Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Adapting Arts
Trillium keeps trucking along
Running a performance art organization in this moment is just crazy.” This sentiment from Trillium Salon Series founder Katy Henriksen pretty much sums it up. Performing arts venues and storied institutions are closing or delaying their seasons, funding for arts and cultural organizations has dried up, and artists and the nonprofits that support them are struggling in the wake of covid-19. This is not news to anyone.
What may be news is that organizations like Trillium — newly minted as a nonprofit at the end of last year — are expanding their efforts to cultivate community between the artists and audience in a world of virtual performance, while also trying to actually pay the performers through fundraising, sponsorships and grant opportunities.
Trillium began as a series with the vision of hosting arts performances in nontraditional spaces where genres merge and the barriers between audience and chamber musicians are broken down. The nonprofit’s very first grant, awarded by the Northwest Arkansas Council through its bridge fund program, will further that objective as it helps to support Trillium’s first artist in residency, which was supposed to happen back in March.
“Because of the circumstances of last time with the pandemic, the timing was wrong for Tom to come up here and actually be in Fayetteville and have a concert,” Henriksen explains of the residency that was set to take place at Trillium’s new home on Mount Sequoyah with Austinbased guitarist and composer Thomas Echols.
She and Echols were able to facilitate a livestreamed salon instead, hosted on YouTube, but now the multimedia artist is actually making his way to Fayetteville to take advantage of the Ozarks’ natural beauty and the tranquility of the mountains for his composition centered on breath.
“He’s developing a software, and he’ll sample breaths and augment those breaths into filters, and then use synthesizers and his guitar to filter the sounds through that and create a multi-movement that examines this idea of the breath,” Henriksen reveals.
One of the most important pieces for Henriksen in Trillium’s adapting to the circumstances of covid-19 is finding ways to establish the interactive nature that has come to define the Trillium Salon concerts.
“As you’ve probably been following, there’s a lot of issues with the bigger social media platforms and how they function and who’s benefiting from it,” Henriksen mentions. “And I just really wanted to create space that is actually Trillium’s own space.”
She’s describing the new community forum that will part of Trillium’s virtual programming, set up through a platform called Discourse. Rather than just a comments section, the forum allows viewers to interact with Echols and Henriksen — who will be hosting a Q&A after the performance — in real time.
“The fact that we have this pandemic happening, and we don’t know how long it’ll happen, and when is the right time to actually do any kind of in-person thing, it’s just been such a scramble to tweak all of the programming to go online,” Henriksen reflects. “So we’re trying to figure out true interactivity in an online way — cultivating community specifically for all the people who would be coming to a Trillium concert and hanging out before and after and with the musicians to talk about all these different things, and connect when we’re not able to actually have in-real-life performances.”