The Wake

What happens when you mix spoken word with dance, and artists with urban planners? Or when students dress in Velcro suits and play with giant tarps? And what does the guy in a squirrel costume have to do with anything?

You’ll find out at ArtsMosis, the Arts Quarter Collective’s annual event where anything is possible. The AQC, an eclectic student group in the West Bank Arts Community, also hosts grant writing workshops, cabarets, and art festivals. But none are as big as ArtsMosis.

This year’s festival includes about 10 projects, ranging in content from spoken word and multimedia presentations to dances and explorations of space and place. Of course, there could always be spontaneous last-minute works, adding even more eccentricity to the festival.

Zachary Crockett, one of AQC’s leaders and a graduate student in music composition, calls ArtsMosis a “unique and amazing [event] for students at the U of M.” It’s unique because the show allows students to collaborate on what they love in order to create meaningful works, a feat not always possible when professors hand out detailed assignments. Instead, students are allowed full reign with their projects—with one stipulation. They need to be interdisciplinary, meaning students from different focuses must join forces.

ArtsMosis is a “nice mechanism to invite people to work together,” says Laura Winton, a theater graduate student who’s collaborating with Annie Hanauer, a dancer. Winton will be performing a spoken piece about her experience in New York on Sept. 11, and Hanauer will add movement to her words with a choreographed dance. While Winton feels she could always improve upon the piece, she’s decided to retire it after ArtsMosis, since it’s the fifth anniversary of the attack.

The festival isn’t limited to art students. The “Urban Echo” project, for example, is the brainchild of three graduate students studying four diverse fields: landscape architecture and urban planning (Laura Baker), music composition (J. Anthony Allen), and, well, art (Christopher Baker). “I don’t think landscape architecture has ever been involved [in ArtsMosis],” explains Baker. “Maybe it’ll add an edge.”

The Urban Echo project is an exploration of space and place. It goes beyond just speaking of the terms’ differences by actually exploring what creates a place. The interactive experiment will take place outdoors, between the Regis Center for Arts and the Barker Center for Dance. Their goal is to make the grassy knoll a place rather than just a space. To do this, the collaborators are inviting anyone to send text messages, images, emails, and voicemails to specially created numbers or addresses. “It’s really the participants who are creating the piece,” explains L. Baker.

Participants are asked to submit answers to simple, yet profound questions: Who, what, where, and why we are. Responses will fill the large projection screens and echo from speakers. These individual answers are, ultimately, the threads that make up the fabric of this “place,” which celebrates individual stories and unique urban landscapes.

Past ArtsMosis projects have been wildly successful and are always imaginative, like last year’s tarp experiment led by students who wanted to explore its many uses. Though the project’s original plan didn’t come to fruition, Crockett explains, what came to pass may have been better. The artists ended up frolicking, playing, and tossing objects (think shoes, rocks, and miscellaneous debris) onto the tarp. Soon a huge group gathered to watch and explore the tarps uses, creating a huge party.

“I tell you, it was the most successful thing at the event,” Crockett says with a laugh. “Total pandemonium, complete insanity.”

Last minute, unplanned projects sometimes make appearances at ArtsMosis as well. Last year, three young men showed up hours before the event commenced, set up large boxes, and hid in them all night. As people stopped to look at the handmade sign they posted in front of each box, a knife would suddenly poke out. Stranger still, one of the men later emerged wearing a squirrel costume and started running around.

“You just never knows what’s going to happen at this thing,” Crockett says.

What we do know about this year’s showcase, scheduled for Oct. 6, is that there will be an electronic music piece, a percussionist performance enhanced by video and electronic music, people dancing in Velcro suits (mildly improvisational, mildly choreographed), and a history lesson, in the form of a piece taking place on the Bohemian Flats, which used to inhabit the West Bank.

We also know that ArtsMosis is a truly unique event, and an ideal way for students of all backgrounds to become involved in on-campus art. Without the generosity of the College of Liberal Arts, which funds students’ projects, and the passion of the students, ArtsMosis wouldn’t be possible, Crockett says. The main goal, he concludes, is “to keep art going with students.” Even if that means commandeering a section of the West Bank or dressing like furry creatures.

ArtsMosis is scheduled for Oct. 6, on the West Bank of campus; tc.umn.edu/~aqc/artsmosis.html.