BY TRACY ZOLLINGER TURNER
Coming up with a fresh musical and theatrical performance based on the concept “Love Songs for a Lasting World” each year can be challenging. But hammered dulcimer musician, composer, and director Malcolm Dalglish says it’s much like love itself. “In marriage and sustained relationships there is a need for the remaking and remaking what you’ve had over and over again to make it last,” he says.
“Love Songs,” now in its fourth iteration at the Buskirk-Chumley Theater, is Dalglish’s annual convergence of music, artistic movement, and a piece of pie for all. It has become a core fundraiser for Middle Way House, which provides support and services for survivors of domestic abuse, sexual violence, stalking, and human trafficking.
The focus of this year’s show will be family-centric, Dalglish says. The audience can expect plenty of lyrical playfulness, as well as a sense of the awe he recalls experiencing with his children in the natural world—”a place of reverence beyond the religions and dogmas,” he says.
“My development as a musician has really paralleled my growth as a father and family guy,” Dalglish explains. The domestic sphere may not be readily associated with love songs, but Dalglish has a wide view of the label. “Some people think of love songs as lovey-dovey dessert menu items, but I think of them as nutrition. Love songs are inclusive of family love, romantic love, affection, and the essential feeling of awe, of the out-and-out gift of being on this planet.”
The family-ness of the event is also reflected in its participants. His wife, Judy Klein, is the event’s key fundraiser. Their adult daughters, Naomi and Mia, perform. Mia’s fiancé, dancer Jun Kuribayashi, will present a piece by his Hybridmotion Collective.
“Love Songs” always ends with pie, but Dalglish says that after last year’s “climate-change rain shower” put a damper on the walk to the bonfire-lit dessert tables on the B-Line Trail, this year’s Muddy Fork Farm & Bakery pies will be served inside the theater.
The Saturday, March 2, event starts at 7 p.m. General admission tickets are $35; youth/student tickets are $20. For more information, visit bctboxoffice.org.
