Last Saturday, Stone Mountain Farm in Tillson – longtime home of the Center for Symbolic Studies – hosted its “first annual” Summer Wellness Festival. In more ways than one, it was a glimpse into what the future of the beloved site will look like, now that CSS founders Robin and Steve Larsen are going into retirement. “It’s all about the healing and performing arts, and also permaculture,” says the Larsens’ daughter Gwyneth, who along with her brother Merlin has taken over management of the bucolic facility at the foot of the Shawangunk Ridge. “We want to keep it in the spirit of what my parents created, but also make it work for us.”
Gwyneth Larsen’s influence on Stone Mountain Farm is already manifest at the site’s Fly Stage, which has long hosted trapeze lessons by the group known as Wild Arts Collective. After spending some years as a professional stuntwoman, Gwyneth became a teacher of “flying dance” at her Fifth Wall Studio in Brooklyn. “I put the Studio on hold during COVID,” she says. “Now I manage the Farm, and I’m also the director of the not-for-profit.”
But something else, something major, is afoot at this magical place, and visitors to the Wellness Festival were among the first to be introduced to a vision for the future that merges CSS with another local arts organization with a deep pedigree and a long history of collaboration: the Vanaver Caravan. The Festival was the occasion for the launch of a capital campaign to build a permanent headquarters space for both groups, most likely to be known as the Caravan Center.
Celebrating the 50th anniversary of its founding in the Hudson Valley this year, with a mission to “inspire, through dance and music, the harmonious co-existence of world cultures and traditions,” the Vanaver Caravan has become a fixture in the cultural landscape of this region, especially via the generations of children who have participated in its arts-in-education programs. Its partnership with CSS over the years includes co-organizing the pageantry of the much-loved Beltane Festival that takes place at the Farm each year on the weekend closest to the first of May.
Like many not-for-profits founded in the 1960s and ‘70s by young idealists steeped in counterculture values, the Caravan is facing the same issues of generational transition as CSS. Co-founders Bill and Livia Vanaver will undoubtedly go on making music, dancing and teaching until they drop; but like the Larsens, they’ve reached the age where it becomes necessary to ponder who’s going to take up the torch when they’re gone – not to mention how to ensure that the organization’s mission will remain relevant in the decades to come.
The Caravan has a small rented office in New Paltz’s Water Street Market, and much of the planning process over the years has happened at the Vanavers’ kitchen table, but finding class and rehearsal space for dance has been an ongoing challenge. A new generation of Caravan veterans is now stepping up to the plate, prepared to shepherd in the next phase. And that includes the dream of a “forever home,” co-owned by the organization.
“We’re interested in having a physical space to dance year-round,” says interim executive director Miranda ten Broeke, known to the troupe as Moo since she began taking dance lessons with the CaravanKids as a preschooler. “A natural evolution that feels very organic is building a four-season space…It’ll make it possible to do a lot more collaborations like Beltane.”
Presuming that its $125,000 pricetag can be raised through grants and donations, that space will be a round yurt 50 feet in diameter, made of insulated canvas by an Alaska-based company called Nomad Shelters, according to Gwyneth, who’s handling the construction logistics. “These things have serious R-value and can take a heavy-duty snow load. Some people in Alaska live in them year-round.”
Dance-friendly marley vinyl flooring will be installed atop a platform of structural insulated panels supported by Sonotube piers. The yurt will be wired for electrical service, with mini-splits for heating and air conditioning, and the ceiling will be high enough to accommodate aerial dance classes in inclement weather. Part of the plan is to make the Caravan Center available for residencies at an affordable rate to other artists for about a third of the year, says Moo. “It’ll be a space for all of the arts to thrive.”
On Saturday, capital campaign director Chelsea Miller took Wellness Festival attendees on tours to the location where this new facility is proposed to be built: in what is now a meadow, just before the first parking lot on the south side of the access road to Stone Mountain Farm, at the terminus of River Road Extension. The building site is opposite (though out of sight of) the Rail Trail Café, and there’s a bathhouse near completion right next door. Proximity to the Wallkill Valley Rail Trail will make it feasible for New Paltz and Rosendale residents to bicycle to the Caravan Center, grab a quick shower before class or quaff a local microbrew at the Café afterwards.
Organizers of the project say that a few anonymous donors have put up seed money for the campaign, whose goal is to raise $125,000 by this autumn so that the yurt kit can be ordered and delivered before winter. “We want to close out the fundraising by the year’s end and break ground as soon as it thaws,” says Miller. To become a donor or sponsor of the Caravan Center, visit https://vanavercaravan.org.
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