Welcome!

Welcome to Arts On The Edge: Wolfeboro, an expression of ministry by the First Congregational Church, Wolfeboro, a congregation of the United Church of Christ.

Celebrating the connection between Artistic Creativity and Spirituality seems natural since faith proclaims God is the ultimate Creator.  The symphony of the mountains, the rhythms of the cosmos, the timbre of the winds all reveal the artistry of the Creator’s hand.  In the same way, the creator’s sublime truth is expressed in dancing sound, pulsing colors, and modulating movement.

To Artists we bid welcome:  welcome to Arts On The Edge: Wolfeboro, where you are invited to give voice to your creative vision.

To Visitors we bid welcome:  welcome to Arts On The Edge: Wolfeboro, where you are invited to find soul refreshment through creative works.

To Artists and Visitors alike we bid you welcome, for wherever you are on your life’s journey, you will find welcome here.

Welcome!

Rev. Dr. James W. Christensen
Senior Pastor First Congregational Church Wolfeboro

ARTISTS & SCHOLARS

Toby Twining

Toby Twining moved to New York in 1987 to work with modern dance choreographers, who wanted the sounds of a new choral music. In 1990 he formed the vocal ensemble Toby Twining Music, which recorded two ground-breaking CDs—Shaman (BMG Classics, 1993), and Chrysalid Requiem (Cantaloupe Music, 2002). Twining’s instrumental works include Satie Blues, recorded by avant-garde pianist Margaret Leng Tan (Uni/Point, 1997) and 9:11 Blues, recorded by Matt Haimovitz (Oxingale/Artemis 2002). Cantaloupe Music plans to release Twining’s third CD, incidental music composed for Sarah Ruhl’s Eurydice, in 2010

Laurie Olinder

Laurie Olinder (Projection Designer) is a painter and an award winning theatrical designer. She has created multimedia projections for many prominent contemporary composers, including John Adams, Gavin Bryars, Philip Glass, Michael Gordon, Henryk Gorecki, David Lang, Harry Partch, and Julia Wolfe. She is a founding member of Ridge Theater and has been recognized with two Obie awards, a Bessie award, and an Elliot Norton Award.

The Choir of Christ's College Cambridge

The Choir's raison d'etre is, as it has always been, to sing services in the College Chapel. More generally, the Choir makes an important contribution to the life of the College, singing at feasts, weddings, memorial services and other occasions. Today, as one of Cambridge's finest mixed-voice ensembles, the group also pursues an exciting range of activities outside College, performing concerts in Cambridge and around the UK, recording CDs, broadcasting, and undertaking a major international tour each summer. The 28 members are selected by audition either before or after coming up to Cambridge, and each is expected to be of a very high musical standard. Music has played an important role at Christ's since the earliest days of its 500 year history. The Choir's repertoire embraces sacred and secular music from the 15th century to the present.

Eiko and Koma

Since 1972, Japanese-born choreographer/dancers Eiko and Koma have collaborated in creating a unique and riveting theater of movement out of stillness, shape, light and sound. They studied with Kazuo Ohno in Japan, Manja Chmiel in Germany and Lucas Hoving in the Netherlands before moving to New York in 1976. Eiko and Koma have presented their works in theaters, universities, museums, galleries and festivals world-wide, including numerous appearances at BAM's Next Wave Festival and the American Dance Festival. They have received numerous awards for their work and have been the recipients of Guggenheim and MacArthur fellowships. Eiko and Koma want the vulnerability of their own dancing bodies to invited the audiences' empathy. Each viewer brings his or her own emotions and associations to the experience.

Leslie Dworkin

Leslie Dworkin has been choreographing, teaching, and performing internationally for the past 15 years including residencies in Puebla, Mexico, the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, and at Jacob’s Pillow and Joyce SoHo, to name a few. She has performed in the works of such noted choreographers as Ralph Lemon, Maureen Fleming, Kei Takei/Moving Earth, and Bebe Miller, among others; and in the dance companies of Leah Stein, and Melanie Stewart Dance Theatre. “Dworkin moves like silk” (ArtsHouston) and her uniquely fluid dance pieces have garnered much choreographic support from such sources as the Pew Charitable Trusts, Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, Movement Research, Djerassi, and the Susan Hess Choreographers Project. She has taught as a guest artist in many dance departments including UCLA, UNCG/Greensboro, Oberlin College, Ohio University, and is currently adjunct faculty at UT/Austin. Leslie has an MFA in Choreography from Temple University and is a certified Trager bodywork practitioner.

Darla Stanley

Darla Stanley is freelance dance maker, performer, and teacher. Her work has been supported by the PEW Charitable Trusts, Philadelphia Live Arts Festival, Philadelphia Fringe Festival, Susan Hess Choreographer’s Project, and Connecticut Commission on Culture and Tourism. Most recently she set two new works on Washington D.C. based Dakshina/Daniel Phoenix Singh Dance Company. Darla has performed with numerous dance companies and independent choreographers and was awarded a Rockette from the Philadelphia Fringe Festival for Dancer Whose Skills You’d Most Like to Have.

Marcia Atkinson Christensen

Marcia Atkinson Christensen is a non traditional watercolor artist who has exhibited widely throughout New England and part of the United States. She was the Arts Chair at Berwick Academy in South Berwick, Maine were she taught art for 14 years. In Ohio she was the Education Coordinator for Wayne Center for the Arts in Wooster where she was an education partner with The Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. Christensen is also a juried artist member and past board member of the New Hampshire Art Association. She has traveled to Ghana and Kenya many times in order to gather information and material for her Fellowship of Women series of paintings.
In addition to her fine art Christensen has recently completed illustrations for The Grey Ghost, a children's book written by Julie Hahnke. The book has been named to the Kids Indy Next List and was voted third in the country by independent book sellers.

Margaret Leng Tan

Margaret Leng Tan has established herself as a major force within the American avant-garde; a highly visible, talented and visionary pianist whose work sidesteps perceived artificial boundaries within the usual concert experience and creates a new level of communication with listeners. Embracing aspects of theater, choreography, performance and even “props” such as the teapot she "plays" in Alvin Lucier’s Nothing is Real, Tan has brought to the avant-garde, a measure of good old-fashioned showmanship tempered with a disciplinary rigor inherited from her mentor John Cage. This has won Tan acceptance far beyond the norm for performers of avant-garde music, as she is regularly featured at international festivals, records often for adventurous labels such as Mode and New Albion and has appeared on American public television, at Lincoln Center and Carnegie Hall.

Born in Singapore, Tan was the first woman to earn a doctorate from Juilliard, but youthful restlessness and a desire to explore the crosscurrents between Asian music and that of the West led her to Cage. This sparked an active collaboration between Cage and Tan that lasted from 1981 to his death, during which Tan gained recognition as one of the pre-eminent interpreters of Cage’s music, partly through her New Albion recordings, Daughters of the Lonesome Isle and The Perilous Night/Four Walls. After Cage’s death in 1992, she was chosen as the featured performer in a tribute to his memory at the 45th Venice Biennale.

Tan takes a lively interest in the musical potential of unconventional and unlikely instruments, and in 1997 her groundbreaking CD, The Art of the Toy Piano on Point Music/Universal Classics elevated the lowly toy piano to the status of a “real” instrument. Tan is certainly the world’s first, and so far, only professional toy piano virtuoso. Since then her curiosity has extended to other toy instruments as well, substantiating her credo "Poor tools require better skills" (Marcel Duchamp).

Tan favors music that confronts and defies the established boundaries of the piano and her toy instruments and has collaborated with like-minded composers to create works for her, such as Somei Satoh, Tan Dun, Michael Nyman, Julia Wolfe, Toby Twining and Ge Gan-ru; she is also a favorite of composer George Crumb. Tan’s authority on matters of Cage has evolved from that of an expert interpreter to responsible scholar protecting the textual integrity of his work; Tan edited the fourth volume of Cage’s piano music for C. F. Peters and in 2006 gave the premiere of his newly discovered 1944 work Chess Pieces, which she also edited for publication. Tan’s Mode DVD of Cage’s Sonatas and Interludes includes a video in which she examines the original, 1940s era preparation materials for the work. Photogenic and comfortable with the camera, Tan is the subject of a feature documentary by filmmaker Evans Chan, Sorceress of the New Piano: The Artistry of Margaret Leng Tan, which has been screened at numerous international film festivals including Vancouver, Melbourne and AFI/Discovery Channel’s SILVERDOCS where it was a Best Music Documentary Nominee. Sorceress of the New Piano and a bonus film by Chan, The Maverick Piano, is now available on DVD on Mode Records (mode 194).

Roberta Michel, flutist

A native of Maine, flutist Roberta Michel now lives in New York City and is an active performer of solo, chamber, and orchestral music. Michel recently won the Artists International Special Presentation Award and was presented in her debut recital at Carnegie Hall's Weill Recital Hall for which she was described in the New York Concert Review as a “solid craftsman” who “riveted with her performance, inspiring one to want a repeated hearing”.  Michel has performed with groups throughout North America including the Portland String Quartet, SEM Ensemble, Philharmonic Orchestra of the Americas, Cheyenne Symphony, and the Greeley Philharmonic in venues including Lincoln Center, Carnegie Hall, Alice Tulley Hall, and The Kennedy Center.  This summer she was a Bang on a Can Summer Intitute fellow and a participant in the Institute and Festival of Contemporary Performance at Mannes College.

Dedicated to the advancement of new music and described for her “extreme adventurousness” (New York Concert Review), Michel has premiered numerous works.  She is a founding member of The Cadillac Moon Ensemble, a quartet dedicated to commissioning and performing new works.  The group was recently signed on the New Dynamic Records label and will soon record its debut CD.  For more information, please see CadillacMoonEnsemble.com.  

Michel holds a BM with highest honors from the University of Colorado at Boulder, an MM from SUNY-Purchase College, and is currently a doctoral candidate at the City University of New York Graduate Center.  Her teachers include Robert Dick, Tara Helen O'Connor, and Alexa Still.

Kent de Spain

Kent de Spain is recognized for his work as both a dance/multimedia artist and a researcher. He received his B.A. in Dance (1980) and M.A. in Choreography (1986) from U.C.L.A., and his Ed.D. in Dance Studies from Temple University (1997). He has taught and toured throughout the United States and Europe, including performances at Jacob's Pillow and Judson Church, and has been the recipient of several major awards, including the Pew Fellowship in the Arts for Choreography and an Established Choreographers Fellowship from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts. He was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Ohio State University and has presented his broad-ranging dance research at numerous international conferences and symposia, including the Congress on Research in Dance (CORD), the “Uncommon Senses” Conference at Concordia University in Montreal, the “body/machine” congress in Toronto, and the Multimedia Technologies and Applications (MTAC) conference in Irvine, California. De Spain has also written extensively on the interface between dance and technology, on liturgical dance in America, and on the politics of contemporary approaches to dance theory. He recently completed a feature length documentary film called, A Moving Presence: Ruth Zaporah and Action Theater (available through Insight Media) and has a book coming out next year called Method to the Madness: Movement Improvisation in the Words of Its Practitioners.

Mark Burrows

Professor of History of Christianity and Director of Worship, Theology, and the Arts Program at Andover Newton Theological School.

Mark Burrows grew up in Wisconsin, graduating from Lawrence University before completing graduate studies at the Eberhard-Karls-Universität Tübingen (Germany) and Princeton Theological Seminary (M.Div. and Ph.D.). He joined the faculty of Andover Newton Theological School in 1993, where he is Professor of the History of Christianity and faculty director of the program in Worship, Theology, and the Arts. During the “Summer Semester” of 2007, he served as guest professor at the Kirchliche Hochschule in Wuppertal, Germany, lecturing on “Eros and Mysticism” and leading a seminar on “Poetics and Theological Insight.” During the 2007/08 academic year, Dr. Burrows will be on sabbatical leave, having been named a Luce Fellow in Theology in order to complete work on a forthcoming book entitledUntamed Wisdom: The Poetics of Desire and the Renewal of Theology as an Art

Dr. Burrows is past president of the Society for the Study of Christian Spirituality, an elected member of the American Theological Society and a member of the Society of Biblical Theologians. . His current research and writing projects explore the nexus of mysticism, spirituality, and poetics, with a particular interest in developments spanning the medieval and modern periods. Recent publications include essays on a range of topics, medieval and modern, including: Bernard of Clairvaux’s mystical reading of the Song of Songs, the visionary writings of Julian of Norwich, questions of the church’s commitment to “just peace” in the contemporary world, and the relationship of literature and theology. He recently edited a collection of ground-breaking essays entitled Minding the Spirit: The Study of Christian Spirituality (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005).

Dr. Burrows is an ordained minister of the United Church of Christ, representing the denomination as chair of the national “Working Group” for the UCC’s full-communion partnership (Kirchengemeinschaft) with the “Union der evangelischen Kirchen” or UEK (“The Union of Uniting Churches of Germany”), and as one of the delegated members of the Lutheran-Reformed Standing Committee on Theology established under the “Formula of Agreement” Accord of 1997. In addition to his professional interests, Burrows is a practicing poet, an avid mountain hiker, and a gourmet chef.

James Christensen

Senior Pastor First Congregational Church, Wolfeboro, United Church of Christ

2004-Present Senior Pastor of First Congregation Church, Wolfeboro 
2002-2004 Co-Pastor of Old North Church, Marblehead MA
1995-2002  Senior Pastor of Trinity United Church of Christ Wooster OH
1969-1995 Senior Pastor of First Parish federated Church, South Berwick, ME  
1984-1987 Clinical Director of Family Pastoral Counseling Center of the Dover Rochester Area
BS in Psychology Springfield College
Bachelor of Divinity – Andover Newton Theological School
Doctor of Ministry – Bangor Theological School

Elizabeth Nordbeck

Moses Brown Professor of Ecclesiastical History, Andover Newton Theological School

In her writings, lectures and work as a resource to national and international church bodies, Beth Nordbeck offers insights into the historical roots and precedents of today’s trends in American religion. Her interests range from the roots of Congregationalism in New England to ecumenism and new religious movements.

Her recent books address denominational consolidation and expansion in the 19th century and the history of Congregationalism in New Hampshire. In 2002 she published a history of the Massachusetts Council of Churches and “O God Tender and Just: Reflections and Responses after September 11, 2001.” An ordained United Church of Christ minister, she is co-editor of Prism, the theological journal for the denomination. She joined the faculty in 1990 and served as dean for 11 years.

R. Blair Moffett

Honorably Retired, Presbyterian Church (USA)

Blair Moffett retired in 2006 after 40 years as a Presbyterian Pastor. A life-time of summer visits to Wolfeboro drew him and his wife Patricia back to the Lakes Region. He appreciates the expanding arts expressions of the area, participating in the Great Waters Music Series, Friends of Music, Clearlakes Chorale, and others. While serving in New Haven, CT, he worked closely with a local artist to create and install a major piece of fabric sculpture as the focal center of the sanctuary. He is himself a potter, a photographer, a musician, and a poet.