer.

Click on the following links to listen to excerpts from the songs called “Idiomatic” and “Sound Alike“.

We are so grateful to the three wonderful Allentown organizations who partnered with us this summer:   The Allentown Public Library, Casa Guadalupe and Old Allentown Preservation Association.  They helped us identify the participating children, identify the rehearsal and performance locations, financially supported the program as well as million other ways of ensuring the program was a success.  They have all asked us to return next year, and we’ve already started the discussions about how to expand the program!

We’d like to express our hearty appreciation also to the City of Allentown and the Harry C. Trexler Trust for their generous support of this program.  We could not have done it without you!

The funny thing about trying to use theatre to catalyze positive community transformations is how often we find our own lives are transformed in the process.  Our experience of Pebble Theatre this summer was a perfect example.  We had no idea when we started out, how much we would love the Allentown youth we’d be working with.  They are so talented!! And beautiful!! And hard working!!  I don’t know about you, but if someone told me I had ONE WEEK to memorize and perform a solo or dance a routine or act a scene, I would be nervous!  These kids leaped into the program with so much gusto it made our hearts melt.  A colleague of ours came to see one of the performances and called it “a miracle”.  These kids were our miracle this summer.  They won our hearts and have completely inspired us to dedicate a large part of our programming to focus on nurturing their awesome potential.  Here’s to you, Pebble kids!  Can’t wait to work with you again next year!

Love,

Pana

Bringing the Love to Allentown August 23, 2008

On May 17th Circle of Stones held its inaugural Allentown event, the Green Man Festival. It was the kick-off of ourBringing the Love to Allentown campaign. It was presented in partnership with the Allentown Economic Development Corporation, the City of Allentown, The Department of Parks and Recreation and WDIY.
Thank you so much to our wonderful sponsors:

Air Products
PPL Corporation
WDIY
One With the Earth Project
Olympus America
Joe Elias
Mixed Bag on Main
Pavlack and Klein
Sign-A-Rama

And our fabulous sponsors who donated goods for our basket raffle and silent auction:
The Heavenly Hog Ice Cream Company
The New England Country Store
Tallarico’s Chocolates
Donnegal Square
In the Mood
The Foo Foo Shoppe
Comfort and Joy
Bone Appetite Bakery
Susan Bingham
Lesta Bertoia
Scott Eggert
Richard Hoenich
Leslie Heffron
Herbein’s Garden Center
C.H.A.N.G.E.
Susan Bianchi
Stephanie Seigh

Thank you to the 150 or so people who attended this, our benefit fundraiser, and the many more who sent in donations from all over the country who were unable to come!
Why did we choose Allentown?

Allentown is in a really exciting time in its history, rebirthing itself, determining what it’s going to be. The leadership of Allentown has been showing strong support for its arts community. To that end, in the last year, they organized a series of exciting meetings with members of the Allentown area arts community, including in a six-hour strategic planning workshop led by the Allentown Arts Commission.

Allentown is being born every day! What an extremely attractive environment for artists! What an exciting opportunity to be able to contribute to the rebirth of a city. We chose a universal symbol, the Green Man, to represent this rebirth.

At our Green Man Festival, we chose activities that would literally transform peoples’ experience of this city. We chose a location that was profoundly beautiful and virtually unknown to people outside its immediate neighborhood - the Bucky Boyle Park on the shores of the Lehigh River. So many of our attendees reported on how delighted they were to discover for the first time this magical gem of a park in Allentown’s first ward.

The festival opened with Pebble Theatre, our children’s outreach program, premiering an original performance, Abel’s Play. The play gave our children the first opportunity of the day to give voice to the nature of change. The play was about a boy struggling with school and his friendship with a flock of butterflies which helped him turn things around. At the end of the play, the children (with the help of some friendly audience members) planted a butterfly garden in the park. Special thanks to Deana Zosky for her help creating it! A few weeks after the event, one of the participants gave me a card, which told me that the play actually taught him to view school in a different way.

One of the event’s highlights was the premiere of singer/songwriter Scott Paul’s “Bells of Allentown”, accompanied by Scott Eggert, Yves Gerard, and Richard Hammond.This “new”Allentown song is a beautiful modern parable of an event that
happened in the Queen City during the Revolutionary War. The song reflects the current tide of
change sweeping the city:

“Saw my lady at the fair
Happy revolution everywhere
We don’t have to wait around for one more day
700 wagons are on their way…”

The song climaxed as Pastor Bob Stevens of the Zion's United Church of
Christ rang one of the church’s 200 year old bells. To hear this inspired song, CLICK HERE

Another highlight was the sneak preview of Circle of Stones’ much anticipated production of Gilgamesh. Gilgamesh, will premiere next summer in Allentown, and is will serve as a galvanizing force towards the revitalization of the city. Even though we only showed a 10 minute glimpse of the play at the festival, let me tell you a few examples of how the magic of this play is already contributing to fulfilling this lofty goal:
When we were first introduced to this myth by our friend Andy Hubatstek in 2005, we read it out loud to each other discussing what the relevance of this story could be to our community. We were drawn to the fact that there was a temple in the story where people would go to be transformed. It was the Temple to Ishtar, goddess of love. We were inspired by the idea of a beautiful physical place where people would go to be transformed. Thus the first conversations ensued about the kind of theatre/arts center we would like to create.

By the time the acting ensemble went on retreat to start writing Gilgamesh in 2007, the mission statement for this arts center had been created during a public visioning workshop generously funded by Air Products. It states:

The Arts Luminarium* is to be a temple of the arts fostering community transformation, celebrating human experience and inspiring a culturally creative movement. The center will model environmental sustainability and educate through multi-cultural and multi-disciplinary programming.

The name, “The Arts Luminarium” (which means ‘enlightenment through the arts’), was created during a 5-week collaboration with a group of multicultural students the Iacocca Institute’s Pennsylvania Governor’s School for Global Entrepreneurship at Lehigh University.

The center incorporated and formed a board of directors:

Ethel Drayton-Craig, Ph.D., President
Steven Zakos, Esquire, Vice-President
Scott Snyder, Treasurer
Susan Bingham, Secretary
Greg Edwards
Julie Thomases
Pana Columbus

So during the Gilgamesh actor’s retreat (generously funded by The Amaranth Foundation, The Rider-Pool Foundation, Holt Family Foundation, Tom Moroz and the Open Society Institute (as a matching grant) the goal of creating an arts center seemed like too easy of a transformation to try to invoke with the play! It was well under way already. So we set our sights higher until we decided that the new transformation the play would focus on is no less than the revitalization of Allentown!

The 2 people who first inspired us to base The Arts Luminarium in Allentown were Julie Thomases and Miriam Huertas. We thank both of them for their inspiration and sound advice!

So, as a result of the decisions made at that retreat, Circle of Stones decided to start a campaign called “Bringing the Love to Allentown”. So far, this not only included holding our Green Man Festival in Allentown (which in turn, introduced people to Bucky Boyle, inspired Scott Paul to compose The Bells of Allentown etc.), but also was the deciding factor for us to bring out children’s outreach program to Allentown youth. So this summer, in partnership with Old Allentown Preservation Association, Casa Guadalupe and The Allentown Public Library, and made possible with the support of the same, as well as the Harry C. Trexler Trust and the City of Allentown, Allentown children are performing 3 original hip hop operettas called Tales of Tenacity! The first one, performed at St. Michael’s Church, was, “A miracle”, as one audience member described it. Another described it as “so incredibly beautiful”. The next one is Saturday July 19th at 4pm at Symphony Hall’s Rodale Room-don’t miss it!
…all this because of a play called Gilgamesh which hasn’t even been performed yet.

Back to the Green Man Festival:
Joyce Marin, the Director of The Department of Community and Economic Development, gave a presentation about the Lehigh Landing Trail Visioning Project. As a result of a grant she applied for when she was the Executive Director of the Allentown Economic Development Corporation, AEDC has hired a facilitator to hold visioning sessions with members of the community about a trail alongside the Lehigh River. I’ve attended 2 of these meetings, and the discussions about the riverfront have been inspiring to say the least. This is one of the amazing initiatives Joyce has started in Allentown.

Another one is the Plaza Growers Market, a producer-only farmer’s market at PPL Plaza on Wednesdays from 4-6. Farmer’s Markets are heaven on earth, in my opinion. And this one in Allentown is no exception. Picture this: Shopping for local and organic foods by farmers you get to know by name while your child runs around the plaza with a gaggle of adorable children. It’s a warm and social environment. Yes! Grocery shopping can be a joy! See you Wednesdays at the market!

Thousands of Lehigh Valley residents have attended Danse Oriental artist Tahya’s performances at Musikfest etc. over the years. She graced us at the Green Man Festival when she and a group of her students lead the attendees in a processional. What the audience didn’t know, was that Tahya played, for the first time in perhaps thousands of years, an extinct Egyptian instrument called the sistrum! Tahya, while studying Egyptian artwork and visiting Egypt, kept noticing an instrument played by women. She looked for one to buy and realized, as far as she could tell, they were no longer made. So she contacted an instrument design and manufacturing company, and convinced them to design a prototype based on ancient Egyptian artwork. As far as we know, Green Man Festival 2008 in Allentown Pennsylvania marked the return of this ancient instrument!

 

Once in awhile, I am blessed to meet a visual artist who doesn’t only reflect the beauty of the world, but reflects the beauty of what the world could be. Lesta Bertoia is one of those painters, and out of the generosity of her enormous heart, she painted 5, 8 foot murals for the Green Man Festival. (Thank you, thank you, thank you, incredible one!) Pictured here is her gorgeous painting of the Green Man himself! She decided at the last minute that the timing was not right to hang 5th painting, but you can be sure you’ll be seeing it soon-it’s a painting of Gilgamesh! Dinner was a Middle-Eastern feast prepared by one of our favorite Allentown restaurants, Damascus. The festival introduced some of the attendees for the first time to this restaurant’s incredible fare. (Others were long time fans!) The restaurant is located at 449 N. 2nd St. when you’re ready for more! See you at Damascus!

After dinner, there was dancing to R&B music from members of New York’s Nite Time Band. Dancing to awesome music under the pavilion right on the Lehigh River with old and new friends was a joy. The evening ended with the attendees yelling out, “Viva Allentown!” again and again. Their hearts, it seemed to us, were inspired to bring their love to Allentown. Which was the whole point.

A special thank you to our amazing Board of Directors: Stephanie Seigh, Zac Cohen, Gary Frey, Dave Olsher, Virginia Ellen, Leslie Heffron, Dick Lane and Nolan LeBlanc, and the many more volunteers for all their hard work to make it happen. Viva, Allentown! Viva!

Much love,
Pana