- [Voiceover] The following program is a production of Pioneer Public Television.

This program on Pioneer Public Television is funded by the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage fund with money from the vote of the people of Minnesota on November 4, 2008.

Additional support provided by Mark and Margaret Yackel-Juleen in honor of Shalom Hill Farm, a non-profit, rural education retreat center in a beautiful prairie setting near Windom in southwestern Minnesota.

shalomhillfarm.org The Arrowwood Resort and Conference Center, your ideal choice for Minnesota resorts offering luxury town homes, 18 holes of golf, Darling Reflections Spa, Big Splash water park, and much more.

Alexandria, Minnesota, a relaxing vacation or great location for an event.

ExploreAlex.com, easy to get to, hard to leave.

(orchestra music) - Welcome to Postcards, I'm Dana Johnson.

Today we take a look at the role fine arts played in developing a public liberal arts college in Morris in 1960.

This episode was produced by University of Minnesota Morris.

(choir singing in foreign language) - I think the students really need to have an understanding of what they're singing, what it's all about.

Because you're taking 65 people and have them do the same thing at the same time and do it really well together.

So before I walk into a rehearsal, with a piece of new music, I want to know it pretty well.

I want to know what I want to do with it.

Then with the choir, you have two problems.

One, you want them to be able to perform the music so you're gonna have to work on technique things, the art of singing, how to sing properly.

But also then they have to understand what they're singing, so I need to know it pretty well so that not only in what I tell them about that piece of music is really accurate and helpful, but how I direct it, the hand motions that I use to help them interpret the music all need to be pretty well ironed out.

You really have to know what you're doing when you're standing up in front of a group.

Well I'm a west coast boy.

I grew up in Vancouver, Washington which is just across the river from Portland, Oregon and actually I was an instrumentalist.

Until I got into high school and a friend of mine talked me into joining the choir.

And I did and I loved it.

It just struck a chord with me.

In the course of the two years that I was in choir, in my junior year and senior year, one year the St. Olaf Choir came to Portland, Oregon and I went to the concert and the next year the Concordia Choir come to Portland and did a concert, I went to that one.

And I really liked what I heard with the St. Olaf Choir and I thought, you know, I want to learn how to do that.

So ultimately that's the road I took.

And they accepted me at St. Olaf and I went back there for three years and did everything I could to find out how a choir worked.

The most significant influence probably was Paul Christiansen at Concordia College, because I worked with him for five years and I really did spend a lot of time observing him and seeing what made him click and made the Concordia Choir so unique.

Then I came to the realization that if I was gonna continue in college work, I had to get a doctorate.

The place that was really hot, so to speak, for choral directors in the 70s was University of Illinois, where I ultimately went and worked with Harold Decker.

So I spent two years there and at the culmination of the doctorate work the job opened here at Morris.

Ralph Williams, who is long standing in the tradition of choral music here and began the program when the college opened up, Ralph was hired in from doing work with the Schubert Club, the men's choruses in the cities, to get things going and I think that first year he taught everything that was imaginable.

Clyde Johnson came on the next year and the two of them did everything, the band, the choir, music history, music theory, and ultimately they had to hire a few more people simply because to make it a viable program for music education, for potential choir directors and band directors, they have to have a full round of courses the same as they would at the university.

So Ralph and Clyde had it for quite a few years and there was a few adjunct people that came on to teach lessons.

And when I came on the scene, Ralph was still doing the university choir and then they kind of rolled that over and opened the job up as primarily a choral directing job.

And my responsibilities that first year were basically to direct the, there was a chamber choir and a university choir, and teach courses as needed.

So I started a concert choir that very first year.

And then continued on with the students who weren't interesting in that intensive of study with a chamber choir.

So we had a concert choir and a chamber choir and that's the way it stood in the choral program for a number of years.

It worked very well, because then the university choir offered an opportunity for singers who were not really interested in the intensity of work and dedication that a concert choir took to have a choral experience.

And then we auditioned and filled up the concert choir very quickly and the second year I had 65 people who were really excited about the concert choir and performing.

And part of performing, at the very beginning I had made it clear that part of performing is touring.

When I think of the number of performances that we have done, and I tallied them up (laughs) for an article a few weeks ago, the choir has done, in my 34 years, 516 performances that I could count.

(choir singing) I think that the final carol concert that we did in December of 2012 was such a thrill because there was so many alumni there that the group singing that we did, the singing of carols involving the audience was the best it's ever been.

But when you have a couple hundred alumni out there adding to the normal singing voices of our audience, it was really significant.

So that was a great performance.

When I think of outstanding experiences, the one was performing with Garrison Keillor on the Prairie Home Companion and the chance to really get to know Garrison and converse with him, but those performances were so cool and the last one was so thrilling because he took some of the singers and had them say, "Now maybe you could sing "with Jearlyn for this piece."

You know, well this is two in the afternoon and we'd go on live to they say 12 to 14,000,000 people at five o'clock and we've got a bunch of guys going up there to learn a background for a song and they did it.

They did it beautifully, it was a familiar tune to them, it was just natural for them.

And he also pulled some kids out to get in with the actors on a western skit.

And you know, it's thrilling to me because that's what education is all about, to give these kids really a diverse experience.

Not just a choral experience, but an experience of performing, an experience of living together on tour., and becoming a community as such in the rehearsals.

I have fleeting memories of times when I felt the choir had really achieved a marvelous level of performance, where they were very much one with me in the pieces that we're doing.

And the applause always seemed to reinforce that, when we, as we might say, when we hit it, when everybody was really working together.

We have had just marvelous responses.

- I make pots because after all these years I seem unable to not make pots.

I think about pots during the day and if I'm lucky, I dream about them at night.

Small pots, large pots, pots for everyday use, pots that are used only occasionally during weddings, funerals, holidays, or other special occasions, they all have a place.

The connection between humans and pottery is vast, deep, and time-honored.

As a potter I feel privileged to bring them forth from the earth.

So I took my first ceramics class actually after I was graduated from UMM in the fall of '74.

And my first teacher was Meredith Jack, also known as Butch Jack, and that was a pretty pivotal experience for me.

I think the first time that I saw Butch throw a pot on the potter's wheel I knew that I wanted to learn how to do that and learn how to do it well and it sort of set me off on a course of focusing on that.

I had a number of different teachers.

Butch Jack, maybe for two or three years, and then Molly Mason for a year, and then Jenny Nellis of course.

And she was also very, very important in my development as a potter.

I always wanted to have a wood-fired kiln because I had been exposed to that first at Richard Bresnahan at St. John's University and was always very excited about that method of firing.

But UMM did not have a wood-fired kiln, we had a gas kiln and an electric kiln as a lot of colleges do.

But I've also always been interested in using recycled materials.

I had started collecting materials for quite some time and happened to get about 2,000 fire brick from the Douglas County Waste Incinerator project.

Near Alexandria they had built a big incinerator, but had ordered too many materials and at the end of the project they had a lot of fire brick left over and didn't really know what to do with them and were willing to donate them.

My proposed summer school class in designing and building a wood kiln on campus and plant services was very gracious and helped a lot and it just so happened that there was a kind of an unused plot of land on the northern edge of campus near the horse pasture where it was originally a windbreak for the school.

Just a lot of trees that helped break the wind coming from the northwest.

And so I taught a summer school class along with one of my former students, Sam Johnson, who now teaches ceramics at the College of St. Benedict.

So the two of us taught this class and I think we had seven or eight students and it took us all summer and we built a wood kiln.

It's about 70 cubic feet in interior space and we've fired it a number of times.

If we fire it in the next two weeks, it will be the 16th time that we've fired.

Ultimately I think the major reason I want a wood fire is the end result.

I want an atmosphere in the kiln where there's a lot of turbulence and activity.

And there's a relationship between the fuel and the oxygen which potters can control on the outside with either a gas kiln or a wood kiln and you can't really control in an electric kiln, it's just a given.

So with a wood kiln there's a much greater amount of unpredictability and chance, I guess I would say.

The longer you fire typically, the more ash will be on the pots.

In a wood kiln, typically the primary fire is in the front of the kiln and as that fire burns, the wood ash floats through the kiln and some of it eventually settles on the shoulders of the pots, or rims, or lids.

Here are a couple of examples of wood-fired pots.

This is a tall, hand-built, porcelain pot and so this pot had no glaze applied to at all when it was loaded into the kiln and all this development here is a result of being in a wood fired kiln for three days.

And ash tends to settle on more horizontal surfaces.

This isn't a truly horizontal surface here, but ash is settling in this area and eventually it starts to melt and flow downhill and that's what these stringy rivulets are.

They're ash that over a three-day firing eventually melts and starts moving down the sides.

Here there's a big shoulder on this pot where there's room for plenty of ash to rest and again eventually it will melt and move downhill.

And definitely there are times during a wood firing or during the unloading process where you're very disappointed, but that whole subject of the unpredictability is very appealing to me and interesting to me.

With a wood kiln, I cannot fire that thing myself.

I can do a six hour shift once a day, but then another shift of people has to come on and do six hours worth, and then another shift, and then another shift, and then it's my turn again.

The students love being involved with that process.

It's, like I said, very physical and they play a real role in that whole process.

They help split the wood and stack it and they help load the kiln and clean the kiln shelves and all the various things that go into loading and firing, and so they feel really proud and engaged in that whole process, as I do.

- As an artist, I am really interested in the space that I live in, what the landscape is like.

I'm interested in things that come from the landscape.

I'm interested in structures that are built in the landscape and how they interact with it.

I'm interested in how we change the landscape in terms of the place we live and what affect it has on us.

I like to garden.

I like to look at flowers.

I like to be in the landscape, I like to dig in the dirt.

I do like also working in the landscape and did work from milkweed pods in combination with a friend of mine, Gary Wall, to build a bird bath in the west central gardens.

And that was a lot fun.

I like experimenting with stuff.

We spent quite a while playing with white Portland cement and figuring out how to get the colors that we wanted from it.

And we combined with the Portland cement cast iron, which we hoped in fact would rust and stain some parts of the concrete.

I like building things.

I like the tactile quality of materials.

I like working the materials with my hands.

When I go to a museum and I see sculptures I can hardly keep my hands off of them, because you know, I think they're tactile, they're meant to be handled, in my opinion.

When I joined UMM, the faculty who were already in Morris were Fred Peterson, John Ingle, and Lois Hodgell.

I know that Fred Peterson was one of the original faculty who started both art history and the studio.

So when I first came to this school, I taught in the foundation program with John Ingle.

I got to know John pretty well and spent some time with him in his studio looking at his work.

He was doing these very controlled watercolor still lifes, full of symbolism and lush, wonderful textures and objects that were sometimes antique, sometimes reflective and very rich in their surfaces.

He did commissions.

And one of those commissions he's well-known for was the most recent rendition of Betty Crocker.

They were interested in updating Betty's look to reflect the current population.

So they had taken, I'm sure thousands of portraits of women within a particular age range and then they had begun morphing those photographs together in groups.

And in the final end result, they had a photograph that John worked from.

Now that was something that he was particularly well-known for when it hit the sides of boxes and everything else on the supermarket shelves, there was John's painting.

So that was a really interesting event, when that came out.

- It's a hot, lazy day in the life of Amazing Girl.

No criminals to catch, no animals to save, no people to help.

- UMM was an opportunity for me to work directly with people who are interesting in acting and directing.

We are a theater discipline with three full-time faculty and two staff, and doing a full season of generally three to six different productions, including the student productions throughout the year, so lots of student opportunities for productions.

We try to do a good variety of shows, from Shakespeare to musicals to comedies to dramas to some obsurdist type prodiction so that our students in the four or five years that are here have an opportunity to experience the different styles in theater.

The UMM theater disciplines started in 1960 and that was just theater alone and it was one or two faculty members who were doing everything.

Ray Lammers was instrumental in getting the program started, he's the one that was running everything and doing all aspects and then built the program up from its beginnings.

And we ended up naming the Proscenium Theater after Ray Lammers to kind of honor his beginnings of this program.

- [Actor] Now how do we start?

- [Siobhan] Some memorable productions at UMM include Sophie and the Adventures of Ice Island, which is a children's show that was an original script written by a Minnesota playwright, Forrest Musselman.

And he and I worked together to develop this script idea the year prior to the production at UMM.

We met, I gave him an idea of that I was looking for something environmental, because our school has an environmental focus, and something that could go with that theme.

So Forrest wrote this play and then we workshopped it a couple times, had some staged readings, did a couple rewrites, and then were abel to produce the children's show here on campus.

And the exciting part with Sophie and the Adventures of Ice Island is we put it together with the visuals also being environmentals.

So we collected plastic water bottles which became the ice for ice island, which was a wonderful effect, because we were able to shine lights through it and it looked like glass or ice.

We also collected literally thousands of plastic bags, trash, if you will, Target bags, Shopko bags, grocery bags from our local grocery store, Willies.

And then used all of those to weave in and out of chicken wire so it would also look like snow and ice.

And then we had a boardwalk, which Sophie gets into a boat and drifts off to this island as part of the show.

And the wood from that was all collected from people who had it in their backyards and was unused or unusable in a wood shop.

And then the boat itself was made out of road signs, stop signs, yield signs that we put altogether to make look like a boat.

So the whole idea behind it, besides the story of Sophie, who falls asleep and drifts off to this island and then realizes that the island is melting, has to save the island.

And so she figures out with the help of the animals on the island how to do that.

But beyond the environmental story, we also had the environmental issues and elements with the visuals, the set, the costumes were also had environmental issues.

Like a bird that would be affected by trash, the pop rings.

So another example was when the old video tape pulled apart was put on a costume to look like oil, because oil was what was affecting that character as well that animal out in the environment.

So there's some nice environmental touches and connections to the show.

and so our costume designer figured out what was affecting animals in the environment and then used elements of those as part of the costume.

And we've done other shows at UMM with the environmental theme as well.

We did As You Like It a few years back as well that all of the costumes were created with help from the art discipline to put environmental aspects into the costumes as well.

Children's theater is really important, not only to build our audience and connect to our community, but it's the beginnings of art for a lot of young people today and with so many cuts, especially in the arts, because people oftentimes think that the arts are insignificant to what people need in our world today, that that makes it even more important for the kids in our community and surrounding communities to have an opportunity to experience art and to see theater and to be able to get into the story and connect with the characters or be against the characters, whatever it may be, in a live performance.

It's really, really important to our youth today.

I think theater for young people is an opportunity to get a holistic view of what's happening in our world today, and that communication with people and open mindedness and collaboration and self-awareness and teamwork and many of the things that we learn from being involved in a theater production as well as seeing arts being created is elements that people really need today to be able to communicate.

Especially in this world of technology and texting and lack of face-to-face communication.

People don't learn that type of communication today as effectively, so seeing the arts and being involved in the arts and knowing what goes into the creative process is really important for not only kids, but everybody today.

Theater in Morris really adds a vibrant aspect to our community by the number of shows, the types of shows, the style of shows, the variety that people are able to come and take part of and it's a small community, so the opportunities maybe aren't as big as a Twin Cities population, but because there is theater and lots of different arts events happening, we're able to see that, even out here on the prairie.

Which is a really great benefit for our students and our community members here in Morris.

- That's all for this week.

For more information, go to our website.

See you again next time on Postcards.

- [Voiceover] This program on Pioneer Public Television is funded by the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund with money from the vote of the people of Minnesota on November 4, 2008.

Additional support provided by Mark and Margaret Yackel-Juleen in honor of Shalom Hill Farm, a non-profit, rural education retreat center in a beautiful prairie setting near Windom in southwestern Minnesota.

shalomhillfarm.org The Arrowwood Resort and Conference Center, your ideal choice Minnesota resorts offering luxury town homes, 18 holes of golf, Darling Reflections Spa, Big Splash water park, and much more.

Alexandria Minnesota, a relaxing vacation or great location for an event.

ExploreAlex.com, easy to get to, hard to leave.

(orchestra music)