About Hogfish
““Gone, gone forever — and well gone, perchance —
Are the blithe days when wandering troubadour
In camp and castle sang the deft romance…
...Their wealth of myth and pageant to inspire
Our dreams, still are there those devoted to the lyre!””
Mission Statement
Hogfish is a regenerative arts production company and artist residency at the historic Beckett Castle, surrounded by an internationally recognized rose garden on the coast of Maine. We are building an artistic sanctuary and body of work dedicated to restoring creative and physical health to individuals, our communities, and our earth.
Vision Statement
The climate is changing. Temperatures and tensions are rising in our environment, our communities, and ourselves. Industrialization and the digital world have lifted billions out of poverty, and yet, with the rise of wealth has also come the rise of inequality, toxic carbon levels, fraught public discourse, and sedentary lifestyles. Hogfish is inspired by heroes, sung and unsung, working to restore wellness to global, social, and personal realms.
Hogfish believes that applying the principles of regenerative agriculture to the arts provides a unique opportunity to holistically restore every layer of the human experience. We are on a quest to build an artistic sanctuary and body of work to restore a healthier dynamic balance between our planet, the stories we tell, and the way we live.
Why the name Hogfish?
Hogfish (Lachnolaimus maximus): a species of wrasse (fish), native to the western Atlantic Ocean, living in a range from Nova Scotia to the Gulf of Mexico. A singular beauty outside of conventional boundaries, it looks like a pig and lives as both male and female during its lifetime.
Like our namesake fish, Hogfish transcends conventional boundaries - of music and theater, mind and body, performer and audience, natural and man-made, individual and community, company and environment, and performance and education.
What We Do
Regenerative Arts Residency
Each summer Hogfish invites roughly 20 artists-in-residence for a six week residency from June-July in Southern Maine.
REGENERATIVE WORKS
On the last Saturday of June, we kick off the season with Kegs & Roses, our annual fundraiser concert featuring the artists-in-residence in concert at the rose garden of historic Beckett Castle on the coast of Maine. It is the once a year chance for the public to see the spiritual home of our artist residency
While in residence, artists rehearse and perform a flagship large scale multi-disciplinary production at the end of July. Hogfish seeks to broaden the canon of the performing arts by adapting classics that will resonate today and by creating new work that represents the voices of all.
In addition, during the residency each artist receives time, space, and support to develop their own emergent work. Artists are asked to work on projects that are regenerative to themselves, their communities, and their neighborhoods. Presentations of these regenerative works in progress are presented on our “Farm to Stage” series in venues around Southern Maine.
Select projects and artists are invited back to be produced as full productions during a smaller “winter garden” residency in January as well as for future summer seasons.
The History of Beckett Castle
Sylvester Beckett and his daughter pose in front of the castle he built that is now named for him on the rocky coast of Maine in the late 1800’s.
In 1871, lawyer, poet, amateur ornithologist, and spiritualist Sylvester Beckett built the first summer residence in Cape Elizabeth, Maine: a stone cottage with a three story tower perched on top of jagged rocks and crashing waves with a one hundred eighty degree view of the Atlantic Ocean and five lighthouses.
“Beckett Castle” quickly became the pre-eminent gathering spot for writers, artists, and society folk. Beckett was a spiritualist like Rudolph Steiner who founded the Waldorf School, and Beckett had a deep belief in the connection between the living world and the after-life. When Beckett died, many stories maintained that Beckett’s soul continued to live in the castle and by the 1970s there were numerous published reports of supernatural activities in the haunted castle.
Beckett Castle languished until social-worker and amateur rosarian Nancy Harvey won the castle at an auction in 1981. Harvey restored the property, and with the help of gardener Lynn Shafer, spent the next thirty years creating a private rose garden that was eventually featured in the final book of Peter Beales, the royal rosarian to the Queen Mother.
In 2018, Edwin and Matt Cahill purchased Beckett Castle with the dream of joining Nancy Harvey’s vision of a magical rose garden on the rocky cliffs of Cape Elizabeth with Sylvester Beckett’s castle hermitage for artists and thinkers, where the next generation can create new works and performances to inspire the communities in Maine and around the country.
2020 was planned as Hogfish’s inaugural season, but was cancelled due to the worldwide Covid pandemic. In 2021, Hogfish held their first event in the Beckett Castle rose garden, and the annual season-opener “Kegs & Roses” was born featuring artists-in-residence performing in the rose garden while audience members drink local brews by the crashing ocean waves. In 2022, Hogfish launched its inaugural full season with a modern Maine adaptation of Gluck’s The Magic Tree. The rest, is ongoing history.
Hogfish Resonance Podcast Episode
Learn more about the founding of Hogfish in this interview with Hogfish founders and co-directors, Matt & Edwin Cahill from season one of our podcast.
Beckett Castle & the Rose Garden Today
“One single rose is every rose,
and this one: the irreplaceable one,
the perfect one, a supple spoken word,
framed by the text of things.
How could we ever speak without it
of what our hopes were,
and of those tender moments
In the continual departure.”
