SIBYLLE SZAGGARS REDFORD’S CONSERVATION CRY

This page: The Way of the Rain—Voices of Hope for Brushwood Center at Ryerson Woods / 2018 June 1. From left: Tim Janis, Sibylle Szaggars Redford, Floyd Thomas McBee, Robert Redford. Photograph by Karsten Staiger. Opposite: Sibylle Szaggars Redford, Santa Fe October, 2018, watercolor on Arches watercolor paper, 15 x 11 in. Photograph by John Baker.

The multidisciplinary artist brings The Way of the Rain —Hope for Earth to Dallas Symphony.

BY LEE CULLUM PHOTOGRAPHS BY KARSTEN STAIGER

Some say the world will end in fire, Some say in ice. From what I’ve tasted of desire I hold with those who favor fire. But if I had to perish twice, I think I know enough of hate To say that for destruction ice Is also great And would suffice.

Robert Frost, when he wrote this, might well have had a premonition of the end-times we are facing if dramatic action isn’t taken soon to save the planet. That is the urgent energy propelling Sibylle Szaggars Redford, who is bringing the latest version of her production, The Way of the Rain—Hope for Earth, to the Meyerson Center October 22. Initiated by Trammell S. Crow, Michael Cain and EarthxFilm, A Festival for our Future, with the Dallas Symphony Orchestra plus choir, film, art, and spoken word by her husband Robert Redford, this will be the US premiere of a work that was first mounted in Monaco a year ago under the aegis of HSH Prince Albert II. It is as if Szaggars Redford were born for this moment. For years SSR, as can be found writ large on some of her paintings, has married nature to art, but now, in a great apotheosis, she has deployed her art, with unmistakable immediacy, to glorify Mother Earth so forcefully that rescue can be postponed no longer. From chaos to the Big Bang to the Milky Way and the ascendancy of the sun, she charts the improbable appearance of the Earth, so beautiful, she says in a phone interview, “so tiny…there is nothing like it.” The narration she crafted with Robert Redford for him to read rings with wisdom, some of it indigenous, such as this: “I do not believe we go up to the sky unless it is to come down again, with the rain.”

As a seasoned environmental artist, Szaggars Redford felt she needed a stronger voice to promote awareness and open up conversations about environmental consciousness. “I decided to create a staged, live, and moving painting through the addition of other art forms—music, sound, light, dance, film, and the spoken word. This underlined my concern for our planet, and through collaboration with my rain-painting process, I envisioned The Way of the Rain,” she emphasizes.

The show in Dallas is a continuation of earlier iterations, which began in 2013 through collaborations with diverse composers who embraced her originality and story line. Five years ago, at Carnegie Hall, the performance featured Al Gore and novelist N. Scott Momaday among others, some of them singers, some instrumentalists, all highly gifted. Tim Janis composed the music and Floyd Thomas McBee assembled the art film. By then Szaggars Redford had “created a little team” she relates, including McBee and Gregory Leon Baird, now managing director of The Way of the Rain, Inc., a nonprofit into which this group has gradually grown.

By the time he joined forces with Szaggars Redford, Janis already had moved from Maine to Santa Fe with his wife, film producer Elizabeth Demmer. He found something “soothing, peaceful” in New Mexico, which is what he pursues in the music he writes and conducts throughout the US and Europe. Even so, he tells me by phone, growing up in Maine shaped his life in important ways since he “has always gravitated to water.” But Santa Fe is definitely the place to be if working with Szaggars Redford, water or no water, since meetings with “Mrs. Redford,” as he unfailingly refers to her, were essential while creating Rain. He had to be sure the music was “conveying her inspiration.”

McBee, the video artist, also was at those meetings, but not before he would “hide in a cave for a while,” collecting images, with no music at all, to go on at first. Then, with reactions from the group in hand, plus the beginnings of work from Janis, which soon would outpace his pictures, back to the cave he went.

McBee found his way to Santa Fe from Tennessee, where he attended two colleges as a home-state guy before decamping to Dresden to continue the music studies he had begun at Belmont University in Nashville, exploring monophonic tones such as Gregorian chants. From there he moved on to the avant-garde in Germany, building sound “from the ground up…dissecting it to the nanosecond” with computers—definitely polyphonic—then to St. John’s in Santa Fe to immerse himself in “the great thinkers.” He points out by phone that “Beethoven would have studied Euclid, Shakespeare. I realized I was deficient in that area” and did not have “that exposure to depth and inspiration.” After teaching English in Japan, he returned to a job at St. John’s College and met Szaggars Redford, whom he calls Bylle. An early convert to her environmentalart movement, he took up creating visual images and worked with her

Sibylle Szaggars Redford, Santa Fe October Rain #3, 2016, watercolor on Arches watercolor paper, 11 x 15 in. Photograph by John Baker. Sibylle Szaggars Redford, March 10, 2016, Early Morning Rain in Saint Helena, 2016, watercolor on Arches watercolor paper, 22 x 30 in. Photograph by John Baker. Sibylle Szaggars Redford, Royal Torarica Hotel, Paramaribo, Suriname, May 7, 2016, 2016, watercolor on Arches watercolor paper, 11 x 15 in. Photograph by John Baker.

on projects from Santa Fe and Albuquerque to Miami and Monaco.

“Life” he avers, “is a process of production.” Janis holds to a similar view: “Life is a forward journey.” For them, both the process and the journey led to Szaggars Redford, who spent her early life on a farm near Hamburg, which had been “totally destroyed by firebombs” during the Second World War. “A major factor for myself,” she notes, “was a focus on nature.” When her father took a job in Hamburg and moved the family there (“there was no there there for me,” she laments), the young Sibylle “would sit in my room and create farm trees and animals—it was an escape for me.”

She did not go to art school, however. “I applied for it,” she says, but, “I was a tomboy; my grades were not good enough.” Instead, she pursued hotel management. At 21 she set out for London and, in time, worked to take Cats to Germany, plus two other hits by Andrew Lloyd Webber: Starlight Express and Phantom of the Opera. When all that came to an end, she moved to the US, where a skiing invitation landed her in Utah. “It was a nice getaway from London,” she recalls, and she decided, “I’ll stay and paint for a year.” She never left. Instead, she fell in love with the land, with Native American history, and with Robert Redford.

When the two of them moved to Santa Fe she turned to the pivotal invention of her life: rain painting. Inspired by the monsoons of Northern New Mexico, she found a way to put pigment on dry paper— not wet which is usual for watercolors—and put those papers out to catch the showers that used to pour in the afternoons— alarmingly, less so now. Visitors to Santa Fe in recent years have met admonishments to use as little water as possible because of the drought. She found more rain, however, in Suriname, where the American ambassador asked her to make art as part of a program for embassies. The rain paintings are unexpectedly radiant, not damaged at all by the elements but rather resplendent in primary hues vivid enough to bring the hope that she is working to generate.

Szaggars Redford is a renowned practicing artist who has mastered a variety of mediums while keeping the environment at the forefront of her work. Her nontraditional application to wood fragments and other natural materials informs her oeuvre. Over the course of her career, her work has been exhibited in Europe, Monaco, Peru, Singapore, Japan, and throughout the United States. Concertgoers and patrons will have the opportunity to view her work through a solo exhibition at the Christopher Martin Gallery in Dallas from October 18 to November 4.

As for Robert Redford, here is part of an email from him: “… The urgency I feel about the threat of climate change is at an all-time high...Increased drought, fires, more severe storms, a warming and rising ocean, flooding, and deadly heat waves continue to mount… Scientists warn that our planet is approaching an irreversible tipping point…So yes, I feel a heightened sense of urgency, but I also have optimism and hope that we can come together and use the tools available to reduce greenhouse gas emissions before it is too late. We can’t stop trying.” P