Robin Mix had romantic notions about studying glassblowing from the masters of Murano in Venice, Italy, but they didn’t welcome many American artists back in the 1970s. So he went to Sweden instead, where its own well-entrenched glass craft—less revered and tradition-steeped than in Murano—allowed him to develop his skills. He started shaping molten glass about eight hours a day for a tradesman and then moved to the Orrefors factory.

In his free time, Mix escaped to classes and collaborations with other glassmakers in Amsterdam and Copenhagen. He taught some classes, too, and sold some of his first work. Back the States, he continued his education in Seattle, a U.S. hub of glassblowing. “I was very drawn to the people who were trying to master it,” whose goals were to “try to be the determinant of what happens with glass,” Mix says.

The Murano style inspires Mix, but he has made it his own. It took him years to command the complicated murrini method, he says. Dating back centuries, murrini involves the melding of glass canes in an oven into masses that are cut by cross-section into a sheet. The sheet is rolled up and closed before Mix blows it into shape. The combined canes create an intricate tapestry of colorful squares or bubbles, sculpted into a vase.

Mix’s murrini grew more and more detailed, requiring him to craft his colors from scratch. He needed lighter hues that didn’t end up looking like dark blobs when combined, and the colors changed the metal content in the glass, so he had to continually adjust the heating and cooling. “It’s a very obvious manifestation of physical labor,” he says. “I took it about as far as I could go.”

Mix’s other glass vessels use techniques that turn them striped or plain or into abstract patterns. For years, he sold his work through luxury department store Barneys New York and in galleries around the country.

Ben Fleishman Photography

Mix grew up in Minnesota and stayed in school in the States while his parents and younger siblings moved to West Africa for his father’s work in the foreign service. They returned to settle in central Vermont, near where Mix lives and works in Tunbridge. In 1973, he went to Hampshire College to study architecture and, at nearby University of Massachusetts Amherst, took some glass-blowing classes, which simply looked like fun. “It turns out to be much harder than it looks,” he chuckles.

But compared to architecture, “it was instant gratification,” Mix says. “In glass blowing, you either got something or you don’t.” So he left school early and headed to Sweden.

Recently, Mix created a collection of heavy mixing glasses, wrapped in threads of color, made originally for his daughter, a mixologist who co-owns a cocktail bar in Brooklyn. So many of her friends asked for their own sets that Mix set up an Etsy store to sell them.

Some of his longtime customers have come into his studio to refresh their collections, noticed the new glasses and say, “I gotta have one of those,” he says. That helps this 63-year-old master keep a “youthful enthusiasm” for his old-world work.

Robin Mix–glassblower
Tunbridge, Vermont
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Top image by Ben Fleishman Photography

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You could almost set a timer —every 20 years or so, the Northampton-area music scene attracts national attention. Bands get signed, stories get written, hype builds. Then, like a lighthouse beam, the spotlight rotates away to the next town or sound. A couple of decades go by, and the whole process repeats: starting in the late 1960s with western Massachusetts acts like Arlo Guthrie, Clean Living, and Fat; continuing into the late ’80s and early ’90s with Dinosaur Jr., Sebadoh, and the Scud Mountain Boys; and moving all the way up to a crop of current groups that includes And the Kids, LuxDeluxe, and California X.

Yet as any music fan in the region knows, the local scene doesn’t rely on outside illumination to thrive. For more than 45 years, the sound of music in western Massachusetts—in Northampton, but also throughout the Pioneer Valley and the Berkshires—has been abundant and varied. Rock ’n’ roll, blues, punk, and various indie rock sounds have all taken root, along with heavy metal, jazz, and plenty of folk. Bands have come and gone; venues have opened, closed, and burned down; and the scene has flourished through it all.

“I just always marvel at the richness of it, considering how small the area is,” says David Sokol, who was music editor at the Valley Advocate from 1977 to 1993.

Dave Sokol, photo by Izzy Berdan

Billboard magazine expressed a similar sentiment in a slightly condescending frontpage story in 1992 that described the area as “a picturesque, place-that-time-forgot farming community.” Yet despite a population less than a quarter of the 3.4 million people in greater Seattle—the aspirational baseline for music scenes since the city birthed the ’90s grunge explosion that gave us Nirvana and Pearl Jam—the four counties of western Massachusetts have for years had the essential ingredients of any successful music scene: a creative class of musicians; places for them to play; audiences who will go see them; and supportive local media, including radio station WRSI-FM and the Valley Advocate, that will play their records on the air and write about them.

Western Massachusetts is also an affordable place to live, with a youthful atmosphere that flows from the local colleges, most notably Amherst, Hampshire, Mount Holyoke, Smith, and the University of Massachusetts. It’s also near the intersection of two interstate highways, which is helpful when it’s time to go on tour. Those attributes have made this area attractive to a continual flow of music-minded people, far more than there’s room to mention. Some of them got famous; more of them, then and now, play music simply because they love it and it’s fun.

“Northampton is an incredible place to emerge as an artist and to find that group of people who support what you do,” says folksinger Dar Williams, who moved to Northampton in 1992 and began building her career. So far it’s yielded 10 solo studio albums, including this year’s Emerald. Though she relocated to New York in 2000, she adds, “I would say it’s the reason I’m still doing what I’m doing.”

Ray Mason, photo by Izzy Berdan

The beginnings of the western Massachusetts scene date to the mid-1960s, when musicians like Holyoke native Ray Mason would play the local YMCA and slip an occasional original song into sets of covers of The Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, and The Rascals. The covers-are-king attitude started to fade when bands like the Rockin’ Ramrods from Boston and The Wildweeds from Connecticut came through playing their own songs, almost as if they were demonstrating that such a thing was possible for regular guys from New England.

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The result for nine years and counting is the “surrealist cabaret,” an interactive, walkable performance set in the fields of western Massachusetts, punctuated by crisp autumn air, framed by the setting sun, and characterized by multiple takes in multiple media around a single unifying theme. Last year’s theme was “home,” a resonant, deeply personal concept that can be both comforting and dark. Members of the Royal Frog Ballet Corps scatter to do their various work and art for most of the year, but they trek back to the Pioneer Valley each fall to undertake large-scale performances and installations. Here are snapshots of some key members.

Sophie Wood

Wood studied theater for social change at Hampshire College, and the work she did then was overtly political. But around the same time that Wood began thinking about making art with her housemates, she had an epiphany. “Social change, those two words—social is one of them,” she says. “And dialogue is a huge part of how inclusive change happens. My hope is that this whole shebang is where artists can have conversations with each other, but it’s also happening with the audience.” Wood is acutely aware of how powerful art can be but doesn’t believe it has to be sharp-edged. In fact, at its most effective, its borders can blur. “I think there’s a softness about making things a little dreamlike. People can connect things.” For last year’s “home”—themed cabaret, installations included egg-based breakfasts and laundry hanging from a line—deceptively simple tropes meant to evoke losing home, not having a home, missing home. But there was no narrative, so audiences—and actors—were left to figure out what their subconscious was telling them. “You wake up and you’re like, ‘That didn’t make sense—but it all made perfect sense in your dream.’ ”

Julia Read

Read set the idea of “home” to music, writing a waltz. “The words were from the perspective of a house that missed the people that had lived in it,” she says. But she brought another piece to the cabaret as well, thinking about her mother who had passed away years prior. “I found a dress that was my mom’s—a beautiful long blue dress with flowers on it—and we hung it from a branch of a tree. I would go up to the dress and smell it, imagining my mom was inside it and what it would feel like to touch her and see her.” Then Annie Burdette and Molly Greene, two more members of the Corps, approached. “Annie came up behind me and took my shirt and began doing the same thing, except that my body was inhabiting my shirt, and Molly Greene came up and did the same to Annie’s shirt.” One didn’t need to know anyone’s backstory to sense the intimacy of the moment. “The audience was really quiet. I feel like it helps drop me into being present, having the audience nearby, to see people’s faces.” On any given night, Read may recognize some audience members, but not all—and she likes it that way. More than anything, she appreciates the precipice of performing. “I love the moments right before. As the audience is gathering, people are bundled up and chattering, and the light is usually dramatic. I love those moments. It sort of feels like we don’t know what will happen yet as we move into this world.”

Chelsea Granger

Granger is up for almost any kind of project, but she’s most excited about the ones she undertakes with other people. This is not an accident. “My first few years [with RFB] it was hard to find my footing as a visual artist who makes smaller works on paper,” she says. “It took a while to understand what my work could be outside in a large field setting with big crowds.” But eventually she got it. Her project for “home” was truly collaborative—and truly huge, compared to the small-scale work she was used to. “I wanted to make a really big painting, a cantastoria, with Sophie.” A cantastoria, or “story-singer,” is an ancient melding of visual art and theater where a series of paintings are narrated by a live performer. “Eventually I made a huge painting of a vase of flowers, and Sophie wrote a prayer for flowers to go with it.” Because several members of the Corps had recently undergone loss and were processing grief in various ways, the prayer held special meaning. “It was about creating rituals, showing up for each other in the time and space. I wanted rituals, needed rituals.” Religious expression can be deeply personal, but many of the most powerful rituals happen in community—or collaboration. “I think that’s the thing. It’s not just your voice, your ideas, but your voice and ideas meeting someone else’s voice and ideas. Sitting alone in a room drawing is nothing compared to the alchemy that happens when people make things together.”

Jazer Giles

The natural, outdoor theater is central to the RFB experience, but Giles has fond memories of a rare indoor moment: a monthlong installation at the APE Gallery in Northampton, Massachusetts, when the troupe created a boat-shaped stage in the space. “We spent most of the time building it,” says Giles. About a week before the show, they realized they still needed to come up with a performance. “I had built an artist posing figure, a puppet that mimicked my movement, and I hooked up to it with four coat hangers attached to my limbs with leather straps. I built a small bird outfit for him, and we made this event happen out of the ether.” Some performers might have been daunted, but Giles is less attached to the outcome, more interested in the process. “You’re always pulling art out of the air.” With its outdoor performances, RFB is “harnessing the magic of the place, distilling it, setting it up in a certain way—or just framing it. Of course, sometimes it rains. Often it’s freezing! But you can’t fake things like space. When you put people out in a field, 50 feet away from people, and put them in costumes, you can’t translate that to an inside space with a stage.”

Mike Gundlach

Gundlach began as the mess cook for the Corps, but he quickly found his role morphing. “Sophie asked me to collaborate to make an outdoor-feast show. The food was interspersed with two or three acts in between each course of people popping out of the ground and having dinner.” After that, Gundlach was both company cook and performer, and has been contributing edible art ever since. “We’ve made a pepper-infused, chocolate-covered asparagus as an aphrodisiac course that was served on spires. We’ve hung Turkish delight from trees for people to pick and eat,” he recalls. “Molly and I performed a piece with soft-boiled eggs and volkenbrat, this German rye bread that people would make in the fall and survive on all winter.” They garnished the peasant food with chives and edible flowers, then dumped freshly squeezed grapefruit juice on top and served [the dish] in small planter trays. “For one show we had a bunch of rain and made pizza in the rain. We just figured it out,” he shrugs. “If people can see you be excited, you get that energy.”

Molly Greene

In her other life, Greene is completing a PhD at Yale University in American studies—an interdisciplinary field that explores how elements in society intersect. One could argue that RFB does the same. “The themes of the cabaret are always threads that weave in and out of aspects of our lives,” Greene muses. “Sometimes they congeal into a single idea, but usually it’s a constellation of terms that connect, then get kind of carried off in various trajectories, then get rewoven into something we hope is coherent.” Greene’s printmaking work is solitary and quiet. “I’m kind of a hermit. Being in front of people performing . . . there’s a little bit of tension in it for me, but it’s also rich and nourishing. One of my favorite moments is when we’re literally hiding in a ditch somewhere as your next costume is being assembled or whatever, and the sky is doing something incredible, and it’s fall in New England. You’re listening with one ear for your cue, but you’re also just conscious of being outside, and there’s a heightened sense of purpose and consciousness and collective awareness of just being in that place. I have that moment every year, and it is always all-consuming.”

This story originally appeared in the June/July 2016 issue of Take, which is available here.

Royal Frog Ballet
Amherst, Massachusetts
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All images by Candace Hope

The post Field Trip appeared first on Take Magazine.

Brenda Lynn Siegel, the executive/artistic director of the Southern Vermont Dance Festival, has dance, performance, and drive in her blood. Her mother was a dancer and instructor, her grandfather, Ernest Kinoy, wrote the screenplay to Roots, her grandmother was an accomplished Jewish female activist, and her great uncle was a famous civil rights attorney. “If I could be half the person that any of them were, and do half the good that they all did in the world, that’s the best I could hope for,” Siegel says.

Siegel works tirelessly to make the Southern Vermont Dance Festival an impactful event while also juggling motherhood and her role as co-founder of the IBIT (Intrinsic Beauty of Invisible Things) Dance Company. Growing up in Vermont, Siegel was a competitive figure skater. She left to earn a degree in dance from Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts and from there she landed in Baltimore, Maryland to choreograph for the Baltimore Children’s Theatre.

Brenda Lynn Siegel in rehearsal at IBIT Dance Company, photo by Kiqe Bosch

She returned to Vermont to raise her son and continue her work in dance. When tragedy struck in 2011 and Tropical Storm Irene stripped Siegel and her son of their home and belongings, recovery became her focus. Through dance, Siegel conceived a plan. “Dance is a form of escape from hardship,” she says. In 2012, Siegel debuted the first Southern Vermont Dance Festival to both bring awareness to the Brattleboro dance community and support local business in need of storm assistance. “It’s an exciting festival and what makes it unique is that we turn the downtown into a campus,” Siegel says. “When you’re there during the festival you see people from the community, who aren’t dancers, watching and participating in workshops and performances. Then you’ll see groups of dancers in dance clothes heading to their next class.”

Julie Marie Muskat performing in the Promenade at Southern Vermont Dance Festival 2016, photo by Jeff Lewis

The festival is open to all—instructors, choreographers, and attendees travel from all over the world to be there. “It’s for everyone from the dance enthusiast to the dance expert, and it’s also for people who have never walked into a studio,” Siegel says.

In addition to performances, the festival also features visual artists whose movement-inspired work will be displayed in various galleries around town. New this year, festival goers can share in art, conversation, and food at a community potluck meal. A Midsummer Night’s picnic will be held at Scott Farm where guests can enjoy performances while they nosh. A free social justice promenade will take place downtown where walkers will experience music or performance every 15 minutes at various locations along a self-guided tour.

Southern Vermont Dance Festival 2016, photo by Jeff Lewis

This year’s festival is set to be the biggest and best yet, and with Brattleboro’s long list of dance studios and businesses, it’s an ideal location for such a diverse, dance-inspired event. “People have said our workshops are like master classes they’ve taken in New York City,” Siegel says. “They say, “It’s every bit as good as when I’m in the city except, I’m in Vermont.””

Brenda Lynn Siegel–executive director, Southern Vermont Dance Festival
Newfane, Vermont
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Top image Julie Marie Muskat performing in a gala at Southern Vermont Dance Festival 2016, photo by Jeff Lewis

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