The Grapevine Art & Soul Salon
Why We Love Atlanta
GATEWAY PERFORMANCE PRODUCTIONS
Gateway Performance Productions showcases the artistic talents and community values of Sandra Hughes and Michael Hickey in offering a multiplicity of theatrical entertainments, teaching engagements, and therapeutic arts ventures. We discovered their work in the 1980s and have been present with them on many occasions. The quality and quantity of their presentations will amaze you. We are delighted to have elicited from Sandy a written piece with photos representing the history and evolution of this remarkable team.
The Life Raft of Language
by Sandra Hughes
For decades my core vision as Producing Artistic Director of Gateway Performance Productions focused on the relationships that exist between movement—dance, mime, mask theatre—and music. From time to time spoken language found a place in this work. These short poems of mine come to mind as examples:
Ancient Knowing,
Let me drink again
At the Hawk’s well.
Yellow fullness
that challenges the sun,
Icy sliver of Wisdom
Penetrating the void
Of Rebirth,
I am yours.
One good eye
Making me laugh,
Then turning
His milky gaze,
Sheds a tear
For visions never seen.
Abandon empty stomachs,
Buried in a weariness
That yields only dust.
These original performance pieces with masks by Michael Hickey were conceived, directed and choreographed by me and performed by Michael and myself with my poetry and original music composed and performed by Atlanta composers Tom Spach and Allen Welty Green. Three of these became the signature pieces we’ve performed locally, nationally and internationally thousands of times for concerts and educational programs offered by Gateway for the live stage at theatres, festivals, arts centers, museums, conferences, colleges, universities, schools and other community venues as well as for television and film. During the 1980s, we performed for a meeting of the Jung Society in the elegant living room of Barbara and Charles Knott’s Castle House.
Gateway is the nonprofit arts organization Michael and I co-founded. The company was originally called the Great American Mime Experiment/GAME and was renamed in 1991, following a one-year consultation with nonprofit arts organization experts Nello McDaniel and George Thorn from Virginia Tech. Nello and George said our programming included much more than the art of mime. They recommended a new name be adopted to communicate our larger scope of services to the public and our funders.
The intent that drove the two of us to create 50 plus original productions was consistently fueled by the desire to utilize all of our talents and artistic skills to craft performances that commune with a part of the human psyche that is in danger of falling into disuse. Michael and I dedicated our efforts to the refinement of our abilities in order to activate more effectively our audiences’ imaginations. To this end I developed a movement-based language that relies upon a marriage between my concepts and choreography with Michael’s masks.
What emerged was a heightened performance style capable of transcending perceived barriers of culture, race, age and economics. For the most part, spoken language remained a secondary or non-existent part of the work. There were exceptions, projects where language became a major artistic element in our performances.
Spoken word narration was an integral part of the artistic mix for collaborations initiated with Gateway by the Cleveland Orchestra, the Akron Symphony and the Amelia Island Chamber Music Festival. The McCracken Cultural Society commissioned four language-based plays I wrote (2000-2006) for an ongoing Peace and Reconciliation Project located in the area then known as “The Murder Mile” in Belfast, Northern Ireland.
Other language-based exceptions facilitated by Gateway include my radio play, The Final Draft, which was broadcast on WABE Public Radio/Atlanta and KSFR Public Radio/Santa Fe, and my thirteen original Irish mummer plays presented annually at Emory University for Atlanta’s Celtic Christmas. A number of these short plays inspired by a 2500-year-old Irish Folk Theatre tradition are now housed in the Irish Collection at The Ohio State University as “works of significant culture merit.”
Beyond my work with Gateway, I’ve maintained an independent profile as a language-based playwright, poet, journalist, storyteller and spoken word artist. I’d taught creative writing workshops and master classes as a teaching artist for Atlanta’s Woodruff Arts Center. So when Peter Traina (then director of a Life Enrichment Program for senior citizens) invited me to teach ongoing creative writing classes at the Helene S. Mills Senior Multipurpose Facility located in Atlanta’s Historic Old 4th Ward in January of 2012, I accepted. The Historic Old 4th Ward—home of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and the American Civil Rights movement—beckoned. Seven years later I’m still teaching there. This programming has been expanded to include an ongoing writers exhibit and in-house performances.
This class was the beginning of a dramatic shift towards language-based programming for Gateway. I was invited to teach creative writing at other senior citizen centers as well as for adults of all ages for the Atlanta-Fulton Public Library System. These free classes were made possible by the City of Atlanta/ Mayor’s Office of Culture Affairs, the Fulton County Commissioners under the guidance of Fulton County Arts and Culture, Power2Give Atlanta, Alternate ROOTS and individual contributors. Class participants wrote astonishing memoirs, poems, essays and stories, and I found myself moved to incorporate their writing into Gateway’s public programming.
I also adapted and directed (in collaboration with Rob Jerome and Brenda Porter) sixteen original, written and oral stories for the stage at another senior citizen facility. Michael created sixteen original surrealistic hats for the sixteen cast members. The production, The Persistence of Memory, was performed at a national Senior Theatre Conference and Festival in Atlantic City to much acclaim and in Metro Atlanta at the Southwest Arts Center for a standing-room-only audience.
Art on the Atlanta Beltline awarded Gateway five commissions (2012-2016) to create new performance pieces and large outdoor art installations. For three of them my students wrote and performed while Michael and I incorporated their words into the designs we developed together. Michael then masterfully constructed the installations. The students’ voices—new and important voices—became part of Atlanta’s ongoing public dialogue and artistic conversation.
These language-based projects addressed community grievances, the importance of food to family, culture and community, and with the help of audience members, fed the hungry. With support from the Irish Government through the Consulate General of Ireland in Atlanta, we incorporated personal stories written by my students into our original production, We Have Risen, an official program for Ireland’s Centenary (1916-2016). This story of Ireland’s journey to liberation with an historic African American dimension featured a thirty-member cast representing both the black and white communities in Atlanta and included students from the Dekalb (High) School of the Arts where Michael and I currently provide ongoing drama support services in acting, mime, mask theatre, movement for the actor, commedia dell'arte and storytelling.
With Gateway’s support I’ve produced, written and co-hosted with composer/songwriter Tom Spach, The Writers Space Radio Hour on WMLB 1690 AM Voice of the Arts in Atlanta. These hour-length programs feature emerging and established writers including participants from my creative writing classes as well as writers from other Gateway projects. Participants from the Southeast Branch of the Atlanta-Fulton Public Library recently published an anthology of the writing developed during class sessions.
My own writing and performance work has grown deeper roots as a result of Gateway’s emphasis on language-based programming. I was recently a featured performer (telling a personal story) for a benefit for Men Stopping Violence, which raised over 100% of its fundraising goal. This led to being selected as a National headliner for Georgia Tech’s two-day on campus event, Transformational Narratives, where I told personal stories at six of the seven curated and themed performances.
My spoken word/flute album, Kairos, with Grammy-nominated composer/pianist John Burke, was released at a concert at Oglethorpe University. I was also a featured poet for the global event 100,000 Poets for Change. I then expanded my spoken word poem, No Voice, to include my flute and mask performing with percussion and vocals by Micael (Kevin Taylor) for a Fieldwork performance showcase at Emory University, Schwartz Center for the Performing Arts.
Michael Hickey is a well-established and award-winning master mask maker and a gifted performer. Gateway’s recent shift to language-based art has revealed that he is also a masterful visual artist and theatrical designer capable of creating large scale art installations. This includes the forty-foot floating dragon he crafted for one of Gateway’s Art on the Atlanta Beltline Projects.
I’m currently directing a film—Thorne: Honor Song—produced and written by Lead Actress Carrie Anne Hunt with Director of Photography Daniel Krutchkoff.
During 2019-2020, I’ll travel to Kathmandu, Nepal, to choreograph One World Theatre Company’s production of the Greek tragedy Philoctetes. While there, my goal is to create a documentary film about Bright Nepal, a humanitarian effort on behalf of at-risk children.
In the meantime Gateway has a number of language-based projects in the works. The creative writing classes I teach continue. Saturday mornings Michael teaches free drawing and sketching classes at Gateway’s eighteen-year-old venue, The Mask Center, located in the Little 5 Points Center for Arts and Community. If you’d like to attend, please contact us ahead of time.
Current audiences crave true personal stories via theatre, film, video, visual art, songwriting, poetry, spoken word, books and storytelling. There’s a particularly vital interest in reading and listening to what the human heart has to say right now. I have come to understand that what we are building together through our written and spoken use of language is a life raft—an ark, a place of protection and safety constructed by words made manifest.
Phoebe Pettingell addresses this notion in her commentary on the poet James Merrill’s monumental poem Mirabell on the back cover of Scripts for the Pageant:
“Merrill holds a mirror up to our deepest fears: that our actions are impelled, not chosen; that we cannot assimilate the increasingly complex way in which our world must be viewed; that we have lost religion and morality; that our race is doomed to extinction. But at the same time it acknowledges this state of affairs, the poem offers numinous reassurance that we can be saved by the life raft of language—that beyond our myopic vision gleams a profounder understanding of life than we have yet conceived.”
According to Nena Couch, the director of the Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee (the playwright, not the Confederate general) Theatre Research Institute where my Sandra L. Hughes Theatre Collection at The Ohio State University has resided since 2001, I have created a “massive body of work.” What’s contained in my Collection is not even half the story.
Boxes and boxes of poems, short stories, essays, plays, journals, articles and memoirs inhabit large areas of my home and a studio space at The Mask Center. Most of these pages have only been read or seen by me personally.
This fact—one that has long tortured me—begins to bring me comfort as I realize I’ve written those thousands of unseen pages not for success, fame or to be published, but for a deeper more soulful reason. For decades they have provided a place of protection and safety by consistently allowing me to engage personally and passionately in the creation of the written word.
I’m full of gratitude for the life and career I’ve been given—especially for the colleagues and supporters who have made Gateway’s work possible. Our Board of Directors—Jim Alexander, Michael Hickey, Chris Moser, Carolyn Rene and Tom Spach, as well as all the board members who’ve served in the past—have facilitated the dreams of many artists in a multitude of genres through Gateway. They’ve helped extend the company’s artistic reach to venues and communities in thirty-six states in the U.S. and fourteen other countries. Thousands of performances, classes and residencies have been presented for people of all ages and backgrounds. Many have been given opportunities to develop their own artistic voices and share what they’ve created with others. I'm especially grateful to Gateway's Associate Artistic Director, Jerilynn Bedingfield, for her decades of dedication to the work we do together.
As they say in the business, “It’s a great gig if you can get it.” I’m one of the fortunate ones—I got the gig.
Copyright 2018, Sandra Hughes (text) with photo copyrights by individual photographers acknowledged above © and with Barbara Knott representing The Grapevine Art and Soul Salon. All Rights Reserved.