HOT SPRINGS — On a typically muggy Sunday in August 2005, singer and watercolorist Deleen Davidson loaded her mother, four cats, a change of clothing and a laptop into her car and fled Slidell, La., for Hot Springs to wait out a severe hurricane predicted to hit New Orleans and the Mississippi coast the next morning.
Davidson, a native of New Orleans, was used to weather forecasters’ dire predictions about the hurricanes that threaten the city every year, so she didn’t expect this storm to be more dramatic or damaging than those in the past. But officials advised residents to evacuate their homes so she decided to ride it out at a house her mother, Marilyn Davidson, owns on Lake Hamilton. Deleen Davidson says she figured they would simply drive to Hot Springs, check on the house, spend the night and return to Louisiana the next day.
Like thousands of other Katrina refugees, she never imagined that storm waters would break through 53 levees on Lake Pontchartrain and flood 80 percent of New Orleans, destroy part of the Mississippi coast and wipe out the life she’d built.
“By Monday night, we suspected the damage was such that it was going to [affect] us strongly,” she says. “But it actually took a month before we began to realize what that meant.”
Davidson didn’t visit her home on the northern shore of Lake Pontchartrain again until October that year, but knew even before she saw her house (only the studs remained) that her home, possessions and livelihood had been literally and irretrievably washed away. Everything - her singing career, interior design business and visions for finding ways to teach about the holistic benefits of the fine arts - had been dispersed by the flood waters.
“Everything I thought I relied on was gone overnight. Possessions, commitment, obligations, attachment - from one day to the next, I just didn’t have those anymore. All of these basically superficial things, these everyday things we rely on, they’re not as permanent as we believe,” Davidson says. “It really did teach me that everything is changeable.”
Seven years later, she doesn’t dwell on regrets, the past, the minutiae of daily life, her singing career, the future. There’s no point. That life is what it is today, tomorrow and every day is a natural conclusion of a person whose life was yanked loose from seemingly secure moorings, then shaken violently and flung aside in fragments.
Fortunately, Davidson - described by friends and family as resilient, upbeat and resourceful with an unfailing faith in God - has never been afraid of change or challenges, meeting new people or living in unfamiliar places. As a classically trained soprano, she has traveled the world performing, studying and teaching. She has performed in opera and musical theater productions in Austria, Japan and the United States. From 2001-2005, she was a soloist with the New Orleans Opera and the Gulf Coast Opera.
Davidson made her professional debut in 2001 with the Gulf Coast Opera, performing the role of Zerlina in La Serva Padrona. She followed that with roles in Rigoletto, Cavalleria Rusticana and The Merry Widow. In 2005, she debuted in New York, singing Susanna in Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro with Martina Arroyo’s Prelude to Performance series. She also has performed in The Mikado, Evita, Scrooge, Man of La Mancha, Sweeney Todd, Cosi fan Tutte, Don Giovanni and Oklahoma!, among others. In Hot Springs, she has participated in more than 70 concerts and recitals.
A FATED MOVE
While working through all the emotional, financial and logistical issues arising from Katrina’s aftermath, Davidson and her mother remained at the Hot Springs house, which her parents had intended to be their retirement home. But a short time after retiring, Davidson’s father died and her mother moved back to New Orleans. But she kept the house, which became their haven after the storm.
Hot Springs, a city that enthusiastically supports and embraces the arts, seemed an ideal place to rebuild their lives, Davidson says, adding that what may appear a happenstance move actually feels fated. Her parents fell in love with the Spa City in the late 1950s and early 1960s when Marilyn Davidson - also a classically trained and well-known soprano - studied with renowned Australian opera singer Marjorie Lawrence when she held workshops at the Arlington Hotel.
Today, her mother lives in the lake house, but Deleen Davidson moved into a cottage near Oaklawn Park, where she began establishing herself in the city’s arts community by holding small recitals and concerts. Those events were the beginning of The Muses Creative Artistry Project, a nonprofit organization Davidson founded to explore and promote the synergy of musical, visual, performing and written arts as healing, enriching forces that bring balance to an individual’s life.
“The people of Hot Springs love her,” says philanthropist Dorothy Morris, a Muses board member who will be honored June 7 at a fundraiser in the Governor’s Mansion to benefit The Muses. “Deleen is such an asset to the community. We’re so proud of her. Not only is she incredibly talented, but she’s smart and knows how to run an organization.”
“The Muses is a gateway to inspire people to explore their own creativity and show them that experiences in personal creativity enrich them as human beings - make them more interesting, more satisfied, more complete human beings,” Davidson says. “One of the things we explore is how early exposure to the arts and performance can be truly influential on the development of a person and his personality. It’s wonderfully liberating and formative.”
DESTINED FOR MUSIC
Davidson was born into her love of music and arts. Her mother sang opera, played piano and was a sought-after soloist. Davidson’s first stage appearance was in utero when her mother sang the role of Mimi in La Boheme for the New Orleans Opera.
“She was always exposed to music,” Marilyn Davidson says. “In fact, the Sunday before she was born on Thursday, I was playing the piano and singing hymns in our church. So she was hearing music, or feeling the vibrations, in the womb.”
Marilyn began teaching her daughter how to play the piano before she was 3 years old and about age 3 1/2 years, Deleen Davidson had her first public performance. “By performance, I mean a small recital in the home of one of my students,” Marilyn says. “She played a little piece called ‘Ladybug.’ She also sang ‘The Caissons Go Rolling Along.’”
Growing up, Deleen Davidson also learned to play the violin, took dance lessons, studied painting and visual arts, performed in community theater musical productions, and was a member and soloist in her church choir. Today, she’s the choir director at Arkansas School for Mathematics, Sciences and the Arts and choir director for First Presbyterian Church in Hot Springs.
“I’ve sung tons of sacred music. It has been a constant throughout my entire life,” Davidson says. “Being choir director at First Presbyterian has been a lovely coming together of my early training and the benefits I received from sacred classical music.”
“She has a very beautiful, lyrical soprano voice,” says Bill Stiebing, a family friend who has known Davidson since she was 9 years old. “She can sing pop but she prefers opera and classical music. Her voice is a pure, clear soprano but the effect of her singing is not so much from her voice but from Deleen’s personality. When she sings, you can see the feeling she puts into the music.”
Davidson’s love for singing and her joy in life shine in each note she sings, agrees Toni Spears, a close friend and colleague. “She’s one of the most genuine people I know. She’s just one of those people whose heart is open. When she performs, that’s what moves the audience. That’s what makes her special - it’s not just the talent and brilliance, it’s the love she has for what she does.
“She’s so multitalented, a genuinely good person, compassionate and generous and also intellectually brilliant,” Spears says. “I say this sometimes as kind of a joke, but there’s truth in it: I always say when God was handing out gifts, Deleen just kept getting back in line.”
INSPIRATION
The Muses project allows Davidson to use not only her talent, but the marketing and organizational skills she developed while running her own business. Although she had always intended her career to be singing or otherwise related to the arts, she detoured in 1995-2005, founding and running an interior design company, Venture Designs, in New Orleans.
But after Katrina, she says, she decided against resurrecting the design company in Hot Springs. Instead, she wanted to rebuild her life with arts at its core and somehow help others enhance their lives through the arts and pursue their own creative dreams.
“We feel like it’s important that people understand that arts aren’t just for entertainment,” says Spears, a life coach in charge of the healing aspect of The Muses project. “Whatthe arts actually do is lower blood pressure, help with grieving issues, stress.”
The idea for The Muses arose from Davidson’s experiences as a college student when she studied in West Germany and Austria on Rotary International and Fulbright scholarships. She spent 1987-88 at the Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Kunst, a music school in Karlsruhe, West Germany. In 1991, she taught English at Musikhochschule Feldkirch in Bregenz, Austria, where she also studied painting and music. An event she attended in Bregenz inspired her vision for The Muses.
“It was very simple, very immediate but it really stuck with me,” Davidson says. The event, titled simply “Words and Music,” was held in a monastery barn that had been converted to a cultural arts center. “There were paintings on the wall, and a locally famous dramatist was reading a story in German. There was a string quartet from the Ukraine doing movements from a Beethoven work. We were in a beautifully restored building, looking at this fantastic display of original artwork. It was a moment in which all forms of art were blended - and it was transformative.”
Davidson says she and Spears had been refining The Muses concept for several years and were about to set their plans in motion the Friday before Katrina struck. On that day, Davidson was to make a deposit on a property where they planned to put the project, but as she sat in her car outside the real estate company, she felt something about the deal wasn’t right. So she held off on signing the mortgage documents. Two days later, that property was destroyed in the floods.
“On Friday, I thought the project was supposed to be in New Orleans. On Monday, I was living in Hot Springs,” Davidson says. “It’s truly a ‘bloom where you’re planted’ kind of story.”
GRACE NOTES
The Muses grew from the recitals in Davidson’s cottage to become an official nonprofit in2007. Recently, the organization set up shop at the historic Hale Bathhouse after getting a two year lease from the National Park Service. The Muses hosts recitals, concerts, cabarets and poetry readings at the bathhouse, and also operates the 3 Arts Cafe in the Hale lobby.
Davidson currently is raising $1.6 million to renovate the bathhouse to include an artist studio, recital halls, rehearsal rooms and classrooms. The goal is to complete renovations by 2013.
The Hale Bathhouse seems a fitting location for The Muses, given that its original purpose was to promote wellness and restore people to health. Indeed, Davidson says, the Spa City itself has become a “haven, a place of restoration, a place to regroup and rebuild.”
“When you lose everything, you might as well pursue your dream. You don’t have any more excuses not to do it. You’ve faced the worst that can happen. So there’s a freedom,” Davidson says. “You think, ‘I’ve hit rock bottom so I might as well do something meaningful, satisfying and beautiful.’”
SELF PORTRAIT Deleen Davidson
DATE AND PLACE OF BIRTH June 2, 1967, New Orleans
MY FAVORITE OPERA is Mozart’s Le Nozze di Figaro (Marriage of Figaro)
THE MUSICAL ROLE I MOST ENJOYED PERFORMING was Peron’s mistress in Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Evita.
MY FRIENDS DON’T KNOW I am a good shot with a .38 S&W.
I ABSOLUTELY WILL NOT EAT turnip greens.
WHEN I FEEL STRESSED, I journal.
THE LAST BOOK I READ WAS The Sound of Paper by Julia Cameron.
I WOULD LIKE TO SOMEDAY SING Cleopatra in Handel’s opera Julius Caesar.
GUESTS AT MY FANTASY DINNER PARTY WOULD BE Socrates, Leonardo da Vinci, Thomas Jefferson, C.S. Lewis, Carl Jung, Kenji Miyazawa, Margaret Thatcher and Albert Einstein.
I AM MOST GRATEFUL FOR Inspiration.
MY FAVORITE CITY IN EUROPE IS Vienna.
I WOULD LIKE TO VISIT Ireland.
ONE WORD TO SUM ME UP Resilient.
High Profile, Pages 35 on 05/27/2012