for the Arts record
Chanteyman Don Sineti performs

The Nantucket Whaling Museum will host Mystic Seaport's chanteyman Don Sineti at a performance tonight at 7 p.m., free to Nantucket Historical Association members and $15 for the public. Sineti, also an artist, will utilize traditional instruments for his sailor's songs and folk chanteys that depict, in song, life on the seas. He will also offer drawing classes during the Family Whale Festival on July 17 and 18 at the museum, held from noon to 4 p.m.

The Family Whale Festival on the 17th and 18th is for all ages and is a coordinated endeavor between the NHA, the International Fund for Animal Welfare, Water Education for Teachers and Project WET.

The festival is meant to highlight the whale's vital place in Nantucket's history and in today's world. Besides drawing classes with Sineti, there will be interactive events such as listening to whale sounds, learning the history of whaling whale biology, creating origami whales and scrimshaw replicas and listening to songs of the sea.

The Essex gam will recount the tragedy of the whaleship, showing visitors what it would have been like to travel the ship's doomed round-trip voyage from Nantucket to the Pacific Ocean when sailors became adrift in flimsy boats on the open, sometimes fierce ocean, after the Essex was stove in by a whale. The true tale was the basis for the story of the novel, "Moby Dick."

The festival is free for NHA members and with museum admission. I