My town has an old Opera House, Hubbard Hall, which was saved from demolition some years ago, preserved and transformed into an arts center. Hubbard Hall is vital to the soul of my little town, it is important to me. I teach there, courses on creating blogs and short story writing. Hubbard Hall is important to lot of people. It is a sacred space here, not a ghost but a temple.
Today I met with the new director of Hubbard Hall, David Snider, a savvy, energetic and experienced theater director from Washington C.D. We had lunch at the Round House Cafe, it went quickly, it was fun. David has two kids and was eager to raise them in a small rural community where they might have more freedom than kids in Washington. He seems to love the challenge of taking Hubbard Hall to the next place in times that are, to say the least, challenging for the arts.
He has all kinds of plans for bringing some exciting new things to Hubbard Hall and connecting the cultural center to the world around it in new and different ways. I have written many times that rural America has been written off by the economists and politicians in Washington, deemed to inefficient for the new global economy. I think David will prove otherwise.
He is exciting, he grasps the new relevance of electronic and social media and loves the traditional culture that Hubbard Hall has represented for more than a century. He is intense, funny and asks everyone he meets for money for Hubbard Hall. He talked me into going to see the opera tomorrow afternoon at Hubbard Hall in about two seconds, and I am not a big opera fan.
I remember some of my first book readings were at Hubbard Hall, it is such a special place and one of the very few old opera houses that the small towns of upstate New York managed to preserve. Hubbard Hall is much more than an opera house (read vaudeville) now, it sprawls over five or six buildings and offers all kinds of things, from dance to yoga to tai chi classes.
David will change Hubbard Hall – I pestered him to start his own blog and I hope he will, he has great stories to tell – and our town along with it. We may sometimes forget it, but culture is really the heart and soul of a place, it mirrors us and our world. It burnishes the soul.
David gets all that, he means to connect the center with all kinds of new people, he is already planning world premieres and the works of new playwrights and winter festivals for locals and local writers (I offered him a short, one-act play on the death of a dairy farm today). He understands social media and the ways in which it can reach audiences alienated from big arts centers. I hope to follow the change here on the blog.
In our culture, the arts are sometimes forgotten, but they bring us light and meaning, we have never needed them more. I am lucky to live in a place where they are not being forgotten..
My small town, Cambridge, N.Y., is a special place. All kinds of different people live here – farmers, writers, carpenters, artists, poets, photographers, academics. I think David Snider is about to change it, to make it more exciting. One of the first things David has done is set up a 16-day theater festival when we most need it, in mid- January. A brave and wonderful thing to do in the dark and cold days.
I am excited to be on the faculty of Hubbard Hall, a new chapter for creativity in my town.