By DAVID DUPONT
BG Independent News
At Arts X a surprise awaits the visitor around every corner.
An actress in a shimmering gown and dramatic blond wig, steps forward to sing “Let It Go.”
One of the Living Statues in the lobby of the Wolfe Center, she’s been waiting her turn as other characters have stepped forward to offer a song or monologue.
Look up and there’s a pair of eyes projected overhead. Big Sister is watching.
As the audience settles for a performance in the Donnell Theatre, someone says she has just posed for a Vogue cover.
Two comedians come careening down the hall on the second floor of the Wolfe Center, making a harried entrance into the Heskett dance studio. Do you know there’s an art exhibit, they exclaim. It’s part of the act; we’re all part of the act.
There’s always something to see and hear and do at Arts X, and that means there’s always something to miss. There’s always someone new to meet, or an old friend to greet.
With the end of the semester looming, and finals and holiday festivities just ahead, artists, performers, writers and their fans took time out to celebrate.
Arts X drew hundreds to the Bowling Green State University School of Art and the Wolfe Center Saturday night. The annual event is part art fair, part music and theater festival, part holiday party.
Arts X organizers have been tweaking its presentation since the start. This year the Bowling Green Philharmonia offered a prelude of holiday music in the Donnell before the hubbub officially ensued.
The theme “Volanti: Seeking Unknown Heights” tied in with the featured guest artists Violet and Fortuna, storytelling acrobats. They performed two shows in the Donnell, sections from their work-in-progress, “Laces.”
The piece combined a disembodied voice emerging from the dark to set the scene, a house in Toledo’s Old West End. The scenes introduced the audience to the home’s inhabitants. There was a very tall man, the original owner. There were stuffed toys left behind in a trunk. There was a lesbian couple who made the property bloom with plants and company. These stories were played out with circus arts – aerial work, acrobatics, clowning, tightrope walking. In the most dramatic instances the duo of Erin Garber-Pearson and Kathleen Livingston hung high above the Donnell stage, muscles taut, twisting in light and shadow.
Auxwerks, a dance company from Ann Arbor, swept through – literally in one scene – offering impressionistic transitions between the scenes.
Pop Culture Professor Montana Miller added a few high flying stories of her own about her girlhood when she felt miscast as a human. She wanted to fly, and she pursued that, always falling just shy of realizing her dream. She took to the air in the Donnell using aerial acrobatics to illustrate her story.
Most other activities were earthbound. The Combustible Ensemble performed Frederic Rzewski’s “Coming Together,” complete with megaphone wielding vocalists. The piece, with text from a prison letter written by 1960s radical Sam Melville, touches on the political turmoil of that time, sentiments that resonate in our own time.
Contemporary music provides much of the soundtrack for Arts X, from a solo saxophone in the Wolfe lobby to the evening of performances and video in the Wankelman Gallery, offered by doctoral students as a tribute to the recently deceased composer and performer Pauline Oliveros. The event offers plenty of new sounds in anticipation of the coming new year.
For those looking forward to gift giving in the next few weeks, student artists had many suggestions – goblets and glass balls, earrings and pins, cups and pots, prints, blank books and t-shirts. Photography studios were ready to snap impromptu holiday portraits in several formats. Creative writing students were offering “a blind date with a book.” Visitors could buy for a dollar or two a book wrapped in white paper with just a few hints about its contents written on the outside.
The faculty and staff exhibit opened in the Bryan Gallery. The exhibit offers a chance to acquaint visitors with the newer members of the faculty while seeing what the established faculty and active retirees are producing.
That show will continue through the end of the semester. Arts X ended at 9. But the memories of experiencing creativity taking flight will linger.
Falcon Swing Club
