(If you haven’t read last month’s entry, you can find it here: May 2025)
Much of May and June were spent developing The Tom Walker B-Side Collection, which is an experimental set of environments created with the materials from Tom Walker’s 50 year collection as The Living Theatre’s archivist.
Read about The B-Side’s debut below, and stay tuned for its further development around New England in 2025/2026!
Since he passed, I have been working on digitizing Tom’s collection (Special thanks Parker Memorial Library). See posts on The Diarist’s “Archive Fever” series to take a peek at Tom’s collection!
Dracut, MA (which is part of Greater Lowell & The Merrimack Valley in New England) is where The Living Theatre’s US operations are currently based.
June 2nd: Attended my first ever Dracut Town Meeting (civic theatre, for better or for worse)
June 5th: Finished “dorm room” environment wall layout for B-Side exhibit
June 6th: Assisted with the opening of The Rebirth of Apsara: Beyond Genocide, a Cambodian dance theatre production performed at the Academic Arts Center at Middlesex Community College in Lowell, MA.
The Rebirth of Apsara, a Hewlett 50 Arts Commission, tells the story of the importance classical Khmer dance has had on Cambodian culture and the life of Neak Kru Charya Burt (principal dancer) and how the dance was resurrected by surviving master artists and how it continues to be transmitted from generation to generation. (Lowell, MA has the second largest Cambodian population outside of Cambodia)
June 9th-14th: Put finishing touches galore on The B-Side! Last week before Colby College!
June 13th: Took a trip to Home Depot for supplies so we can build legs for our plywood flats (so they can stand on their own) and ultimately decide not to build legs but instead to attach brackets and create book flats for the Piazza environment for The B-Side
June 14: Packed the car! Will it all fit!?!? (It did) | Got to Waterville, ME and unloaded the car at Waterville Creates (building pictured below); dropped our stuff at our room in the Hathaway Lofts and then met April for a dinner meeting
Take 1 of this experiment included (2) realized environments, created with and inspired by materials from Tom's collection. These environments and others are in perpetual development.
Each environment makes use of materials from a particular place/time: the dorm room is situated in New Haven, CT between the years 1966-1970; the Piazza has a somewhat ambiguous temporality, it flows in and out of the latter 20th century as fluidly as the Living flowed in and out of Europe throughout that time. We invite people to break the 4th wall between themselves and the materials, to pick things up and move them from their original place, to flip through the books the journals the photographs the slides.
Artistic Director Brad Burgess was invited by Ed Patuto to be part of The Lunder Institute’s Summer Think Tank, and we brought The B-Side with us!
As part of the Summer Think Tank Public Program, a Living Theatre workshop/performance was given to about 40-50 people including Think Tank cohort members, Lunder Institute/Colby Museum/Colby College staff, special guest Chakra Sokomsan (who we met during The Rebirth of Apsara earlier in the month), some folks from Waterville Moves’ newsletter, Waterville community members, plus some friends of Chakra’s who came down from Bearnstow in Mt Vernon, plus! some family members of mine who live in Bangor, ME. (I had never done a chord with more than 10 people at once, so doing it with almost 50 people blew my mind)
BIG thanks to Colby College student, April Levy, who assisted with setting up/breaking down the exhibit and guiding visitors through the environments throughout the week.
June 22nd: Paused to gaze in awe at this gorgeous Dracut sunset from the back porch:
June 28th: Helped organize and execute a pedestrian audit with Let’s Walk Lowell! This idea grew out of Lowell resident Tom Hood’s comments at the “Let’s Talk Lowell” series hosted monthly by DIY Lowell and is an ongoing effort. With help from the Northern Middlesex Council of Governments (NMCoG), participants walked from the Charles A. Gallagher Transit Terminal to various places in downtown Lowell to identify places where improvements to the pedestrian experience could be made (sidewalk issues, overgrowth, signage, etc) and logged them via survey created by NMCoG. (Let’s Walk Lowell website forthcoming)
June 29th: Helped out at the Nashua Farmer’s Market, newly heralded by our friend Alyssa O’Mara! While at the market, we got salmon from a local fishmonger, produce from a couple different local farms, and spices from a local seller. I then made dinner for Brad and myself with all the local goodies!
Living Theatre board member Cindy Rosenthal gave the prestigious “Drew Lecture.” Cindy’s talk was in relation to her forthcoming book, Late Stage: Theatrical Perspectives on Age and Aging (which she co-edited with the late great Eleanor Fuchs and which will be published by University of Michigan Press in March ‘26). Cindy’s chapter in the book (and her talk) is about Judith Malina’s last performances in the context of theatrical perspectives on age and aging.
Watch/listen to Cindy’s talk here.
We mounted the B-Side environments at Bread Loaf as a way to bolster/support Cindy’s lecture with contextual materials for those who may not have been familiar with The Living Theatre’s history.
Fionna Brennan, our newest Living Theatre member from Lowell who helped us develop the environments on display joined us. This trip was my first time in Vermont and it was GORGEOUS.
Take 2 of this experiment included the same (2) environments featured in Waterville. These environments and others are in perpetual development. At Bread Loaf, the dorm room environment was set up in the dining hall (where all 120 students and all Bread Loaf faculty/staff saw it over the course of the three days it was up) and the piazza environment was set up in the barn and served as a backdrop for Cindy’s talk.
Stay tuned for more in July/August! :)
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