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Northern Rockies Folk Fest Lineup Announced Page 3
Sage School Student Keah Jones Knows What it Takes to Breath Easy
Szabo Explains, In Migration: The Early Bird Gets The Worm
Page 5
Margot Tantalizes the Palate with a Cheese Charlotte Page 13
read about it on PaGe 7
A p r i l 2 5 , 2 0 1 2 • Vo l . 5 • N o . 1 7 • w w w.T h e We e k l y S u n . c o m
A Filmmaking Journey BY KAREN BOSSICK
A It took 300 gallons of paint to paint the black on the ceiling over “Seussical” stage manager Kim Cortez’s head, said Teresa Gregory, Community Campus manager.
Public Invited to Tonight’s Theater Unveiling STORY & PHOTO BY KAREN BOSSICK
K
arl Nordstrom gestures past a lift sitting on the stage at the Community Campus toward three catwalks used to suspend lighting instruments and microphones above the stage. “It used to be we had to use this lift to get up to the top of the ceiling to change lights. Now we not only have the catwalks for that but we have poles in the theater for extra side lights and a spot in back for a spotlight,” he said. Nordstrom and students involved in the Wood River High School’s Performing Arts Academy got their first taste of the newly remodeled Wood River High School Performing Arts Theater last week. And they’re liking what they see. No longer do they have to build sets on stage; they can build them in the adjacent art shop and roll them through giant doors built for that purpose onto the stage. They have a state-of-the art lighting system and actual dressing rooms that they can change in. And not only do they have a stateof-the-art sound system, they can hear one another more clearly on stage. “We didn’t even have a sound system before,” Nordstrom said. “We had to bring in speakers every time we did something.” The public will get to see the improvements for themselves when the newly christened Wood River High School Performing Arts Theater at 1050 Fox Acres Road is unveiled tonight. The open house starts at 5:30 p.m. Chartwell’s Café will provide refreshments. And there’ll be tours of the Community Campus, along with performances by the B-Tones men’s singing group and Sun Valley Summer Symphony music students and a bouncy house for kids to play in. A ribbon-cutting and performing arts showcase will follow at 7 p.m. in the new theater. The Wood River High School drama program will present a preview of “Seussical the Musical,” which it will stage Thursday through Saturday. There also will be performances from the school’s orchestra, band and choir, which just returned from a music competition in Anaheim, Calif., with a slew of gold and silver trophies. The remodel transforms the facility from a school lecture hall built in 1978 to a first-rate theatrical setting that can accommodate every need in the community, including lectures, plays, dance and choral music, said Footlight Dance Director Hilarie Neely. Neely served on the board that planned the theater, along with Nordstrom, vocal instructor Max Stimac,
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lex Hamlin was eight when he fell in love with films while threading the projector at the Magic Lantern Cinemas that his mother managed. Today, that love is taking the 26-yearold Wood River Valley native from the bottom of the world to the top as he films the world’s greatest ultra-runner in his quest to circle the world from top to bottom and bottom to top again. The documentary will depict Jesper Kenn Olsen as he makes friends with the inhabitants of the jungles of Colombia and the deserts of Sudan, whom he says were extremely friendly despite hostilities between Sudan and his native Denmark over a cartoon of Mohammad published in a Danish newspaper. The film will also explore the body’s physical and mental capacity to run the equivalent of a marathon each day for an extended amount of time. “Actually, the physical aspect is not as interesting because the body is so capable of adapting. More interesting is the mental aspect, which is more difficult,” said Alex, himself an endurance athlete and All-American Nordic racer who’s joined Olsen on his runs when not filming or driving the support vehicle. “Jesper is very focused on long-term goals. In the short term, he can get frustrated if he takes the wrong turn. Some days he’s happy, having a good time. Other days are tougher because of the weather or running along exposed roads. He runs quietly… no music. I think he uses it almost as meditation. He’s not a spiritual guy
but he’s grounded.” Jesper Kenn Olsen chalked up a world record 16,300 miles running around the world horizontally in 22 months during 2004 and 2005. In 2008 the Danish runner, who has degrees in political science and law, set out to chalk up another 25,000 miles on his Ecco and BiomC running shoes, running from Scandinavia through the mountains of Transylvania, along the Suez Canal where soldiers stopped him at gunpoint and across the Sahara Desert to the beaches at Cape Good Hope. He currently is running from Punta Arenas, Chile, to Newfoundland. Alex started filming the first leg of that journey in April 2011, spending three months on the road with Olsen through some of Chile’s most isolated stretches, up an 18,000-foot mountain pass in Bolivia that the support car wouldn’t climb and through off-road sand that mired the car but not Olsen. He and Olsen have been invited into the homes of miners who gave them copper-laced rocks. And they’ve learned about the idiosyncracies of countries and cultures, experiencing a two-week delay at the Chilean border, for instance, after learning that non-Chileans can’t take Chilean cars into Peru. “He’s really learned self-sufficiency. He’s learned to condense his life into a bag and live on $500 a month,” said
Cindy Hamlin, Alex’s mother. Alex made his first film for a sixthgrade project on Canada, using stop-action photography with claymation-type figures he’d created. The teacher kept it until she retired to inspire creativity in her students, Cindy said. In high school Alex rented all the films from the silent film era and spent hours studying them. He dressed his friends in Mafioso-type trench coats for a silent film he titled “Loaded Dice.” And a silent film he made for his senior project at Wood River High School in 2004 caught the attention of Bobby Farrelly, who directed “There’s Something About Mary,” “Dumb and Dumber” and “The Three Stooges: The Movie.” Farrelly was so impressed by the flick about a down-on-his-luck guy who finds a bag full of money that he gave Alex his phone number and told him to keep in touch. Alex continued to make short comedies featuring himself and claymation figures
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L-R: Alex Hamlin’s travels have taken him around the world, including this jaunt to Olympic Nat’l Park in Washington State. Jesper Kenn Olsen runs through Argentina. COURTESY PHOTOS
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