Poems with Wings

MORE ABOUT POEMS WITH WINGS ….

Poet and actor Court Dorsey and cellist Eugene Friesen will collaborate on a series of three performances in January 2026, including January 24 at the Wendell Meetinghouse (1 Morse Village Road, on Wendell Common in Wendell, MA), January 31 at Next Stage (15 Kimball Hill, Putney, VT), and February 1 at The Workroom (APE, 33 Hawley St., Northampton, MA). All performances will be at 2 pm.

Dorsey and Friesen first performed together in June 2022 as part of the Mohawk Trail Concert series, with Court reading poetry by Billy Collins, as well as his own work, in collaboration with Eugene’s cello improvisations. “The audience was captivated by their spirited interchange and magical responsiveness to one another,” wrote Mark Fraser, Executive Artistic Director, Mohawk Trail Concerts. “The poetry was alive!” Their January 2026 performances will reprise the improvised cello and poetry readings format, with a focus on Dorsey’s poems included in his 2024 collection of mystical poems, Tiger Stripes: Poems of Shadow and Light.

Four-time Grammy Award-winner Eugene Friesen is active internationally as a concert and recording artist, composer, conductor and teacher. Eugene has worked and recorded with such diverse artists as Dave Brubeck, Martin Sexton, Toots Thielemans, Betty Buckley, Dar Williams, Will Ackerman, and Dream Theater.  Eugene's passion for improvised music has been featured in concerts all over the world with Paul Simon, the Paul Winter Consort, and with Trio Globo (Friesen, Howard Levy and Glen Velez). Eugene is an artist-in-residence at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City, and is Professor of Music at the Berklee College of Music in Boston. He appeared on Garrison Keillor's "A Prairie Home Companion" playing with Keillor and superstar soprano Renée Fleming and has performed as a soloist at the International Cello Festival in Manchester, England; Rencontres d'Ensembles de Violoncelles in Beauvais, France; the World Cello Congress in Baltimore, Maryland; and the Rio International Cello Encounter in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Friesen’s recording credits include five albums of original music, more than 30 CDs with the Paul Winter Consort, and hundreds of tracks featuring his rapturous cello playing on instrumental albums, films, and television scores. 

Court Dorsey has written, acted, or directed in over 30 performance ensembles, including his recent world premiere of Swamped, an original play he wrote and directed, focused on the reconciliation of red/blue state divides, with ten performances in Wendell and Hadley, MA and two more scheduled in January in Brattleboro, VT. He also performs selections of his original songs, poems and short writings as a solo performer. Dorsey has been a member of Pilgrim Theater Collaborative (Mephistopheles in Faust 2002, BCA, Malta Theater Festival in Poznan, Poland and Guys Dreamin’ co-created with Jean-Claude van Itallie and Kermit Dunkelberg, La Mama E.T.C., “Top Ten Shows of the 1997-8 Season”, New York Theater Wire), and Serious Play Theater Ensemble (Milosevic at the Hague, Joakim Interfest, Serbia). He was a frequent guest artist at Amherst College and was Artistic Director at the Maezumi Institute for Zen Studies in Montague, MA.  He has appeared in the films Voices of Belarus, an international activist theater project, as Brother Wilf in Elyria Pictures’ Bridge of Names and as Des Plains in Elyria’s Anniversary.  In 2010, he co-created, directed and performed in Ambush on T Street with collaborators John Sheldon and Al Miller.  He was a founding member of the folk cabaret ensemble Bright Morning Star, including tours with Pete Seeger and Odetta.

Dorsey notes, “Over the years, I have created many written pieces: some for the theater, a few short stories, shreds of memoir, short prose pieces, ‘dark rhymies’ (some of which have become songs), a novel (in the works), and any number of poems. These include mystical or philosophical poems.  Some are humorous or ironic, others describe states of consciousness that feel especially significant. In others I try to write my way through dilemmas and existential befuddlements. Many are attempts to integrate spiritual practices I have found valuable. Tiger Stripes: Poems of Shadow and Light is a collection of these mystical poems. I look forward to performing them in collaboration with the stunning cello of Eugene Friesen.”

Friesen excels in improvisation.  He offers to students and collaborators “music as a discovery — exploring themes of musical freedom, innovation, and creative strategies. These draw on wisdom from musical masters, as well as personal reflections that bridge the gap between structured learning and free, expressive play.”

Tickets for all three venues are $15 in advance, $20 at the door.  http://www.courtdorsey.com/events for advance tickets. The January 24 performance at the Wendell Meetinghouse (where Dorsey is President of the Board) is sponsored in part by a grant from the Wendell Cultural Council, a local agency which is supported by the Mass Cultural Council, a state agency. The Wendell Meetinghouse is part of the MA Card to Culture program, offering discounted tickets to EBT, WIC and ConnectorCore cardholders for the Wendell performance of Poems with Wings.