The Lancaster Festival at 35
Ohio’s Lancaster Festival is celebrating its 35th anniversary this summer. For the occasion, the 11-day summer festival asked us to collaborate on their July 18 season opener.
In the early stages, the Festival’s Artistic Director Gary Sheldon and Westwater Arts’ Creative Director, Nicholas Bardonnay had several conversations to narrow down the programming selections before arriving on four complementary visual pieces: The Eternal Struggle, National Park Suite, Rodeo!, and a newly commissioned piece.
We kicked things off with a newly created piece that celebrates the achievements, people, and cultural legacy of the Festival itself. Over their 35-year history, the Festival has amassed an impressive image collection—over 30,000 images!—documenting all sorts of activities both at the concert hall and out in the community. Nicholas curated all of that material, selecting the most celebratory and timeless images, and choreographed the final selections to Chadwick’s Jubilee, from his larger Symphonic Sketches work. The result, titled The Festival at 35, is a short and sweet tribute to Lancaster’s hometown festival and the people who’ve made it possible.
Ohio also played a major role in the American Civil War, and Lancaster was home to General Sherman—so after a musical interlude featuring Schuman’s New England Triptych— we stepped back in time to pay tribute to that historical connection with the next visual piece on the program, The Eternal Struggle. That piece, set to Copland’s Lincoln Portrait, contains hundreds of historical images from the Civil War era, and fittingly, the Festival asked a beloved, local Lincoln impersonator and former Festival executive director, Ken Culver, to give weight to Lincoln’s poignant words. However, they didn’t stop there, because there was a special second narrator—a first for us—who presented the third person narrative portion for Lincoln’s words. That narrator was Jennifer Myers, a talented local actress and director of theater.
On the second half of the program, we deepened our exploration of America’s legacy with two additional pieces from our repertoire: National Park Suite and Rodeo!. Through imagery spread across 30+ National Parks and National Monuments, National Park Suite, is a contemplative montage of the places that unites us as Americans. This particular visual rendition was paired with Dvořák’s lovely Largo movement from his New World Symphony, a work the Czech composer wrote in 1893 while getting to know America’s beautiful, wide open spaces and its diverse cultures and musical traditions. That visual-musical pairing holds a special place in our hearts as well; it’s the one we premiered with the National Symphony at the Wolf Trap National Park for the Performing Arts to help celebrate the 2016 Centennial of the National Park Service.
Closing out the concert was Rodeo!, a foot-tapping and heartfelt look at a couple small town rodeos and the western frontier traditions they uphold to this day. Photographed on location in Arizona and Utah, Rodeo! is set to Copland’s eponymous work, Rodeo, which, through its four movements, is both rowdy and breathtakingly spacious. Likewise, through the choreographed imagery we definitely got into the chutes, but also took some time to appreciate those sweeping western horizons that create the backdrop for this emblematic lifestyle.
As part of the festivities, Nicholas also led a special keynote discussion at the University of Ohio—Lancaster, during the weekend prior. We know the Festival means a lot to the Lancaster community, so it was wonderful to see such an enthusiastic audience turnout as we came together to usher the Festival into the next 35 years.
(All images provided by the Lancaster Festival.)
