BRATTLEBORO — What a lot of people think about ballet is sitting in a stuffy hall watching some tutus and tights as dancers prance across a stage.
But imagine being in an open field on a summer night watching a dance performance designed to celebrate Vermont's farming culture.
That's exactly what will happen on Saturday, Aug. 20, when the Retreat Farm in Brattleboro presents the Farm to Ballet Project, a celebration of arts and agriculture in Southern Vermont.
Outdoors on the Harris Hill Ski Jump Field on Cedar Street from 6 to 8 p.m., Farm to Ballet Project will perform an original outdoors ballet that reinterprets classical ballet choreography to tell the story of a Vermont farm from spring planting to fall harvest.
All ages are invited to come at 5 p.m. to enjoy food from local food trucks Rigani Wood Fired Pizza, Dosa Kitchen South Indian Soul Food, and Ro's Petite Fete, as well as taking a tour Retreat Farm's new educational garden, beginning an hour before the show. The event is picnic-style, so bring your own blankets and chairs.
Farm to Ballet is a full-length dance production directed by Chatch Pregger, featuring a live sextet playing Vivaldi's “Four Seasons.”
The show starts with the geese returning for the spring and then the farmer planning out the farm. The subsequent pieces move through the stages of planting, irrigating, tending and then harvesting the farm's produce.
The farmer takes a detour from the crops to work with the animals and celebrate their contributions to our local foods. The production wraps up with a celebratory farm share pick-up scene before the geese fly back south for the winter.
“The performance is really suitable for the whole family, with a special concern to keep children interested,” says Anna Mullen, Retreat Farm program associate. “The production has wonderful costumes as it tells the story of life on the farm. The troupe coming here to Brattleboro is composed of mostly professional dancers and musicians. Many are from Vermont, although others come from out-of-state.”
After an extremely successful inaugural season, Farm to Ballet Project is in the midst of another touring season around New England. This dance collaborative was specifically designed to celebrate the unique culture of New England farms while promoting a vibrant, local, and sustainable food system and introducing new audiences to the beauty of classical ballet.
Proceeds for the Brattleboro event will be split between Farm to Ballet and Retreat Farm.
Farm to Ballet is the very first public event the Retreat Farm, Ltd. is hosting since it has became a nonprofit a year ago. Primarily known to the public for its petting farm barnyard, Retreat Farm in fact has a much larger mission: to preserve “Retreat Farm's historic lands and farmstead while advancing a healthier, more resourceful greater Brattleboro community.”
To achieve these lofty goals, Retreat Farm, Ltd. is in the process of restoring the historic Retreat Farm in Brattleboro as a center for conservation and preservation, cultural and natural history interpretation and education, public recreation, and sustainable farming and other lands-based enterprise.
“We are about to implement construction as we start renovating the farm buildings,” says Mullen. “In the first phase of the project, we want to create a public green space in the center of the farm.In the future, we will establish spaces for education and the public in Retreat Farm's historic buildings.”
The Retreat Farm has been a central feature of the Brattleboro landscape since its establishment in 1836, less than a year after the founding of the Brattleboro Retreat, the first mental hospital in northern New England.
As explained at the Retreat Farm website, www.retreatfarm.org: “From its beginning, the Farm provided food, fuel, occupational therapy, and activity in nature for the Brattleboro Retreat community. During the last half of the 19th Century, the Retreat Farm built a complex of eight then state-of-the-art barns. As the Farm's program breadth grew through its first century, its dimensions also did, covering ultimately more than 2,000 acres of farm fields and trail-traversed forest.”
As times changed, the Brattleboro Retreat found it increasingly a challenge to manage the farm.
In 2001, joining forces with the Brattleboro Retreat, the Vermont Land Trust, Preservation Trust of Vermont, and the Vermont Housing and Conservation Board, the Windham Foundation took ownership of the property to preserve the remaining 612 acres of farm and forested land and the iconic farm structures.
“The Windham Foundation brought in its Grafton Village Cheese operation, but it just let the farm itself run business as usual,” says Mullen. “Last year, they approached Retreat Farm's president [Arthur “Buzz” Schmidt] to see if he would consider taking on the farm as a separate nonprofit. He jumped at the idea.”
After a year of study and analysis, the Windham Foundation Board and Retreat Farm initiated a new effort “to develop a comprehensive strategy to preserve the property and simultaneously support sustainable rural development in greater Brattleboro and Windham County” by establishing a new nonprofit entity, Retreat Farm, Ltd., to which Windham Foundation will give its Retreat Farm property.
“We are now in the final days of our transition from Windham Foundation, which will continue operating the Grafton Village Cheese plant there, as well as managing four acres of the farm's land,” says Mullen. “The Retreat Farm employs six to seven regulars who operate the barnyard, and another six who work in the office. Some work part-time, and those in the office also help out on the barnyard, so the exact number of our employees is variable.”
The Retreat Farm is committed to high quality farm-based education.
“We already have 30 to 40 schools which go through the barnyard program each year,” says Mullen. “Looking beyond the barnyard, we are adding plant based programs to our educational services. We are also planning programs here year round. While schools often come only once a season, we are hoping to have schools make repeated visits each year. Already, the students from Dover came twice this summer to plant the pumpkin seeds in our Education Garden.”
Mullen said the Retreat Farm“ is actively working to transition into an active farm, but we are still trying figure out our place and role in the local farming community. Miller Farm from Dummerston has been helping us work the field near the ski jump. This summer, we began our Education Garden there, which now is just a pumpkin patch. The garden, which is not yet open to the public, will be unveiled on the Farm to Ballet event.”
Mullen says she is “really excited” about the first public event of Retreat Farm, Ltd.
“Honestly, I don't really know what to expect,” she confesses. “If the people who attend are like me and are unfamiliar with ballet, this should be an interesting experience.
“I do know that Farm to Ballet is quite different from your usual dance show because it is outdoor and is aimed to please, not just ballet aficionados, but a varied audience. Many coming, I'm sure, will be those who know and love dance theater, but I suspect others will be viewing this form of entertainment for the very first time.”