Performing artists and those who serve them take note: Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival is accepting submissions to perform on its Inside/Out stage through October 31st.
http://www.jacobspillow.org/about/insideout-participants-artist-submissions.php
Here’s to spectacularly diverse and rigorously excellent dance next summer!
Many cities have experimented with art openings and related cultural events in a given district or neighborhood engineered to coincide on a monthly basis. Unfortunately, such predicability can lead to ennui among scenesters. New Haven is trying something new in its Ninth Square.
The organization on9 has a plan for September which brings to mind a large note-to-self displayed in a former boss’s office: Remember to Breathe! The public is invited to use this idea as both a prompt and a lens through which to experience culture.
Breathe On9 happens tomorrow evening, September 7th, starting at 6pm in Pitkin Plaza (behind Bru Cafe, in front of Devil’s Bike Gear). See http://www.on9newhaven.com/ for a full schedule of offerings.
The First Friday event celebrates reinvigorated streetlife and the change of season with a concentrated sampling of body/mind alignment systems. It will also show off the district’s lean and green foodscape, e.g., Elm City Market, a new(ish) coop where membership is not required and the vast majority of products come from within a 250-mile radius.
A closing reception for three exhibitions at Artspace is fitted within a panoply of experiential services that promote wellbeing. The art is not on display in the casual manner of a craft fair nor necessarily on view to be “read” and deconstructed by critics (though both can be fun, when done well). Rather, in this context art is assertively occupying its place as a source of mental nourishment and aesthetic satisfaction without which urbanity would be incomplete.
Do people really want to be this heavily curated? Is the theme idea working to boost business from pedestrian traffic? Is the Ninth Square authentically a special place? Do such events reinforce cultural coolness? Last month’s photo display from the Noise on9 event appears validating…but I just may check in for follow-up with a few of the participating artists and organizations.
http://www.on9newhaven.com/home/noise-on-9-august-3/noiseon9-highlights/
First Friday themes upcoming this fall:
October / Creative on9
November / Faces on9
December / Shine on9
The DIY ethic that has fueled underground scenes since the 1980s is alive and palpable in artist-run spaces across the country. Despite much handwringing at the recent Aspen Ideas Festival in Colorado –http://www.aspenideas.org/festival/overview – many creative people do still believe it is important to bring people together face-to-face in a physical space to experience art and find ways to make it happen. Whether evolving incrementally or borne from a conceptual vision, these spaces are an important part of the ecosystem on which innovation depends. Here are two I visited on my recent Agileseed Tour. (Please see previous post titled Agileseeding! for more background on this.)
Agileseed Tour Destination: Omaha, NE
Omaha is an unexpectedly quirky city, where the editor of a local weekly put in a mayoral bid as a kind of performance art. On the main drag of Dodge Street, a handful of painters and scupltors including Dave Jenowe (pictured below with his work) share studio space in a split-level storefront. After critiquing each other long enough, they decided to invite the public in for periodic Saturday night openings. Says Jenowe, “It was a simple thing, originally. It started with just three of us. We made work, and it needed to be seen.”
Social media brought people in the door, and the venue, called Studio…Gallery, has since built a solid reputation among an alternative downtown crowd. Step by succinct step, it has added a jazz music series and comedy nights. The space itself has evolved to accommodate growing programs, now sporting a tiny stage downstairs with superior acoustics. Meanwhile, a core group of colleagues continue to pursue independent artistic investigations in a shared workspace.
Jenowe continues, “We are always tweaking, but we continue to have a good time. It’s great to see new people discover the space and be surprised by the quality and diversity, to have it surpass their expectations for what they might find here. Jamming with musicians from New York and mixing with local artists, it just makes you feel glad and inspired to keep going, to keep making new work.”
Agileseed Tour Destination: Twin Cities, MN
The Bindery Projects, named after its location above a longrunning book bindery in St. Paul, is the brainchild of Caroline Kent and Nate Young (pictured below). Their mission is “…to show dope work and validate practice through dialiectic democratic social disourse.” The pair has a curatorial calendar booked through spring of 2013.
http://thebinderyprojects.com/thebindery_projects/visit.html
When I visited in early August, Nate and Caroline were prepping to hang 47 drawings by Nyeema Morgan, whom Young met at the Skowhegan Center in Maine. The Dubious Sum of Vaguely Discernable Parts, closing Sept. 2, 2012, uses textual variations on cake recipe instructions along with abstract photographs of individual baking ingredients to explore the search for a perfect system.
Says Young, “We might not have a ton of people coming through, the space isn’t that big. But the ones who do are key people, influencers. They’re paying attention.” In fact this is true, as I heard about The Bindery Projects long before arriving in the Twin Cities area, from the Director of ArtSpace in New Haven, CT – artspacenh.org.
Art galleries conduct their business in an inherently networked and iterative manner, releasing work to the public in regularly scheduled increments. Exhibitions take place over and over in the same space, and as they do, a body of knowledge develops around how to succeed and improve. Artists intuitively seek to assemble the most viable chunks of work for release, even at small scale or in-progress stages, because it makes good sense. What they may not know is that, in Scrum circles, this is known as the vertical slice.
Running a gallery on a DIY basis should be recognized as one of the most authentically agile ways of working. People and interactions are reliably more important than tools and processes. Those who run such spaces deserve credit and support as incubators for creativity and innovation, nimbly adaptive yet true to what they represent.
The Agile teams forming in today’s workplaces are essentially trying to function like artists. Those leading the charge towards Agile business transformation should seek out these creative and highly productive scene-makers, talk to them regularly, and make it a point to visit the exhibitions and other programs that artists have developed and released in their communities.
Bates Dance Festival presented a luscious performance by Kate Weare Company on July 28th. Wisely, the Saturday night programming included an Inside Dance pre-performance talk by dance critic Debra Cash. Ms. Cash took just the right amount of time to illuminate the choreographer’s approach and give us some reference points.
Kate Weare has built a white hot trending company that does not count beats. Instead, the dancers co-locate their highly synchronized parts by listening to each other’s breaths.
From the front row, at performance time, I could also hear them breathing. Knowing their lungs were the bellows to propulse minds, tendons and ball-joints toward precisely executed micromovements added new layers of sensory information and interest. This is hypersensitivity at its best, derived from the very seat of our animal intellect.
At a certain point, the medium of contemporary dance approached in this way triggers a particular sublimity. Embodied skill becomes the material from which art is made.
2012 is the 30th Anniversary of a true artist-centered community. It is also, not coincidentally, the 25th year of tenure for Laura Faure, the guiding force that has made Lewiston, Maine a center of creative gravity in the contemporary dance world internationally. It was meaningful and logical that Bates was the first stop on the Agileseed Tour, as it was from Laura that I first witnessed the curatorial power that comes from trusting self-organization and allowing the inner structure of a collaboration to emerge and reveal itself rather than be imposed. We worked together for five years finding resources to realize Festival artists’ next best ideas, working at high velocity in the climate of extreme uncertainty and entrepreneurial fierceness that is nonprofit arts fundraising.
The evening’s performance was the award-winning Kate Weare and Company, featuring Kate’s breakout work Drop Down which received an Audience Choice selection when it premiered at The Joyce Theater in New York in 2006. The company’s newest work in-progress, Dark Lark, will premiere at Brooklyn Academy of Music. BDF is one of the co-commissioners.
Dining at the college cafeteria beforehand I ran into Boston-based dance critic Debra Cash, who delivers contextual insight to the works performed on stage in the form of Inside Dance Talks. Another part of her professional life is dedicated to helping companies prepare for and navigate culture change. We discussed the upcoming Agile Culture conference.
Meanwhile, my oldest son was rhapsodizing about the Festival as a field of earliest memories from when he was toddler-in-tow. There were a host of children in-residence with their parents this summer, a good sign that the dance world is finding its way toward healthy work-life balance.
Aimee Petrin, a longtime colleague and Director of Portland Arts, presented Laura with a lovely and well-deserved tribute before curtain. And Laura pointed out the remarkable press the Festival has gotten this summer – including this coverage on Maine Public Television:
http://video.mpbn.net/video/2255629111
Musings in progress…more to follow…
Instructions Not Included: Tinker, Hack, Tweak will take an unexpected look at readymade culture and the objects with which we surround ourselves November 9, 2012 – January 17, 2013 at Artspace in New Haven. Meanwhile, in the spirit of the show, I am organizing a meet-up for industrial designers, engineers and product developers to explore and respond to the work – and perhaps other exhibits/performances in the future – as a specially-informed audience.
At Artspace, artists/makers from Connecticut and the surrounding region are invited to submit proposals for consideration through August 30, 2012. http://artspacenh.org/opportunities.asp?id={FB9554BB-D036-4ABD-ADC6-A31F144EC35E}
At Artsinterstices, industrial designers, engineers and product developers interested in developing a collaborative, contextual response to the selected artists’ viewpoints should contact me at artsinterstices@gmail.com. The group will convene November to see and discuss the work as it opens. We will explore and respond to the concepts on this blog in the New Year. This is an experimental approach to curating audiences from outside the arts who have specialized knowledge and informed insights to share, for purposes of mutual enrichment and alliance-building among creative enterprises. An app, if you will, with the exhibit as platform.
I am excited to see what happens next when we put interesting minds together in the space between art and business! – EBS
Generally speaking, and safe bet this is true in your neighborhood, the pretty flippingest cool stuff happens in garages.
Natulis ArtTemporary invites us to recap this historical cultural trend as they put out an open call for free studio space this August in a former car repair shop in Berlin, Germany:
http://natberlin.com/garage-art-about/
True, the liminal space of a garage is irresistable. You can try things out in the garage that you could never get away with in the house, even in the basement. It is space that feels set apart, where one can experiment and suspend cultural notions about what is safe, what is allowed and what people do. Everywhere, there are local, national and international heroes garaging it old school while keeping it innovative. Samples from my personal ‘chive? – Ta-DA:
S.L.A.M (Streb’s Lab for Action Mechanics) 5,000 squ. ft at 51 N. 1st St. in Williamsburg, Brooklyn http://www.streb.org/V2/space/index.html
Biopunk scientists hacking genomes around MIT (ever hear of glow-in-the-dark squid?) http://bostonbiotechwatch.com/2011/04/14/hacking-ourselves-%E2%80%9Cbiopunk-diy-scientists-hack-the-software-of-life%E2%80%9D-by-marcus-wohlsen/
And of course there’s West Haven, Connecticut. In a backyard garage on Savin Avenue, a horse and carriage are kept in circulation, you see them cruising around town. And in a more industrial setting, 14 Gilbert St. hosts a long-term affair between sculptor and sculptures in the studio of Guggenheim award-winner Robert Taplin.
http://roberttaplin.com/pdf/art_new_england_nov_dec_2010.pdf
Do you know what interesting ideas are taking shape in some of the garages near you? Believe me, it’s worth investigating. Welcome these incubators into your midst, even or especially if it is unclear what’s being spawned. And on August 30, if you’re anywhere near Berlin, enjoy the party at Scharnhorststraße 32 celebrating nine artists who have made “ephemeral, time sensitive art at tremendous growth rate” in their provisioned spaces for Garage Art 2012.
Verge Arts Group 