Gail Snyder

Every town has its raison d’être. Ours is Art. We live for it, we celebrate it, we welcome it into our world like the exquisite familiar it is. Creativity sparks and leaps out from every nook and cranny of Santa Fe’s soul, and nowhere is this more obvious than on Canyon Road, the Arts and Crafts Road.

Visiting the Santa Fe Opera grounds in the final few weeks before Opening Night feels like a forbidden pleasure, somehow, almost like getting to sneak a peek into the closet where your Christmas presents are hidden when your parents aren’t home. Unlike the scene we’re usually met with — it’s night, the orchestra is tuning up, ushers mingle with exotically dressed audience members — in mid-June, all the action happens in the place ordinarily off-limits to the audience — backstage.

Right this minute, as many of her peers are panicking about a wonky job market and how they’re ever going to pay back that tower of student loans, 24-year-old Amanita Thorp is out wandering the vast high desert wilderness of the Galisteo Basin, atop her horse, a pair of hawks making lazy loops overhead in the endless blue sky. She’s got no worries, she’s blissfully content — and, surrounded by 164 goats, she’s also gainfully employed!

Admittedly, I tend to have an overactive imagination. When allowed to wander untended through the amazing carnival of sights and smells that is the Santa Fe Farmers’ Market, I stare at everybody–at their tables full of locally grown and produced goods, invariably losing myself in reveries about their lives. Usually, they turn out to be a lot more ordinary than the romantic tapestry I’ve imagined. But not in the case of Daven Lee.

Owner of the local business Milk and Honey Soap, Daven’s childhood was the perfect launching pad for someone who would grow up to make handmade soap in her kitchen out of her own goats’ milk and bees’ honey. Although she has no discernable acc...

Within the ancient art form known as flamenco, many who love it best believe, lies the heartbeat of the entire world. Julia Chacón sensed that inexorable truth early on, as a teenaged ballet student. Extensively trained at the Phoenix School of Ballet, she was also exposed to other forms of dance expression there, including Spanish dance, and took to it immediately. By the age of 16, she was professionally performing with the Artes Bellas company in Phoenix–and she’s never looked back.

When she talks about her passion, this performer, teacher, choreographer and model fairly sings the word “flamenco,” as if it were a lilting, graceful bird soaring from her tongue, out into...