What do we lose when we cannot gather together to take in
what we love?

The movie industry, theaters, concert venues and so much more are all in peril as a pandemic shuts down these everyday parts of our lives. Ted Hope has worked in film on a variety of levels, most recently at Amazon Studios. He is one of the industry’s big thinkers on the constant evolution of how we watch movies. Sasha Sullivan is Artistic Director and co-founder of the beloved Telluride Theatre. She will talk about how they managed to strategize and safely perform Shakespeare in the Park in this summer, as well as what happens when these sacred spaces and events go dark.

Musician Dierks Bentley has played to thousands of fans and will speak to the important relationship between the performance of live music and the audience. We further explore collective culture through two thoughtful documentary shorts. Kevin Beasley’s Raw Materials focuses on this dynamic artist who explores the challenging nature and history of an everyday material - cotton. Postman Jim tells the story of Telluride’s own Jim Looney, who retired from the town post office after twenty years and deeply understands the importance of connecting with each other, which is so challenging today.

Speakers

Dierks Bentley

For nearly 20 years, country music star Dierks Bentley has played to thousands of fans around the world. In our show Collective Culture, he will speak to the important relationship between live music and the audience, and how navigating that in a global pandemic has pushed artists to find creative solutions

Ted Hope

Ted Hope has worked in film on a variety of levels, most recently at Amazon Studios. He is one of the industry’s big thinkers on the constant evolution of how we watch movies.

Sasha Sullivan

Sasha Sullivan is the Artistic Director of Telluride Theatre. She's a director, playwright, Burlesque teacher and performer. In Telluride, she started SquidShow Theatre in 2007, which merged with the Telluride Repertory Theatre in 2011 creating Telluride Theatre. She will be speaking to the necessity of the arts in our communities and how her theatre company found creative solutions to continue to perform publicly in the midst of this crippling pandemic.

Film

Kevin Beasley’s Raw Materials

Celebrated Queens-based artist Kevin Beasley juxtaposes sound, silence, and sculpture to examine the personal and historic legacy of cotton in the American South. Set to the beat of his improvised drumming, the film charts the progress of Beasley’s most ambitious work to date - “A view of a landscape” (2019) - from its creation in his Long Island City studio to its final installation at Whitney Museum of American Art.

Postman Jim

For twenty years, Jim Looney worked at the post office in Telluride but the mail was only a small part of what he delivered to this small town. This heart-warming short documentary, directed by Telluride’s Keith Hill (and produced by Original Thinkers ringleader David Holbrooke) tells the story of Jim’s last few weeks at the post office before he retired and is full of the abundant kindness and simple wisdom that is so redolent of this fine man.