One Trunk! Post Mortem!

So the One Trunk Festival of New Hybrid Performance was nearly two weeks ago...and I wanted to make note of it before my recollections got too tattered.

There were three pieces, the first of which revolved around the Louis Riel statue at the Legislature.

The final piece featured Winnipeg Contemporary Dancers performing to Keri Latimer's music in front of a screen with images by Kristian Jordan superimposed by text by Chris Rutkowski.

The second piece on Central Park was the one I contributed work to, as did cellist Natanielle Felicitas and visual artist GMC Chomichuk.

I got up and read my little essay on the park/on the process of working collaboratively. I'd forgotten how very bright stage lights can be and so stood there and talked to the dim outlines in the audience. As though I knew them very well.

I felt a bit less lonely when I finished and exited stage right, where the performers, Andraea Sartison, Ardith Boxall, and Gwen Collins (who put together the piece with with assistance from dancer Tanja Woloshen) were waiting. As I moved past them in the muffled dark, they touched my arm, patted my back, and whispered good job.

I got back to my seat just as Greg Chomichuk flicked on the light to his overhead projector at the far end of the stage. He spend the remainder of the piece drawing (re-drawing?) the three paintings he'd created in-situ. After thirty seconds, Sartison, Boxall, and Collins came out onto the darkened stage point and watched him draw.

Then the music began. The three performers began to dance, mimicking the children-at-play audible in Felicitas' recording and described in my poem.

The final part of the performance saw the three performers approach a music stand and recite this part of my poem.

Which, frankly, was fucking awesome. Every poet should have a chorus of women reciting their work! (But I do have to say that the Central Park piece prioritized the text best. But that's a writers' bias talking...)

I was trying to take pictures and listen and see and analyze so my memories of the piece...are a little blurry. (I wish I'd thought to shoot video, even just on my phone...)

The third piece was situated in Elmwood Cemetery. Video/puppeteering duo jaymez and Grant Guy took the sound recorded by Andy Rudolph, the video/stills of Deco Dawson, and the writing of Melissa Steele, and came up with a piece with flickers of light and sound and colour, with just-visible outlines of parents and children, with clippings and snippets of text somehow on top.

Melissa Steele's introduction to the piece was complicated by the fact that Guy and jaymez had a lot of set up to do. Keep talking, they said, when at one point she glanced behind her, to the assemblage of low and high-tech tools, to see how they were doing.

Once the all three pieces had been presented, there was a brief intermission where I got a cup of tea, did some multi-disciplinary chatting and leered at the Greg's paintings, which were on display in the lobby.

And then it was the strat-planning part of the programme, where organizers asked the audience What next?

And I think I can answer for all of us, artists and audience members, when I repeat: Keep talking.

More Central Park-ing

Central Park, an urban park bounded by Ellice and Cumberland Avenues and Edmonton and Carlton Streets in downtown Winnipeg, was founded in 1893.

The city’s Public Parks Board originally called Central Park (and the three other parks established at the same time) "ornamented squares or breathing spaces.”

The land, which was mostly gumbo in summer, was purchased from the Hudson’s Bay Company for $10,000 in cash and $10,000 in debentures. (An elaborate form of credit now replaced by the expression, “the cheque is in the mail.”)

According to the Historical Buildings Committee, “thousands of loads of manure and soil were brought in and, while settling subsequently occurred, this new base created extremely lush lawns and gardens.”

Though at various points there was also a bandshell and tennis courts, one of the main features of the park is/was the Waddell Fountain, which I mentally refer to as ‘the resentment fountain.’

The fountain was named after Emily Margaret Waddell, a childless temperance worker who lived two blocks away from the Park. She died in 1909 but a rather unique stipulation in her will wasn’t triggered until 1911, when her husband Thomas wanted to re-marry.

He was shocked to discover that upon his remarriage, her will required him to donate $10,000 to the city for a fountain.

This being Winnipeg, he didn’t…exactly…have the money, his funds being tied up in a real estate deal. But, eventually, he came up with the cash-o and the fountain was completed in 1914.

By the 1980s, the neighbourhood surrounding the park had changed. Instead of the stately-pleasure-domes of the upper-middle-class, the park was slowly surrounded by large apartment complexes and fell into what city planners like to call disrepair.

Which is not to say that it wasn’t still heavily used by residents, just that the fountain was sort of broken. And there would often be people struggling with addictions sitting quietly on the benches, watching the children play.

In 2010, a variety of funders, public and private and community-based, raised five million dollars for a fancy reno that includes the city’s largest splash pad and wader pool, an AstroTurf soccer field and a two-story slide/toboggan run fronting on Ellice. Oh, and the resentment fountain works again.

Two weeks ago, in the midst of a mini heatwave, musician Natanielle Felicitas and artist Greg Chomichuk and I were assigned to go make collaborative art at Central Park.

Each of us approached the hundred and twenty-year-old park differently. Natanielle wandered around recording the sounds of the park and thinking musically. Greg hauled three plywood panels and a bag of markers to the park and plunked himself down on the grass.

I alternated wandering around, looking at the trees and talking to people with stretches of sitting, scribbling in my notebook. When I needed help in my thinking about the trees, arborist Christopher Barkman agreed to come walk with me. When I needed help with my thinking about the neighbourhood and the city that surrounds it, I did some research.

After a week, we turned our materials in to Gwen Collins, Ardith Boxall and Andraea Sartison, who crafted the piece you are about to see with help from Tanja Woloshen.

Each of us approached this work with a mixture of excitement and trepidation. Each of us approached collaboration with a slightly different idea of what it meant and what it could mean.

But I think I can safely say safely say, without having to put a lien on your imaginations, that you’ll enjoy your time in Central Park, both the literal and the figurative versions.

* * *

This is my intro for the collaborative artwork on Central Park presented this Sunday at 2 pm as part of the One Trunk Festival.

Reprint: One site, three artists, endless possibilities

Winnipeg Free Press - PRINT EDITION 
By Kevin Prokosh
  
The idea behind the inaugural One Trunk Festival is to send teams of artists to a Winnipeg site and create individual pieces that will fit into a larger collaboration presented Sept. 8 at the West End Cultural Centre.

Andraea Sartison, the artistic director of the fledgling festival, assembled three crews consisting of a musician, writer and visual artist, including the trio of sound artist Andy Rudolph, filmmaker Deco Dawson and author Melissa Steele, who were assigned to capture the essence of the Elmwood Cemetery.

"She failed to mention the cemetery was under lock and key and surrounded by this giant fence at least 10 feet high and very sharp on top," says Rudolph, 29. "I started climbing with my equipment and felt kind of weird breaking into a cemetery. All I was stealing was some of the sounds whistling through so I didn't feel too bad, although I was totally trespassing."

Rudolph, who calls himself a hired gun for weird musical collaborations, began wandering around the rows of gravestones in search of a location to record. The sounds of crickets, birds, passing trains and the odd siren were hardly inspiring. Then it hit him that his approach was wrong and that he should let silence speak for itself.

"I found a good spot along the river where there were two really big tombstones which acted like two perfect receiving dishes for audio," says Rudolph, whose recent project was an inter-species collaboration between belugas and humans in Churchill. "There was a ton of sound pooling."

His microphone picked up this unidentified sucking, creaking sound that intrigued Rudolph enough to return to the cemetery for another midnight visit.

"The sound was a little spooky," says the drummer. "There was definitely some groaning and shrieking but it was mostly coming from the neighbourhood across the river. I recorded a more immersive, environmental sound and put those exciting train noises to build over top and built a bit of a narrative."

Rudolph submitted his 15-minute soundscape with Dawson's video and Steele's 10 pages of poetry to theatre artist Grant Guy, artistic director of Adhere & Deny, and projectionist Jaymez, who together will fashion a presentation.

"The festival is mixing inter-disciplinary artists together, which is essentially what I do all the time," says Dawson. "It was one of those things that you couldn't say no to because it is everything that I believe in as an artist."

The other performances will be made up of the contributions of science writer Chris Rutkowski, photographer Kristian Jordan and Nathan's lead singer Keri Latimer, who all were inspired by the Louis Riel statue at the legislature while the threesome of graphic novelist Greg Chomichuk, writer Ariel Gordon and cellist Natanielle Felicitas went to Central Park.

"I was interested in how these different artists will interpret the same place," says Sartison, who directed the fringe hit Hamlet as Told on the Street. "The focus for me is about process and product and to build a community of artists who are interested in this kind of collaboration."

She would like the One Trunk Festival evolve into an event like the PuSh International Performing Arts Festival in Vancouver or Edmonton's Nextfest, which showcases the voice of the next generation of artists.

"It's not a final premiere performance but an interesting collaboration between some of Winnipeg's finest artists. It's about working together and building a foundation for things to come."

One Trunk Festival takes place at 2 p.m. Sunday at the West End Cultural Centre.

Central Park-ing

Evening. People come out
of unaired rooms, of breadboxes
& bachelors
with flickering TVs
& the temperature drops
a blessed degree.  On the edge of the field, a cluster
of women in hijab, one of them fluttering
a white paper fan. The women clap as a toddler wobbles
towards them, as if she’s in the middle
of a dance floor.

By the elderly fountain
that had its hips and knees, its star finial finally,
finally replaced, an old man offers to sell me
his life story
but gives the latest chapter away:
his plan to send an iPhone to his daughter in Iraq
before he dies. He rolls his eyes dramatically, all the teeth
in his impish grin gleaming
in the last of the light.

Behind him, a girl bows
so reverently
to the splash pad’s cold jets her forehead
touches the ground. Nearby, two stumps.
Growth rings almost lost
in the long grass. The arborist kneels
& puts his nose to cut edge: elm!

Evening. As the wet footprints
on the fountain’s stony lip finally,
finally disappear, the women cheek-kiss farewell
& summon single children out of the masses
of arms & legs running after soccer balls
on the AstroTurf.

* * *

Here's one of three parts of the poem I wrote on Central Park for the One Trunk Festival of New Hybrid Performance.

We only had a week to come up with something, so I suppose it's only fair that the performing arts companies now only have a week to make my poem, and GMB Chomichuk's three drawings, and Natanielle Felicitas' cello composition into a performance of some kind.

See you September 8 for the performance? Here's the official blurb:

"Winnipeg’s artistic communities unite to present an afternoon of performances inspired by one another’s interpretations of the city we call home. Featuring the work of Winnipeg Contemporary Dancers, Grant Guy, Deco Dawson, Keri Latimer, Natanielle Felicitas, Melissa Steele, Ariel Gordon, Chris Rutkowski, Andy Rudolph, Andraea Sartison, Tanja Woloshen and more.

Join us for a town hall meeting following performances to discuss the development of an annual hybrid performance festival and the growth of collective creation and interdisciplinary work in Winnipeg."

One Trunk Festival

* * *

CALLING ALL ARTISTS!

One Trunk is hosting a microfestival at the West End Cultural Centre on Sunday, September 8th, at 2:00pm.

The festival will feature performances by Winnipeg Contemporary Dancers, Grant Guy & Jaymez, Tanja Woloshen, Gwen Collins & Ardith Boxall based on the following artists interpretations of the city we call home.

Melissa Steele
Ariel Gordon
Greg Chomichuk
Chris Rutowski
Deco Dawson
Andy Rudolph
Natanielle Felicitas
Keri Latimer

Following the performances there will be a discussion about the developing a festival of new, hybrid work and the growth of interdisciplinary collaboration in Winnipeg.

* * *

I've just found out that I'm going to be working with musician Natanielle Felicitas - who I don't know - and visual artist Greg Chomichuk - who I do - on Winnipeg's Central Park. 

Which is apt, because I used to take the girl there when we lived in the Spence neighbourhood. 

Yay! Fun!