Two years ago, as Brooke Hardman made the move to what she then saw as “a remote Island,” the actress whose career had taken her to Boston, New York and Chicago resigned herself to the fact that “I wouldn’t be acting anymore.”

Widow’s walks attest to them, historians tend to overlook them, and now at last, they have been given a chance to speak for themselves. Or rather, to sing for themselves.

They are the wives of Vineyard whalers, whose husbands left for voyages of up to four or five years, and who were left to tend farms, manage general stores and mind their husband’s assets in a society unaccustomed to accepting women’s role in the public sphere.

In the history of the hawkers, hucksters and visionaries who knew how to turn a buck off of the middle-class mania for leisure and travel that emerged at the tail end of the American 19th century, Joseph Chamberlain has a firm, if overlooked place.

Is the Vineyard poised to become the launch point for the next American Great Awakening?

Ask Squire Rushnell and Louise DuArt, the celebrity entertainers and authors who are the masterminds behind Inspiration Weekend 2009, which runs this weekend (June 5 to June 7), at the Tabernacle in Oak Bluffs, and they’ll tell you it just might be.

“We’re gonna light that fire again,” says Ms. DuArt, a well-known comedic impressionist who appears on national television as everyone from Judge Judy to George Burns.

As spring cracks open our winter stillness, the natural world appears to speak one unified, coherent command: Dance!

This summer season on the Vineyard, dance will break off the stage, with performances in the field at the Farm Institute, at Polly Hill Arboretum, and even on Main street, Vineyard Haven. The season will feature fusions of dance with video projections, puppetry and elements of circus in an exploration of dance’s natural affiliation with other fields of visual arts.