Daily Sitka Sentinel

Fine Arts Faculty to Show How It’s Done

By KLAS STOLPE
Sentinel Staff Writer
    How do you blow off a little inspirational steam when you teach students in a nationally recognized fine arts camp?
    For faculty instructors of the Sitka Fine Arts Camp, they can enter stage right … that is, the Performing Arts Center stage right.
    “We have an Arts Share at the PAC,” the camp’s executive director, Roger Schmidt, said. “It features some of our faculty.”
    The words “some” and “faculty” are a little misleading.
    These performers are the “who’s who” of many stages across the country, the “Most Likely to (insert the most aspirational and inspirational words here)” in their own high school, college, or professional year books.
    At 7 p.m. Sunday, faculty instructors from the SFAC theater, music, and dance programs who are teaching students in the summer camp programs will share their own talents with the public.
    In other places, a show with this number of talented professionals would cost a lot for even a distant seat.
    Not so at the PAC.
    The Sunday event is free and there’s no bad seat in the house.
    “To see this level of professionalism, in this setting, and with no cost is a highlight for us,” Schmidt said. “And it really lets us give back to the community. Plus we enjoy being on stage, too.”
    For their viewing pleasure attendees will see theatrical instructor Aldo Billingslea.
    When performing, Billingslea is the actor directors seek out; when directing, his are the productions artists long to be a part of. He has orchestrated his and others’ talents across national stages in productions by Shakespeare, August Wilson, Joe Turner, Ma Rainey, Arthur Miller, August Strindberg, and Tennessee Williams.
    A member of the Actors Equity Association and Screen Actors Guild, Billingslea holds credentials second only to his interpretations on stage.
    “Aldo has a pretty prestigious career ... as a Shakespearian actor, and he’s been featured in a production from Afro-American playwright Roger Miller,” Schmidt said. “And we have Buba Basishvili, who is a physical theater artist from the Republic of Georgia – he’ll be doing something.”
    For Basishvili, imagine a cross between the old physical humor of Harold Lloyd and any current professional gymnast – his master’s of fine arts is in “Ensemble Based Physical Theatre.”
    In other words, be prepared for character, mime, mask, clown, dance, directing, choreographing, vaudeville, cabaret, melodrama, tragedy, commedia dell’arte, bouffon, archery, horse-back riding, stage fighting, and, of course, dramatic acrobatics.
    Oh, and he plays a little bit of drums and loves the silly and serious combined.
    Among musical instructors on Sunday will be Robert Fleitz and Giancarlo Latta, Colin Roshak, Brian Neal and Schmidt.
    The credentials of all are too numerous to list.
    Fleitz is co-founder of new music violin and piano duo escapeVelocity, post-disciplinary performance-art collective PROMPTUS, and toy music-theater band Wind-Up Elephant. He’s completed graduate and undergraduate studies at The Juilliard School.
    Latta is a violinist and composer committed to the intersection and convergence of music old and new. His venues have included the Rothko Chapel in Houston, Mariinsky II in St. Peterburg, National Sawdust in Brooklyn, London’s Royal Albert Hall, Lucerne’s Neubad, and a former public swimming pool.
    Roshak founded and conducts the Oberlin String Orchestra at his recent alma mater (2018) Oberlin Conservatory; has toured internationally;  and is currently based in Anchorage.
    Neal trained at the Manhattan School of Music and played trumpet with the internationally celebrated Dallas Brass. He was a fellow at Tanglewood, Waterloo, Fountainbleau conservatory in France, and currently lives in Miami, where he instructs at Miami Date College.
    On the dance side, instructors Tommy Scrivens and Caroline Fermin, from New York, will perform.
    Scrivens has been with world-renowned choreographers and dancers, and been featured in several movies, musicals and TV shows. He currently dances with dre.dance, Nicholas Andre Dance, marInspired, and Kristin Sudekis Dance.
    Fermin studied with Bolshoi Ballet’s Constantin Apetrei and with Jan Miller and Miguel Lopez at New Orleans Center for the creative Arts. The Juilliard School B.F.A. performer has toured internationally and currently works professionally as a dancer and choreographer. She is a professor at Barnard College of Columbia University and teaches for New York City Center and Juilliard.
    And Schmidt? Well, Schmidt grew up in Sitka, is a former Sentinel carrier, and attended the camp as a student from 1980-1984. He graduated from Oberlin College and Conservatory with degrees in philosophy and trombone performance, with additional music studies at the Aspen Music Festival, Pierre Monteux School and internationally in London and at the Bruckner Conservatory in Austria.
    Schmidt’s passion is, literally, the stage. He negotiated the donation of the historic Sheldon Jackson school, oversaw the restoration of the campus through volunteers and donors, and has grown the camp to become a year long arts advocacy program.
    “The entire Arts Share show is just slightly over an hour,” Schmidt said. “The spirit of Arts Share is for our faculty to share a short look into their career and their practice as artists. That’s why there’s such a variety of artists, which makes for a really fun evening for the public too, because you’re going to see some theater, some dancing, and some music and it’s unusual to find an arts event that has all these different disciplines represented.”
    Schmidt says it benefits the artists as well.
    “I think for us what makes it really special is as artists we are usually in a disciplined field that we operate within,” he said. “And one of the really amazing things about our Arts Share for all of us is that we get to see each other share their work with us, and that’s really inspiring. For me, as a musician, to be performing on stage with dancers and actors, all appearing in their work. Our artists come from all over the country and all over the world and so there is just a huge amount of diversity of art work.”
    Schmidt noted that the Thursday night Arts Share featured many of the faculty’s visual artists.
    “We had a filmmaker from Brazil (Helena Sardinha), we had a painter who grew up in Iran (Marjan Hormozi), we had a Tsimshian artist (Abel Ryan),” Schmidt said. “Kind of a biodiversity of staff that makes it really interesting. People come from different cities all over the country and also bring their international perspective as well. It was just an incredible evening.”
    Sardinha, currently a Los Angeles-based producer for Driven Equation, is also a co-creator of a work-in-progress reality show, tentatively titled “Sitka,” that’s in the proof of concept and initial editing stages. It is to be shown soon to networks and streaming services in hopes of securing interest and a possible full-season production that could include actual neighbors and citizens of the municipality.
    Oh, and it’s not yet cast. So keep your best smile forward.
    Currently, more than 260 middle school students are at the camp.
    “The kids have such different perspectives,” Schmidt said. “Our faculty is absolutely world class, and from the world, which is a pretty amazing thing for students to experience.”
    Schmidt also noted that Christie Maltese spoke on Thursday night.
    “She spent 26 years painting the background art as the director of background art with Walt Disney Studios for all the major Walt Disney movies,” Schmidt said. “So she showed some of her work.”
    Schmidt said the faculty likes getting the break to perform with their peers, and the students get to see their instructors in their elements.
    “It’s a nice way for inspiration and then when the kids go to class they’re usually sort of starry eyed when they realize that the person who was teaching them to paint, that person did the background sets for Little Mermaid,” Schmidt said. “Or Beauty and the Beast. They’re sort of like ‘wow, she’s my teacher?’ Or they go to Tommy Schriven’s class and take dance classes with him and then find out he was just on the new FX show Fosse/Verdon… or one of our film composers (Marco D’Ambrosio) was sharing a recording session in which he was the conductor for doing the music for the video game Overlord.”
    There’s also an Arts Share today in Odess Theater featuring the jazz faculty, a ceramics artist, a theatrical architect and interior designer, and a rock performance, but the number of camp kids also participating results in standing room only availability.
    Schmidt says those performances are by word of mouth.
    “We used to advertise them every so often but we ran out of space at Odess,” Schmidt said. “They’re just so wonderful, people that know about it come but understand you might not get in to that one. A few years ago we just stopped advertising because we would have 10-20 people standing at each show. But on Sunday at the PAC we would love to have the public come out for it.”
    And on a Sunday, or on any day, there’s no better place to be than the PAC.
    “On Saturday, though, we take a break,” Schmidt said.
    Next week, the final middle school performances will be 7 p.m. June 26, 27, 28 at the PAC.
    An Afternoon Showcase will be on June 28 from 1-4 p.m. on the Sitka Fine Arts Campus.
    For more information contact 747-3085 or office@fineartscamp.org.