Art Hounds: Songbirds and snails onstage

Art Hounds

From MPR News, Art Hounds are members of the Minnesota arts community who look beyond their own work to highlight what’s exciting in local art. Their recommendations are lightly edited from the audio heard in the player above.

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Hankering for a crankering

Norah Rendell is the executive artistic director of the Center for Irish Music in St. Paul. She saw — and loved — the original storytelling musical “The Well Tree” by the Heartwood Trio last spring.

The trio consists of Sarina Partridge of Minneapolis, Heidi Wilson of Vermont and Willie Clemetson of Maine. They’re back for performances of “The Well Tree” tonight at 7 p.m. at the Twin Cities Friends Meeting House in St. Paul and Friday, Nov. 15 at 7 p.m. at New City Center/Walker Church in Minneapolis.

Norah says she imagines the acoustics of the church venues will be well-suited for a show with beautiful harmonies.

Norah says: It’s an original singing story performance that includes songs and instruments and acting and illuminated paper cut art called a “crankie” [so named because a person turns a crank to scroll to new images].

It tells a story of a young woman who finds herself running away from home, and along her journey, she meets songbirds and snails and ancient trees as she finds her way home. And the three artists who perform are super talented. They’re beautiful harmony singers. There’s a fiddle player, a banjo player and they’re all actors and they invite the audience to sing along.

It seems like it would be geared towards children, but it really suits anybody of any age who loves the experience of singing together with other people. You leave the show feeling great; it’s very inspiring, very positive. The show itself is really inspiring.

— Norah Rendell

The male gaze

Erin Maurelli is an artist and educator in the Twin Cities. She wants people to know about the MCBA / Jerome Book Arts Residency show which is up now at the Minnesota Center for Book Arts, inside Open Book in Minneapolis.

Free and open to the public, this show displays the work of the three winners of the Jerome Book Arts Residency: photographer Christopher Selleck; papermaker Jelani Ellis; and artist and printmaker Louise Fisher.

Erin says: Christopher Selleck is a photographer who takes on the body, the figure and what we think of as idealism, and through the lens of the camera, he’s able to capture kind of the ideal masculine body — which, in my experience, we don’t see a lot of that in art and art history. Christopher brings issues of identity and sexuality into his work as a gay man, I think the male gaze becomes part of his narrative.

Christopher was selected to be part of the Jerome book arts fellowship, and the show is through January 4 of next year. He’s one of three artists that are part of that show, there are some hand-crafted books featuring his photographs as well as sculptural elements. He’s exploring bringing the photographic process into bookmaking.

— Erin Morelli

Baroque in Gaylord

Charles Luedtke is a retired professor of music at Martin Luther College in New Ulm, and he is heading to Gaylord tonight to see La Grande Bande.

The group specializes in performing music written from 1600-1800, using instruments of the period. Their November concert celebrates the 340th birthday of Handel with two of his works set near water, his famed “Water Music Suites” as well as his cantata “O come chiare e belle.”

Handel’s "Water Musicks" is tonight at 7:30 p.m. at Immanuel Lutheran Church in Gaylord. Michael Thomas Asmus, the founder and artistic director, will give a talk before the performance at 6:45 about the music.

Charles says: It’s rather spectacular because he lives in Gaylord, just outside of Gaylord and his music performances have been kind of centered around that area, sometimes in St. Peter, sometimes in New Ulm.

So, it’s kind of local, but [it’s] tremendous quality. They’re not amateurs, never amateurs. They are all really professional performers and on period instruments — baroque instruments.

— Charles Luedtke