In three breezy minutes, the freshly made experimental film Night Life follows a band of young men at nighttime and dusk in what looks to be the Monterey Peninsula, going out for a drive, digging for vinyl records and playing pool. The sound is turned down in favor of a score of anxious, atmospheric drone music; the camera hovers unsteadily, causing background and foreground to exchange focus and lights to bead and flare. There is no dialogue, no narrative, just vignettes of movement and energy, all of which gives the viewer room to think.
CSU Monterey Bay Cinematic Arts student Dylan Lewis crafted this evocative piece of filmmaking, just one of many gears that turns Monterey Museum of Art’s first-ever Outside the Walls Festival.
In 2013, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art closed for an architectural expansion project (to be re-opened May 14), and while closed they continued to put on exhibits at other Bay Area venues.
The Monterey Museum of Art is doing something similar, though not closing. It’s part of their aim to reach out to untapped populations, to partner with creative organizations and people, and erase the stigma of a museum as a mausoleum.
“Museums are sometimes located in areas that are difficult for some populations to access,” writes Ami Davis, Director of Education and Community Partnerships. “Additionally, some communities continue to feel intimidated and alienated by traditional art museums.”
To counter that, they’re going outside of their own walls, partnering with the Marina dance studio space of SpectorDance to launch that part of the campaign.
This Saturday, the Outside the Walls Festival stacks up event after event, some overlapping, in two distinct parts, in two big rooms of the dance studio. The family-focused stuff happens 3-5pm, and includes a group mural project called “The Art and Life of the Oak” with art activist Paola Berthoin (3-5pm), and a cooperative poetry project called “A Chorus of Birds” by poet, author and workshop leader Patrice Vecchione (3-4pm).
A trio of players from the Monterey Jazz Festival All-Star Combo, comprised of the best jazz musicians from Monterey County’s high schools, will play starting at 4:30pm. MJF Education Director Paul Contos says the kids are very in-demand, and relish playing gigs and exercising independence.
“They will collectively decide what to play,” he says. “They have a certain repertoire they do: Horace Silver, Art Blakey, Miles Davis. That’s where all the best combo material comes from.”
Their talent landed the big band and vocal component of the All-Stars major gigs in Washington, D.C. last year, including the Kennedy Center on the 4th of July and the 90-year-old jazz club Bohemian Caverns (slated to close next week).
Like a prelude to Jake Shimabukuro’s coming performance at Sunset Center, a group intriguingly called the Ukulele Songbirds will play 3-4pm. Overlapping a bit with that, a screening of animated films made by children, for children, and curated by CSUMB professor and filmmaker Soyeon Kim, begins at 3:45pm.
Adult-oriented projects follow, 5-8pm. Some of the earlier events – hands-on art activities with museum educators, a film screening curated by Kim, and Paola Berthoin – show up again, but this time grown up and more sophisticated.
In the first half, SpectorDance, for instance, puts on a kid-friendly performance by their Youth Company set to the summer movement of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons. In the second half, they lift the veil on a new work called Ocean Trilogy (5:30-6:20pm), a follow-up and expansion on Ocean, their 2011 collaboration with the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute.
SpectorDance founder Fran Spector-Atkins based it on a TEDx talk she did four years ago with Kyra Schlining, an MBARI senior research technician.
“Kyra is a real-deal scientist,” Spector Atkins says. “She goes out in submersibles, filming underwater. They discover new creatures all the time.”
Lilly Nguyen, a dancer from Ocean with an MFA from the London School of Contemporary Dance, returns to improvise on ideas in the Ocean Trilogy excerpt, elucidated by a talk, videos and music.
The theme of the festival is “Sustaining the Natural World,” and some events will revolve more closely to it than others. The experimental film screening (6:30-7:30pm) in the second half zooms in on urban environments, color fields, aging and death in open-ended, meditative ways that allows for a flexible interpretation – variations on a theme. Open Ground Studios will be in the house, leading a “community art space for creative adults” (5-8pm) which sounds like it can weave as close to the theme as the participants want it to.
The whole festival mashes up art-making, music, dance, poetry, film and talks, fueled by food from Tacos Amatican food truck. Because this is a first for the museum, expectations are high, but they are flying a little blind. Charlotte Eyerman, executive director of the museum, sums it up succinctly: “We’re excited about the experiment.”
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