Yo-Yo Ma performs with local and Indigenous artists in the Upper Valley

On Saturday, Oct. 18th, the world-famous cellist Yo-Yo Ma sat down on a folding chair in the grass near the banks of the Connecticut River. It was dawn in Hanover, New Hampshire, and mist was rising off the water. He took a deep breath, then began to play.

This was "We Are Water," a special series of performances inspired by the waterways of the north. It was part of the reopening celebrations for Dartmouth’s Hopkins Center for the Arts, which just completed a three-year renovation.

Yo-Yo Ma is a fellow at Dartmouth and the founder of the Silk Road Ensemble, a Grammy-winning group that plays music from all over the world. For "We Are Water," he teamed up with Chris Newell, a Passamaquoddy musician, educator and Dartmouth graduate whose work is closely tied to the lands and waters of New England. 

Newell and Ma were joined for the sunrise ceremony and evening concert by a diverse group of Indigenous and local musicians: Jeremy Dutcher, Andri Snaer Magnason, Mali Obomsawin, Nance Parker, Roger Paul, Lokotah Sanborn, Lauren Stevens, and Ida Mae Specker, a fiddler from Andover. Their performances combined music, poetry and storytelling.

Then; a discussion of "Along the River's Way," a new multimedia exhibition and oral history project about elder artists in the Mad River Valley. We hear from Christopher Wiersema, the executive director of Mad River Valley TV, and Tracy Brannstrom, a local journalist and the primary interviewer for the project. 

The exhibition will be open to the public at Mad River Valley Arts from Nov. 6 through Dec. 13 in Waitsfield.

Broadcast on Wednesday, October 29, 2025, at noon; rebroadcast at 7 p.m.

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