The Blooming of Cultural Opportunities at Kendal

We all knew that the opening of the Amelia Gathering Room would create exciting and new opportunities for the residents of Kendal at Granville. Some of these events have begun to occur, and I've mentioned them in earlier postings - visits from local choirs, lectures by people of interest, a resident talent show. But the schedule of happenings is growing apace, and the reach and vitality of our cultural calendar is steadily widening. The evidence for that claim lies in two coming ventures that I'm pleased to announce.

First off, on Thursday, January 30, Kendal will host a concert by the Newark-Granville Symphony's newly-minted Chamber Orchestra. This will be the first large-scale professional musical organization to perform at Kendal, and its appearance is still another dividend from our decision to include the construction of a performance venue in our Phase II expansion plans. The concert will be, in effect, a guided tour of western music from the 16th to the 20th century, with visits from both familiar and less-familiar composers. Both Kendal and the NGSO expect that this concert will mark the launching of a long and happy cooperation between the two organizations.

But that's not all. The technology that supports the activities of the Amelia Gathering Room now allows Kendal to participate in large-scale interactive telecommunicating. As a consequence, Kendal will be partnering with the Distance Learning project of the Cleveland Museum of Art to bring classes in art history to Kendal. In these sessions, to be held in the Amelia Room, docents at the museum will use representative art works from the museum's distinguished collection to offer classes on such subjects as Impressionism, Renaissance Art, and Twentieth-Century American Art. These programs will be beamed exclusively to an audience at Kendal. And the nifty part of the linkage is that participants at each site will be able to see each other and to engage each other in real time question-and-answer exchanges. The dates for these classes are yet to be fixed. But we hope to get them started in March. And as with the NGSO project, everyone involved contemplates future interactive programing to occur between the museum and Kendal.

In future postings I'll be reporting on the success of these two ventures. For right now they represent our first steps into the wider arena of cultural access that digitization makes possible. Among people I am talking with here at Kendal, there is a palpable surge in expectations. The Phase II construction project is allowing us to enter a new phase in our engagement with the cultural world and to widen still further our redefinition of retirement in America.