10.15.08

MENTOR: Helping kids to shine is part of Holly Vinson’s success.

By David Templeton

Holly Vinson may not be a household name in Sonoma County, but to hundreds of former child thespians—many of whom have grown up into working adult thespians—Holly Vinson is known as the fondest, fiercest force in North Bay children’s theater. For 14 years, the L.A.-born director-den mother has run the summer theater camp of the Santa Rosa Players, which over the last few years has been folded into the Sixth Street Playhouse in Railroad Square, where the first show of every season is traditionally Vinson’s.

Last month, the Sixth Street Playhouse honored Vinson’s years of service by officially naming the annual program the Holly Vinson Summer Theater Workshop. At the ceremony announcing the honor—following a matinee performance of the Vinson-directed musical The Music Man—dozens of adult attendees told stories of how Vinson changed their lives with her patented blend of affectionate Mama Bear coziness and passionate, no-nonsense straight shooting. Over the years, her enduring support and belief in the power of community theater has been the palpable underscoring to all that she does.

“One of the first things I always say to a new group of kids,” Vinson explains over a cup of chai, “is that, fine, if they want to be a professional actor, more power to them, but I don’t think it’s very intelligent to go into a profession where only 5 percent of the union actors are working. But then I tell them that if they want to stay in community theater, if they want to do theater in college, then there are plenty of ways to make theater a part of their lives forever—and their lives will be richer for it.”

In 1983, when Vinson first moved to Santa Rosa after 38 years in L.A., the culture shock took some adjustment, especially with Santa Rosa’s former lack of theatrical opportunities. She found a job teaching at Brush Creek Montessori School in Santa Rosa, and begun looking for ways to continue the work she’d began in L.A., where she’d founded a popular program called Kids for Kids Theater, which had run for 10 years. It wasn’t long before she resurrected Kids for Kids, using a theater she built in her living room.

Before long, she had 40 students taking acting lessons every week on her tiny, makeshift stage, and the regular stage shows she presented there often required four or five performances to accommodate the 200-plus people who wanted to see them. Eventually, she moved into a small spot in the Lincoln Arts Center, where the Santa Rosa Players had a large theater space.

Later, after she’d been approached to direct a production of Oliver, she was asked if some sort of camp could be created for the kids who would be playing the singing orphans and pickpockets. Quick as the Artful Dodger lifting a wallet, the Summer Theater Workshop was born.

“It just came to be,” Vinson says. Oliver was followed by a string of popular shows—Peter Pan, The Wizard of Oz, Bye Bye Birdie, Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat—with Vinson always casting adults in the adult roles but somehow finding ways to incorporate her growing band of theater kids.

“The important thing is finding a show that the kids can shine in,” she says. “I have insisted from the beginning that these not be shows with only kids in them, because then the only ones who come are the parents and family of those kids. My goal has been to legitimize children onstage. I want to eliminate the phrase, ‘Oh, that’s just a kid’s show.’ Kids can hold their own with the adults, and by appearing in these shows with experienced adult actors, it gives them a higher standard to rise to.

 “My students learn a lot,” she continues. “And it’s not just song-and-dance routines and stage presence and how to memorize and deliver lines; they also learn responsibility, professionalism, independence and cooperation. These are life skills they are learning, not just artistic skills.”

According to Vinson, people often tell her they are surprised at how professional the kids seem in her shows, but she insists that they never surprise her.

“I know what kids are capable of,” she says. “Kids can do anything.”

10.15.08

PRAYER: For Uribe, the circle represents sanctity.

By Gretchen Giles

Before the Persian Gulf War began in 1990, artist Mario Uribe and a group of colleagues rented a billboard in San Diego, where Uribe then lived. Blowing up an abstract brush image by Japanese master Kazuaki Tanahashi, they inscribed the advertisement with the question, ‘What If We Go to War?” On the day that the war started, Uribe climbed the billboard and threw blood-red paint over every word except ‘War.” For their part, the billboard’s owners swapped out the image that very same day.

Almost two decades later, Uribe, now 66, is in the seemingly curious position of having recently completed a war memorial for the city of Santa Rosa. Except that, from Uribe’s standpoint, it’s not curious at all. It’s yet another chance to publicly protest the unholy carnage that results when diplomacy is too quickly exhausted. And it’s emphatically not a memorial to war. It’s a monument to those who served.

‘Every art challenge that comes my way requires an art solution, and for me, designing a veterans memorial, I approach it from a perspective of not having any more wars,” Uribe says, seated in the industrial space that houses his studio and those he rents to other artists in Santa Rosa’s eclectic South A Street area. ‘We acknowledge that wars are terrible. We don’t want to glorify war, but we acknowledge that people have given their lives. So coming up with a design that was all circles, that was all positive . . . The main theme behind the design was that it was a prayer. To me, circles are prayers, that’s how I use them all the time.”

The subject of much initial controversy, Uribe’s veterans memorial, placed adjacent to Santa Rosa’s City Hall at Sonoma and Santa Rosa avenues, was unveiled this summer to near universal approval. Rather than the original proposal—a bronze statue of two soldiers that Uribe gently describes as ‘old-fashioned”—his vision includes a group of columns representing different 20th- and 21st-century conflicts inscribed with the names of residents who died in them. One column was purposefully left blank.

‘The circular configuration, the descending size of the column has to do with fewer names, less wars, less death,” Uribe explains. ‘We are moving to a point where we are not going to need to put more names on columns. The last column is left blank for that reason. That’s part of this whole prayer, this hope that we never put names on that column.”

Known as a painter, Uribe has, since he moved to Santa Rosa in 1995, been increasingly active in the civic art placements of his adopted town. He is involved in so many public projects that it’s almost hard to keep track. A former owner, with his wife Liz Uribe, of the American School of Japanese Arts, Uribe’s Zen-influenced circle paintings are his signature. Having just resigned as the creative director of ArtStart, the innovative program for high school artists cofounded by Liz and Eleanor Butchart in 1999 (and itself a 2006 Boho Award winner), Uribe remains deeply involved in the program.

For the past four years, he and the ArtStart kids have labored on the sculpture almost directly across the street from his veterans memorial at Gateway Park, a lead-in to the Prince Memorial Greenway, the trail alongside Santa Rosa Creek that ArtStart has adopted and hugely embellished. A massive rainbow trout encased in mosaic leaps from the Gateway Park’s cement floor, sparkling in the sun and promising a day when fish may again be plentiful in local creeks. Uribe hired sculptor Daniel Oberti to design the steel and concrete structure even though Oberti initially objected that he didn’t like working with teens. ‘Since then, he’s done two other projects with ArtStart,” Uribe reports with a chuckle, ‘because he loved working with the kids.” With this completed, Uribe next returns to work on a farmworkers mural some three years already in the making and to placing site-specific artworks at the Sonoma Mountain Village.

Having collaborated on civic art for over 30 years, Uribe is now firmly known as a problem-solver by city officials. It’s a designation he savors.

‘There should be an artist involved in every civic project,” he pronounces, ‘because art creates civilization.”