An experiment in artistic 'flocking'

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September 23, 2009

New Arts Festival

By Gail McCarthy

A lime-green baby grand piano musically altered with bits of metal, glass and rubber will take center stage Saturday evening in a free sound and light experience at Stage Fort Park at the fifth annual Gloucester New Arts Festival.

Stephen Hastings-King of Essex will play the baby grand, originally a player piano, owned by opera signer Lily Pons who later gave it to Joan Crawford, both rumored to have spent time in Magnolia.

In this event, the public is asked to take part by bringing lights of any kind, whether a flashlight or a child's toy, and just walk around the oceanfront historic park and be part of this experimental experience.

The public has another opportunity to take part starting at 3 p.m., when interactive sound sculptures created by an Essex artist are set up at the park's visitor center. Jay Havighurst, the creator, will give a demonstration of those sculptures that leads into the main event at 7 p.m. titled "the ways you flock," a musical duo comprised of the group Clairaudient and the light-wielding public.

Festival founder and director Sarah Slifer said the event's mission is to create a bridge connecting the artists with the audience. No performance is the same in these ephemeral works of art.

"The idea is to engage the public, and shake it up a little bit," she said. "In this case, we want to make it just plain fun to be a part of the event."

Over the years, the New Arts Festival, a partner for public art with seARTS, has hosted an array of artists working in the realm of contemporary and experimental art.

Flocking at the park

In the flocking event, Hastings-King and Brett Ian Balogh of Chicago, who comprise Clairaudient, will perform. They have appeared at high-profile events including the Philly Fringe Festival and at Chicago's Millennium Park for the Focused Listening festival. Balogh, who performs on radio, synthesizers and assorted electronics, earned a bachelor's degree in biology from the University of Pennsylvania in 1999 and his master's in fine arts from the Department of Art and Technology Studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He is now an instructor there teaching courses in electronics and digital fabrication.

"This flocking event has the potential to be really spectacular. The sound will be pointed toward the water. We hope people will to add to the visual aspect of the performance by strolling around the park with a light source," said Hastings-King, who plays what he calls a "prepared piano," which is embedded with fragments such screws and bolts and shards.

"This makes it different from any other piano," he said. "There's a lot of structure to the music but it's also open-ended. The musicians are discovering the sound as the audience is. What the pieces come to mean is based on the audience. The park will become a space of emergence and people are encouraged to move around and explore the environment and explore the sound."

"The ways you flock" was inspired by observing birds, in which spontaneous individual actions lead to complex large-scale forms.

"The piece is a transient remaking of Stage Fort Park¬ into an imaginary version itself in which the public is directly involved — by flocking there," said Slifer. "We want to invite everyone to take part in this piece by bringing safe light sources to illuminate their movements in the dark.¬ But the public can also just listen to the music and watch the spectacle unfold. The prepared piano is a totally different instrument. The screws and glass in between the strings completely transform the instrument. You just never heard anything like it."

The idea is to have residents and visitors "flock" to Stage Fort Park.

"It's a way to redesign your experience of the park and create a new memory of it. When you do these things, it leaves an imprint," said Slifer. Residents still comment to her about previous New Arts Festival events in which they match a part of the city with a recollection of an event held there.

"I want them to remember the park with this new experience," she said.

Hastings-King, who earned a doctorate in modern European history from Cornell University, said the prepared piano is linked to an approach developed by composer John Cage Jr. (1912-1992), a pioneer in non-traditional use of musical instruments. The idea was to insert pieces of steel, bronze and brass, as well as other objects, in between the piano strings to subdivide the sounds.

"Usually when you press a key you get one pitch, but when I prepare the piano, I can get up to four to five pitches at one time depending on the material," he said.

The sound of sculpture

The public has another way to take part when Essex's Jay Havighurst shares five of his musical sculptures on Saturday.

Havighurst, who studied at the Massachusetts College of Art, works with materials that produce different types of sound, like aluminum and wood.

He has even created new instruments. An author, he wrote "Making Musical Instruments by Hand" in 1998.

"I studied older instruments and I have different ideas of sound, from those of African instruments to instruments of Indonesia, as well as violin and cello," he said. "My mind is always coming up with ideas for sound, and sound sculpture takes the idea of a small instrument and makes it big. When I do that, it causes people to lose their idea of traditional instruments and have more of a bonding with a bigger instrument."

When the scale changes, he said it creates an inviting environment for those want to participate and try it.

"A lot of my work is participatory. I encourage people to get involved with the instruments," he said.

His interest in sounds stems from his childhood.

"When I was a kid, I tried to order hearing aids because I wanted to see what hey were. But the company called my mother," he recalled. "I was one of those kids always thinking about the world."

Havighurst loves living on Cape Ann and near Boston.

"Wherever you have the ocean and the quarries, there's a great sound space in our environment," he said.

Another aspect of his work relates to what he calls "environmental sound sculpture."

On Saturday, he will set up his sound sculptures on the veranda of the Stage Fort Park visitor center overlooking the harbor. The public can try them starting at 3 p.m. He will begin a demonstration around 7 p.m., which will lead into the "flocking" event.

Gail McCarthy may be contacted at gmccarthy@gloucestertimes.com

IF YOU GO

What: Fifth annual Gloucester New Arts Festival, which features artists from Chicago, New York City, Philadelphia, Washington state and Cape Ann, who are coming to downtown Gloucester to present work from the outer-reaches of contemporary art and performance.

When: A free event Saturday at Stage Fort Park, and a Sunday event at Blackburn Performing Arts:

Saturday at 3 p.m., Jay Havighurst will set up five sound sculptures for the public to try. At 7 p.m., he will perform a demonstration that will lead into the main event, "the ways you flock," with the music of Clairaudient at the bandstand at Stage Fort Park. The public is invited to bring flashlights or any kind of light source and stroll during the performance, creating a large-scale effect of light, sound and movement from 7 to 9 p.m.

Sunday at 4 p.m., there will be a performance at Blackburn Performing Arts space at One Washington St. in Gloucester. Cost is $15. The performance bills two distinct music-video collaboratives, and mixes them with the Boston-based improvisational dance collective The White Box Project.

Sisters Bianca and Andria Bibiloni, both of New York City, will perform "D vs S," an exploration of two opposing types of motion. Also performing are Underwater Airport, an improvisational group influenced by shamanic trance music, 1960s free jazz and psychedilia, ambient electronica, and world beat. It plays with videographer Marc Lisle. ¬

Both days: Visual artist Ayesha Fuentes of Washington state is the wild card.¬ Expect to find her visceral visual explorations at unexpected locations.

For more information, www.newartsfestival.com.