NEW E-NEWSLETTER
FROM THE EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR
rori.eddie.herbison
Welcome, Readers to
Delta Arts Alliance's first issue of its NEW electronic newsletter,
FROM THE MIDDLE.
If you look at a map of Cleveland, MS and drop your pen directly to the middle of the town, HI! That's us...Right there in the middle, 104 South Court Street, home to the Ellis Theater and the many, many happenings at the Delta Arts Alliance.
But there is more to the name than location, it also speaks directly to our mission as an organization.
The Delta Arts Alliance is committed to being in the middle, to playing the middle man. We want to be the conduit of access into the inspiring, challenging, life-changing and wildly creative world of art and arts education.
Our programming is vast and our work, worthy. Our job is to connect this community and its neighbors to the awesome opportunities that do exist and are available in this area for art lovers and patrons, alike, to the mildly curious to the relatively new.
I believe with all my soul, all my being - THE ARTS ARE FOR EVERY ONE.
Do you have a favorite song? How does that song make you feel? You see, you've just had a meaningful and rich experience with the arts.
Can you remember the first time your teacher read a book to you and you wanted to reread it yourself, because it was just that good? There you go, my friend. Another meaningful interaction with words and literature, all disciplines of art.
As humans, we are drawn to interaction and the visual arts allow for interaction on a very visceral level.
I have stood in this very gallery I am blessed to call my office and listened to sisters, couples and friends debate which painting, which piece, which artist is better. The beauty to their question, there is no better. There is no right, no winner to the debate.
I will never get my mother to agree with the paintings I enjoy most or feel led to like, just as she can never get me to feel a song as she does. We may both like a piece of pottery or a dance routine, but it is impossible to say we feel it, we process it and we connect to it the same, exact way.
And that is what I love so much about our work here at the Delta Arts Alliance.
This month, we welcomed in H.T. Chen & The Chen Center Dancers from New York City. They used our dance studio, in preparation for their Chinese New Year performance at Delta State University. While here, the dancers performed two master classes for our DAA School of Dance. The Chen Dancers essentially taught the identical class for each group: same material, same dancers, same instruction, same props. SAME EVERYTHING, yet, our students, ranging in age from four to 12, could not have reacted more differently. Some thought the dancers were powerful, others thought they were graceful. Some thought the material was emotional, some thought it was historic. Beauty of the tale, neither are wrong. It was powerful, just as it was graceful. It was emotionally driven work, just as it was historically accurate work. Our students' take-away were varied, but all correct, and all personal.
At the performance of "South of Gold Mountain," many of the DAA dancers were in attendance and again, their reactions as varied as their ages.
And at the middle of it all,
FROM THE MIDDLE of it all, the Delta Arts Alliance - doing our work to connect, bringing access to dance, to the arts. It is what we do. It is what we believe in doing and it is what we are proud to do.
I hope you will enjoy our first issue of today's newsletter and we look forward to bringing you more news, more spotlights, more stories in April.
Until then,
MIGHTY THANKS to you all for your continued support of the Delta Arts Alliance.
-rori