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Maui Connections

An impromptu “double bill” provided one enchanted evening last Saturday at the Maui Arts & Cultural Center. The opening of “Piero Resta: Illuminations” in Schaefer International Gallery followed by an Ebb & Flow Arts multimedia concert in Castle Theater featuring the premiere of Dr. Tom Vendetti’s newest film, “The Tibetan Illusion Destroyer,” hadn’t been scheduled in conjunction with each other, but proved to be a great pairing.

With the exception of Sarah Cahill’s piano performance of works by the late California composer Lou Harrison, most of the creativity on display was Maui-built. Multimedia artist and poet Resta, who died in 2015, was a longtime Hana resident, cutting a colorful swath through Maui culture for decades. Composer Robert Pollock founded Ebb & Flow Arts on Maui in 1999 as a bridge to the cutting edge of modern music. And Emmy-award winning filmmaker Vendetti with his wife, Nancy, have also made Maui their home for decades.

Rather than feeling provincial, both the art exhibit (continuing through July 16) and concert were cosmopolitan and soulful. Their concerns and spiritual scope were more planetary than local.

Gallery Director Neida Bangerter curated a half-century of Piero’s work for the show. Sensuality and poetry blend in his soft colors and soothing images. In his last years, he used his paintbrushes to try to fend off lymphoma. Rather than a monument or memorial, the installation feels more like a home, extending a warm welcome through the Schaefer glass doors.

Piero had many descendants, and lotsa Restas flew to Maui for the opening. The women looked goddesslike in long white gowns adorned with lei; and the men wore white linen suits, obvious inheritors of Piero’s impeccable style and his zest for living life fully.

It must have been all that creativity surrounding us that sparked lively conversations with George and Janet Allan; Lali Groth; Klazine Pollock; Bruce and Kolleen Wheeler; Bruce Travis; Bruce Dunbar; Harlan Hughes and his wife, Judy Anderson, in vintage Piero T-shirts; Cynthia Conrad and Jerry Labb, Sara Tekula; Roan Browne; Glenn Beadles; Piero’s old Hana neighbor Ken Martinez Burgmaier and Luciane D’Souza.

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Meanwhile, the evening’s second act was doing a different dance next door in the Yokouchi Courtyard in preparation for the film and concert.

Kevin Horan, an old friend of the Vendettis when they were all clinical psychologists in Northern Arizona, was doing wry, nouveau-country song stylings on stage, making instant fans out of Maui guitar maker/musician Steve Grimes and his canoe-voyaging teacher and wife, Mary Anna. Nancy Vendetti, Don Lane and others had the silent auction table buzzing, featuring exotic items from Nepal where the film had been shot at the Mani Rimdu festival at the highest Buddhist monasteries in the world.

The concert began with Cahill’s mesmerizing piano artistry, which included accompanying microscopic photography of sugar granules by Dr. Gary Greenberg. Then the audience climbed aboard Vendetti Airlines headed for the Himalayas. The film program included the short documentary, “Dalai Lama and Happiness,” as well as amusing stories by Keola and Moana Beamer about trekking with the Vendettis on Nepal’s “stairmaster from hell” to the exotic thin-air monasteries that would inspire Keola to create the film’s entrancing musical score.

While PBS showings have made fans around the world for Vendetti’s documentaries, an extended ohana of creative folks has developed over the years around Tom and Nancy. The group encompasses artistic collaborators, fellow mental health practitioners, and others who have spent countless happy hours in the Vendetti living room.

Sharing the premiere with all the friends on stage and Robert Stone behind the projectors were Christopher Hedge, with his wife, Sharon; Lama Gyaltsen; Doug and Cindy Schenk; Bob and Ashleea Neal; Dave and Grace Haake and others who have hiked happy trails together, or helped make the films or brought a dish to the potlucks.

Tom’s on-screen focus for decades has been the pursuit of happiness. Reflecting the two sides of his career — filmmaker and psychologist — his films illustrate his belief that what Westerners call psychology and what the folks high in the Himalayas call Buddhism are just two different ways of talking about the same thing.

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More filmmaking with a Maui connection will be on view at Consolidated Theaters Kaahumanu 6 Wednesday. Local award-winning filmmaker Ken Martinez-Burgmaier will premiere “2307 Winter’s Dream,” the futuristic sci-fi adventure he co-produced, in screenings at 5:30 and 8 p.m.

The film is just back from the Dublin SciFi Film Festival and has already won seven festival awards since its rollout in Cannes last summer. “Ho’omau,” a Hawaii International Film Festival award winner Burgmaier co-produced, will also screen in this Hana MauiFEST Hawaii movie event. Buy tickets at www.WintersDreamMaui.Eventbrite.com.

* Rick Chatenever, award-winning former entertainment and features editor of The Maui News, is a freelance journalist, instructor at UH-Maui College and documentary scriptwriter/producer. Contact him at rickchatenever@gmail.com.

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