War is not an abstraction. And the wounds of war don’t stop at the warrior. They reverberate through families and communities. The salient question remains “When does war end?” For veterans and their families and loved ones the answer is complex. “Between War & Here” is a new collaboration between journalists and musicians, exploring honor, courage, loss, and hope, with music, poetry, and memoir.
This theater piece, which premieres in Salt Lake City on November 4 at the Jeanne Wagner Theater as it heads into its first national tour, features NPR’s Neal Conan and Anne Garrels, who have covered wars and conflicts around the world, have been in the middle of firefights, have seen war, lived it, and been changed by it. “Between War and Here” also features Ensemble Galilei, whose members Sue Richards and Carolyn Surrick spent seven years of Fridays playing for wounded warriors and their families at The Walter Reed National Military Medical Center. Tickets available at ArtTix.
Join us Thursday at 9:00 a.m. for Access Utah when our guests will include Anne Garrels; Neal Conan; and Carolyn Surrick from Ensemble Galilei.
For almost 25 years Anne Garrels was the senior foreign correspondent for NPR, reporting from Russia and the other former Soviet republics, the former Yugoslavia, the Middle East, China, Mongolia, and Iraq. She arrived in Baghdad six months before the 2003 U.S. invasion, stayed during the U.S. bombing campaign and continued to cover Iraq for the next six years. Before joining NPR in 1986 she was chief correspondent in Moscow and Central America for ABC, and the State Department correspondent for NBC. She has been honored with numerous journalism awards, including the Peabody and the Polk. Garrels is on the board of Oxfam America and the Committee to Protect Journalists.
Over 36 years with National Public Radio, Neal Conan worked as a correspondent based in New York, Washington, and London; covered wars in the Middle East and Northern Ireland; Olympic Games in Lake Placid and Sarajevo; and a presidential impeachment. He served, at various times, as editor, producer, and executive producer of All Things Considered and may be best known as the long-time host of Talk of the Nation.
Carolyn Surrick lives outside Annapolis, Maryland with her daughter, her beloved extended family, and two dogs. She received a BA in music from the University of California, Santa Cruz and an MA in musicology from George Washington University. Carolyn has been playing with Ensemble Galilei for more than twenty years. In that time the group has recorded eleven CDs, performed for tens of thousands of people in almost every state in this country, Canada, and Mexico, has done outreach in the schools with thousands of students, and has created four special projects including their most recent collaboration with the Metropolitan Museum of Art, First Person: Seeing America.