St. Johnsbury Arts and Entertainment
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Bob Swartz, President |
Arts and Entertainment around St. Johnsbury
For the arts and entertainment enthusiast, St. Johnsbury has a wide assortment of activities. The center of cultural life in downtown St. Johnsbury is Catamount Arts on Eastern Ave. Its weekly schedule of arts offerings includes one first-run film and one independent/international film, live jazz concerts, art exhibits, classes in various artistic media, as well as performances by various musical ensembles, dance troupes and theater companies.
Many organizations sponsor a wide variety of cultural events throughout the year. Local venues include Fuller Hall and the more intimate Black Box Theater at St. Johnsbury Academy, several historic churches in St. Johnsbury, and the Alexander Twilight Theater at nearby Lyndon State College.
The Star Theater on Eastern Ave. in St. Johnsbury shows first-run films year-round on its three screens.Downtown St. Johnsbury is the home of the Artisan's Guild, where local crafts people display and sell their varied works.
Many writers, visual artists, and crafts people have found a home in the St. Johnsbury area. Our cultural directory shows the wide range of artistic talents on display in the St. Johnsbury area.
Arts and Entertainment Links
Summer Fun for Kids in St. Johnsbury
Around our house, just about now, the thrill of summertime is starting to wear off. The weather is hot, day camps are over, and the kids are wondering, “What can we do now?”
Well, we’ve got some help for you!
Catamount Arts, on Eastern Avenue, is offering free movie screenings of two classic films for kids and their families. “The Swiss Family Robinson” will be shown Thursday, August 5, and “The Bad News Bears” will be presented Thursday, August 12. Both show times are at 10 a.m. No advance tickets or reservations are needed to see these films as they were meant to be seen – on the big screen!
Also coming up at Catamount is 3 Apple Story Teller Judith Witters on Saturday, August 21, at 11 a.m. Witters will enthrall children of all ages when she presents her story telling magic as part of Catamount’s “Kids Rock!” series. The morning starts with a screening of a family-friendly film at 9:30 a.m., and will conclude with a lunch for the whole family at noon. This event is free to Community National Bank Totally Kids Club members, and is $5 for Catamount members and $7 for the general public.
The Fairbanks Museum and Planetarium on Main Street in St. 
Johnsbury is a tried-and-true location for family entertainment. Along with everything the natural history museum has to offer, including its world-famous dioramas of animals, the “Eye on the Sky” weather center, and the ever-popular bug art, this summer the Fairbanks offers a program called Destination Discovery. The program introduces participants to the countless ways local plants and animals adapt to better survive. Kids can get their paws on real skulls, take a peep at feathers and fur, and find out how the animals in their back yards put these things to good use.
If you want to beat the summer heat, you can pay a visit to the Kiwanis Pool off Western Avenue in St. Johnsbury. The entry fee is donation based, so grab your swimming gear and head down. The pool has general swimming from 1:30 p.m. to 4 p.m. They close for an hour and then open again at 5 p.m., when underage swimmers must be accompanied by an adult. Teen swim starts at 6:30 p.m.
On a rainy day, St. Johnsbury’s Comfort Inn offers swimming for the general public at its indoor pool. Admission to the pool is $10 for adults and $7 for children.
One more great spot for kids in St. Johnsbury is the Children’s Library at the St. Johnsbury Athenaeum. Storytime is held every Monday at 11 a.m., for all ages of kids. The children’s librarian, Gloria Molinaroli, is happy to recommend books for your children to keep them busy. And for crafty guys and girls, the children’s library hosts a drop-in knitting club every Tuesday afternoon at 3 p.m. visit www.stjathenaeum.org or call 748-8291 for more information.
So tomorrow morning, when your kids say, “There’s nothing to do!” take them to St. Johnsbury for fun that lasts until school starts in the fall!
If you haven’t heard, everyone who’s anyone has taken to raising chickens at home. Of course, this is something we in northern Vermont have been doing for years.
As a special treat for chicken lovers everywhere, the Northeast Kingdom Artisans Guild in St. Johnsbury will host a multi-media exhibition celebrating the diverse world of poultry, from June 21st through August 7th. The public is invited to meet the artists and enjoy wine and cheese at a reception June 26 from 3:00 to 5:00 pm.
The exhibit highlights artists from Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom and across the state with artwork that expresses their joy and delight in chickens of all shapes, colors, and sizes as well as ducks, geese, and even emus, guinea fowl, and wild turkeys. Images of poultry are captured in ceramic baking dishes, felted place mats, block prints, paintings in watercolor and oil, hooked 
rugs, photographs, and sculptures. If you love to watch the antics of your backyard chickens, if you thrill to see a flock of wild turkeys grazing in an open field, or if a V-formation of migrating geese makes your heart skip a beat, this is a show you won't want to miss.
The Northeast Kingdom Artisans Guild is located at 430 Railroad St. in St. Johnsbury and is open Monday - Saturday from 10:30 am to 5:30 pm. Call 802-748-0158 for more information about the show.
Two Arts Organizations Are Better Than One!
St. Johnsbury’s own Catamount Arts center has joined forces with the Colonial Theatre in Bethlehem, New Hampshire. Members of either organization can now enjoy reciprocal benefits on both sides of the river.
Catamount Arts has been an important force in St. Johnsbury’s cultural scene since 1975. The non-profit organization provides programming in the arts for area residents, visitors, and schoolchildren. Catamount Arts shows two foreign/independent films each week and holds regular gallery showings of area artists’ works. The organization sponsors a series of live performances, both for area schools as well as the general community. Its building on Eastern Avenue houses two movie theaters, an 80-seat performance space, two classrooms, and gallery space.
by the Friends of the Colonial since 2002, presenting independent and foreign films, plus live performances by national touring artists from May through November. Its building on Main Street is beautifully restored and is listed on the New Hampshire 
Register of Historic Places. Like Catamount Arts, the organization has significant outreach to its local community, including schools, libraries, and other arts organizations and community groups.
Catamount Arts or the Colonial Theatre will enjoy member ticketing at both locations. This means reduced ticket prices for movies and live events whether you’re attending at Catamount or the Colonial.
Green Mountain Film Festival
Extends to St. Johnsbury
Every year, scores of movie lovers from Vermont and beyond come out of their long winter naps to celebrate film. No awards. No pressure. Just pure enjoyment of the craft. This year, the Green Mountain Film Festival takes place March 19-28 in Montpelier and for the first time, in St. Johnsbury from April 9-11.
Catamount Arts is the host of the new St. Johnsbury location. This satellite venue was the brainchild of Catamount’s executive director, Jody Fried, and Donald Rae, the Green Mountain Film Festival’s executive director.
“The Green Mountain Film Festival has become one of the most vibrant events of its kind in the region,” Rae said. “This new collaboration with Catamount Arts enables us to reach an even broader audience, while retaining the intimate scale and friendly atmosphere that is so much a part of the festival.”
The festival has shown independent, international and documentary films in and around the state capital since 1997. The Montpelier location will have screenings at the Savoy Theater, the City Hall Arts Center, and the Pavilion Auditorium. In St. Johnsbury, Catamount Arts will host the festival and films will be shown in the two theaters at Catamount Arts and at the Morse Art Center and Fuller Hall at St. Johnsbury Academy.
The St. Johnsbury satellite festival will feature a High School Filmmakers 
Showcase, which will present a variety of short films produced by teens from Vermont and throughout the U.S. and Canada. Teens were invited to submit entries in the competitive categories of comedy, drama, documentary and experimental films. The official entries were each selected by a panel of area teens under the guidance of Jamie Yerkes, Director of SOCAPA (School of Cinema and Performing Arts). Each block of films will be screened several times throughout the festival at the Charles Hosmer Morse Center for the Arts at St. Johnsbury Academy.
Rae says the Green Mountain Film Festival is unusual when compared to other festivals in that it does not have a specific category or theme. “The festival is curated,” Rae says. “We go out looking for the best films we can find in any category.”
One such film is “The Summer of Walter Hacks,” a remarkable film made by Vermont farmer George Woodard over the span of about five years. A piece of the film was screened last year as a work in progress and this year the film is being shown in its entirety. The showings in Montpelier are already sold out, and the film will be screened in St. Johnsbury as well.
Rae said the festival usually draws around 10,000 in attendance, and with the added screens at the Pavilion Auditorium in Montpelier and in St. Johnsbury, this year’s festival is expected to be bigger than ever.
More information is available at www.greenmountainfilmfestival.org. Tickets can be ordered by mail or phone. The ticket office opens March 15, and tickets usually sell out well before show times.
For information about the events happening at the St. Johnsbury location of the film festival, visit www.catamountarts.org. Tickets for the St. Johnsbury showings can be purchased through the Catamount ticket office on Eastern Avenue or by calling 802-748-2600.
If you’ve ever wondered what the future of life in Vermont will be like, visit the Charles Hosmer Morse Center for the Arts at St. Johnsbury Academy from March 5 through March 13. There, ten Vermont artists show, in 52 separate artworks, their visions of Vermont in the 21st century.
Artists in the exhibit have painted their views of possible 
Vermont futures, including one work that shows Vermont as a green refuge surrounded by the menacing figures of big-time commerce. Another piece of art shows a bucolic Vermont with different farm activities throughout the year. A scary vision of Vermont’s future is depicted in a image of a large Wal-Mart store and concrete parking lot. 
One artwork shows windmills in a landscape, and another piece celebrates special Vermont gatherings such as town meeting day.
The exhibit is part of the Vermont Arts Council's “The Art of Action” exhibit, which is currently touring the state. Entrepreneur Lyman Orton, owner of the Vermont Country Store, provided the funding for a statewide competition to select artists to portray their visions of the future of Vermont.
More than 300 artists applied for the contest. Ten artists were 
chosen as winners and each received an average commission of around $25,000 to paint their impressions of the future of Vermont. The artists created 108 pieces of art, 52 of which will be on display at St. Johnsbury Academy. Descriptions of the art and artists is on display on the Vermont Arts Council website, www.vermontartscouncil.org.
The exhibition kicks off with a reception Friday March 5, 2010 from 5:00 to 7:00 p.m. The public is invited to the reception, which in addition to the artwork, will feature the St. Johnsbury Academy musical groups: the Jazz Band, the Hilltones, and the String Ensemble.
Concurrent with the exhibition is an online auction at the Vermont Arts Council website. Members of the public can purchase unsold works at the exhibit or through the online auction.
The concert will start at 8:00 p.m. Case will be joined by Vermont vocalist Anais Mitchell who will open the performance, and will be backed by Paul Rigby and Kelly Hogan.
Case moved to the St. Johnsbury area last year, and now enjoys life on her farm. Her barn is already famous for housing a number of pianos of all sizes that she has collected, and several songs on her "Middle Cyclone" album were recorded there.
Case’s album, “Middle Cyclone,” was the highest debuting independent release of 2009, bowing at #3 on the Billboard Top 200 chart in March, as well as #1 on the Top Independent Albums chart. Amazon recently named it the best album of 2009 on its annual year-end list.
But charts and lists do nothing to measure Case’s ability to connect with her audience on an uncommonly deep and meaningful level. She's one those artists whose songs linger in your head, your heart and your soul, long after the record has stopped spinning.
For Case, making music remains a mysterious, confounding and, occasionally, contradictory process.
"When I toured for ‘Fox Confessor’ one of the things I said in interviews about that record was that I don't like writing love songs, that I can't write them," she recalls. "Of course, as soon as I said that, I ended up writing a bunch of love songs.”
Those love songs became “Middle Cyclone.”
Ultimately, for Case, the songs and themes on Middle Cyclone express a long internal struggle, a pitched battle between nature and nurture. "Things like animals and nature, they're located in the tender receptor of my brain. And I'm just now trying to come to terms with the notion of loving people as much as I love those other things - because I grew up in a way that made me love the one but not the other. So, I guess I've been working that out for myself, and these songs are my way of reconciling those feelings."
You will have a chance to experience these songs in person when Case performs at Fuller Hall on Friday, March 12, at 8:00 p.m. Tickets for this benefit performance may be reserved by calling 802-748-2600 or by visiting the Catamount Box Office from 1 to 6 p.m., Monday through Saturday. Ticket prices range from $30 to $75 for members and $36 to $90 for non-members.
For more information on this concert please visit www.catamountarts.org.
At Catamount Arts, you can watch “Live in HD” performances of major artists on film screens. The performances are broadcast live, as they are actually happening, and you view them on the film screens – bigger than life. Watching a “Live in HD” performance is almost like being there, and in some ways, even better. You have a great seat for the show in an intimate-sized theater. No need to travel to Boston or New York to see the finest artists. Plus, the ticket prices are far less expensive than at the actual performance.
One upcoming “Live in HD” performance sure to draw a big crowd is Garrison Keillor, the much-beloved National Public Radio figure, performing his show, “A Prairie Home Companion,” at 8:00 pm, February 4, 2010. Tickets for the “Live in HD” broadcast of “A Prairie Home Companion” are only $15 ($12 for Catamount Arts members).
Catamount will also be presenting a “Live in HD” performance of “The 
Nation” from the National Theatre of the U.K. Saturday, January 30 at 2:00 pm, with an encore presentation Sunday, January 31 at 2:00 pm. This acclaimed production is taking place live in Great Britain, and we in St. Johnsbury can watch the play live on the film screen at Catamount Arts. What a fabulous way to bring exciting cultural events to our corner of Vermont!
4:00 pm at the South Congregational Church. This pianist and cellist have been brought here in seasons past by the Classical Series, and the duo has been one of their most popular concerts. Arron and Rose have been acclaimed by New York critics for their artistry. The upcoming program will feature a mix of classic and contemporary music, including Mendelssohn’s Song Without Words for Cello and Piano, Opus 109; Manuel DeFalla’s Suite Populaire Espagnole; Elliott Carter’s Sonata for Cello and Piano; and Brahms’s Sonata for Cello and Piano, Opus 38.
Johnsbury Academy campus. The Starline Rhythm Boys and the Burke Mountain Bandits, two Vermont bands, will present a “Good Time Jamboree” guaranteed to chase away any wintertime blues. The two bands are well known in this area for their energy and exciting performances, and will present an evening of “toe-tapping fun!”
ages – the “King of Silly,” Todd Wellington. Part of the family series, Kids Rock! from 9:00 am to noon January 30, 2010 at Catamount Arts, Wellington will entertain the crowd with his unique blend of juggling, balloons, unicycling, magic, and physical comedy. As Wellington says, “I’m bringing back silly!”
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