Student Art Celebrates Learning
This year’s Provincetown IB Schools annual exhibition at the Commons (46 Bradford St., Provincetown) doubles as a celebration of the 10th anniversary of the school’s adoption of the International Baccalaureate program. Each grade worked on a project based on one of the IB program’s 10 “learner profile attributes,” which visual arts teacher Michael Gillane describes as “10 ways we like to live our lives.” Taking “Attributes” as its title, the show is on view through Sunday, March 17.
Students in second grade — known in the IB system as “primary years program two” — chose the attribute “knowledgeable” and made “abstract self-portraits using watercolor, crayon, colored pencil, and other materials,” says Gillane. They then printed photos of themselves and wrote responses to prompts about things they like to eat, secret talents they have, places they wish to travel to someday, and something they wish people knew about them. All of the components were then collaged.
“It was a chance for them to share knowledge about themselves and gain new knowledge about their classmates,” says Gillane.
Lela Okeanos’s self-portrait is full of swirls of color, zig-zags of blue crayon, and lines of text: “I speak French”; “In my free time I like to jump rope”; “I am half cat”; “My favorite food is bacon.” (“Her mother is a vegetarian,” Gillane notes.)
In a project that combined the school’s history curriculum with art class, the third grade chose the attribute “communicator” and made prints based on Paul Revere’s midnight ride. “They learned about the printing press as the way people disseminated information and communicated about important things,” Gillane says. “And they also learned how to print, how to ink the plate, how to rub the plate down. It’s hard work.”
Gillane says there’s “a whole variety of work” from other grades on display as well: “Masks, paper stencils, jelly prints, and monoprints. And there’s lots of ideas behind the artwork. We’re really celebrating the kids and their education.”
See provincetowncommons.org for information. —Paul Sullivan
Senior Creativity at Castle Hill
Outer Cape residents age 60 and up will have an opportunity to participate in a series of free classes and workshops at Truro Center for the Arts at Castle Hill beginning next month.
The six-session classes, which are open to full-time senior residents of Provincetown, Truro, Wellfleet, Eastham, Orleans, Chatham, Harwich and Brewster, will meet twice a week beginning on April 1 and 2 and cover a range of visual art and creative writing practices.
Truro artist Rob DuToit will teach a painting class for all levels including beginners. Ceramicist Christopher Smith will introduce participants to the essentials of working with clay by hand. A class taught by Michael A. Giaquinto, former exhibitions curator at the Cape Cod Museum of Art, will explore mixed-media collage making, and poet Keith Althaus will lead a workshop for writers, who will be asked to bring poems they have already written or are in the process of writing for class discussion.
All classes are free, and participants are asked to attend all six sessions of the class they are registered for. Due to space limitations, participants for classes will be chosen by lottery. To apply, visit castlehill.org/2024spring-senior or call 508-349-7511 before March 22. —John D’Addario
20 Years of Dragon Riding — and Writing
More than two decades after publishing the young-adult fantasy novel Eragon at age 19, author Christopher Paolini is back with Murtagh (2023) — a sequel to the four-volume Inheritance Cycle, each installment of which has achieved popular success. As part of its affiliation with the Library Speakers Consortium, the Provincetown Public Library (356 Commercial St.) presents a virtual discussion with Paolini on Thursday, March 14 at 4 p.m.
Murtagh, which takes place after the events of Inheritance, returns the reader to the world of Alagaësia and its dragon riders. For the uninitiated, imagine a literary descendent of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle-earth or a fleshed-out version of the role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons. It is archetypal fantasy in all its melodramatic glory — elves, magic, and long-winded journey included.
This novel follows the fall of the evil King Galbatorix, who in an act of rage and madness temporarily ended the age of the dragon riders until the events of The Inheritance Cycle. Murtagh was one of Galbatorix’s unwilling henchmen — and now, with his dragon, Thorn, he seeks redemption as the power of a new witch threatens a precarious peace. As the fantasy genre is well equipped to do, Murtagh holds an imaginative mirror to the spectrum of human nature and explores the implications of the paths we choose rather than the ones we are prescribed.
Registration for the free virtual event is required. See provincetownlibrary.org for information. —Aden Choate
A Happily-Ever-After Gay Musical
Jon Richardson has been working on his debut musical The Jack of Hearts Club since 2018. “I’ve done the music, the lyrics, and the book, which only a crazy person would do,” he says. In March 2022, he presented a song cycle from the musical-in-progress. Last April, it was a reading of the musical’s first act. Richardson will now present The Jack of Hearts Club in its entirety with a free musical reading directed by David Drake on Wednesday, March 20 at 7 p.m. at the Provincetown Theater (238 Bradford St.).
The play has shapeshifted many times since Richardson first conceived it. “It started out as a story about a young man named Sonny at this piano bar,” Richardson says. “But over the last four years, I’ve started to zero in on the woman who owns the bar and her lesbian daughter, Elizabeth.”
That fictional bar is in Provincetown, and the year is 1963, six years before Stonewall. Elizabeth, who’s played in the upcoming reading by Brittany Rolfs, has been invited by her girlfriend Maggie to move to New York City. But Elizabeth, who Richardson describes as a “true Provincetown creature,” is scared to leave the one place she has called home and enter a world that, unlike her little town, might not be too friendly toward her.
“I wanted to write a musical in which no gay trauma befalls the characters, no beating up or police raids,” says Richardson. “Instead, their drama is very internal. It’s just about their relationships and who they are and celebrating each other.”
Musically, Richardson says, The Jack of Hearts Club is a mix of classic and modern Broadway. “I’m 36, but I’m definitely 90 years old in terms of what I like to listen to,” he says. One song, which Richardson wrote in the year since the first act was performed, is a tongue-in-cheek number called “Friends of Dorothy,” referring both to The Wizard of Oz character and to the owner of the bar in the show. “I feel really proud of that song,” Richardson says.
While the musical reading is free, reservations are requested. See provincetowntheater.org for information. —Paul Sullivan
Jake Blount Goes Back to the Future
Jake Blount, who is currently attending graduate school in ethnomusicology at Brown University, has a wealth of knowledge about the history of Black and indigenous string music. The traditions serve as the basis for Blount’s own music, which he describes as interpretations of folk archives and collections. Despite his focus on songs of the past, Blount also dwells in the realm of Afrofuturism: a movement in literature, art, and music that combines history and science fiction to create a new world of Black liberation and imagination.
Blount will kick off the 2024 Payomet Road Show season with a concert at Wellfleet Preservation Hall on Saturday, March 16 at 7 p.m.
Blount’s latest release, The New Faith, from 2022, is an Afrofuturist concept album. It imagines a dystopian future where Black refugees perform a religious ceremony after the world’s collapse because of catastrophic climate change. The songs balance the line between past and future: traditional American string band instrumentation accompanies lyrics about current issues. Despite the album’s dark theme, the sounds of spiritual music evoke a sense of acceptance, community, and hope.
At Wellfleet Preservation Hall, Blount will perform solo, playing fiddle and banjo and using pedals and backing tracks while weaving in storytelling and explanations of the historical background of his music. As well as songs from New Faith, Blount will play songs from his 2020 album Spider Tales and some “surprise songs” not included on either album.
Tickets are $20 to $25 at tickets.payomet.org. —Eve Samaha
Mark Faherty Wants You to Listen to the Birds
Every spring morning, the woods, fields, and marshes of the Outer Cape erupt in birdsong. Mark Faherty, science coordinator at Mass Audubon’s Wellfleet Bay Wildlife Sanctuary, wants to help you understand — and appreciate — those songs with a free workshop at the Truro Public Library (7 Standish Way) on Thursday, March 21 at 6 p.m.
Birdsong, Faherty says, is inherently calming: “It is evocative of natural places, calmness, and peace.” The aim of this workshop, he says, is to help attendees appreciate birdsong on another level by associating these sounds with the birds themselves.
The sounds can reveal a lot. Birds often make distinctive sounds when they are scared or angry or when they are communicating with flock members or trying to mate. Learning birdsongs also helps us feel even more connected to the environment around us, Faherty says, as the sonic landscape becomes as familiar and decodable as the physical one.
The “song” in birdsong can also be taken literally. Birds like the North American hermit thrush, whose song is one of Faherty’s favorites, and the South American musician wren can be analyzed like human music. Bird sounds can provoke powerful memories, too — the song of the pacific wren always reminds Faherty of his time in the Pacific Northwest, where he says the little bird’s song “echoes through those gorgeous cathedral forests.”
Although learning these sounds might seem intimidating, Faherty says it’s possible “in the same way that you can recognize your favorite songs.” Tools like the song-identifying app Merlin and repositories of birdsongs online also make the process easier. Faherty hopes that his workshop will help give people the tools they need to understand birdsong better.
See trurolibrary.org for information. —William von Herff
