(car starts) (upbeat music) (low music) - Hi, I'm Ray Hardman.

And welcome to season two of "Where Art Thou."

We've got an amazing lineup of artists and performers to profile this season.

Plus, we have a new segment, which I'll tell you about later in the show.

Our first stop today is in Middletown.

With its location right on the Connecticut river, Middletown was originally a busy port.

Later it became a haven for refugees and immigrants from around the world.

Throw into the mix a thriving, liberal arts institution, Wesleyan University, and what you have is a city with a unique blend of history, culture, and art.

To help me find out what Middletown has to offer, we have on the line, our Middletown curator, Kisha Michael.

Kisha is the arts coordinator for the city of Middletown and a lifelong resident.

Hi Kisha.

- Hi, morning.

Thanks for coming to Middletown.

- Oh, I'm so excited for today.

First, every time I come to Middletown, it's always energetic, there's a vibe to Middletown.

What do you think accounts for that?

- Well, I think first, a little fun fact for you, Middletown is named one of 100 best small arts towns in the country.

So I think if you start there, there's your answer.

But in Middletown, we celebrate arts and culture through food and entertainment, shopping, and education.

And you know, the Middletown arts sector is heavily driven by the spirit of our leadership of our citizens, our stakeholders, our community leaders, commissions, business owners, our chamber of commerce, nonprofit organizations, schools, and universities.

So, you know, when it comes to the arts, Ray, in Middletown, it's an all hands on deck initiative.

- Okay.

Kisha, so where are you taking me today?

- So we're taking you to see Michael Pestel.

Michael is a performance and installation artist.

He's a professor and a maker educator, and that's just the short list of what Michael does.

So I'll let him share with you more, but just to give you a lead in, Michael has created a magical world of art.

Today he's going to share with you his method and process and handcrafted instruments that emulate the sound of distinct birds.

- Oh wow.

So he makes instruments that sound like birds.

- Yes, so my, your job is to ask if he will play the bird machine for you.

- Okay, so where are we going after that?

- So then you're going to, you'll be on the same side of town, I believe, and you're going to skip over to master artist of textile and visual art, Mr. Pierre Sylvain, self taught and extremely driven.

I just want to say Pierre embodies the process of becoming an artist.

He's a true inspiration.

And we as a city have watched him grow for the past decade or more.

And Pierre has made the, the concerted effort to be, to put his passion into practice and become a career artist.

So among his paintings that you will see his current collection of mosaics.

Wait till you see what he can do with broken glass.

- Well, this all sounds very fascinating.

I knew you'd come up with some really interesting folks for this show in Middletown.

Kisha, thank you so much for your guidance today.

- My pleasure, please come visit Middletown anytime.

- Absolutely.

All right, let's check it out.

(bird-like instrument sounds) So we're here on the property of Michael Pestel.

I'm really, really curious to find out exactly how art, music, biology, even evolution, all come together for this unique artist.

Let's go check him out.

(birds chirping) Michael.

- Is that you, Ray?

- [Ray] How are you?

- I'm pretty good, how are you?

- Yes.

Good to see you.

- Great to see you.

- What do we have here?

- Thanks for coming.

This is a small bird machine and it's essentially a bass recorder.

This one is just the straight instrument and I've attached it to this spinning device.

The spinning device is actually the hub from a 1956 Chevy.

This is a sighting tube and I'm sighting the horizon.

I'm looking for birds and I'm calling to them with my various, this happens to be a Seagull.

(seagull squawking) And then I've got a, I've got a blackbird here.

(blackbird chirping) And I also have a flock of sparrows in my hand.

(sparrows Chirping) - Oh, listen to that.

- Here.

Try them.

- Yeah.

They're bicycle inner tubes with- - Look at that.

- tea kettle-like sounding devices at the end.

So when you squeeze them, you get that nice little percussive sound.

- Oh yeah.

When did the fascination with birds begin for you?

- When I was very young, I think I had a, had a very strong relationship to birds.

And then as I grew up, birds were just birds.

You know, they're just out there.

You're sort of aware of them, but I wasn't that interested in birding.

I wasn't really interested in ornithology.

And then I moved to Pittsburgh.

And the special thing about that, I didn't realize at the time, was that they have the most amazing aviary.

I was invited to do an art show there and I thought, well, I don't know, I think, you know, I'm a flutist.

I should act, I should really think about playing flute with the birds.

And so on the way to the performance, I stopped at the library.

I had this idea that I would read the names of the extinct birds, at the time there were about 175 of them.

And so that's, that's exactly what I did.

I simply read the names of the birds and the approximate date of extinction.

And then I played a short riff as a kind of stand in for sounds we can't hear anymore.

HawaiianM, 1935.

(flute playing) And I get to about number 16, which was passenger pigeon [Flute Playing] 1914.

[Flute Playing] And suddenly I hear [Flute Playing] and a light went off in my head and that happened, that mimicry happened several, several more times during the performance.

And then I was going to the aviary every Sunday morning at six o'clock and bringing friends with me, musicians, singers, dancers, and it became a whole thing in Pittsburgh.

I did that for ten years.

- And so you were performing with the birds.

- I was performing live with birds.

Of course we don't know what they sound like.

Most birds became extinct before recording technology in 1939.

So, you know, we can guess, but I'm, I'm not even so interested in guessing.

And the one thing we have left of these birds are their names.

We have the Latin name, the genus, and the species and that's Latin, so it's a dead language, but then we also have the vernacular name.

So how can I resuscitate these names?

I've got a very simple algorithm.

I'm not the first person to use this algorithm where, where the letters of the alphabet are applied to the.

- [Ray] Oh, sure enough.

- [Michael] Trouble clef, bass clef.

And then the names are translated into notes.

- Well, Michael, I'm really curious to see your prepared piano stuff.

Can we go have a look at that?

- Sure, sure.

Shall we go walk over there?

- Yeah, yeah, let's do that.

(whimsical music) So Michael, we were talking before about a prepared piano.

- Right.

- This is a prepared piano.

- It is a prepared piano.

- It might be an over-prepared piano.

- It's a harp from an upright piano.

- Okay.

- And it does have some preparation over here, meaning that there's screws in between the strings, (xylophone playing) which gives it a kind of a Gamelan sound, you know, the Indonesian orchestra.

- Sure, sure.

- But my discovery on this thing is the application of a glass block to the strings, especially the base strings.

And what happens is quite surprising.

(ringing sound) You get these very long sustains, as long as you want.

(ringing continues) - Michael, let's go.

I know you've got a real, a true prepared piano back here and that's more.

- Yes, I do.

- [Ray] And that seems to be more in line with, with the extinct birds.

- Unlike the other piano, I can play these with, (piano playing) with the keys, you know, in the normal way.

(piano playing) And the notes are also letters.

The letters are also notes.

So if I'm reading a word like Mauritanius, which is the species name.

If I read it again, so syllabically, it's going to sound like this.

(piano playing) These things here are what I call piano cluster boards, Mauritanius, all the letters in that word expressed as a cluster.

And it sounds like this.

(piano playing) And if I change the keyboard by pressing the soft pedal, it sounds like this.

(piano playing) We're getting a nice vibration there.

- I like the vibration.

- Yeah.

- Wow.

- And so the name is played and the name decays, and it's a way of reconnecting with something that's gone.

- Yeah.

Well, Michael, this is just truly fascinating.

It's been an incredible afternoon.

Your music is so beautiful.

And thank you, just thank you for letting us come here.

- Well, thank you so much.

- So at the top of the show, I mentioned that we have a new segment for season two of "Where Art Thou."

So here it goes.

We get a sneak peek into the fascinating things that galleries, museums, arts organizations have in their storage.

We call it "What's in Your Attic?"

And our first stop is the Rand building and Middletown's Oddfellows Playhouse youth theater.

- [Dic] Well, this is called the Remington Rand building.

It's owned by the city of Middletown.

I think it was built in like the 1890s or so.

And it was originally a typewriter company.

It has become now a small business incubator.

So the city gives, you know, cheap rents to businesses to try to get started here.

And it was abandoned for a while.

It's a super fun site, but it's coming back to life.

- We are here with Dic Wheeler.

He's the executive artistic director of Oddfellows Playhouse.

And behind here is your storage space.

- It's true.

This is where we keep all our circus things and a lot of assorted weird stuff.

- Oh, I can't wait.

So first tell me a little bit of about what's happening at Oddfellows these days.

- Well, we are, you know, Oddfellows has been around for 47 years, I guess since 1975 and we're a youth theater.

So we do a lot of programs for kids from age three to 20.

We have a teen repertory company that is this spring producing Greek tragedy called "The Greeks," two plays by Euripides, run a lot of classes for kids, neighborhood based troops.

And then we're getting ready for our summer program, which is the Children's Circus of Middletown, which is, has about 170 kids for five weeks.

And it's in its 34th season.

- Wow, and so this is where you keep the circus stuff.

- This is where we keep most of our circus stuff that we don't need during the school year.

We keep it here for the summer ready for the summer circus.

- Right, alright.

Well, I'm super excited.

Let's open that door.

- All right.

It's a bit of a spectacle.

Let's see.

(chains clanking) - That is a big solid door.

- That is a big solid door.

And this gets opened.

Hold on.

I got it, yeah.

And if you got that, now, let me just get this.

- I love it.

Okay.

You ready?

- And we're safely in.

- Okay.

- Let's see what you got.

- Welcome.

- Here we go.

- [Dic] All right, so we've got all kinds of goodies in here.

- So Dic here we are.

This is amazing.

And you know, I've been to the circus a few times in my day and I recognize some things here.

But let's, let's talk about it.

And let's talk about right behind you here with this cannon.

- All right, now this is, this only comes out every few years.

It's for the Human Cannonball act.

And it only gets used if we happen to have identical twins in the circus that year.

- Okay, so you have to have identical twins.

- We got to have identical twins and that's always your cue to like, okay, we need to bring out the Human Cannonball act this year.

Because basically it's all an illusion where we stuff, we, you know, dress them, both identically, stuff one kid into this, have a big build up, and a giant boom.

And then everybody in the field, 200 people are all looking up and across and across and across and across and then boom, 80 feet over there.

The second twin appears and it's like ta-da and it's, it's a winner every time, but it's all illusion.

No children are actually flying through the air.

- All right, we need all right, So we need some identical twins here.

- That's right.

We're hoping for identical twins this summer.

- That's awesome.

Tell me about this cutie.

- Well, this is, this is one of our like giant puppets.

The children's circus happens on a very large scale.

So like I, you know, the ring itself is about 80 feet in diameter.

There's 160 kids out there, 20 piece band, 40 staff.

So you got over 200 people.

So everything's kind of on a big scale.

And we're really inspired back in the early days.

And we started the circus in the late eighties by Bread and Puppet Circus, which is up in Vermont.

So this is the frame of a giant llama that was in the circus in 2019.

This is its body, gets wrapped around this frame.

And then the head is, is separate so that'll be connected to a neck and a separate, basically I think four people carry the llama and then somebody on the head, you know, it's when you need a random llama crossing the stage, we got it for you.

- [Ray] You got it covered.

- Okay.

Oh, this is okay.

So these are the fish juggling stuff.

- Okay.

- So you can see when you need to have an underwater juggling act, these are very useful.

Don't know if you want to try.

I usually start with one.

- Well, I usually I can do balls, but I've never done.

So you.

- There you go.

That's it.

- That's what you're doing.

That's how you start just back and forth like that.

Right, and then always the trick is engaging the second one.

So you've got like up, up, so it's the same throw up, up.

And about the time that the first one is about halfway across you throw up the second bump, bump.

- I'm going to try that.

So you're coming here and then underneath like that, right.

- That's right.

- Not bad.

Not bad.

- Okay.

All right.

- I think you've been practicing.

- [Ray] I see some other trappings of the circus.

You got stilts.

- Most kids start by learning on stilts like these which are handheld and you just step onto this and you hold the hands.

It's a partnership with the city of Middletown.

So they handle the registration and they subsidize it.

So that for a lot of kids, it's a free program.

- Yeah.

That's great.

- So it's very diverse.

It really reaches all parts of the Middletown community.

And for me, that's really one of the things that's special about it.

I feel like over these 35 years it's changed the kind of community that Middletown is.

Because so many kids have grown up into adults and just learned to work together and learn to take these kind of risks and grow, and circus is all about trust.

You know, you got to figure somebody's going up on your shoulders.

You know, they got to trust you.

That you're not going to drop them.

So, you know, there's that kind of just building of trust that is immeasurable and you know, kids growing up.

- Well, Dic, I mean, this is just incredible.

- Thanks, Ray.

Thanks.

Great to have you visit our hidden treasure.

- All right, Dick, I'm going to give it a shot here.

- Okay, remember, keep them close together.

That's right, pulling up with the hand and foot- - Pulling up with the hand and - The hand and foot together.

(upbeat music) All right, beautiful, beautiful.

- All right.

- Oh, you're owning it.

- I'm going to join the circus.

So Kisha suggested that we go see artist Pierre Sylvain, and that's where we're headed.

He's a Haitian American artist and he works in a lot of different mediums.

And from what I hear lately, he's been really involved with glass mosaics and stained glass.

So I'm really curious to see him.

Let's check it out.

(upbeat music) Oh my God, this is beautiful.

Tell me a little bit about yourself.

- My name is a Pierre and I am from Haiti.

So I, you know, came to the town, from Haiti.

The name is Les Cayes and I was very fortunate to be, you know, exposed at the art at a very early age, you know?

So in my neighborhood, we have like a lot of artists.

So I'd be able to, you know, watch them working.

- Really.

How much of Haiti is in your art?

- You know what I have from like, you know, Haiti, you can always see those, you know, vibrant color.

So, you know, so I still have that.

- You're the kind of artist that, that goes on jags where for a while, you'll be very involved in this particular medium and then you'll move on.

Is that correct?

- Yes.

Yes, yes, yes.

Yes, that's, you know, pretty much correct because when I, you know, first start I was to do a lot of painting.

So now I am doing glass.

I am doing mosaic and I am doing, you know, textile work because I feel like if I was doing just one thing, I mean, I think that just the way I am.

So that will be like a little bit boring for me.

- Well, Pierre, I'm looking forward to seeing all the different jags you've got going on.

- So yeah, let's, you know, show you, if you can follow me downstairs.

(upbeat music) - [Ray] How important is it being in Middletown and working in Middletown to you?

- You know, that's my like second home, people really love what I'm doing as an, you know, artist, you know?

And when you are doing work on your, you know, studio, not like too many people see it.

And the fact now people can just walk on, you know, Main street, see them, you know?

And so that just make me, you know, give me like a sense of pride, you know, joys, because you know, a lot of people would, you know, would see those, picture, they, you know, love them.

- I've noticed you have a lot of work that is inspired by social issues.

- [Pierre] Yes.

- Like racism and "Me Too."

How do you transform, I guess, an issue like racism and how do you break it down into something artistic so people can see it in a different light?

- I find we are like a very, because we are so divided here, but with my work, my, you know, main goal to bring people together.

- I want to see your mosaics.

And if we could, could we see you at work?

- [Pierre] Oh, sure.

- [Ray] Working on some of this.

- Oh yeah, sure.

Oh yeah, sure.

I will, you know, love to because that's will, you know, give you like a whole idea how that, you know, process work.

- Great, great.

Well, let's, let's do that.

Pierre, what do we have here?

- So, you know, this is a new, a new piece I am working on right now, so I can show you, I, you know, how I do the whole process.

So what I like usually do, I will do like a sketch.

After that, I will, decide what, you know, kind of color of glass.

So you have to like break them.

So that's mean that's like a lot of work.

So what I usually do, I will break it in a smaller pieces in a smaller like that.

(glass cracking) And now, so I will glue it like that here and just like, figure it out where I will put it.

I will take, and then add all the pieces.

So I keep like doing that until I fill the whole thing.

So that's mean the piece is like, almost done.

- How long will this take you?

- [Pierre] This thing here will, you know, will take me three weeks, but those big, you know, pieces you see here will like, you know, take me like three months.

Yeah, those things like take like longer.

But this one because it's like smaller.

If I am working on it every day, you know, I would say two or like three weeks.

- [Ray] Yeah, well this is just absolutely beautiful.

- [Pierre] Oh, thank you, thank you, thank you.

- I can't wait to see what it looks like when it's done.

Well, Pierre, we're gonna get out of your hair here.

And I just wanna say, thank you.

I mean, this just your artwork is so inspirational, so beautiful.

And I'm so glad to get a chance to see how you, how you do your process here.

- Thank you so much.

You know, I am so glad, you know, you guys come, I feel so honored.

Thank you.

- Yeah, same here.

(upbeat music) Well, that's a wrap for our day here in Middletown, an incredible day.

You know, it's people like Pierre and Dic and Michael that make this part of the state truly special.

Hey, do you have somebody in your neighborhood, in your town, that's doing some amazing artistic things?

We want to hear about it.

Drop me a line at wherearthou@ctpublic.org.

Join me next week when I'll get back into that beat up old company van, we're going to head out to Waterbury and see some incredible young musicians there.

You won't want to miss it.

Until then, I'm Ray Hardman.

Thanks for watching "Where Art Thou."

[Upbeat Music]