Free to Gather Again: Vulture Sister Song at AVA Gallery

Keith Haring: Subway Drawings at BMAC extended

Then, and now.

The pandemic may not be entirely over but things have changed. Delivered packages no longer sit untouched for three days in the garage for fear that the virus lives on cardboard. No more swabbing canned goods with disinfectant wipes before bringing them in the house. No longer scrambling for vaccine appointments. Sometimes I look back on the last three years and am startled that I have forgotten some of my own lived history of the time: the stuff of stories you will tell your incredulous great-grandchildren.

Once there was a time when an art gallery, like all cultural gathering places, had to shut its doors and remain vacant for longer than anyone could have foreseen. Windows—great big ones— however, are not doors; hence their particular power. And so there came a time in March, 2021, when a lone dancer danced in an empty gallery, and we all viewed the performance from the outside, peering through the glass. Who could have imagined?

That dancer, Ellen Smith Ahern, is no longer alone and the doors at AVA (and just about everywhere) are once again open. “The lone dancer not only represented a missing audience within the galleries, but also a poignant reminder of community and togetherness that we had in the past taken for granted.”

Vulture Sister Song is a performance designed for community spaces. From across the country and throughout the limitations of the pandemic, the ensemble has been generating imagery, music, choreography, and text. Vulture Sister Song is a modern fairy tale about the relationship between humans and the natural world, specifically, the deeply symbolic vulture. Organized by Lebanon dance artist, Ellen Smith Ahern, this interdisciplinary performance explores human and more-than-human relationships through story, song, sculpture, and dance.

The story sets up a compelling frame for two dancers and a migrating body of sculptural lanterns to explore scenes and ideas through movement and light. The sculptures resemble both small houses and shape-shifting, slope-shouldered creatures. Made of wood and canvas, they function as light sources that are moved throughout the space during the performance, taking on different relationships with the human dancers and shaping the visual landscape with their light.

At AVA Gallery, Bank Street, Lebanon NH on Friday, April 7, 5:30-7:30pm. Purchase tickets here.

And on another note, in a previous post I wrote about the exhibition of Keith Haring’s work (photo, above) currently on view at the Brattleboro Museum and Art Center (click here). That exhibition, originally scheduled to close in mid-April and headed to Barcelona, Spain, has just been extended to June 11, 2023. If you dare, you can join a 1980s-themed, adult-only Radiant Baby Dance Party at BMAC on April 14 at 8:00 pm.

(Photo, top, by Sam Kann; photo of Keith Haring exhibition courtesy of BMAC. Text in block quote courtesy of AVA Gallery.)

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And in case you are wondering . . . Susan B. Apel shuttered a lifelong career as a law professor to continue an interest (since kindergarten) in writing. Her freelance business, The Next Word, includes literary and feature writing; her work has appeared in a variety of lit mags and other publications including Art New England, The Woven Tale Press, The Arts Fuse, and Persimmon Tree. She connects with her neighbors through Artful, her blog about arts and culture in the Upper Valley. She’s in love with the written word.