String camp with daily rehearsals , practices, sectionals and instructions at Camp Idlewood, Ranier Community Centre, The Dungeon, and Zion Lutheran Church. Final concert at the end of the week at Ranier Community Centre. 4- 5 p.m. Sunday – Thurs. for Sinfonia, 5:30 – 7 p.m. for adult group, Concert Friday Aug. 18 at 7 p.m. Concert location:
Ranier Community Centre
2099 Spruce St.
Ranier, MN 56668

Summer Art Camp at the Library will be a four-day art camp held in five different libraries.  The participants will work on air-dry clay, two-step watercolor process, Eric Carle style art, paper mache and more.

Robert Dewitt Adams, Elizabeth LaPensee and Christopher Selleck explore games, gaming and game mechanics in their work. Adams features his Great Lakes map sculptures, constructed from hundreds of thrift-store Battleship games to depict shipwrecks, as well as his abstract hockey collages that contain encoded game statistics. LaPensée is an Assistant Professor at Michigan State University. She created “Honour Water,” an Anishinabe singing game for healing the water, and designed and programmed “Invaders” (2015), a remix of the arcade classic “Space Invaders.” Selleck addresses issues of masculinity, identity and sexuality through interrogations of hyper-masculine sports and Pop culture. A game of croquet, designed by artist Robb Quisling, will be available to play in the Corridor, with other tie-in events offered throughout the show. Originally planned for fall of 2017 in the Morrison Gallery, the exhibit was renamed and moved to the Steffl Gallery for summer of 2017. Event will be as followed: Lecture by UMD Prof. David Beard on Games in Culture on August 23rd at 5:30pm. 

I will be traveling to the Netherlands to serve as a guest tutor for Grappelli-Django Camp, Europe’s leading workshop camp for Gypsy Jazz. The camp was started by Tim Kliphuis and Reinier Voet in 2010 and it has become an annual event whose goal is to offer a long weekend of world class tuition for international players. “Gypsy Jazz” is the style made famous by Django Reinhardt and Stéphane Grappelli in Paris in the 1930s. Their all-string jazz group is still seen as Europe’s biggest contribution to the jazz history.

The camp is open to string instrument players of all levels (beginner – intermediate – advanced). Level-based instrumental workshops are alternated with ensemble lessons, short private lessons, a guest clinic and, guided and open jam sessions. The camp takes place over two long weekends in late August. I will be a guest tutor for the first weekend, and will participate in the camp’s public concert which showcases the instructors and students.