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By ALEX HANSON

Thanksgiving has always seemed to me the greatest of our holidays. The idea of a harvest festival, where families or tribes gather to celebrate their agricultural labors with a generous feast, might be outdated in the era of factory farming, but the...

By ALEX HANSON

This space has already taken note of Lebanon Opera House’s 100th birthday, in part because it’s kind of a rolling celebration.The dedication of the building took place on Oct. 29, 1924, so it seems fitting that the opera house’s fall season is perhaps...

By ALEX HANSON

Sometimes there’s an obvious subject for this column, such as the three music festivals I wrote about last week.But sometimes there isn’t. Instead there are a bunch of art opportunities that run counter to the big event, which this weekend is the...

By ALEX HANSON

The music festival is a feature of the automobile age. Even before Woodstock, the massive 1969 concert in Upstate New York, the Newport (R.I.) Folk Festival dates only to a decade earlier and the Newport Jazz Festival to 1954. Cheap gas brings people...

By ALEX HANSON

When this summer’s Bookstock literary festival was canceled, organizers were already looking ahead to next year.So it comes as no surprise that the Upper Valley’s biggest literary event is back on the calendar for 2025. The festival is scheduled for...

By ALEX HANSON

Will Sheff had a cozy upbringing in Meriden. His parents were both teachers at Kimball Union Academy, the prep school at the heart of the village, and Sheff had the run of the campus, then was a student there.When he moved away, though, he struggled....

By ALEX HANSON

Patrick Schlott is still a young man, a 2016 graduate of what was then called Vermont Technical College, in Randolph. But he is old enough to remember when payphones were still ubiquitous.When he was a student at Montpelier High School, from 2008 to...

By ALEX HANSON

For its first three years, Lebanon Opera House’s Nexus Music and Arts Festival has specialized in bringing less-heralded acts to an Upper Valley audience.The thinking, as opera house Executive Director Joe Clifford has explained it in years past, is...

By ALEX HANSON

Five years ago this summer, Olivia Zerphy had just graduated from a theater school in Paris and was on her way back to her native Vermont, where she’d secured a residency for the Voloz Collective, the small theater company she and some fellow students...

By ALEX HANSON

As an eight-year resident of Corinth, and a frequent visitor to his wife’s family there prior to relocating, Brian Carroll knew of the photographer Suzanne Opton, a fellow resident.But it wasn’t until a mutual friend, Kerry DeWolfe, expressed an...

By ALEX HANSON

WOODSTOCK — Lela Jaacks’ interest in visual art dates to her years at Woodstock Union High School.After she graduated, in 1995, and before she headed off to Rhode Island School of Design, she helped Charlet Davenport with the myriad details involved...

By ALEX HANSON

For a long time, the primary venue for dance in these parts was Dartmouth College’s Hopkins Center.The college incubated Pilobolus, the celebrated, New England-based modern dance company, which itself produced spinoff companies that make regular stops...

By ALEX HANSON

THETFORD — At Smith College in the 1950s, Gillian Lewis majored in visual art and minored in theater. Those studies presaged the direction her life would take after she moved to Thetford in 1960.Art was major, at least at first, as she made woodcuts...

By ALEX HANSON

A little over a year ago, Seth Kelly and Arlo Hastings, who were then sophomores at Lebanon High School, had written a play they were hoping to produce.Because it was a Christmas play and their plan was to produce it in June, and because they thought...

By ALEX HANSON

The heat is supposed to break by Friday, if the forecast is for real.That’s a good thing in general, but particularly for Randolph, where the Chandler Center for the Arts and other organizations have made big plans for International Make Music...

By ALEX HANSON

HANOVER — Education is a series of expanding horizons. Students do their work, fail or succeed, move forward and repeat the process all over again.“The human condition is complex,” Hanover High School Principal Julie Stevenson said at the start of the...

By ALEX HANSON

A couple of weeks before Town Meeting Day, longtime Norwich School Board member Neil Odell wrote a letter to future Vermonters about the demise of public education.“Rather than double down on our public education system,” Odell wrote, “we instead...

By ALEX HANSON

After Memorial Day, the arts start to emerge, just like their orthographically similar cousins, ants. It’s warm, occasionally sunny, and the woodwork has grown confining.Arts events seem a bit weirder in the summer, more experimental and free form....

By ALEX HANSON

The line “Rock and roll can never die” lodges in the mind in Neil Young’s voice, but there are countless examples. Keith Richards, for one.Locally, the best measure of rock’s staying power might be the River City Rebels. The band celebrates the 25th...

By ALEX HANSON

WOODSTOCK — Last year, the organizers of Bookstock, the literary festival begun here in 2009, set out a lofty aim.“Our goal,” they wrote in a funding application to the Woodstock Economic Development Commission, “is to make Bookstock one of the most...

By ALEX HANSON

CANAAN — A few summers ago, during the pandemic, Martin Decato and Peter Dionne got together to play music. Decato is a longtime pro, Dionne an avid amateur.They looked around for a good place to make music videos, and didn’t have to look far. They...