Enchanted Islands at Nellieville

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“ENCHANTED ISLANDS” RETURNS TO DOWNEAST MAINE 

“Faerie Queen Story Hour” returns with new magic for the Deer Isle woods

DEER ISLE, MAINE – This August 1st-7th, something magical for audiences of all ages is coming back to Deer Isle.

Melody Bates, in partnership with Nervous Nellie’s Jams and Jellies and the Stonington Public Library, presents the return of ENCHANTED ISLANDS - a living art story project. Think of it as Faerie Queen Story Hour: wandering through the woods, you happen upon the Fairy Queen, bedecked in otherworldly finery, a book open on her lap, ready to tell you a story. This enchanting project delighted Deer Isle audiences last summer, and will return in August for a second annual residency at Nellieville.

The project’s creator Melody Bates is well-known in the Blue Hill Peninsula region for her two original plays, R & J & Z and Avalon, both produced by Opera House Arts. In Enchanted Islands, she performs her original fairy tales in curated locations at Peter Beerits’ woodland art park, costumed in spectacular garments designed for each tale by Jennifer Paar. This innovative collaboration debuted in 2023 with three fairy tales. Since then, the stories have been featured at 5th Wall Studio in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and at the Hudson Valley Beltane Festival in upstate New York. The project is the latest collaboration between Bates, Beerits, and Paar, who all worked together on Bates’ 2019 production of Avalon, which received a special award for Innovation and Creativity from the State of Maine.

Deer Isle resident and former Maine State Representative Genevieve McDonald brought her daughters to Enchanted Islands in July 2023. “Melody’s vibrant storytelling makes magic come to life in the fairytale forest at Nellieville,” she says. “My daughters absolutely loved it!”

This year’s story lineup includes “Cap-o-rushes,” “All the Birds of the World, and “The Twelve Dancing Princesses,” plus an all-new fourth story: Bates’ take on “Diamonds and Toads,” complete with a fabulous fairy godmother costume. “I loved fairy tales as a little girl,” she says. “I found so many heroic characters who happened to be girls, something I rarely found in literary fiction. With this project, I get to bring beloved tales to life in my own unique voice, celebrating their humor and humanity, what they teach us about how to grow up, how to be brave in the face of hardship, how to heal, how to live a good life. I think that’s what ‘happily ever after’ means: not that everything is easy or perfect, but that you can look back and know you’ve lived a good life.” 

Bates will also offer a storytelling workshop during her residency on Deer Isle, in collaboration with the Stonington Public Library and Nervous Nellie’s Jams and Jellies. Registration is open to beginning and experienced writers, ages 16 and up, with scholarships available.

ENCHANTED ISLANDS will float into view August 1st-7th at Nellieville on Deer Isle, with a special “Faerie Queen Story Hour” event at the Stonington Library on August 2nd at 1 pm. Audience costumes are encouraged! Attendance at all performances is free to the public, with donations accepted.

NELLIEVILLE is located at 598 Sunshine Road, Deer Isle, Maine

ARTIST BIOS

MELODY BATES (she/ they) is a native Oregonian actor and writer based in Brooklyn, NY, whose first professional acting job was at the Stonington Opera House. She is a queer femme creatrix whose award-winning work includes Avalon and R & J & Z, both of which had world premieres on Deer Isle. As an actor and dancer, she has performed at the Metropolitan Opera, The Public Theater, Brooklyn Academy of Music, La Mama ETC, The New Ohio Theatre, ART Boston, Theatre des Amandiers (Paris), and Cankarjev Dom (Ljubljana). TV and film appearances include Law & Order SVU, I Am Homicide, PBS Great Performances, and the indie feature Ask For Jane. Melody’s play R & J & Z, called “boisterous and splendid” by the NY Times, is available from Original Works Publishing and continues to be produced around the country. The New York Independent Theater Awards have recognized her with acting, writing, ensemble, and original music awards. She was featured in Necessary Exposure: The Female Playwright Project, and was a finalist for the Doric Wilson Independent Playwright Award.

PETER BEERITS (he/ him) studied art at Boston Museum School and completed an MFA in sculpture at Long Beach State in California. He then returned to Deer Isle and started a jam business in the kitchen of a tiny white clapboard cottage, surrounded by sculptures from his MFA show. Over time, the jam business thrived and he returned to making art in response to a growing visitor audience. He is interested in the intersection of myth and history: the gunslinger, the sheriff, the knights. The king who is born in a stable, the fairy queen who presides over the end of her era. The campus covers four acres and includes a Western town, juke joint, general store, and garage. In the woods, deeper in mystery, a Grail Castle, wizard’s tower, and church. The entire installation has 95 figures and fifteen buildings and is seen by tens of thousands of people annually. His work is something like a movie set which can trigger deeply-felt emotions. It is transactional in the way that theater is, a portal to unscripted psychic terrain. Some visitors to his life’s work at Nellieville are profoundly moved by what they experience there. This intersection of art and audience changes lives.

JENNIFER PAAR (she/ her) has worked in New York and regionally as a costume designer for over 20 years. In 2019 she designed the costumes for Avalon, a site-specific collaboration with Melody Bates and Peter Beerits. In New York, she has worked extensively with the Obie-Award winning Keen Company, having designed sixteen shows with them including: Year of Magical Thinking, Ordinary Days, Tick, Tick...Boom, and Alphabetical Order. Other New York credits include Othello (New Place Players), Transatlantica (Operating Theater), Futurity, The Musical (Joe’s Pub), Every Day Above Ground with Sabooge Theatre (PS 122), and Thrill Me (York Theatre). Regional credits include Sense & Sensibility, The Fantasticks (Cape Playhouse), On Golden Pond (Bucks County Playhouse), Glengarry Glen Ross (Asolo Rep), and Rabbit Hole (Premiere Stages). Jennifer is also the Co-Founder of The Costume Studio, a non-profit organization that provides space and supplies for costume designers working on non-profit productions in NYC. 

NELLIEVILLE, or Nervous Nellie’s, is an eclectic campus covering several acres in an idyllic island setting, a one-time homestead and heirloom orchard at the edge of a spruce forest. Founded and run by Peter and Anne Beerits, it includes a working jelly kitchen where they make about 300 jars of jam a day by hand using mainly Maine fruits. The meadow and woods are filled with sculptures made by Peter from discarded metal, locally-milled lumber, dump-foraged material.  A Western town--jail, lawyer's office, fortune teller, hotel, saloon, Chinese laundry--sits shoulder to shoulder with a Delta-style juke joint, a Deer Isle general store, a church, a Grail castle, wizard's tower, 50's garage complete with jam session:  all comprise Nellieville, a lifelong work in progress.