Tonight on New Hampshire Crossroads, we visit a very unusual art exhibit over in Hollis, New Hampshire.

The show is called Nudes and Animals.

You could paint a group of nudes, and all you'd see is a lot of individuals.

You could paint a group of people in suits, and all you'd see is a crowd.

Then we step into the world of contra dancing.

Meet some of its movers and shakers.

Well, it has to be in the right tempo, and it has to be in that format, one of the format of those kinds of things I just did.

That, that beat and, and if everything goes well and they enjoy the melody, why then perhaps you've got a tune that somebody would like to dance to.

And then we travel up to Warren, New Hampshire, to view the spire beside the town green.

Turns out the spire is a Redstone rocket.

Hi, I'm Fritz Wetherbee, and this is New Hampshire Crossroads.

Theme Music Presentation of New Hampshire Crossroads is made possible by grants from First NH Banks, serving the financial needs of individuals, corporations, and local governments throughout New Hampshire.

The Union Leader Corporation, publisher of New Hampshire's statewide newspapers.

Delivering a world of color to you every morning and Upton, Sanders and Smith of Concord, New Hampshire, providing a full range of legal services throughout the state of New Hampshire since 1908.

Today we're at Union Lake, over in Barrington, New Hampshire.

And what a glorious day this is, about as warm as September gets.

Pretty as a picture, too, especially with a duck in the frame.

And that's what our first story is about: pictures.

Over in Hollis, New Hampshire, there is a gallery called Opus 71, and twice a year, once in the spring and once in the fall, they put on a unique art exhibit.

Last year at this time, their exhibit was designed to encourage the use of the nude in fine art, and a $1,000 prize for excellence was given out by the Hollis Arts Society.

It was a big success.

All sorts of artists exhibits exhibited, that is, and they had paintings with titles like Oh Slippery Slope and Pathos Lust and, let's see, oh, Eden And After.

Oh, when the show itself?

That was called Nudes and Animals.

Music We have felt for a long time that, that nudes were greatly ignored these days in art.

I mean, everyone is into landscapes and florals and anything that's decorative, anything that fills the space and satisfies a color need for a wall.

But real art has other subject matter as well.

And, and the human form is certainly one that has been recognized as such for centuries.

I know I looked at that for about five minutes, and tried to figure out what the vertical line was.

My name is Patrice Methey.

There's a dynamic involved with the human figure, which is unachievable any other way.

The nature of human beings to relate to their own image makes it all that more impelling.

And, you work with the figure in space, you work with its internal dynamics, and the human figure is also timeless.

You know, you start dressing it up, you start cloaking it.

It becomes less human.

It becomes much more a contrivance of whatever societal dictates might be going on.

This is without contrivance.

It is humanity unbounded, uncontrived, uncontrolled.

It is an individual.

You don't see the nude as, you could paint a group of nudes, and all you'd see is a lot of individuals.

You could paint a group of people in suits, and all you'd see is a crowd.

And that's where the difference is.

It's much, much more personal.

It's a much better vehicle for, for touching the soul, the intellect, the the heart of, of a human being.

Why the controversy around nudes these days?

Because people are silly.

And this one, they get really into it., Because it’s much, much more complicated.

Music I'm Ruth Fletcher and I live in Mason, New Hampshire, which is a town about two miles west of here.

I kind of hate to see, like, you have X-rated art shows.

You know, they have X-rated movies, but I, I think in a way, even that would be better than having politicians cast such a climate of fear beforehand.

And I think that's really been detrimental because everybody's feeling very much under siege, and it's totally unnecessary.

And I think nudes are, nudes are not pornographic in any way.

I mean, it's, we all have bodies you know, there's certain ways you can show them.

And I mean, like, I want to show her as if she was really at home in her body, which I think she is.

I just don't, I don't relate to the controversy.

And I think it's been taken as a political issue just to, to get a lot of points for, well, certain politicians.

I guess you might say.

And did you do the vases on the shelf too?

Those two, yes.

Music My name is Peter Grannouchi and I'm from Gilson, New Hampshire.

The nude has always been a center of art, and I think it should continue to be so.

And if an artist wants to push those limitations as far as he or she wants to, I think they should be allowed to.

And I think it's unfortunate that the government is starting to restrict the creative expression of artists.

It's a form of censorship, and it's going to really hinder, I think, the just the freedom that artists have to create.

That's always been one of the highest aspirations of an artist to be able to do the figure well.

Some nviews of gods and devils from the (inaudible).

I'm Christopher Gaul and I live in Portsmouth, New Hampshire.

I've been working for about 20 years doing figurative sculpture, almost all nudes.

Last year I did my first clothed piece.

So.

You’re putting clothes on this.

Is the climate changing, did the environment change?

Well, it was a sculpture of Daniel Webster, and they didn't want a nude Daniel Webster.

I don't know why.

Did you think about it?

I certainly did.

I mean, I usually I, I sculpted him in the nude first and then put clothes on him.

So I’m just trying to think, just think, we could even Abraham Lincoln?

You could do a whole series.

Well, it happened with Rodin.

He was asked to do Balzac and first he did him nude.

And, the city townspeople said, no, no, no, that won't do.

Then he did him in a toga and they said, no, no, we don't want him in a toga.

So finally he put this huge burnous cloak on him, and that was very satisfactory, so, with just the head peeking out.

And maybe that's the climate now, I don't know.

(inaudible conversation) In order to make it more interesting, we wanted to combine it with the animal form because we felt that, to achieve an emotional happening between the two, in effect, was, was really critical.

This is what makes for great art.

If you can, if you can, depict something, a, an interplay going on between two individuals, even if one is merely an animal, so to speak.

You have a chance of coming up with some great art.

And I think that this show has some wonderful things in it because of that.

Music You work really long hours.

You work extra jobs.

You invest an awful lot of time.

An awful lot of money.

And it's not the sort of thing you can just sort of sit down and do.

It's very intensive.

If you were, a research scientist, no one would want you to compromise your time and energies to do other things that were not particularly important.

But people really don't understand what's involved in doing serious artwork.

It's it's intellectually intensive.

It's, you know, physically intensive.

You, you not only have a whole thought process going on, but you've got skill levels to maintain in producing the work.

You've got to know your materials.

You've got to know what you're dealing with.

It's not going to get much easier in the near future, either.

You have to really feel a commitment to the work in order to do it.

Music Sort of throwaway graphic art is so pervasive that people have lost touch with, with individual creativity, particularly expressive creativity.

Music This fall's Opus 71 show is entitled Flawed Perfection, and I spoke with Gary Johnson at the gallery last night.

He tells me that this promises to be the most unique of all of the exhibits that they've ever had there, and it opens on October the 6th, runs through October the 27th.

Now, as our first story was about the plastic arts that is painting and sculpture, our second story is about the kinetic arts.

In this case, dancing.

Contra dancing as seen through the eyes of those people that do it.

The movers and shakers as t’were Now contra dancing is based on 17th century English and Scottish folk dancing, and it has had tremendous success, especially here in the northeast.

And producer Chip Neil begins our story at the Peterborough Town House on an autumn Saturday night.

Everybody goes (inaudible).

Each tune begins with dance instructions from a friendly caller like Todd Whitmore.

Right hand (inaudible) with the one below.

Straight ahead ran right, left, right.

It ran right, left, right.

Your partner left.

The one after that passed through up and down the line and find the next person.

Say hi.

How are you?

Good.

Stay right there and we'll do it to music.

Go early.

Dances in the beginning of the evening tend to be easier and don't watch.

Just hop right up and do it.

Once around.

Music Now the piano player here, Bob Mcquillen, is someone else I want you to meet.

He's a longtime contra dance musician and songwriter.

He's written well over 500 songs.

Caller has to tell them what to do on the floor, so they have to have the figures presented to them.

But they have to have the music.

And the music is what weaves the pathway for them to fall all the way along.

And the music has gone unbroken in a steady stream ever since it came from over there and came up there and then came down here.

Somebody’s been dancing the Chorus Jig for the past 250 years, all right?

Or they've been dancing Hull’s Victory for the last 250 years.

That's a continuous thread.

The music that I write is in the vein of these other things.

And, it can be a marchy type thing, or it can be a reel, which is, that's a reel and that tempo there, or it can be a jig.

Like that.

See, that's a jig.

Well, it has to be in the right tempo and it has to be in that format, one of the format of those kinds of things I just did, that that beat and and if everything goes well and they enjoy the melody, why then perhaps you've got a tune that somebody would like to dance to.

Music And everybody needs a partner.

Now let’s swing.

Music Back on the left The other way.

I found out that you can't talk about contra dancing without talking about this person.

Ralph Page.

I'm sorry to He lived in Keene, but his influence on contra dancing was worldwide.

He died a few years ago, but his memory lives on in his memorial collection, now housed at the University of New Hampshire.

And in the memories of his friends, people like folk dance teacher Mary Ann Taylor, who is helping to organize the collection at UNH.

He kept it going when there weren't very many other people calling in the 40s or so.

There were some, still some people up here in New Hampshire who are calling, but they were calling in small communities and so on.

And he spread it out, let everybody know about it, and really got to be very, very well known.

Turn around on your right and left, right back this way In one of the, in the earliest picture that we have of his old band, Bob McQuillen is a young man playing the accordion.

He played with it for many, many years, and they had a very, very close relationship.

I really think that Bob did think of him as a father.

And Ralph did a lot to publicize Bob's tunes as well as his own, as well as the tunes that he had written, and both of them being real New Englanders, people who spoke their minds.

I think they got along very well indeed.

You promenade around the hall and thank the lady and tell em that’s all Music At about 1030 at night, you sort of put yourself on automatic pilot.

You know, you're on your way down.

You don’t have to think about where you're going anymore.

You talk to the people you meet, you get to a different couple each time.

Swing with someone new, every time.

If everyone's working together and everybody's really making it easy for everyone else, it's the most wonderful kind of dancing.

Music Writing contra dance tunes that people enjoy is not always a painful process.

One of Bob McMillan's popular tunes, Woodland Dream, came to him in a dream while he was on a hunting trip.

And I wrote that thing out, and if it took me three minutes, I'll be surprised because I didn't have to think.

I had dreamed the entire tune.

The complete solid A part and the complete solid B part.

I didn't have to invent anything.

It was all right there.

Bang.

And I wrote the thing out just as fast as I could write it down.

Music Well, the whole thing has to be happy.

And then you look out on the floor and you see smiles.

The dancers are smiling as they go through the thing.

It’s full of joy for the dancers Music Traditionally, the biggest contra dance event of the year is held right here in New Hampshire.

It is the Ralph Page Memorial Weekend, which is held in January at the University of New Hampshire over in Durham.

And people come from all over the world to take workshops and to have one giant contra dance at the end.

You know, most greens and commons in America have some kind of a war relic.

Usually it's a Civil War cannon.

Well, in our next story, we go to a little town up in northern New Hampshire, and we see a war relic that is unlike any in the whole of New England.

You know what this is?

Any idea what this is?

This is a, this is a Redstone rocket.

A real Redstone rocket.

And you know where it is?

It's next to the village green here in Warren, New Hampshire.

Now, the shape of this thing reflects the shape of the Methodist church steeple and also the cupola on the elementary school building.

They're both next door here, and all of them are painted white, so a lot of people think this is entirely in keeping with this town.

A lot of people don't, mind you, but a lot of people do.

And one of those people is Bud Pushee.

I love it.

I'm not particularly, you know, impressed with the condition of it at the moment, but this is symbolic of it, you know, it being symbolic of so many things.

Yeah.

I love it.

When you say symbolic of of many things, you mean... Well, Christa McAuliffe said, reaching for the stars.

And that's what it's doing.

And they took Alan Shepard up in a rocket like this.

And just so much that’s been strived for and just close to the church and, you know, like lighting a candle for God.

And if it wasn't for the missile, we might not have the church.

What Bud Pushee is saying is that missiles provide defense for America.

Former Selectman Floyd Ray agrees, but Floyd has another view of how appropriate the missile is to Warren.

It's misplaced.

That's another story.

As trustee of the church, as I was at that time, we could have probably stopped that thing at that time because it was near the church.

But we thought, well, hey, here's a hometown boy trying to do something for the town.

We won't kill it.

We’ll say, yes, go ahead with it.

We did, after that, we wish we'd done something else.

The time that Floyd was speaking of was 1971.

And the local boy?

A fellow by the name of Teddy Ashland, who was born and brought up in this town.

Went quite a while in the Army down in Alabama, Huntsville and retired and came back and he started the restaurant down here in the town, and he got the idea that he he heard there was a missile for sale, offer, a gift or whatever you want to call it in Huntsville.

So his big job was to get the thing up here.

In these papers, they’ll tell you all about what he went through to do it.

He put a lot of work and time in it.

Expense practically bankrupt himself to get here, but he finally got it here on a truck.

Flatbed truck.

And then they had a big crew and assembled it.

That thing’s in the ground eight feet.

Eight feet in the ground, with an I-beam reinforcing the inside.

Permanent.

But as missile supporter Sandra Hair tells us, permanence also means upkeep.

It was painted when it was first put up and then over the years, it got looking pretty shabby.

And then the man who brought it here, Ted Asselin, moved away from town, in 81, I think.

And then the, there was a move at a town meeting to establish a committee to investigate what ought to be done with what was becoming an eyesore.

When it isn't cared for, it doesn't look as well.

It isn't attractive.

And the next year, the town voted to have it moved out.

(inaudible) contacting people is that the vote was to move it, to see what we could do with the thing.

And I found that some thought it should go down to where Shepard was, in his hometown.

So in Derry.

We contacted Derry.

They didn't want any part of it.

This is the rocket that actually put Alan Shepard into orbit.

No, no.

I mean, one like it?

No, it wasn't like it.

This never went anywhere.

No, but but I mean, this is the this is the model of the rocket that put Alan Alan Shepard into into orbit.

Huntsville.

I would think that Derry would be pleased to have it.

Yeah.

They didn't want it.

Then I found a party, a trucking company, Van Houten’s in South., South something, Maine.

Okay.

And, they came up to see it, and this guy had a turkey farm, and he thought it’d be a great thing to store turkey feed in.

A silo.

So, he came up to see us, and interviewed us just like well he said, could we help him move, the expense of moving it?

And we said no, the town vote was determined not to spend any money whatsoever on that thing.

So he says, well, I'll get a big flatbed and I think I can move it.

Well, in the meantime, people started to get aroused because they thought they were going to lose the missile.

So the VFW got mixed in it and they said, well, they finally said, we’ll take it over and take care of it if we can keep it here.

Well, we had another meeting to decide, well if the VFW wanted to do that, we’ll do what’s best for the town.

How big is the VFW in a town of 600 people?

Very, very, very small.

A dozen people?

Maybe, but covers towns around us (inaudible).

So, we voted to let them do it if they'd take care of it.

(inaudible) So they did that.

But the VFW got together, they got some volunteers.

They painted it Got it cleaned and put up with scaffolding.

Look pretty good for a while.

Now it's rusting again.

So I don't know what will happen because some of the workers, the good workers in the VFW, have passed away the last two years.

They were the backbone of the veterans at that time.

Well, there it sits, getting older by the hour, wearing as it were, its way into history.

The question, of course, remains is it an inspiration or an eyesore?

And the answer to that, of course, is it depends on who's looking.

Music You know, I was up in Warren a few days ago, and it seemed to me that the rocket was mellowing into its setting, and I wondered if that had to do with the breakup of the Soviet Union.

I mean, with less of a threat, it seems to me that weapons, especially obsolete weapons like the Redstone rocket, do become more like relics.

I don't mean Civil War cannon or anything, but it did seem to me a lot less shocking.

Of course, we're all getting older, too, aren’t we?

Well, thank you for joining us.

Next week, we go north up to Bartlett to experience the Wild West, the Wild West up in Bartlett.

Yep.

There's a rodeo up at the Attitash Mountain Resort, sort of Texas on the Saco River.

Until then, for New Hampshire Crossroads.

I'm Fritz Wetherbee Theme Music Presentation of New Hampshire Crossroads is made possible by grants from First NH Banks.

Serving the financial needs of individuals, corporations, and local governments throughout New Hampshire.

The Union Leader Corporation, publisher of New Hampshire’s statewide newspapers.

Delivering a world of color to you every morning.

And Upton, Sanders, and Smith of Concord, New Hampshire, providing a full range of legal services throughout the state of New Hampshire since 1908.

Music