The vast Wells Lamson quarry was the setting for the performances in 2022, six acres of water enclosed by walls of Barre gray granite with remnants of the industry everywhere you looked. Now we bring the ingredients of that substantial project into the intimate setting of the Kents Corner State Historic Site, a pre-civil war inn and tavern where each room is empty of furniture, the lath and plaster, wide floor boards, brick fireplaces, and wallpaper offering an intriguing setting for the art. These collaborating artists are influencing one another, finding inspiration that goes beyond the 2022 presentation, unpacking visions and impressions not only of the performance on stage but of the powerful setting.

Collaborating Artists

  • Leslie Anderson sees the world as a multitude of ever changing visual compositions. Whether creating costumes, painting, filming dance, working in the garden or creating installations, her goal is to capture the feeling of being immersed in the moment.

    photo: Emily Boedecker

  • Julia Barstow is a photographer from Adamant, Vermont. She photographed The Quarry Project in its development stage beginning in 2017 through the 2022 performances. The role of project photographer was a fruitful, relational opportunity bringing together Julia’s interests in connection to place, site specific movement, process and photography. In the midst of photographic endeavors, Julia has hands in the soil and pen to paper.

    photo: Emily Boedecker

  • Hannah Dennison has been creating and producing site specific dance/theater projects in her home state for 40 years, working with civic partners, engaging with communities, and creating dance/theater pieces that employ Vermont dancers, musicians and artistic collaborators.

    Often at the end of a project, she organizes an installation/exhibit of the work of the artists with whom she has partnered so that their specific vision is front and center. The Kent Museum offers delightful challenges for all involved in The Quarry Project Echoes.

    Site specific work is unique in the performance genre. The location is the primary motivator, informing all that is created. In each of Dennison’s projects, people have said how this art has positively changed how they see and experience the place where the art was created. Situating the art made in response to a large, flooded quarry into small rooms in a pre-civil war inn and tavern alters and expands the viewer’s perception.

    photo: Emily Boedecker

  • Alisa Dworsky creates installations, buildings, drawings and prints. She is interested in how structure and force give shape to form and in the way human beings use geometric systems to order their environments. Her art is influenced by textiles, agricultural patterns, computer drawings, topographical maps, construction, architecture, and the most basic principle of quantum physics that in all matter there is movement.

    photo: Danny Sagan

  • Lukas Huffman is an award-winning filmmaker based in Montpelier, Vermont. Huffman’s narrative feature films have been screened in festivals internationally. He has been commissioned to create films for organizations such as The New York Times, Vice Media, ESPN, The Boston Globe, The National Wildlife Federation, and more. Prior to making films, Huffman was a professional snowboarder which informs his artistic interest in exploring kinetic energy. His dance films work to communicate the visceral experience of creative movement. THE QUARRY PROJECT is the result of a ten year artistic collaboration with choreographer Hannah Dennison.

    photo: Jon Steiman

  • Andreas John is an artist photographer exploring the creation of conscious media that reflects the stunning animistic web of connection within and all around us, inspiring movements of reverence, beauty, embodied truth and love. He works in medium and large format analog film as well as with modern digital tools. Andreas offers his creative services to individuals, artists, and organizations in a collaborative process to express the highest essence of what is wanting to be shared.

  • Henry John was born in Brooklyn, NY, and moved to Plainfield, VT with his family 20 years ago. In 2019, at the end of his junior year at UVM where he was a Mechanical Engineering student, he answered a post for a position in The Quarry Project to help design all their infrastructure. It was a perfect match for his skills and a fertile ground for learning. He worked alongside numerous people and dove into unknown territory, coming out relatively unscathed. In 2021 as the project headed into its last year, he became the technical director and a performer as part of what is called in the theatre, “the running crew”, with a specific role that included solving any technical glitches in the moment. During his first few years after graduation in 2020, he worked at Conant Metal and Light in Burlington, and at the end of The Quarry Project took a position at BETA Technologies, joining their team of electric airplane designers.

    photo: Emily Boedecker

  • Marcy Kass has lived in neighborhoods at the edge of woods for most of her life. This fostered a spirit of wonder and kinship with the natural world. The conversation between the human made and the naturally occurring is a thread that weaves through her work.

    A memory came back to her recently of a little pocketbook she made from leaves and twigs when she was around seven, and how happy she was with it. Marcy is a maker of things — handmade books, sewn projects, paintings and hanging sculptures.

    photo: Phoebe Helander

  • Howard Norman lives in East Calais. He received the Lannan Award in Literature. His most recent novel is Come To The Window, and his most recent memoir is The Wound Is The Place The Light Enters You, about the painter Jake Berthot.

    His personal essay, "A Dreamlike Counterpresent" is about Hannah Dennison's THE QUARRY PROJECT, which he attended six rehearsals and performances of.

    photo: Emma Norman

  • Michael Kovner was born in 1948 in Kibbutz Ein Hahoresh. Between 1972 – 1975, he studied painting in New York at the Studio School and forged a close friendship with his teacher Phillip Guston.

    He is an important painter in the Israeli painting world, concentrating mainly on landscapes of Israel. It is a deep expression of love, of caring for and understanding of the Gilboa, the sea, the desert, and Jerusalem. His work speaks of intimacy, secret, idiosyncratic languages, and the experience of gazing at and touching his homeland with compassion.

    In 2020, while confined to his home in Jerusalem, he found Hannah through their mutual love of Pina Bausch’s artistry and profound human connection. His paintings of Hannah’s work – Dear Pina, and The Quarry Project – have been important to both artists and the way they see their art and the places they live.

    Michael’s work has been exhibited in both solo and group shows in Israel at the Tel Aviv Museum, Haifa Museum, Ramat Gan Museum, Ein Harod, The University Gallery in Be’er Sheva and The Jewish Museum in New York.

  • Andric Severance is a composer, teacher, pianist, bassist, recording engineer, producer, and angler from Burlington VT. He can be heard playing regularly with High Summer, Myra Flynn Band, The Andric Severance Trio, Montpelier Community Gospel Choir, Plattsburgh State Gospel Choir, and more. He teaches piano lessons for all ages. Once, he caught a fish *this* big. Lately, he composes more music while singing in the woods than he does sitting at the piano.

    photo: Emily Boedecker

  • Menghan Wang is an interdisciplinary artist, sound artist, musician, and independent curator. Her work has been presented in galleries and events such as Goethe-Institut China, Climate Care Festival Berlin in Germany, Otis Mountain Get Down Festival in Elizabethtown NY, Green Mountain Film Festival in Vermont, and more. As the sound engineer for The Quarry Project Echoes, she is interested in working with the acoustic qualities of the historical architecture at the Kent Museum to help bring the music compositions and ambiance of the original performance to a multi-staged, vibrant experience.

    photo: 23AD

  • Michael Wisniewski is mostly an architect making affordable, multi-family housing. He is also a photographer, tango dancer, cook, lover of books and a crack procrastinator. He is very curious about fusing architecture and photography into a single entity. This may very well happen in his installation at the Kent Museum.

    photo: self portrait