APRIL/MAY
A WONDERFUL WAY TO SPEND A WEEK IN TALLAHASSEE
By Katrina Miles
Florida State and other organizers of Tallahassee's first arts festival were faced with the Herculean task of trying to capture the attention of a national community through words, art, illustration and music - and sustain it.
The works of the artists invited - from the visual art of Judy Chicago, to the drama of Felix Justice and Danny Glover, to the hypno-pompic rhythms and movement of Garth Fagan Dance - were the vehicles, not only for the expression of love, but also for evoking the cruel realities of history.
And so, in February, this community was invited to a dinner party, asked to participate in a dance, to sit for a while and listen to the truth of poetry and social justice, to sing songs of revolution and to enjoy the freedom of sound.
And indeed they did come, and it was good, if Judy Chicago's work, displayed at FSU's Fine Arts Museum, was any indication.
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Filled to the brim, people came to feast at Chicago's "The Dinner Party" where the main course was "the political is personal."
"The Dinner Party" was represented through sketches, tapestries and ceramic test plates that represented female reproductive organs.
Considered very controversial in the male-dominated art world of the 1970s, Chicago's feminist work was a tribute to often overlooked women in history. Her other works included her "Birth Project," a blunt view into the world of childbirth, and a series on the Holocaust, showing the parallels of Nazi Germany and the social contexts of today.
Garth Fagan Dance resounded loudly with the voices of the dead, strangers, family members, lovers and friends - work that brazenly dared us to doubt that there is freedom in discipline, freedom in form and freedom in simply standing still - and made room for a new revolution of ideas.
"One reason I like dancing for Garth is that he tells the truth about people, about black people," said Garth Fagan Dance company member Natalie Rogers.
When movement becomes the only means of communication, when it seems to embody a sublimated love that can never be consummated, when it seems possible for liquid fire to take on human form and move with such fluidity and grace - then you've seen the awesomeness of Garth Fagan.
Danny Glover and Felix Justice took many of us to a level we'd never been before by bringing alive for us the voices of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and poet Langston Hughes, and their words of freedom and revolution.
The very soul of King seemed to enter into the bloodstream of Justice, as he transformed into the great civil rights leader.
And Glover's reading of Hughes poetry reminded us that through words, the ideas of a cultural revolution can proliferate.
It's just that Simple.
This new/old idea of cultural revolution through the arts was not limited to the events on campus.
For the Saturday Matinee, many came from all around to hear and see what local artists, dancers and musicians had to offer.
The steel drums of F.A.C.E., the Fourth Avenue Cultural Enrichment group, took us from Tallahassee's downtown Kleman Plaza to the Caribbean.
Middle school dancers, Freaks in Motion, showed us how to trust, and give and take through their dance style of contact improvisation.
Cultural revolution was the voice, representing itself through the artists and their work.
Some of the voices are hauntingly beautiful. Deep love realized through self sacrifice and determination, makes this one of the most engaging and overwhelming festivals of the arts I have attended.
It was a magnificent debut.