'Boulder Heals' commemorates 150-day anniversary of 9/11

By Patrick Dorn, for the Daily Camera

Like prophets, mystics and madmen, artists often stand on the periphery of a culture, reflecting, clarifying and revealing a community's values. Now, in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks on 9/11, Boulder residents can look to local artists in their search for perspective, meaning, and perhaps even healing.

"Boulder Heals," a multi-media event conceived and organized by University of Colorado theater professor Jennifer Berry, draws on the talents of Boulder-based writers and visual and performing artists to acknowledge and commemorate the 150-day anniversary of the tragedy. The event will be presented at 7:30 p.m. Monday in the University Mainstage of the Department of Theatre and Dance building on the CU campus.

"'Boulder Heals' is a retrospective of feelings and thoughts about what has happened since the incident," Berry says. "What is our town going to do to recover and help make this a better world? As artists, our role is to enlighten, educate and provoke people into thinking about how we can bring about peaceful world change. It's a spiritual thing."

The multi-media event, which is free to the public, consists of poetry readings, monologues and scenes, performance art pieces and a slide show and panel discussion with local artists.

Berry will read "Heartbeat, No Pulse," a performance piece that was motivated by seeing her godchild, a first-grader, drawing pictures of people jumping out of the World Trade Center buildings, and asking her "Why do people kill each other?"

"It's about a little boy who has a heartbeat but is losing his pulse," Berry says.

A dozen of Berry's playwriting students, working separately and together, have written monologues and scenes to create a collective dramatic presentation.

"I asked the students, 'What shouldn't you have been thinking when you saw the planes flying into the buildings?' and 'What scared you most?'" Berry says. "They came up with some really interesting ideas. One student wrote how she couldn't believe how she kept wanting to see more footage. Another felt guilty for wanting his life to go on as if nothing had happened. A graduate student wrote about how a student of Middle Eastern descent had been harassed at CU."

The dramatic piece will be performed by actors from CU's theater department.

The visual artists will shows slides of their work, give a short presentation, then answer questions from the audience. Presenters include: painter Virginia Matlin, who will discuss how her work and her role as a parent has been affected by the attacks; Maria Nearay, who organized an art exchange between students at Casey Middle School and students at a Manhattan middle school; and photographer/graphic artist Robert Barnes, whose computer-enhanced photographs of the World Trade Center stand as a testimony to the structure and what it came to represent.

Barnes, who served as chief photographer for Turner Broadcasting and CNN for 14 years, remembers standing in the lobby of Tower 1 in 1980 as the hostages who had been released from Iran were given a ticker tape parade and then brought to the Windows on the World restaurant at the top of the tower for lunch.

"The World Trade Center was a heroic structure," Barnes says. "Some things become so imbedded in the fabric of our society, they become a place where you want to take former hostages to lunch after they've been released. The World Trade Center became part of the fabric of our civilization."

"Artists hold up mirrors to society," Berry says. "I felt that we had to do something, and every artist I called wanted to do it immediately. Through this process, we can open our hearts a little bit bigger."