written by Josh and Sue Greenberg
On Wednesday, August 11, the Berlin Free Town Library presented its Summer Reading Program Finale, “Go With The Flow.” This summer’s theme was “Make A Splash at Your Library.”
Over the last six weeks, 65 area children ages 3 to 18, parents and community volunteers took part in an art, theater and music production that brought to life Georges Seurat’s famous pointillist painting “Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte.”
In 1884, Georges Seurat painted a huge canvas, 7 feet high and 10 feet wide in a style he pioneered called pointillism. He was ahead of his time…now we call them pixels. The process took him two years to complete.
The Berlin Summer Library participants met for 90 minutes a week, recreating Seurat’s masterpiece in its original size, painting thousands of dots in only 6 weeks!
But the Berlin Library Group painted only the landscape. And the people in the painting were the children from our own communities, dressed in costumes of the time. The musical accompaniment was “Gymnopedie No. 1” by Erik Satie, a French composer of the very same time and place in Paris, France.
What Seurat captured in his famous painting was the universal feeling of a Sunday Afternoon in a park by the water. The Berlin Library Group brought this spirit into the production through the use of a multi-media presentation with a slide show of photos mixed with beach sounds from Grafton Lakes State Park.
In addition to the Seurat/Satie production, the group also performed Bobby Darin’s hit song, “Splish Splash, I Was Takin’ A Bath,” and an original arrangement of “Row Your Boat” by Josh Greenberg and Bill Vitek.
Highlights of the evening included a vocal solo by Caitlin Hungerford on “Splish Splash,” and a vocal solo by Sarah French on “Row Your Boat.” Instrumental soloists included saxophonist, Dan von Schilgen, keyboardist, Ioann Popov, and trumpeter, Andrew Zlotnick. Actors Gable Hartman, Christina Reger, Amanda Ducharme, MJ St. Jocks, Hailey Madsen, and Ben Ruebel, gave notable performances.
Artistic, theatrical, and musical direction for the project was the collaborative efforts of Josh
and Sue Greenberg, Dianne Mosher and Sylvia Thompson.
An audience of over 125 attended the finale presentation and a reception followed to celebrate a wonderful night of the arts at the Seventh Day Baptist Church.
This project is made possible in part through a Community Arts Grant, a program funded by The Arts Center of the Capital Region through the State and Local partnership Program of the New York Council on the Arts, a state agency.
Of course, many people made this program possible, and on behalf of the Berlin Free Town Library, we would like to say a very special Thank You to: Pastor Matt Olson and the Seventh Day Baptist Church, Berlin, Wal-Mart Store, Brunswick, Taconic Plastics, Petersburgh, John Keal Music Company,
Albany, The Friends of the Berlin Free Town Library, Paul Cuomo, Tom Thornbury and Craig Mosher.
