More Devotedly

Kai Talim wants to talk about curiosity. Douglas Detrick and this pianist turned podcaster and entrepreneur had a thoughtful conversation about how following our curiosity can lead to new directions in our lives.

In the time COVID-19, Leila Haile and Joaquin Lopez, Portland, Oregon’s newest Creative Laureates, are focused on healing, especially for BIPOC and queer communities. They talk with Douglas Detrick about how they became artists and why, how artists can heal themselves, and how artists can offer healing experiences to their audiences.

William Seiji Marsh was inspired by a moment of personal realization to launch a new business during the pandemic. Douglas Detrick and Marsh talk about goal setting in music, and how doing it better can relieve anxiety and improve outcomes.

"Why do I continue to devote myself to music?" was a starting point for violist, ethnomusicologist, author and educator Tanya Kalmanovitch to launch her newsletter The Rest. Hear her talk with Douglas Detrick about how capitalism and music interact, how she talks about money with her conservatory students, and how we can stop setting ourselves up for failure in our personal musical practice.

Patrick Walsh talks about “re-enfranchising” incarcerated audiences in Oregon by directing theater for performances in Oregon prisons. He is the Executive Artistic Director of Northwest Classical Theater Cooperative, who presented their latest production, Antigone, via video during the pandemic.

Biography

Patrick Walsh, back row, 2nd from right.

Patrick Walsh is a theatre director and producer who believes in the power of language, art, and community to change lives. His work has been seen across the United States of America. He currently serves as the Executive Artistic Director of Northwest Classical Theatre Collaborative Inc (www.nwctc.org), touring classic theatrical stories to culturally under-served audiences; bringing art to people who have the least access to it and knitting rooms together throughout the state of Oregon.

Locally, in Oregon, Patrick’s directing work has been seen at Northwest Classical Theatre Collaborative, Defunkt Theatre, Portland Actors Ensemble, Post5 Theatre, Bag&Baggage Productions, the Fertile Ground Festival, and at Two Rivers Correctional Facility where Patrick volunteers through the Arts in Prison program. Work across the country includes credits at Chautauqua Theatre Company, The Guthrie Theatre, Goodman Theatre, Compass Rose Theatre, Theater Workshop of Nantucket, Steppenwolf Theatre, and the Hangar Theater. In addition, Patrick is a proud member of the 2009 Lincoln Center Directors Lab, while also being a recipient of an SDC Foundation Observership, a Chautauqua Theater Company Directing Fellowship, The Leslie O. Fulton Fellowship, and a Drama League Directing Fellowship. Patrick is also a proud founding member of Salmon Nation. https://salmonnation.net/

Intro

Welcome to More Devotedly, a podcast for people who see the arts as a force for positive, progressive change. I’m Douglas Detrick, this is Volume V, episode 2. 

The arts are a critical part of how we conceive of ourselves. As much as you’re a person who wears their hair a certain way, dresses a certain way, or practices a certain religion, you’re also a person who makes or appreciates certain kinds of art. You might be into the weirdest of weird experimental theater, or you might prefer Shakespeare, or maybe you really only pay attention to cat videos that your aunt shares on Facebook.

And that part of your identity is like a passport. If you think of yourself as someone who feels not only comfortable but also excited and affirmed by going to a theater in the United States, you’re probably also a person who feels affirmed by our culture in general. You’re likely to have a certain level of disposable income, a level of educational achievement, the ability to have free time in the evenings, and you’re likely to be white.

All of those indicators put you closer to the center of power in the United States, and the lack of them pushes you to the margins. The way I’ve described it so far is that those indicators of power bring you access to theater, and the arts in general. But, in the conversation I had on this episode, we ask, what if it also worked the other way around?

My guest this episode is Patrick Walsh, a theater director and organizer who lives in Portland, Oregon. Patrick is the Executive Artistic Director of Northwest Classical Theatre Collaborative, a company dedicated to bringing theater to culturally underserved audiences. They’ve pursued that mission by producing theater performances in prisons across Oregon. I recommend you go back to Volume I episode 4 to hear Anna Fritz and Paul Susi talk about their roles in a production of An Iliad that Patrick directed. In this episode Patrick talks about a new production of Antigone and how the pandemic has changed how they deliver their work in the short and long term and revealed an even deeper significance to the core of his company’s mission. 

Patrick has been acting on the theory that sharing theater with incarcerated a

Glass, light and steel artist Jen Fuller and Douglas Detrick talk about how glass can inspire adaptability, collaboration, and surprise.

About Jen Fuller

Portland based installation artist, Jen Fuller, has been constructing ephemeral glass, steel, and light experiences throughout the United States for over a decade. As a self-taught artist, Fuller found her passion rooted in the traditional techniques of kiln-formed glass, Raku, and industrial welding. Her art reflects the delicate vulnerability and ever present interconnectedness of nature and humanity. Fuller’s work has been commissioned by Metro Regional Government, Ovation TV, Olbrich Botanical Garden, OMSI, Lan Su Chinese Garden, and private collectors around the world.

Episode Transcript

Intro

Welcome to More Devotedly, a podcast for people who see the arts as a force for positive, progressive change. I’m Douglas Detrick, this is Volume V, episode 1. 

As you move through your life, you move into and out of space. You move according to certain rules at some times, and you follow your own personal anarchy at others. At times, you’re under stress, sometimes you are fluid, sometimes you are solid, or at least you are super cool. Glass isn’t actually a solid, but a liquid frozen in mid-movement.

Glass lives by its own rules. Making glass art requires learning them and communicating through them. My guest for this episode is Jen Fuller, a glass, steel and light artist working in Portland, Oregon. 

As a self-taught artist, Jen found her passion rooted in the traditional techniques of kiln-formed glass, Raku, and industrial welding. Her art reflects the delicate vulnerability and ever present interconnectedness of nature and humanity. Her work has been commissioned by Metro Regional Government, Ovation TV, Olbrich Botanical Garden, OMSI, Lan Su Chinese Garden, and private collectors around the world. 

Jen offered a vivid metaphor about what it’s like to work with glass as a sculptor. As she manipulates glass of different colors and other properties, she imagines an ensemble of dancers. The idea is to create a beautiful dance, but when you look at each dancer, you see that this one dances samba, this one dances hip hop, and this one dances ballet. As the glass heats to 1200 degrees fahrenheit  and cools back to room temperature it hardens and flexes in different ways and at different rates. If she isn’t mindful of these differences as she works with it, she’ll end up with a kiln full of broken pieces.

We talked about how this metaphor can help us to understand the human dynamics of social movements and politics. For those of us who lean to the left, we have a wildly diverse coalition to maintain, whereas the Right is far more homogenous. To achieve a beautiful sculpture on our side, we have to move all the parts of the sculpture up to and down from temperature, and if we fail in that task, the parts of the coalition come apart.

I wanted to begin this volume by talking to a glass artist so we could talk about this adaptable yet willful material on its own terms. We met at her NE Portland studio to talk about glass, about what she has learned by working with it, and how the pandemic has affected her.

Interview

Douglas Detrick: So, Jen, welcome to more devotedly. I’m looking forward to this conversation today and as I’ve been doing with all of my guests basically since the pandemic started I just wanted to give the opportunity to just tell us how you’re doing and how things have been for you over the last year.

Jen Fuller: Yeah. Hi thanks for having me. I’m thriving. It feels cautious to say that out loud in public right now, But this has actually been a really good year for me to rest and regenerate in what is usually a pretty intense grind. So it’s exciting to kind of be reemerging into the world with all the things that have unfolded in the last year in my shop and in my persona

Melting down the broken bits of Volume IV and forging a new narrative about a willful yet adaptive material. An introduction the theme, the music, and the guests of Volume V, inspired by glass.

Intro

Welcome to More Devotedly, a podcast for people who see the arts as a force for positive, progressive change. I’m Douglas Detrick, this is Volume V, Prologue. 

It’s been about a year since I’ve released new episodes on this podcast. It’s been a stressful year, and I had some personal matters to address and other projects to complete, but I’m very glad to have a new set of episodes to offer you now. I wanted to give you a preview of what’s coming up, and to share some of the ideas behind the conversations and the music I’ve created to surround them.

Here’s the episode.

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Over the summer of 2020 the pandemic was raging on with vaccines still off in the indeterminate future. Protests against police violence against Black Americans, and in honor of and in solidarity with George Floyd, were continuing since they began in May. All in all they continued over 100 days without interruption here in Portland.

The protests opened the door to some very important conversations and legislative and policy changes in government, nonprofits and businesses. However, that progress came with a cost. 

Counter-protesters from right wing, white nationalist organizations came here to pick fights. Unidentified Federal agents were facing off with protesters and making arrests from unmarked vehicles seemingly on direct orders from President Trump. And former Attorney General Bill Barr declared Portland an “anarchist jurisdiction” with threats of punishment if the city didn’t get in line. 

As the attention of white nationalist organizations and their right-wing political allies focused on Portland, the city became a battleground in a political proxy war. And real violence, including deaths, resulted from this war of words.

The conversations I put on the podcast were an effort to reclaim at least my own narrative about what was happening. I tried to give some Portland artists a positive platform to talk about what was going on here in their own words. It didn’t fix all the problems, and didn’t ease all of my anxiety, but it helped. 

As always on this podcast, I find those conversations helpful in clarifying my own thinking, even if my thinking is different from that of my guests. And I hope they fulfill that purpose for you, the listener, as well.

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As I was creating music to underscore those episodes, I wanted to create a sound world that would instantly communicate how I was feeling, and how I thought at least some other Portlanders might be feeling—to portray the emotional state of a whole city into sound. I chose glass, to create music with glass objects as the only sound sources.

Glass—as bottles, vases, jars, sheets and bowls—can have incredible resonant qualities, and the sounds they make can be instantly recognizable, or sometimes otherworldly. I chose glass because it seemed like it would capture the fragility and the danger that I felt, and thought some other people here were feeling then.

But, by the time I finished the project, I found that I had misjudged this material. As I worked with it in my hands, I found it to be incredibly resilient. As I studied the history of its use and manufacture, I found it to be incredibly versatile and useful beyond my expectations. The more I learned, the more that glass came to symbolize renewal and rebirth. Fragility is only a part of its story. 

I found that I had misjudged glass, and looking back, I think I misjudged Portland as well. We were under a lot of stress, yes, but Portlanders are resilient. I can’t speak for all Portlanders of course, but I think it’s safe to say that we Portlanders love our city, and the vast majority of us are committed to fighting racism. We are committed to a better future for Black Portlanders,

Sarah Tiedemann, is Artistic Director of Third Angle New Music and a flute and piccolo player with the Oregon Ballet Theatre Orchestra. We talked about how she and other artists are getting through the pandemic; what non-Portlanders should know about our hometown; and how predominantly white arts organizations can help tell the stories of marginalized communities in an ethical way.

Joni Renee Whitworth, who uses they/them pronouns, is a poet and the executive director of Future Prairie, “a queer creative studio and non-profit artist collective.” We talked about how their organization has changed course during the pandemic, what the value of a nonprofit dedicated to marginalized artists is, and how an arts organizer finds space and time for their own work as they support the work of others.

Directors and the Poet Laureate of the United States about the repatriation of the Yale Union building in Portland, Oregon to her organization, about her role as Poet Laureate in a toxic time in American politics, and how she found her voice through poetry and music.