Act Two: Emergent Structures
Fall 2014
by David Gersten
It has been a remarkable year of growth and transformation for Arts Letters & Numbers and it is a great joy to send you our first newsletter sharing updates on our progress and announcements of what is to come.
In May of this year we acquired a new building: a spacious seven-bedroom, five-bathroom house overlooking the Mill. With it, we have realized a dream that had taken root even before we had held our first workshop. Constructed in 1859 to serve as the original Mill owner’s residence, the 'House on the Hill' will now become the residence for the ongoing programs of Arts Letters & Numbers, expanding our grounds to two and a half acres and making a wider range of outdoor events, explorations and works possible.
In combination, the Mill, the House and Grounds provide a new platform for Arts Letters & Numbers. Already this summer the house served as both a shelter for and the subject of the workshop: it was a home for all of the participants and a source for the content and questions of the workshop itself. This proved to be a remarkable double inhabitation, as you will see in the film of the final performance ‘Circling Towards a Disciplinary Chora’ released today here on our new website. This film captures the emotive depth and ineffable beauty of the final performance, and we are deeply moved to share this new work with you.
In a fundamental sense, the house will support and sustain the next phase in our evolution: year-round programming. Below we are pleased to announce the first steps toward this new phase, which will be taking shape in the coming weeks and months: we are now accepting applications for our Artist in Residence Program; starting in October there will be a four-part Master Class with Corporeal Mime Rich Kuperberg; and later this October we will being having a Mill Talk with Anthropologist, Remo Guidieri.
We are beginners interested in beginnings; and as with so much we do, these first fall programs are experiments, endeavors in search of an emergent structure. The dynamics of this emergence is, of course, co-constructed within the broader community of Arts Letters & Numbers, so please come join us for one of our upcoming events and help build this remarkable project.
Act Two begins… I am so deeply moved by this moment: how all of this is actually happening is just a bit beyond me: it is a dream, but we are all awake.
David Gersten
Director
Arts Letters & Numbers