As summer fades and the reality of snow sets in, do you ever think, “sometimes, I just wish the Gathering could come to me”…? Well, it’s happening! We’re gathering—In. Your. Town.—with our new northern Nevada traveling series that brings family-friendly, sunset film screenings and classic cowboy poetry, music, and humor direct to your backyard.
Drawing on over 30 years of archival footage and a wide network of artists, each stop on the Gathering in Your Town circuit will be unique, just like the towns it visits. Between the educational and entertainment experiences you know and love from the Elko National Cowboy Poetry Gathering captured on film, and the artists and entertainers you know and love from your neck of the woods, it’s a match made… well, under a lucky “nighttime in Nevada” moon.
Watching footage of Pipp Gillette and Lloyd Wright during the Gathering in Your Town film in Winnemucca, Nevada, on Saturday, October 8, 2021.
[photo description: an audience sits on folding chairs in an outdoor courtyard lit by string lights and a twilight moon while watching video projected against the brick wall of the Humboldt Museum]
The temperatures may have dropped quickly, but our premiere stop in Winnemucca last Saturday had a hearty local audience, hearty local ambience, our new big-screen movie projector, and that moon!
Carolyn Dufurrena reads one of her pieces in Winnemucca on Saturday, October 9th, as part of the National Cowboy Poetry Gathering in Your Town program.
Dufurrena said it was really meaningful to be able to perform in Winnemucca. While her work takes her out on the road, doing readings at the Elko Gathering among other places, opportunities are rarer for her to share her work with her hometown community. Dufurrena’s poetry was joined by Celeste Brody’s songs and Jack and Dixie Southwick’s recitations. Big thanks to local hosts at the Humboldt Museum and Great Basin Arts & Entertainment, and of course to Carolyn, Celeste, and Jack!
The hospitality, Winnemucca flavor, and opportunity to have a good laugh and a good (if nippy) open-air gather sparked our excitement to continue the Gathering In Your Town tour. As we all adapt to new ways of gathering in person, the insight and wit of cowboy entertainers seems especially resonant: themes of distance, resiliency, uncertainty, making do, and what to do when the herd can’t or won’t herd.
Next up on the circuit: Battle Mountain and Tuscarora… once the high desert springtime kicks in. As we anxiously await that first thaw and the opportunity to continue sharing the Gathering experience with, and in, the wider Nevada community, we want to know…
Do you want us to come to you? Are you a partner organization/venue that would like to host a Gathering In Your Town outdoor event next year? Get in touch! We’re working on plans to add stops to the circuit and we can’t do it without you.
Email Brad at bmcmullen@westernfolklife.org.
