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| Dolphins dancing along to Turkish music put smiles on the faces of autistic children and Downs Syndrome children visiting the Yunus Therapy Center at Antalya's Dolphinland Entertainment Center. Two dolphins named Suera and Alisya are the stars of a therapy program that attracts special needs children from not only Turkey, but Germany, Austria, and Russia as well. The therapy lasts for 10 days, and each session with the dolphins lasts 30 minutes. The total cost of the program is 2,500 euros. Dolphinland Entertainment Center Manager and Antalya School of Psychology Director Dr. Murat Kemaloglu said that the technique of using dancing dolphins accompanied by Turkish music was initially used for patients in comas. Kemaloglu indicated that word of the program spread quickly and requests for the treatment started coming from aboard. He said that more than 80 children from outside of Turkey have participated in the program so far. Kemaloglu explained that music therapy has proven to be very effective in the treatment of special needs children. "When we learned that Turkish music could be a cure for many diseases, we immediately added this to our therapy." He said that the dolphins establish a special way of communicating with the children in the program. Kemaloglu pointed out that the children's interest in the outside world increases gradually during the therapy process. Associate Professor Oruc Guvenc, President of the Turkish Music Research and Introduction Group (TUMATA), disclosed that different tones of Turkish music were used in the treatment of specific diseases. For instance, the reed flute is good for muscle spasms, explained Guvenc. " The Huseyni tone is good for the immune system, the Nihavent tone increases self-confidence in children, and the Rast tone increases the feeling of happiness," Guvenc added.* *Huseyni, Nihavent and Rast are different tones of special measures in Turkish Classical Music.
ILLUSTROTOR
PRACTICES ART OF PRESERVING WHALES, DOPHINS Working to ensure the survival of marine mammals is what Folkens, 52, loves best. But he's not a naturalist or a scientist. He's an artist. If you've seen the Greenpeace dolphins T-shirt, a "Free Willy" movie, "Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home," or looked at "The National Audubon Guide to Marine Mammals of the World," you've seen Folkens' work.
Folkens produces drawings and sculptures of whales, dolphins and other sea creatures under his company name, A Higher Porpoise. His business card for A Higher Porpoise provides contact information for his office in the former Army arsenal east of Benicia but doesn't include a formal title. " Anybody who has to put what they do on a business card is not a very important person," he says. It's a slightly quirky point of view, but Folkens is the kind of guy who has always followed his own path. It's a path that began during his childhood in landlocked Bakersfield. At his ninth birthday party, Folkens took his buddies into the foothills near Bakersfield to dig for sharks' teeth using window screens from his house to sift the dirt. They found a sperm whale skull that perhaps sparked Folkens' lifelong passion for the huge mammals. In the mid-'70s, Folkens became an avid river rafter and studied art at San Jose State. His college roommate was close with the family of nature photographer Ansel Adams in Carmel. Folkens ended up house-sitting for Adams and was invited into Adams' darkroom a number of times where he picked up pointers about the art and science of photography. After he earned a degree in graphic arts, he spotted a notice from Greenpeace seeking volunteers to help protest the whaling trade. He joined the dramatic protests in which volunteers sailed on a specially equipped Greenpeace boat and used small inflatable watercraft to try to disrupt the activities of Russian whalers. The protests eventually led to a moratorium on whaling in 1982. Folkens became an unpaid Greenpeace board member and created illustrations for field guides, handbooks and posters. He supported himself doing various jobs, including a stint as a pizza maker on Union Street in San Francisco. For a while, he lived on an enclosed front porch of a house in the Sunset District for $92 a month, sleeping on a mattress he had scavenged from a dumpster. After two years, he moved into a room in the house. Folkens' interest in depicting whales began about this time. He joined the Society of Marine Mammalogy, an academic group that studies and presents papers on marine mammals, to acquire more background. Through the society, Folkens learned that available reference drawings were of dead whales. In order to create the most accurate drawings of whales, Folkens began observing live whales and studying whale skeletons. " I wanted to find out what these critters looked like when they were alive,'' Folkens says. He says reference photos taken underwater with wide-angle lenses have severe shortcomings. " You ended up with animals that were tremendously distorted because of the distortion of the lens," he says. "I went back to my bone roots and started looking at the skeletons and reconstruction illustrations based on skeletons." With the help of a friend from the Los Angeles County Museum of Natural History, Folkens began creating illustrations based on whale bone structure. He also took workshops on reconstructing animals from bones at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington. At one point, Folkens found himself camping out at the Presidio, with only a broken-down Volkswagen bug and $40 to his name. That's when he drew a pair of dolphins entwined underwater and showed the finished product to the marketing department at Greenpeace. Impressed, they bought the drawing for $1, 500 and turned it into a T-shirt that he says ended up making millions for the organization. In 1981, with the success of his dolphin drawing and a series of posters for the Society of Marine Mammalogy conferences, Folkens was picked by UC Santa Cruz's Natural Sciences Department to develop and teach field sketching and life drawing courses to scientists. Folkens commuted to Santa Cruz but continued to illustrate field guides and handbooks at his office in San Francisco. Folkens' entree into the lucrative world of movie production began when the Greenpeace vessel he had served on was tapped for an appearance in "Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home.'' Folkens learned that the producers of the movie needed someone who could draw whales to help the builders of the movie's whale robot. When Folkens first met with the "Star Trek" producers, they seemed dismayed that their whale model didn't look like a whale. Folkens says he could see the problem at a glance. He told them, "Your proportions are all wrong. No wonder." Folkens began working with Walt Conti, a mechanical engineer at Industrial Light and Magic in San Rafael, to sculpt a lifelike 48-inch whale robot for the movie. When Conti got the contract to begin work on the "Free Willy'' movies in the mid-'80s, he brought Folkens along. Folkens sculpted full-size killer whale replicas for the series. In the first movie, 48 percent of the footage was of the robots, but, in the two sequels, 100 percent of the whale shots were based on Conti's and Folkens' robot designs. The Conti and Folkens collaborations resulted in robots so realistic that animal welfare guardians have been fooled, Folkens says. An SPCA monitor was on the set of the first "Free Willy" movie to make sure Keiko the whale wasn't being abused. While viewing one of the "dailies," footage that's reviewed on a daily basis, the monitor expressed concern about a scene in which he believed the real Keiko was caught in a net. When Folkens told him the whale was actually the robot version, the monitor didn't believe him and shut down production. Eventually, the SPCA was mollified and production resumed. In the last two "Free Willy" films, in which the whale action was 100 percent robotic, Folkens says John Michael Cousteau, the son of Jacques Cousteau and one of the organizers of the efforts that brought Keiko to the sea off of Iceland, was also convinced that the robots were live whales. With movie production money rolling in, Folkens left UC Santa Cruz in the mid-'80s and began devoting himself to his freelance career. He moved from San Francisco to Benicia in 1989, where he lives with his wife, Ellen, son Arend, 16, and daughter Alysen, 11. He has plenty of projects pending. He's working on a series for the Discovery Channel for which he'll be painting a replica of a World War II fighter plane to look like a striped dolphin. He's also working on two posters, three books, four waterproof folding guides that he publishes and a "ship strike" case. He is often called on to testify as an expert witness in cases in which a ship owner is facing charges for having struck and killed a whale or other large marine mammal. His images are so often plagiarized by artists who do crude tracings of his work that he has become an expert in copyright infringement as well. He is often asked to give presentations to lawyers and has won several plagiarism cases. Does it bother him that people recognize
-- and even steal -- his work but don't recognize his name? " It's not about me," Folkens says. "It's about the work." Get a FREE Dolphin Photo and/or Dolphin Tee Shirt
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