for the ARTS record
Book talk: Ronne Hartfield It is a matter of personal significance for author Ronne Hartfield to be speaking on her memoir, "Another Way Home," this Wednesday at the Nantucket Atheneum, where Ralph Waldo Emerson once stood and spoke.

"I learned a language for the way my parents thought when I read Emerson. I call my parents 'Emersonian individualists,'" said Hartfield, whose mother grew up on a plantation, the child of a white master and former slave. "That's what I learned by immersion and conjecture in writing the book. That's what someone like my mother would have to be, the only way you could survive. You had to have some survival tool that allowed you to create your own capacity of thinking. And that's what made my mother what she was."

Nantucket residents Barbara Cohen and Bette Spriggs partnered with the Atheneum to bring Hartfield to the island this week for a reading and discussion on "Another Way Home."

The story follows Hartfield's mother to New Orleans and eventually to Chicago, where, Hartfield said, her parents led a life of "health and sanity" as a family that came from several generations of racial mixing.

Hartfield said she intended for the memoir to stand in defiance of "so many cultural messages, especially those directed at children of mixed race, that mixed-race children should be crazy because they couldn't locate themselves as white or black. Being of mixed race was the history of everyone in my family, and they were fine."

(Last week's Independent misstated the date of Hartfield's reading as May 9.)

When: Wednesday, May 16, 7 p.m. Where: Nantucket Atheneum, 1 India St.

Cost: Free.

For more information, please call 228-1110.

Passes for the 12th Nantucket Film Festival on sale As previously announced, the festival's opening film will be the Lajos Koltai film "Evening." The story of a dying mother and her two beset daughters, the film stars Claire Danes, Toni Collette, Vanessa Redgrave, Patrick Wilson, Hugh Dancy, Natasha Richardson, Mamie Gummer, Eileen Atkins, Meryl Streep and Glenn Close. The festival closes with the Jeffery Blitz film "Rocket Science," about a stuttering boy who joins the school's debate team to impress a girl. The year's festival also sees Robert Benton ("Kramer vs. Kramer," "Bonnie and Clyde," "The Human Stain") receive the NBC Universal Screenwriters Award and the introduction of the Adrienne Shelly Excellence in Filmmaking Award, which honors female filmmakers.

The Nantucket Film Festival will take place from June 13-17. Tickets can be purchased through the festival's Web site (www.nantucketfilmfestival. org). Tickets for individual films will be available at the end of this month. More details on the full line-up to be announced.

Nantucket ballet students travel to Boston for "Giselle" Every year, veteran Nantucket dance instructor Giovanna LaPaglia enriches her students' education on dance by taking them on trip to the Boston Ballet, with a few backstage perks.

Thanks to a grant from the Nantucket Arts Council, about 100 students and their parents traveled from Nantucket to Boston last Saturday to see a performance of "Giselle," the story of a peasant girl who falls in love with a betrothed nobleman with tragic results. It premiered in Paris in the mid- 19th century.

LaPaglia provided the students and chaperones with "packets of information," including photos of people attending the show in 1845, to read before the trip.

After the show, the group received a backstage tour, "to see how stage managers relate to conductors and to learn about the lights, the engineering, the props - it's all quite fascinating," said LaPaglia, who added that the draw of seeing a professional, "sprung" floor is always alluring to the group. "Some of the kids jump around and dance on the stage, so they can see what a real professional

stage is like," she said. I

- MG