glo banner at the entrance to the Maddox Park Pool

Roy Sockwell checking out the treasures we unearthed.  a CD, a key, dice, a necklace, an earing, ping pong balls and tiles!

Dancer Nicole Johnson excavating the leaf stuffed filters

]]> http://gloatl.org/maddox-park-clean-up/feed/ 0 http://gloatl.org/become-our-bff-and-support-an-amazing-evening-of-immersive-performance/ http://gloatl.org/become-our-bff-and-support-an-amazing-evening-of-immersive-performance/#comments Thu, 30 Aug 2012 17:58:46 +0000 paulboshears http://gloatl.org/?p=1363 Continue reading →]]> We are so thankful to Mayor Kasim Reed for his vision of a dynamic, robust—and crucially—well-funded arts community in Atlanta. Thanks to his commitment, the Office for Cultural Affairs is offering matching grants for any donations made using the newly-launched Power2Give website.

Power2Give is similar to other crowd-sourced funding platforms (Indiegogo, Kickstarter, etc.), but what’s really fantastic is that through Power2Give we can harness both the power of many smaller donations and we will get each dollar matched 1:1 by the City!

That means your $15 is now worth $30!

We are seeking cash donations so that we can continue to offer our free-to-the-public works for this city that we love. Your donation, at any level, will enable us to offset the costs of creating our performances for the new Tanz Farm initiative. We’re calling the work Hippodrome.

Any gift is going to make a big difference, thanks to the City’s matching offer. We’re offering some really unique rewards for our donors, you can read more about it here.

Here’s video from the announcement:

©Roy D. Sockwell

We are cleaning-out the pool at Maddox Park (1142 Donald Lee Hollowell Parkway NW Atlanta, GA 30318) this week and we would love to have your support. It’s easy to get to, right across from the Bankhead MARTA station. We will be at the park Thursday, Friday, and Saturday between 12pm and 4pm, August 30—September 1. If you are coming, please contact our Operations Manager, Paul Boshears (paul@gloatl.com) to make sure there is no rain delay.

Yesterday we found all sorts of neat stuff in the pool, including 14 dice!

©Roy D. Sockwell

We cannot thank enough our wonderful volunteers Susan Sorenson and Roy Sockwell (these are Roy’s photos, in fact), and to the dancers that were catching frogs and shoveling top soil. Y’all are the absolute best! This clean-up project literally would not be possible were it not for the support of the City of Atlanta’s Department of Parks, Recreation, and Cultural Affairs; and also the tools that Park Pride is lending to us.

We will be performing search for the exceptional in Maddox Park on September 21 and 22 (Friday and Saturday) at 8pm. Once again we are collaborating with celebrated filmmaker Micah Stansell, but this performance will be very different from our previous work in the Historic Fourth Ward Skatepark. This work is going to be very intimate, quiet, and personal.

If you’d like to learn more about Maddox Park, see our previous blog posts.

We are looking for volunteers to join us on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday (August 28th–30th) between noon and 6 on any of those days to help us sprucen-up the pool area. Thanks to our friends at Park Pride and the Department of Parks and Recreation, we’ll have all the tools we need and now we could just use some helping hands to lighten the load.

Please send our Volunteer Coodinator and all-around superhero, Andrew Tate an email (andrew@gloatl.com) letting me know when you’re available during those several days and I will arrange our time together!

Our volunteers are fantastic folks from across all walks of life and we simply couldn’t exist without all y’all!. Thank you!

Maddox Park is a special place: it’s one of Atlanta’s oldest parks, is home to possibly the best gazebo in the City, it’s proximity to MARTA is fantastic, and it will one day be connected to the Atlanta Beltline. The area was one of the first suburbs of Atlanta during, developing in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The property that is today Maddox Park was initially a landfill. The conversion from landfill to park began in the late 1920s and was completed in 1931. The initial park included a pool house, a swimming hole (later removed and replaced with a pool) and that great gazebo at the top of the hill.

As one of the thirteen jewels in the Emerald Necklace, as the Beltline was initially proposed, there are a number of suggestions for Maddox Park. A comprehensive plan was put forward for the Beltline, after several rounds of community discussion (you can read the plan here—PDF warning), a recent graduate student at Georgia Tech’s School of City and Regional Planning has also put forward an expansion of the Park’s greenhouse as an urban farming initiative.

We are particularly excited about Maddox Park because it is so close to our home at Goodson Yard in the Goat Farm, and it has this fantastic pool. Well, the pool’s been closed for the better part of twenty years now.

With volunteers, we will be cleaning the pool as we prepare for the performances (please contact me if you’d like to volunteer with us paul@gloatl.com) in the next few weeks. In spite of the obvious need for some clean-up, this pool is really amazing because it has an extraordinary granite foundation.

There is a lovely mural at the back of the pool area and that will be the focus of the remainder of this post.

According to the signage, this mural was painted in 2001 and was a collaboration between the Office for Cultural Affairs, and a number of community organizations and businesses.

Of particular note in this mural is this detail:

This symbol on the left-hand side is an Adinkra symbol, originally created by the Akan of Ghana and the Gyaman of Cote d’Ivoire in West Africa. The Adinkra symbols are not simply decorative, they also represent objects that convey traditional wisdom. When I was an undergraduate I had the great fortune to study social change and Traditional West African religions at the University of Cape Coast, located on the coast Ghana.

The above symbol is called Nkyinkyim (“en-chin-chim”), deriving from kyim (twist), the phrase literally means to turn oneself around. According to Adolph H. Agbo’s short text, Values of Adinkra Symbols, “The symbol advises people to endure hardships and be committed to their duty. It also stresses the need to live exemplary lives for others to emulate.” (32) In the context of motherhood, this reminds/advises us that we will perform many roles in our lives and each of these will entail a number of difficulties as we progress.

In their “Atlanta: A Morphological History,” Haynie and Peponis discuss the fractured history of integration in our city suggest that the lack of street connections and agreed upon urban center have historical roots that contribute significantly to our discontinuous urban environment. For me the best examples of this are the numerous highway clover leafs, Spaghetti Junction (the northern intersection of I-85 and I-285), and the name changes that happen at the intersection of Ponce De Leon Avenue. But, the Nkyinkyim reminds me that I will always find myself turned around. I can turn these temporary setbacks to my advantage. The Nkyinkyim also suggests that I must navigate these turnarounds and twistings skillfully, serving as an example to those around me. To borrow a phrase from a group Lauri and I met during our panel discussions at the Living Walls conference, the Nkyinkyim might also be saying that I trust my struggle.

from the High Museum’s Teen Team

The Liquid Culture series has been completed and we are so thankful to all of you for your participation and support. Liquid Culture is an experiment for gloATL and for the people that participate in our five-week Research & Development Intensive Educational Opportunity (R&D).

©Lauren Cunningham

R&D typically includes up to fifty dancers engaged in learning exercises for two weeks. There are six guest instructors as well as four artists from mediums other than dance that also lead classes. The first half of the R&D day is spent doing movement exercises and discussing the methods and philosophies that inform the practices of the guest instructors and artists. One hour of each day involves exploring public spaces and developing gestural exercises. It’s during the second part of the day that materials for the public performances are developed. The challenge is to then create four physical installations during a fourteen day period!

©Lauren Cunningham

The entire project, then, is an experiment. What makes dancing with gloATL so unique is the emphasis on exploring how a body can move. While it may sound redundant, the most critical question for gloATL is, how can this particular body move? Lauri asks the dancers to explore their bodies, to experiment with the forms that they can hold and to relate to themselves as a dance laboratory.

The photos above are gloATL’s performance at the Lindbergh Station taken by the folks that came with cameras. If you click the photos, you’ll be sent to their author’s sites. Thanks for sharing!

Lauri Stallings (gloATL): We’re nomads; it’s different this year, a series of interventions. I don’t consider them site-specific works because we are there for such a short time. It’s an installation: we go in we set up and we are gone.

One of the central thoughts for us is economy: of form, of gesture, etc. LQ is 4 works in 14 days, and that’s a real beast. That’s why we returned to it: we’re only in the middle of our beginning, this being year 3.

Utopia stations, we say that because the sites where we work are stations. We decided we’d take it to you in the streets, to see you. Utopia, that great Thomas Moore term; we’re all in this together.

Andrew Alexander (Creative Loafing): I think that’s so interesting that you work with installations, especially since that’s not a term one thinks of with opera.

Laura Soldati (Atlanta Opera): No, you’re right. Maybe at one time opera might have been nomadic, but no longer. Today opera is on a stage and a bit away form its public. So the opportunity to be so close to our audience and singing to them so intimately, was really an exhilarating opportunity.

Megan Mashburn (Atlanta Opera): It was a big thing to learn and grow closer to my fellow artists. This was so fresh. I loved the interaction with the audience, that they were a part of it. We meet only halfway on stage and at Sol LeWitt’s sculpture they were just all in. Things went differently form what we rehearsed.

Andrew: Was it all positive, were there no negatives?

Megan: Well, there was this one moment. I was supposed to sing, and I knew where I was supposed to be and the audience didn’t know. I tapped him, and I guess he didn’t feel it. So I had to, the poor guy, I had to sing right behind him. It wasn’t a negative, but a new challenge.

Andrew: How about for the dancers?

Mary Jane Pennington (gloATL): Sometimes the columns and the audience are in competition for our spacing. I felt like I was visiting you just as much as you were visiting us.

Jimmy Joyner (gloATL): Y’know there is this phenomenon when another artist from another art form comes to a gloATL event. With the Atlanta Opera it was just great: they were so into stepping it up and going all out.

Andrew: Was there a particular sound that you were going for?

Laura: No, Lauri really just left it open to us. We wanted to juxtapose beauty with the neighborhood, we chose arias and duets that are just beautiful. “Tales of Hoffmann” is hard to produce, some of these songs we performed just won’t likely be performed here and this event enabled us to perform these rarely heard pieces. We had this opportunity to do beautiful work that we usually just aren’t able to do.

Lauri: I come to this with many different responses from many different directions. I wanted to know the songs as quickly as possible because I knew that we weren’t going to be able to meet with the Opera until the very last week of the series. So, we were listening to “Tales of Hoffmann” while also being in the middle of discovering three other sites for dance during Liquid Culture.

Opera and dance. It’s really only in our country that these two aren’t being explored the way were doing. In Germany, for example, this is happening. Choreographic operas they are called; the operas are catalysts in the same way that dance is. My association with opera is several years long now, starting with choreographing the first Spanish language opera to be produced in the United States. This was with the Atlanta Opera and unfortunately the funding fell through, but this was my first entrance to this relationship we are developing with the Atlanta Opera.

I always begin our work with exercises, in Liquid Culture it was with first with Joyner and then the narrative gets transferred to several other folks throughout the series. I like being an earthling, I like gravity. You might have noticed the first station at 15th and Peachtree, which was described as a shimmering spine. That was literally the first point in our working with the Atlanta Opera.

Sol LeWitt was a collaborator with us, even though he’s dead. His spaces he made, they seemed to be made without a concern for whether we were allowed into the work or not. So with Laura we were constantly talking about how to enter into opera and how to enter into dance.

Audience member asked about the platinum wigs.

Lauri: We don’t really work in a male-female situation. I grew up with parents that were pretty much naked around the house frequently. We are a four-legged species, that is how we work. The fact that those wigs were the only ones we could get for $6 a piece, that was the biggest reason to have those wigs.

Audience: What was different from Friday and Saturday?

Lauri: The public was different. On Saturday I didn’t see the audience shift much at the beginning of the performance and that was problematic for me. We want the dance to spread, like a virus, among you and there is a certain kind of etiquette that spontaneously develops when we are together. We want you to be fluid with us. Density was the difference between Friday and Saturday. It’s like going from a small town to a city; they’re different worlds. Tuesday we’re voting about transit, we’re dealing with shifting migratory patterns across our city right now. That is in part what we were also trying to emphasize in the Liquid Culture series.

Joyner: Yeah, maybe because there were so many folks there on Saturday, it was hard to move around with the density of that audience.

Lauri: I know that I can’t change the way that humans interact. But I’m hoping that we will find ways to soften and be more fluid in these performances.

Megan: Yeah, each night presented different challenges. The possibilities were different each evening because the audience was interacting with us in different ways each evening. I don’t know that I could say that I enjoyed one performance more than another.

Mary Jane: Yeah, we challenged the audience as well by placing those bleachers so far away from the sites of the performances. We wanted to bring you into the performances. The columns also provided options for where the audience could be in relation to the performances.

Laura: This isn’t the first time that we’ve done opera in the public. We do these pop-up performances every now and again and it’s a lot of fun to surprise folks with it. The future of performance is going to be in these nontraditional spaces and getting closer to the audiences. Opera is accessible, it’s a full-body sport and people can see that. Each singer has such presence, the song may be the same but each singer is so individual. When audiences can see how the whole body is involved in getting those sounds to come out, people can understand just how physical opera really is.

Megan: Doing the pop-up opera has been really informative. If you come to a pop-up performance you will laugh because it’s not at all expected. So I’ll see a lot of scared children, for example.

Audience: How does the performance change for you when you’re surrounded by all these cameras?

Laura: It’s an opportunity, sure it’s hard for a singer sometimes when there is a camera in their face, but there is nothing like live performance. The feeling of live performance is something that does not happen on a screen. That said, through screens we get many more people involved. The Atlanta Opera is a fairly experimental for an opera company. We worked with the University of Kentucky to develop technologies that would not obstruct light, cast shadows during our Porgy & Bess.

Audience: Is it challenging to be out on an Atlanta summer evening doing opera?

Megan: Well, for me, bugs love to bite me. But, really, I get just as hot on stage as out there. And outside there was that great city ambiance—those sounds, like an ambulance, for example. You’d never get those sounds on a stage.

Audience: There was this universal gesture that came a lot at the L5P performance and I’m wondering why it was used so much?

Lauri: What, this gesture? It’s meaningless. It really doesn’t mean anything. But, no, it didn’t come out in the final station (at Sol LeWitt). By that point the gesture had lost its meaninglessness and so it was no longer useful. We spend our every day exploring these gestures.

Audience member: was there a certain thought that was so necessary to this performance?

Lauri: Yes, I am trying to slow the world down. I want to make a space for us to learn about ourselves, with each other.

Laura: This experience was so exciting for us, because we are pushing boundaries. I think we need to start questioning things. I have always thought of art as a communication of the world and it seems to me that we collectively have moved away from that. Present boundaries, asking about ourselves, these are things that we need to be doing. So many artists I meet are afraid of changing. They don’t know why, they haven’t ventured out and seen that there is a change happening. Speeds things up for me.

Sever’s contribution to the Detroit Beautification Project (2012), via 12oz Prophet

I like that Joey qualifies the indifference a public might display toward an art object as “blasphemous,” and I think he’s right: artworks outside of the productive consumption cycle (this is art because it enhances someone’s cultural capital) are not consecrated and so have no legitimacy. Bastard art objects, then. With this “who begat who” thinking it seems natural that penises will feature prominently in the/a public’s response as was the case with Matt Haffner’s enormous wheatpasted images (see below).

Matt Haffner’s Serial City (2006)

There is this concern that the art objects do not become promiscuous. That the displayed objects demonstrate the genius of the author. With only one author there is no questioning the fidelity of the rendered object to the creator’s conception. Upon conceiving, the artist is also subjected to paternity tests: what genus of genius is this?

The Qianlong Emperor Viewing Paintings, 1746—c.1750, by Giuseppe Castiglione

In another cultural context, the art object is enhanced by the inscriptions or seals left by subsequent caretakers—in classic Chinese paintings, for example. When we address a crowd we might say “Hi everyone,” but in Chinese the phrase would be “大家” (dajia, big family); the latter privileges accounts of belonging and propriety. The emphasis in our orientation is on the collection of discrete units before us and we are forever investigating whether or not we are who our papers say we are.

It is seen as a virtue that a particular lord or official has placed their mark on a painting, because in so doing the person demonstrates that they have cultivated such an aesthetic sense. The dialogue between the artist, the subject of the artwork, and the community is harmonized in this arrangement. This is a demonstration of propriety. An appreciation in the financial sense (the adding of value) rather than subtracting from, as we say when something is defaced.

I don’t mean to orientalize, but rather suggest that there is the potential to reorient ourselves in the face of what we encounter. I think Joey is making a similar call by suggesting that it is precisely our task to see the sites of authorial contention as the sites of creativity.

There is an odd tension for artworks: on one hand we tend to value their homeostatic works—they don’t change, we do our best to preserve them and for ancient works we try to restore to an ideal state, an orthodox presentation. Heterodoxy, the presence of others, threatens the paternity test. I’m left wondering who the plaintiff in this case is? Who is trying to win this paternity case? Who is it that feels their father did not bestow upon them their blessing? But that is a larger digression than is necessary, for now.