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WESTERN MASS. ARTS FESTIVAL SETS SAIL WITH `ODYSSEY'

Author(s): Louise Kennedy, Globe Staff Date: October 12, 2003 Page: N6 Section: Arts / Entertainment

A collaboration between two Dutch artists, the choreographer Beppie Blankert, and the composer Louis Andriessen, kicks off the 10th Massachusetts International Festival of the Arts program this week. The dance theater production, "Odyssey: She Once Was a True Love of Mine," runs Wednesday through Saturday in downtown Holyoke.

"Odyssey" draws on both Homer's and James Joyce's versions of Ulysses' journey, with a male dancer enacting the returning warrior's encounters with a string of women - the goddess Calypso, the sorceress Circe, the seducing Sirens, and the princess Nausikaa - on his way home to his wife, Penelope. Two female dancers will alternate in the women's roles, while a Greek chorus of four sopranos will sing Andriessen's score. Meanwhile, English actress Dawn Mastin's rendition of Molly Bloom's soliloquy from Joyce's "Ulysses" will weave through the program. "It's a real multidisciplinary effort," MIFA managing director Marta Ostapiuk said in a phone interview. "And it's performed in an old historic silk mill called the Lyman Mill," now renamed Mill 3 Theater at OpenSquare, "a two-story open space, really quite incredible. Beppie and her technical director came out earlier this summer to take a look at it and absolutely fell in love with it."

Blankert, who has set several pieces to the music of Charles Ives, Ostapiuk said, "has a real affinity for Americans' musical sensibility." She was also delighted by the unusual space for the work, Ostapiuk said, because her company has performed it in other unexpected venues, "primarily along water edges, including the Rotterdam harbor."

Holyoke's canals provide a natural backdrop for Blankert's "Odyssey." And the festival's organizers hope they'll also become an attractive destination for arts patrons. Working with the Holyoke mayor's office and several volunteer groups, Ostapiuk said, MIFA decided to focus this year on bringing its audience into downtown Holyoke's historic Canal District.

The festival's second event, in fact, tells the history of that district. In "Between the Canals: The Evolution of a Mill Town," the Enchanted Circle Theater takes audiences from the city's 19th-century founding, as the first American industrial planned city, through successive waves of immigration, decline, and renewal. Written by Priscilla Kane Hellweg, Rachel Kuhm Daviau, and Steven Angel and directed by Hellweg, "Between the Canals" plays Thursday through Saturday at the Mill 1 Theater.

On Oct. 24 and 25, the Wire Monkey Dance company rounds out the Holyoke program with a presentation of a work in progress, "As If Life," in its Canal District atelier, the Tree Studio. The MIFA schedule also includes a production of Athol Fugard's "The Island" by some of Fugard's Johannesburg associates, film screenings, an art exhibition, a concert of John Cage's works for carillon, and other theatrical and music events nearby. It all happens this month - except for one performance that had to be rescheduled for January.

"Mikhail Baryshnikov was supposed to kick it off, until he injured his knee," Ostapiuk said. "He wrote a wonderful letter, promising to fulfill his obligations to us, to the city, and to the audience that is awaiting him." Meanwhile, they'll have a full schedule; check www.mifafestival.org or call 413-584-4425 or 800-224-6432 for details.

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