54th in a series of posts on Touchstone Theatre
So Gadfly set up for you the panel conversations about the future of Bethlehem after Festival UnBound’s “Prometheus / Redux” and “The Secret.”
Here we’ll introduce the panel and significant audience participation of the “Poets, Troubadours, and Troublemakers” event and in a following post the panel after “Hidden Seed,” which Gadfly almost forgot about since he didn’t get any video.
Gadfly is first setting these panels up for you and then will come back for closer looks.
PT&T at the intimate Godfrey Daniels on 4th St. was an hour or so of original music by 
local folk singers and composers that was followed by a like amount of time for a panel with audience participation.
Panel members were Bill George (Touchstone wizard), Bob Watts (poet, Lehigh U English Department), Paul Walsh (Charter Arts Artistic Director), Geoff Gehman (arts journalist), and Anne Hills (folk singer).
In setting up the first two panels, we’ve heard shorthand descriptions of the guiding purpose of the entire Festival as generating “a sense of ‘we’ that we have never accomplished before” and envisioning “how we move forward as people committed to building a better Bethlehem.”
Here Bill George frames once again the first principles and principal motivation for the massive 10-day Festival.
- “The purpose is to use our art as a way of bringing us together to express our feelings and thoughts about who we are as individuals and as a community and somehow where we’re going and to help it generate conversation among ourselves as to what kind of community we really want.”
- “Like Stephanie’s [Stephanie Watts] novel, nobody’s coming to save us.”
- “This music . . . calls us to understand that we have a job if we want this town, that we want our community, we’re going to have to fight for it, and the fight isn’t really with other people, it’s with ourselves not just to sit back and let it go.”
Much more on this event in later posts.
Festival UnBound
Closed but never forgotten
