Part of High Meadow’s first graduating class, Gwyneth Larsen has stayed connected to the Hudson Valley throughout her life. Today, she carries on her family’s local legacy combining the arts, nature, counterculture, and community at Stone Mountain Farm. We’re grateful to have Gwyneth – an accomplished aerialist, actor, and theater producer – as our after school Circus Arts instructor.
“My parents met climbing in the Gunks in the 60s,” Gwyneth begins, preparing to share the story of her extraordinary Hudson Valley roots. Her mother, art historian Robin Larsen, and father, psychologist and author H. Stephen Larsen, shared a love of mythology, as well as climbing, and have since woven themselves into the mythology of our region.
Robin and Stephen were part of a group of climbers known as the Vulgarians. As Olivia Abel writes for Scenic Hudson, the Vulgarians were “a counterculture group of mostly 20-somethings, opposed to climbing rules and regulations [who] became as well known for their hard-partying antics — including scaling cliffs in the buff — as they were for their climbing expertise.”
Part of a movement to democratize climbing, the Vulgarians were asking, “How counter can we be to any structure there is? They were raucous,” Gwyneth says. “The whole crew of them became academics,” she adds, laughing.
Years into their relationship, when Robin was a high school art teacher and Stephen was a social worker, “They came up to look for hay for my mom’s horse,” Gwyneth says. “They always came up here any chance they’d get. They drove down a winding road and met an old farmer,” and in the course of this encounter, he offered to sell them the farm.
“They went back to their loft on the Lower East Side and were like, ‘Could we do that?’ They had a habit of saying yes to things.” They pooled money with relatives to buy the property, now Stone Mountain Farm in New Paltz. “Quite an array of characters have had their time on the farm,” Gwyneth says, living there or “camping out,” including well-known spiritual teacher, Ram Dass. Writer and professor Joseph Campbell, originator of the phrase “follow your bliss”, was Gwyneth’s godfather; her parents wrote the book about him. “I grew up there, my brother and I."
Today, Gwyneth lives at Stone Mountain with her partner, Billy Mulholland, and daughter Uma; her brother, Merlin Larsen, lives nearby with his children, Owen and Julia. They’re raising all the kids together on the farm. Gwyneth has been managing Stone Mountain – home to The Center at Stone Mountain (formally known as The Center for Symbolic Studies), Wild Arts Collective, The Rail Trail Cafe, Happy Trails Bike Rental, The Eco Land Academy, Gwyneth’s and Billy’s 5th Wall Studio, and her father’s counseling practice, Stone Mountain Counseling Center – for 15 years. Though her mother passed away two years ago, Robin’s art continues to enliven the farm, and “Dad has a hand in everything.”
I had a hard time speaking in front of people, but I felt totally supported at High Meadow. I learned how to articulate myself there and really hear others. Empathy was really taught and leaned into.
As a child, Gwyneth came to High Meadow after struggling in her Kingston elementary school. “I was pretty dyslexic,” she says and was bullied by peers. “[It was] either Catholic school in Rosendale or High Meadow,” she recalls.
At the time, High Meadow was at the farm on Gatehouse Road in New Paltz. “I was like, ‘Wow, this is pretty great’. I was in 4th grade and should have gone to 5th, but they didn't have 5th, so I did 4th again. I loved it. It was so amazing. I couldn't believe how fantastic it was.”
“The way I remember it, we didn’t have enough classrooms for us, there was a point where they got an annex building, but before we had that, my class would walk around outside and have lessons on the go, and the second part of the day, we would tutor the younger classes. I would help the kids with reading and writing – little groups of three or four kids – learning in the morning and teaching in the afternoon was great. When we played on the playground, we all played together. My best friend was in 2nd grade and I was in 4th grade; age felt like it didn’t matter though.”
“I remember the Stick Wars, and finding things like snakes that had just hatched. We made forts. Playground time was really awesome. We had music with Eli Edmonds’s mom and with Eli Wingrad’s dad. Our tiny school band played at the St. Patrick’s Day Parade in Kingston and actually won something. I was the drummer. My dad drove the trailer we used as a float, I remember we played Tequila and the crowd loved it.”
“We had Town Meeting every week, passing the talking stick. Being asked to talk in front of the whole school when I was so young – like 23 people – felt so real. Everybody’s here. I had a hard time speaking in front of people, but I felt totally supported at High Meadow. I learned how to articulate myself there and really hear others. Empathy was really taught and leaned into. [There was] so much wicked prankster stuff, too, but that just made it more fun. I loved High Meadow, it had a huge effect on who I am.”
Gwyneth was part of the first graduating class at High Meadow, and along with many of her classmates, moved on to Libertyville Farm School. “[It was] just down the road, basically a continuation of High Meadow,” Gwyneth says. When that ended after not even a year, a few of the High Meadow crew formed a cooperative tutoring group at Stone Mountain. Then at 15, Gwyneth started at Ulster Community College (where her father was a psychology professor), graduating two years later.
“When I was 18 I went to Europe for six months and street performed and backpacked,” she says. A longtime dancer and teacher with storied local troupe, Vanaver Caravan, she joined them on tour, then “came home, applied to Sarah Lawrence, transferred in, and graduated at 21.” She studied Ancient Greek literature, dance, and photography.
“My first audition out of college was De La Guarda,” she recalls, a performance piece created in Argentina that played worldwide. “I booked it, much to my surprise. I went on tour with them and worked with them for about ten years,” with time in Las Vegas, New York, Berlin, Tel Aviv, and Korea. It was through De La Guarda that she met her partner, Billy, and the couple settled in Los Angeles and co-founded AiRealistic, a site-specific aerial theater company with her brother Merlin and 4 others.
I really do believe this area should be the place for fringe artists to make new work. We should be seeing everything before it goes to New York City. I think it should be happening inside. I think it should be happening outside. I think it should be happening year-round in the Hudson Valley.
Eventually, they were ready to leave LA. “We’d already decided to come back to New York. De La Guarda had closed, but the creators had a new show, Fuerza Bruta. I auditioned and I booked it. While I was at Fuerza Bruta, I [also] worked at the Metropolitan Opera. Billy worked there, too.”
“I started to do stunt work in 2010 and was asked to be Madonna’s stunt double. After that job I started to get a lot of work as a stunt woman,” she says. She and Billy also produced their own project through 5th Wall Studio, Breaking Surface, described as an acrobatic adventure of childhood delight over a darkly flooded stage.
“I got pregnant right after Breaking Surface, went back to stunt work right away, broke my foot really badly, and that ended my stunt career. [My daughter] was four months old when I got hurt.”
So Gwyneth decided to pivot, focusing on 5th Wall Studio. She and Billy brought to their teaching a wide range of skills in physical theater; acrobatic movement, dance, story, puppetry, clown. They focused on turning 5th Wall Studio into a place where artists like them, who create on the fringe of diverse modalities, could create work. Their mission is for 5th Wall Studio to be an artists residency center, a resource for fringe artists who don’t fit in one box. They’ve brought that vision to Stone Mountain, too, expanding residencies to create crossover between Brooklyn and Hudson Valley artists and resources.
In the years since, Gwyneth has continued working in various roles at the Met, including as puppeteer and foley artist. In the summer, she teaches harness work on the farm, and may expand to offer a Farm-Circus fringe arts summer camp for kids this year. She’s also a health and creativity coach, and “5th Wall is working on a walking show in the forest starting from the Rail Trail Cafe,” she adds. “We use some of my mom’s art reproduced on vinyl, puppetry, projection, and aerial.” She also choreographed the aerial for Phish at Madison Square Garden last New Year’s Eve.
When a child experiences a teacher interacting genuinely, they absorb that.
This year, Gwyneth began teaching Circus Arts in High Meadow’s Afterschool enrichment program. “The kids are quirky and unique,” she says. “Teaching them is different from teaching really driven [stage] kids, the kind of education that allows them to be themselves. I love it.”
“What is this next phase, exactly? I feel very much in a period of transition,” Gwyneth says. “What does this new career look like?” A vision is taking shape, though, of the Hudson Valley as an incubator for experimental theater. “I really do believe this area should be the place for fringe artists to make new work. Finding space to make that kind of theater in the city is really challenging and expensive. We should be seeing everything before it goes to New York City. I think it should be happening inside. I think it should be happening outside. I think it should be happening year-round in the Hudson Valley.”
Gwyneth has known for a long time that she was charting her own course, though she didn’t always know how to describe it. Now, she sees that “my whole education was steering me to become an entrepreneur, and a theater maker. I’ve always worked for myself. It was really challenging, but forced me to sort of figure it out. I don’t know any other way than reinventing the wheel. It was really clear when I was at High Meadow that they were figuring it out – Pat, Mimi, Maryann – they were totally fantastic teachers, they were following their intuition, and everyday was like, let’s do this.”
“When a child experiences a teacher interacting genuinely, they absorb that. When they see someone just following a syllabus, going through their class half asleep –well they absorb that too. You need to be awake in your life, feeding your brain like you feed your body – something that makes you feel inspired.”