Creation, performance, belonging all paths to joy for Bend creatives
Editor’s note: The Bulletin is examining how residents experience joy this holiday season. This is the third in a series. A reporter reached out to four longtime Central Oregon artists to learn how they experience, and think about joy as related to their disciplines — music, visual art and theater.
Bree Beal, children’s theater director
“If we don’t cultivate our ability to experience joy when we’re young, it gets harder as we get older,” said Bree Beal, executive director of BEAT Children’s Theatre.
Beal said that in her work as the longtime director of the Bend youth theater company, she talks a lot about the subject of joy.
Bree Beal, executive director of BEAT Children’s Theatre, pauses briefly before rehearsal at BEAT in Bend Dec. 15. (Andy Tullis/The Bulletin)
“One is, just when I think about the service that we provide to the kids in our world, I don’t think we put enough of a premium on joy for the sake of joy, and fun for the sake of fun, and what an important part of our development as human beings that is,” Beal said.
“Part of BEAT’s purpose is to give kids a liberated, nurtured, safe place to be joyful,” she said. For some kids, the joy comes during performance, for some of them it’s doing tech and support, others it’s finding their tribe and a feeling of belonging.
“A very important part of joy is finding a place where you belong,” she said.
Joy can also arise from setting a goal and succeeding, or hearing an audience applaud after you’ve something new and frightening — all things theater can afford.
Kids often don’t realize the power they have to affect other people’s joy.
“I think when you’re young, a lot of time you don’t feel like you have a lot of power,” she said. “I talk about how, when we go into a theater space and perform, and the audience comes in — and there’s a lot of kids in the audience, a lot of adults in the audience, a lot of grandparents in the audience, all kinds of people — most of them come in carrying the weight of whatever is going on in their day, in their world. Sometimes around the holidays, that’s particularly heavy, or in the world right now there’s a lot of weight, fear and uncertainty.”
Her voice dropping almost to a stage whisper, Beal continued, “And the lights go out, the curtains open, and the kids come out and they perform these amazing characters. And when they do something funny, everyone in the audience laughs. When they do something moving, their hearts are all touched.”
Those moments serve as reminders of how much people have in common rather than the things that make us different or divide us, Beal added.
“And that is an incredibly joyful experience. And I tell our actors, ‘You have the power to bring your audiences that joy, and that moment, and to take them out of their worries, and out of their responsibilities and out of their fears and just bring them something joyful and wonderful.’”
“People leave beaming,” she said. “It’s very powerful.”
Paul Eddy, singer-songwriter
Longtime Central Oregon singer-songwriter Paul Eddy is a busy professional musician, both with his solo work and as a former member of popular Beatles cover band JuJu Eyeball.
“I love seeing the smiling faces at retirement communities when I play music for them,” said Bend musician Paul Eddy. (Submitted photo)
But this has been a particularly busy year for Eddy. In March, he released a full-length album, “Oregonian,” and in November, the three-song EP “Skoolie,” featuring songs about old school buses converted into homes.
Recording is its own joyful process, outside of occasional software glitches. But Eddy also has a recipe for more frequent access to joy: He performs about 10 times a month at retirement communities around Central Oregon. He’s performed for some of these folks for years now:
“I like them, and I guess they like me, too,” he said. “I think they call that a win-win. I play about two or three originals, but the rest are the old-timey songs that they love to hear and I love to sing. Songs like ‘Our Love Is Here To Stay,’ ‘Shine On Harvest Moon,’ and ‘Deep Purple’ go over pretty well, I think. Plus, I think they also just like my energy. I love to perform, and they’ll pretty much let me play anything.”
As you might imagine, the joy he brings them has a ricochet effect.
“I love seeing the smiling faces at retirement communities when I play music for them,” he said. “Sometimes they even cry if I touch on a memory (and I have to look away myself or I’ll go, too!). They’re the best audiences in the world, and it brings me joy just knowing I’m adding some happiness to their day.”
The same is true with playing public gigs, Eddy said.
“Rocking out with the original JuJu Eyeball trio has been some of my happiest times on stage. Solo gigs are also very rewarding. Just sitting and playing my Bedell 1964 OM acoustic brings me joy. Once you get over the nerves that often accompany live performances, I find that making music, singing and playing an instrument, is a joy that you feel through your whole body. And it just keeps getting better over time.”
Raechel Gilland with George, one of her five grandchildren. (Submitted photo)
Raechel Gilland, Adventure Time Entertainment
Raechel Gilland, long active in community theater in Bend, is the leader of Adventure Time Entertainment, a Central Oregon production company that brings to life plays such as “High Desert Horror and the Lava Lake Murders,” “Rocky Horror Picture Show” screenings with a shadow cast and the upcoming Winter Solstice Masquerade Ball Dec. 27 at High Desert Music Hall in Redmond.
Gilland is frank and socially aware when talking about the nexus of joy and art, and the relief they can provide amid personal turmoil, sociopolitical chaos, holiday stress — whatever might be making a person feel down.
“We gotta — especially during the sh–ty times — find some kind of feel-good, or some kind of connection, or some kind of expression, that’s not so hateful,” she said.
“Because we are so immersed with all the politics, and all of the ugly, and all of the things, that’s what we go to be entertained for,” Gilland said. “So we can step outside of (it), or find one little ray of positivity while we’re shrouded in all this.
Like Beal and Eddy, Gilland witnesses the joy performance brings both audiences and the talent. In particular, she has one player who she describes as being “of other abilities.”
“And to see her do stuff, even though she may not be of abilities like you and I, the way she lights up. If that’s all I do it for — she’s happy. None of the rest of it matters in that moment.”
Artists and sisters Lori, left, and Lisa Lubbesmeyer. (Submitted photo)
Lisa Lubbesmeyer, artist
Whenever the door sign says open, the public is welcome inside Lubbesmeyer Art Studio & Gallery, the second-story shop of fiber and acrylic artists Lisa and Lori Lubbesmeyer in Bend’s Old Mill District. What visitors will sense immediately is the heavy influence of nature on the identical twins’ collaborative art, the textures of which evoke the desert hills, mountains, forests and snow-draped pines of the region.
“It’s the beginning and the end of all that we create. Like nature, how we interpret it, is limitless. And this gets to what brings me (and us), joy,” Lisa said via email. “Nature doesn’t rush. As it feels like everything is moving faster, and is less and less predictable — at the root of everything is nature.”
What brings Lisa joy is “spending time outdoors, slowing down and really looking around,: she said. “And by that, I mean looking at everything, closely. Central Oregon is chock full of gorgeous panoramas, and I think they’re part of what makes people so happy to live or visit here. But what never fails to bring me joy, is looking closely at a few small bits of the landscape, and giving it the time to really see it.”
When she makes the effort to do that, without fail the land “peels away the (many) layers of what causes anxiety, rests my aching heart, gives perspective on how unimportant most things are, that change is constant, and one way or another, eventually, everything will be OK,” she said. “This brings me joy. Which allows me to do creative work. If I didn’t have this relationship with nature to help settle my mind, I really don’t know if I could be the artist that I am. And all of this leads to the joy I feel from knowing something that Lori and I created is probably going to resonate with the person who collects it. It seems to us, whether they share their impressions with us or not, that they can somehow see, if not feel, all … that we put into it.”
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