Focal Point: Not The Landscapers!
By Judy Stein
At least once every week or two, I get a call from somebody wanting their grass cut or some bushes replaced, and I have to tell them “That’s not us; that’s those other guys, they spell their name differently, etc, etc.” Occasionally one of them will say “What are you guys then?”
When that happens, to save time I generally tell those people we are a concert venue and that’s true as far as it goes. However, there’s a good deal more to Focal Point than that. We seem to have outgrown a few of our erstwhile definitions. Focal Point began life as a coffeehouse, back in the ‘70s, one of many such establishments devoted to the presentation of “folk music.” The term even then meant different things to different people. To the founders, it meant no electric instruments, mostly soloists, mostly songwriters or performers of traditional ballads and songs.
Fast forward to now, we are located at 2720 Sutton Blvd in Maplewood. Flyers that we keep in a box at the front of the venue say “Traditional Arts Center and Listening Room,” which are marginally more defined terms than “folk music.” We no longer serve the coffee and popcorn common in those early days. We also allow electric instruments, as well as guitars, pianos, bagpipes, dolceolas, kazoos, — there are no banned instruments. We still present concerts, nearly every Friday and Saturday night, and we try to divide the performances as equally as possible between local/regional, nationally known performers, and international musicians.
On the other sign, in the window, we call ourselves a listening room, for the following reasons: people come to actually pay attention to the music. The room itself, and our sound engineers, are specially focused on providing the most accurate, best-balanced possible sound at the shows. We don’t have a bar; people tend to bring in their own refreshments or go across the hall to a very nice Mexican restaurant for drinks. Musicians like us; always have: they feel appreciated, they get paid, they come back, they refer us to other musicians. The people who play here do tell their friends.
But wait; there’s more! True to our folk -music roots, the concerts we present are just one side of our mission: the rest of the week is given over to people who want a chance to actually do the music themselves! You like to sing or write poetry, or dance? You want to find other people who do as well? One Sunday a month, the Arcadia Dance Orchestra holds an open rehearsal, and welcomes the general public in to listen and dance! On Sunday afternoons, the morris dancers hold practice—sort of a cross between street theatre and martial arts—and all are welcome to watch or participate. On the fourth Sunday evening, tango happens! (Oh the stilettos, oh the drama;) Then on the first and third Mondays of the month, there’s Irish dancing. Not the Riverdance competition stuff, but real Irish dance, in sets kind of like square dance only different. The second Tuesday of the month we have contradancing: more American, more countrified; There’s also the poetry society on one Tuesday a month. Every Thursday we host the international folk dance. I recommend all these events: music and dance need to be behaviors, not just spectacles to watch.
In between these regular events, we rent out the building to folks who want to put on their own shows! We’ve been host to every sort of entertainment from Cajun dances to classical ensembles to bluegrass to head-banging hard rock to puppet shows to student recitals to plays—at one point we had a very nice burlesque event.
In coming issues of this publication, I hope to explore all of these different aspects of the Focal Point aesthetic, focusing on particular artists, concerts, groups who use the building, and perhaps even a bit of my two-cents-worth on what makes all these things traditional arts, and how they fit into the musical/dance spectrum. I’ll interview artists and participants, alert you of upcoming highlights, and invite you to listen, sing, dance, enjoy.
Judy Stein grew up in East St Louis. She has been singing, according to family members, since birth; actively collecting songs since about 12 or 13 years old. Along with the Irish music, She has volunteered at Focal Point from 1983 to the present, occasionally running the venue single-handedly. She also produced a weekly KDHX radio show on Sunday mornings, from1987 until they moved to Grand Center.
