CSUMB hosts performance memoir, clown school, political dance and more.

For many, especially students and people in academia, summer can signal a time to slow down and relax. At CSU Monterey Bay, it’s the start of frenetic activity.

The California State University system-wide Summer Arts program, now in its fourth year at CSUMB, brings a flock of creative folks – musicians, filmmakers, poets, dancers, clowns, actors and artists – to the campus to conduct intense two-week workshops in each of their respective crafts for advanced students from as far off as Africa.

The month-long program started in 1986 and has migrated to and resided at different CSU campuses over the years. The instructors and students live in the dorms of their host campus and eat, work and play together for up to 12 hours a day.

But the real broad appeal is that the renowned artist-instructors each do a public presentation or performance, and the students do the same after their course work, on Fridays and Saturdays.

What does that mean for you? Almost daily showcases of creative talent.

It comes from people like children’s book author Deborah Underwood (Sugar Plum Ballerinas, Interstellar Cinderella) who will talk 7pm July 15 ($8-$10) about “the role of downtime in creativity.”

It comes from people like photographer David Hilliard, who will talk about his work 7pm June 30 ($8-$10): “The parental-spiritual rift [between my parents],” he says, “the nuances of masculinity and how it’s mediated through the camera, intimacy, strangers, identity.”

(See the full schedule inserted in this issue; see the full interview with Hilliard on the Weekly’s website.)

“It’s something totally new and exciting,” says Rachel Nardo, director of CSU Summer Arts.

Poets are prominent this year. Marilyn Nelson, who’s authored more than 24 books, received the 2012 Frost Medal and two National Endowment for the Arts writing fellowships, and was elected the chancellor of the Academy of American Poets in 2013, presents work at 7pm July 20 ($13-$15). Jimmy Santiago Baca, of Chicano and Apache descent, started life as rough as a beating. But he clawed his way back from abandonment, homelessness, drugs and prison by using the salvation of words. He’s the real deal.

“He goes to prison illiterate,” says Rob Klevan, Summer Arts community relations specialist, “and he comes out, and his words are like colors.”

Baca and his friends go on 7pm July 6 ($13-$15). But maybe the most prominent poet – a late-breaking coup so new it’s not on the printed program – is the addition of Juan Felipe Herrera (7pm July 21, $13-$15). He is the son of Mexican migrant farmworkers who worked in the San Joaquin Valley and Salinas Valley, and propelled himself into the arts (especially for impoverished communities), won a National Book Award and gained fame for creating a hybrid oral/written bilingual poetry. He’s been a Summer Arts instructor in the past, and worked as a coordinator in 1995.

“He’s an old friend,” says Joanne Sharp, assistant director of Summer Arts.

On June 10, the Library of Congress made him the 21st U.S. poet laureate – the first Latino to be so named in the 79-year history of the designation. The Huffington Post reports he will initiate a program he’s calling Casa de Colores (House of Colors) to “include people of every color and cultural background.”

That reflects this year’s Summer Arts, more diverse than it has been in earlier incarnations, which seems appropriate considering CSUMB is a member of the Hispanic Association of Colleges & Universities.

“We’ve tried to promote equity through the arts,” Nardo says.

They’re also promoting more outreach to underserved local kids. They landed an NEA grant to hook them up to workshops with artist-instructors: Guitars Not Guns with Summer Arts’ classical guitar masters; 160 kids from the Salinas Summer School Migrant Education Program with the dancers of Contra-Tiempo Urban Latin Dance Theater; and Upward Bound, which supports first-generation college-bound kids, with Cirque du Soleil and Clown School performers (and yeah, this one sounds incongruous).

Nardo and Sharp say that the Friday and Saturday student showcases are similar to CSUMB’s capstones in that they give a stage to the culminations of the students’ work, they happen one after another all day, and they’re free.

The whole shebang begins with physicality in the two acrobats and circus clown on June 29 (7pm, $18-$20). And it ends on a bunch of jazzy notes when a combo of Monterey Jazz Festival caliber musicians assemble and perform 7pm July 22 ($18-$20). They include saxophonist and composer Dave Pietro, drummer Billy Drummond, trombonist Alan Ferber, pianist Joe Gilman and bassist Dan Robbins. Between them they’ve won just about every accolade, played with most everyone of note, recorded and toured everywhere, earned their chops and shared the keys to their gifts. It’s the last public artist-instructor performance of this season, and it should resound joyously across the rest of the summer.

CSUMB’s Summer Arts runs June 29-July 25, 7pm for artist-instructor presentations, all day for student showcases. Most events take place at World Theater, 6th Avenue and A Street, CSUMB, Seaside. Free-$20. 262-2714, www.blogs.calstate.edu/summerarts