“Songs from Here” with Sarah Tuttle, pianist Bridget Convey, and guest poets

We are thrilled to welcome for the first time to the Belfast Poetry Festival SONGS FROM HERE, a Maine-based initiative dedicated to the commission of new vocal works by composers born or based in Maine. The program, featuring Sarah Tuttle, pianist Bridget Convey, and guest poets, will include original compositions with poetry readings interspersed between groups of songs. The performance takes place on Saturday, October 19 at 3 pm in the Gammans Room at the Belfast Free Library
Following Songs from Here, the Gammans Room will host Jay Hanes and Eleanor Weisman for “Compress, Impulse, Express,” an original choreopoem based on John Dewey’s aesthetic process and motivated by climate destruction and the rise of fascism. The duo will also offer intermedial interpretations of works by Lawrence Ferlinghetti. To close the afternoon program, Mark S. Burrows, Willie Sordillo and Liz Kalloch present “Dancing the Orange,” an improvisational performance that begins with the poet Rainer Maria Rilke’s eccentric call in one of his Sonnets to Orpheus to “dance the orange”—and, as he goes on to suggest, to “establish kinship / with the pure, resisting rind, / with the juice that fills the happy fruit.” The trio will weave together a dialogue with poetry, saxophone, and movement.