A return to live performance
‘Imagine’ calls to ‘weave the new reality together’ Festival will have dance, jazz, world music and drag shows
The Ideas portion of this year’s New Haven’s International Festival of Arts & Ideas asks participants to join in creating a new reality together.
The just-announced “Ideas” discussions will feature provocative performer Toshi Reagon, Black Lives Matter co-founder Alicia Garza, Poet Laureate Joy Harjo and a slew of national and local activists engaging in far-reaching, future-oriented discussions of violence, race and economics. The overall theme is “Imagine,” and topics range from “Visionary Science Fiction and Liberation” to “building a solidarity economy” to “LGBTQ and racial justice.”
In a release, Festival Executive Director Shelley Quiala calls imagination “hope in action.”
“There’s an aspirational and uplifting nature to the theme Imagine—it’s a future that we don’t yet have in our hands but are working toward. It’s collective. It allows people to weave the new reality together. It’s not just one person’s vision; it’s expansive, and it creates room for voice and dreaming in a way that we really need right now.”
The festival, known for its deft mix of cutting-edge arts events and crowd-pleasing outdoor concerts and activities, marked its 25th anniversary last year by converting many of its scheduled events to a virtual format and offering innovative COVID-conscious live programming such as a series of private backyard music concerts.
The “Ideas” events will remain virtual this year, while there will be a hybrid and live and virtual presentations for the performances and other activities. Due to the mix of live and virtual media, the typically two-week festival has been lengthened and will run for nearly five weeks this year, from May 14 through June 27. Many of the virtual events will remain online after the festival has officially ended.
Key “Ideas” events for 2021 include: Black Live Matters co-founder Alicia Garza and journalist Mercy Quaye of the New Haven-based The Narrative Project discussing “Black Futures” (including the the innovative Black Futures Lab initiative) June 25 at 5 p.m.
Composer/musician Toshi Reagon, and writer/spoken word artist Walidah Imarisha and singer/songwriter/cultural activist Hanifa Nayo Washington hold a discussion June 25 at noon titled “Everything you touch, you change: Visionary Science Fiction and Liberation,” which promises to cover “Afrofuturism, Octavia Butler, and the role of change in bringing a creative approach to our understanding of what social justice initiatives of the future might look like.” The talk is described as “social Justice meets sci-fi meets songwriting.”
Listening to Earth: Indigenous Wisdom & Climate Futures, May 26 at 5p.m.,
The International Festival of Arts & Ideas is going live again, with some of its more than 200 events. The festival’s full schedule, including a concert by the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra, a dance performance by Ronald K. Brown’s socially conscious modern dance troupe Evidence and a high-fashion “hair art show,” all on New Haven Green, was announced Tuesday.
Festival staples, upended by by the coronavirus pandemic last year, have resurfaced, the biggest one being free concerts on New Haven Green. Walking tours and bike tours are also back, though the satellite “neighborhood festivals” which supplement the main festival by bringing local talent to four key sections of the city will be done virtually for the second year in a row.
Many events, including the entire “Ideas” slate announced earlier in the month and the neighborhood festivals, remain virtual. Like last year, the events are spread out over several weeks. Virtual programming is accessed through the festival’s own “Virtual Stage” on its website, as well as through Facebook Live, YouTube and Twitch.
Live events include: a “first glimpse” of Ronald K. Brown and Evidence’s work-in-progress “Equality of Night and Day, June 20 at 8:30 p.m. on the New Haven Green mainstage. Collaborators on the piece include composer Jason Moran, activist/author Angela Davis and photographer/historian Deborah Willis. “Equality of Night and Day” has been described on Brown’s website as “examining the concepts of balance, equity, and fairness in light of the conflicting present-day issues that young people, women, and people of color now face in a world where exploitation, gentrification, racism, and xenophobia are on the rise.”
A “StorySLAM” spoken word event June 26 at 6 p.m. with the winner crowned “top Festival slammer.”
”The Legend Drag Show,” June 27 at 8 p.m., starring La’Diva Monet (known for a devastating Fantasia impression) and hosted by Pride New Haven’s Patrick Dunn.
a beekeeping clinic with the Huneebee Project, June 19 and 20 at 11 a.m.
New Haven Symphony Orchestra performing Vivaldi’s “The Four Seasons” June 23 at 7 p.m.
nine separate in-person bike tours, including a Connecticut Freedom Trail Ride on Juneteenth, not to mention three boat tours and half a dozen walking tours.
Live shows on New Haven Green that will also be livestreamed include:
“Imagine Beginnings,” a multimedia festival kickoff event, June 18 at 7 p.m.
The Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra, June 18 at 8:30 p.m. The orchestra formed
Turn to Arts,
with Native environmental justice activists Eriel Deranger and Kyle Whyte imparting “indigenous wisdom that successfully stewarded the land for millennia before the arrival of western colonizers.” The moderator is NPR Science Friday broadcaster Diana Montano.[/li]Leah Penniman, Rachel Sayet, Farron Harvey, Tenaya Taylor, Charline Xu, Disha Patel — “global majority organizers and artisans who have been doing mutual aid prior to the pandemic”
— and host Raven A.
Blake (of Love Fed New Haven), pondering The Legacy & Future of Love as Liberation, June 2 at 5 p.m. ”Reimagining
Economies: Entrepreneurship and building a solidarity economy,” June 16 at 5 p.m., is in a long tradition of forward-thinking economics discussions at the festival. This one asks “How can budding entrepreneurs actually create communities of ethical care — not just pay lip service to the concept?” It’s co-presented by Collab New Haven and hosted by one of that entrepreneurial group’s founders, Margaret
Lee.
There is an “Imagine a world without prisons” talk on June 21 at 5 p.m., then a Spanish-language (with English translation) panel on the same subject, “Imaginando un Mundo sin Muros, Jaulas y Detención” June 24 at 5 p.m.
A “high fashion Hair
Art show” has been teased for the “Arts” side of Arts & Ideas, enhanced by an “Ideas” talk “Crowning Glory: The Art of Hair,” June 19 at 1 p.m.
Nearly all the “Ideas” events are free. One that isn’t is a reservation-only “World Building” workshop with the astrophysicist
Moiya McTier,” June 18 at 3 p.m.
Other Ideas events include “Indigenous Writers of Connecticut” June 3 at 5 p.m.; “The 15 Minute City: Imagining the Future of Transportation” June 9 at 7 p.m.; the June 13 “New Haven Pride Center Day of Action: LGBTQ+ Racial Justice”; a “New Haven Museum Founders Chat: Finding Your Rhythm” June 15 at 6:30 p.m.; “Monuments and Collective Memory,” June 20 at 5 p.m.; , “How Artists Shape Our Future,” June 22 at 5p.m.; “Brilliant Boba: Amplifying Asian Voices,” June 23 at noon; and
“Honoring our Bodies — A future for all abilities” June 23 at 5 p.m.
The festival is also holding events as part of the National Endowment for the Arts’ “Big Read” program. A different book has been chosen than the Julia Alvarez novels which Hartford Public Library read in its own Big Read earlier this year. The festival’s Big Read author is Joy Harjo, the current U.S. Poet Laureate and the author of “An American Sunrise” and other works. Harjo will make a virtual appearance at the festival May 20 at 5 p.m.
The performance side of
Arts & Ideas has yet to be announced. The festival has teased the names of a few artists on its website, including the nationally renowned choreographer Ronald K. Brown and theater director Madeline Sayet (a Mohegan native and executive director of the Yale Indigenous Performing Arts Program who created the audio drama “Up and Down the River” for HartBeat Ensemble last year).
More information can be found at the Arts & Ideas website, artidea.org/ideas.