Artistic Escape at a Former Prison

A musical march through the sordid history of Lorton prison, with an upbeat ending that reflects its positive new purpose, marked the official opening of the Workhouse Arts Center on Sunday night.

With Washington Metropolitan Philharmonic Music Director Ulysses S. James as conductor and host, the orchestra set a bright mood at the start with Robert Ward's "Jubilation: An Overture" -- big, unsubtle music served with a sprig of lyricism. Then, with vocalists Tia Wortham and Beverly Cosham and members of the Kathy Harty Gray Dance Theatre, the musicians took the al fresco audience of several hundred back to Lorton's founding in 1910. The parcel's 1,115 acres were originally bought by Congress to house a "rehabilitative workhouse" at which prisoners from the District would farm, bake and learn responsible citizenship.

Musicians and dancers punctuated the story of the ways in which the plan did not work, with a medley of naive songs from a century ago (such as "Ah, Sweet Mystery of Life") contrasted with stories of the prison farm's growth to 7,500 inmates in 1995 -- by which time it had the worst recidivism rate in the United States.

Not all the music worked. "The Way We Were" just didn't go with dancers bearing placards demanding women's right to vote, a reference to a particularly sordid episode in 1917: Suffragists were thrown into jail and force-fed when they went on a hunger strike. Those are no "misty water-colored memories."

But the prison closed in 1997, and Lalo Schifrin's famous "Mission: Impossible" theme was a perfect accompaniment for dancers in hard hats to symbolize the raising of $32 million to remake Lorton into the arts center it is becoming. And Joan Tower's "Fanfare for the Uncommon Woman" -- complex, dissonant, rhythmic and propulsive -- was a fitting tribute to the onetime suffragist prisoners, whose ordeal will be commemorated in a museum section in development.

As night fell gently on a quadrangle surrounded by refurbished buildings that now contain studios filled with working artists, but were once places of brutality, James teased the audience by saying he would offer a version of the Anacreontic Song as a finale. The audience looked puzzled, but Americans actually know this 18th-century British drinking tune well. Its original words went: "To Anacreon in Heav'n, where sat in full glee, a few Sons of Harmony sent a petition." Francis Scott Key came along and wrote some new lyrics. But he kept the music, which became known as "the American Air." Hence the work in which James led the orchestra: Dudley Buck's "Festival Overture on the American Air," written in 1879 -- 52 years before Congress designated what we now call "The Star-Spangled Banner" as our national anthem. And so this enthusiastically bombastic piece fittingly tied together both the nation's and Lorton's past and present.

As the orchestra's final fortissimo rang out, a spectacular fireworks display began, laying to rest the dismal atmosphere of the old prison once and for all. There remains, however, much work to be done before the site reaches its full potential: a combination of Alexandria's Torpedo Factory with the Wolf Trap National Park for the Performing Arts.