Ideas for Creative Exploration (ICE)

April 7, 2010
Flagpole Magazine
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The AUX Festival Turns 4
By Christopher Joshua Benton

Heather McIntosh lives in one of those homes marked with a half-address that makes visiting tricky for a newcomer. She has bangs with brown hair that catches the yellow florescence of her kitchen light when she turns her head to laugh, which she does a lot. In all, she’d be pretty unassuming if it weren’t for her black Orange Twin hoodie—the older one that seems to signify participation in an exclusive club of creative types and now slightly old-school wiz-kids. McIntosh is so humble and unassuming, in fact, that it wasn’t until our meeting that she realized it was probably she (and a group of really dedicated collaborators) who started AUX, the experimental music festival, which will be in its fourth iteration this week: “It wasn’t just me; we did it.” So, what exactly is AUX? For its founder, at least, “AUX is a circus-y romp of experimentalism—not as a genre but the physical act of experimentation. Like science… but fun science.”

AUX started four years ago as a festival, a day of wild multi-media experimentation. A compilation CD/ art book was planned, too, supplementing the ephemera with a physical artifact (and get excited, ’cause this year’s compilation includes one of the first new Olivia Tremor Control songs in forever). Over the years, though, AUX has become the music publication and performing branch of ICE (Ideas for Creative Exploration, in effect, UGA’s interdisciplinary community arts fund), often putting together experimental shows, including last year’s unbelievable Faust and Circulatory System concert at the 40 Watt. This year the day-long AUX Fest will occur at Ciné and Little Kings Shuffle Club. It will feature live music, visual art and sound installations, film screenings and an artists’ market put on by the same people behind the Indie Craftstravaganzaa.

If most music can be arranged into tiny boxes, experimental music is that polygon mechanized to entropy—antagonistic to its own shape. And like the avant-garde postures that influence it, experimental music’s abstract expressionism is just as fun to philosophize over as it is to hear.

“Experimental art gets a rap for being less attainable or a bit pretentious, but it is really a place for improvisation and a place where a lot of the best new artistic and musical ideas come from. Make some new sounds,” McIntosh says.

Or listen to Will Kennedy, drummer for the local so-called “atonal, serialistic experimental noise band” Geisterkatzen, who will be playing AUX: “Experimental music gets down to the fundamentals of what is sound. It pushes the limits of what is considered music… We as people classify music in so many ways and we should challenge those ideas.”

Even by its name—experimental—the implication is more of an interest in the means than its own ends. So, naturally, a band like Geisterkatzen started from its own processes of wonder and experimental alchemy: “We started circuit bending Furbies and old toy Casios and then we moved on to traditional instruments that you’d use in a band,” Kennedy says.

In all, dozens of local bands and one-off combinations will perform in short 20-minute mini-sets; but look out for two groups of visiting heavyweights, who’ll play longer, headlining shows. Prog-psych-indie-hyphen-hyphen-hyhen Chicago trio Michael Columbia is one of the big guns. In its short life span the band has already played the well-curated P4K Fest in 2009 while also garnering the title of “Chicago’s Best-Kept Secret.”

Also playing is the duo of Mary Halvorson and Jessica Pavone. These two prolific New York composers and ensemble-grads have both recorded with avant-garde legend Anthony Braxton, while navigating the academic possibilities of being musicians. Pavone’s discography spans over 30 records. Together, the women make chamber music on the fringes of pop: “Ideally, experimental music challenges listeners, and introduces them to new ideas, hopefully encouraging them to be creative and think outside the box,” say Pavone and Halvorson.

Of course, since its inception, AUX has been about more than just music. To wit, McIntosh promises 2010 will bring even more art installations and video work. You may already be familiar with one of the video artists: Ray Burg of the local collective EYEGATE, whose setup includes the type of projectors you used to watch funky slides on during grade school, paint and found images to make surrealistic “moving collages of color.” If you haven’t seen it yet, EYEGATE complements good music like wine to cheese. And Burg is well aware, as he emailed in near-manifesto: “Music should be accompanied by visual forms of art. Sound and light go so well together, and the current over-use of computer-generated ‘pre-programmed’ images does not do justice to the freedom of sound that live music offers.”

He’s right. The organic flow of EYEGATE’s live projections is more analogous to the improvisational freak-out or the steady drone tessellations of experimental music than the type of imagery typically made by computer-aided projections.

More than audiovisual, McIntosh just wants to bring the cross-sections of Athens locales together; but AUX is as much about supporting the creative needs of the artist as it is about entertaining an audience.

“Say you always want to do a shredding, thrash-oriented experimental guitar symphony—why not? Give it a try, even if it’s different from the pop you normally make. It’s an opportunity to do something divergent from your day-to-day artistic path,” says McIntosh. Because really the two—performer and audience—are auxiliary to each other.

November 4, 2009
Red and Black
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Film, art to celebrate fall of Berlin Wall
By Carolyn Crist

When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, the world changed.

Though most students on campus were born just before or just after the event and have no firsthand knowledge of what happened, the effects are still resounding today.

“The world we live in is a direct result of what happened,” said Martin Kagel, department head of Germanic and Slavic studies. “For students, it’s important to note the shift of conflict in the world from ideological to cultural. It’s important to know about revolution, political change and how to bring it about.”

To remember what happened in the days and decades after the wall came down, the department organized a roundtable discussion, a film festival and an art installation to take place Thursday through next Wednesday.

“We’re all interested in eastern European and German politics. It defines our department,” said Kagel, who was a student in Berlin in 1989 and moved to East Germany a few months after the wall fell. “We’re the generation who experienced the events consciously … and are making them visible again.”

On the day of the anniversary – Monday, Nov. 9 – two German and Slavic studies professors will lead a celebration of music and memories.

“It ended the Cold War, reunited Germany and started a whole new global idea,” said Brechtje Beuker, one of the professors involved. “It wasn’t just Germany, and we’ll look broader – Holland, Moldova and even an American perspective with John F. Kennedy’s ‘I am a Berliner’ speech.”

That night, Ideas for Creative Exploration will erect an 11-foot screen as a replica of a section of the Berlin Wall. Video projections and archived photographs will glow in the dark as a memory of what happened the night the wall fell.

“I was a freshman in college when the wall came down and went to Berlin a year later,” said Mark Callahan, director of ICE who organized the art project. 

“The wall was completely gone, but you could still feel the difference between the two sides. It’s amazing how the physical substance can fade away and memories change over time.”

Many students probably don’t have any memories in relation to the wall, and the project was created to capture what happened, he said.

“When we were planning what to create, one of the recurring themes was to try to convey that sense of excitement that existed that night – that strangeness and wonder,” Callahan said.

The ICE group will also place stands near Joe Brown Hall, Cine and Tate Plaza where students can write thoughts, poetry or drawings and attach them to wire to remember the anniversary. The question: What walls would you tear down?

“The world we live in – a globalized and connected economy and culture – comes directly out of what happened,” he said. 

“We live in a post ’89 world, and there’s a lot to unpack and understand.”

For Kagel, part of the project is to show all sides of what happened, even the negative reactions to the wall falling.

“I think people, Americans in particular, overidealize the event. There’s still a bit of separation between the two Germanies and the two blocs,” he said. “The wall came down, and that was great, but it didn’t solve a lot of problems or suspend all the division.”

Kagel said he remembers one scene of east Berliners, with few dollars in hand, walking down a street with expensive stores in west Berlin.

“The mood was not celebratory. They were looking at this obscene affluence on display as compared to what they hadn’t had,” he said. 

“They had mixed feelings and obviously resented their own government for depriving them of goods … and the wishes they had.”

November 3, 2009
Flagpole Magazine
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George Contini Is on the Fringe: Put It in the Scrapbook dramatizes the career of famed female-impersonator Julian Eltinge with sympathy and depth.
By Amy Whisenhunt

Fringe might just be theatre’s punk scene. In 1947 in Edinburgh, Scotland, the pioneers of fringe broke off to create their own all-inclusive subset of the performing arts—the more alternative, the better. Like other artists and groups of people relegated from the mainstream for ideas and presentation too radical for the masses, fringe was a response to exclusion by larger theatre festivals. Today fringe festivals are held all over the world as havens for small companies, avant-garde artists and all things weird and freaky. No matter how many times Kiss Me, Kate plays at the opera house, fringe remains a place for the risky, queer, innovative and experiential theatre that revitalizes the art form over and over again.

He first conceived of the script in 2004, and Contini spent years molding it with the help of director and fellow professor of theatre, Kristin Kundert-Gibbs. Put It in the Scrapbook is a fascinating, heart-breaking and heroic personal account of an artist’s professional demise, as well as a case study of early-20th-century gender politics. Born William Julian Dalton, Eltinge became a beloved star of Vaudeville, Broadway and silent film, earning him the highest salary of any performer in the United States. After years of celebration and success, a shift in the cultural perception of female impersonation chipped away at his reputation, distilling his celebrity and talent down to mere perversion.But fringe isn’t about ghettoizing the non-mainstream. Diversity is key in performer and audience. The spirit of openness, acceptance and exploration of fringe theatre is what makes it an avenue for identity expression and a powerful tool for conversation. Gaining its name because it suitably refers to art on the outskirts of pedestrian creativity, it pretty much guarantees audiences an unusual theatre experience. This November, local actor, playwright and associate professor of theatre at UGA, George Contini, will be transporting his original one-man show, Put It in the Scrapbook, about the life and career of famed female-impersonator Julian Eltinge, to the New Orleans Fringe Festival.

When we first meet Dalton, he seems worn down and tired, while at the same time still reeling from having everything yanked out from under his feet. The show begins with a news bulletin: The Eltinge Theatre, erected on Broadway in 1918, has been renovated into a new AMC movie theater. Who is Julian Eltinge? Just some drag queen, apparently. Contini then invites us into Dalton’s ornate, musty dressing room before the final performance of his career in October, 1941 at The Rendezvous, an L.A. club for “undesirables,” the term for homosexuals. We witness, in a half-guided and half-voyeuristic manner, a recounting of one of the most influential careers in American theatre history, from whimsical start to piteous finish. Of the play, Contini says: “[It] traces Eltinge’s career from his first performance impersonating a young girl for the Boston Cadet Academy in 1898 through his years of international fame during the 1920s to his eventual decline by 1940.”

Inside the dressing room, the audience meets a variety of characters: the aged Dalton, with a coarse voice and slumped posture, Eltinge the performer, plus those currently in his life and ghosts from his memories. We never see Eltinge “onstage.” Instead, we watch him in the mechanical and vulnerable state of preparing for a show. This is precisely what gives Put It in the Scrapbook such depth. Dalton is both unfocused and completely on point. We see him at his best, performing songs from his repertoire, and his worst, ripping dresses off the racks and throwing them on the floor. Juxtaposing fame and disgust, resilience and hopelessness, Contini captures the incredulous state of Dalton’s public favor like it’s a broken promise. How could it be that he once dazzled audiences with song and dance and, now, can’t wear a dress in public?

“The title Put It in the Scrapbook refers to a number of things; it is the name of a song from one of Eltinge’s very first appearances in youthful drag. Also, most of what we know about Eltinge is from various scrapbooks housed in archives throughout the country. And, finally, a scrapbook serves as the entry to Julian’s memories in the play,” says Contini. Put It in the Scrapbook could also be viewed as a dramaturgical opus. Contini further explains that the songs heard in …Scrapbook have not been performed for an audience since Eltinge did so nearly 100 years ago. “Every piece of music you hear is a song that Julian used in an act, many of them written by him, and nearly all the words Julian speaks are direct quotes from interviews he gave or articles he wrote.”

Put It in the Scrapbook is a celebration of one man’s rise and fall against the backdrop of an ongoing struggle. It’s also a reminder that the personal really is political. In Dalton’s words, “I go through a performance with all the keen relish of a man moving a piano on a hot day. The most satisfying part of my work is when the show’s over and I take the corsets off. I can get a full, deep breath.”

Catch Contini’s final dress rehearsal of Put It in the Scrapbook before the festival on Nov. 8 at 7 p.m. in room 115 of the Fine Arts Building or, if you can make the trip, see his performance at the New Orleans Fringe Festival on Nov. 12 at 7 p.m., Nov. 14 at 9 p.m. and Nov. 15 at 5 p.m. Visit www.drama.uga.edu or  www.nofringe.org for more information.

A three-part chronicle of the Faust Workshop by Jeff Tobias for Flagpole Magazine online.

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

October 8, 2009
Red and Black
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Artist explores cyborg interaction
By Michael Prochaska

As a reporter, my job entails bringing words to an art form, be it music, art, or cinema. Though facts are our friends, emotions are enemies – and journalists can hit a brick wall when trying to encapsulate the emotional baggage embedded in artistic vision.

Last Saturday, I had the opportunity to surpass my duties as an observer and become a part of the very art subject to my writing. When I asked New York native artist Clarinda Mac Low for an interview, I received an invitation for our conversation to be publicized in an art gallery hundreds of miles away.

Mac Low’s investigation into technological communication is called Cyborg Nation, a performance of public dialogue. Mac Low sits in a room, surrounded by random statements taped to the wall, wearing a portable media costume, with a microphone, camera, and video projector.

This is what she refers to as SCOPE (Self-Contained Performance Environment). She posts signs throughout the space with a phone number that enables a spectator’s conversation with the artist to be projected to an audience.

“People want to speak to me directly, but instead they have to speak to me on the phone, even if they are standing right in front of me,” Mac Low said. “I’m investigating the different modes in which we communicate right now.”

Mac Low believes in different levels of communicative intimacy.

“People will talk to me [on the phone] in a way that they may not talk to me face-to-face,” Mac Low said. “It would be more formal in person.”

Cyborg Nation explores human dependence on machines. While some classify technology as an inherently evil or good entity, Mac Low sees it as a neutral force able to sway one way or the other.

“[Technology] does everything. It’s supposed to make sense of everything we do with each other,” Mac Low said. “Technology is limiting and it also frees us, and the tool is only as good as the tool user.”

Mac Low stressed that humans are handicapped without machines. “The whole SCOPE idea is how to live with our machine love without letting it destroy us,” she said. “We started being humans when we began using tools. There’s no going back.”

Another sociological insight examined in SCOPE is unity. There’s a common notion that technology isolates society and promotes anti-social behavior, Mac Low attempts to disprove this idea.

“What [I'm] exploring is how you can create more empathy, more presence and more interconnectedness, rather than more alienation, through a machine,” she said. “But there’s no sure result in art…I never find the answer [in art] because there is none.”

When our interview came to a close, I realized I would have to write a story that will be published to thousands of strangers about a woman I have never met.

Is this the correct use of technology? Like Mac Low, I have yet to discover an answer.

October 7, 2009
Flagpole Magazine
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Watch and Learn from Faust: the Innovators of Krautrock

By Gordon Lamb

There are certain groups whose names fall reverently, effortlessly and equally from the lips of both classically trained musicians and forward-thinking rock and rollers. Among the best of those is Faust. The 38-year-old group has, through the course of its recorded history and legendary status, never ceased to be truly avant-garde. That is, the group’s work literally advances the art. Although Faust’s reputation as a “noise band” is generally the first one we’ll hear of them, it’s actually quite inaccurate. Although never following standard pop structure, the group’s work is never grating or irritating. It remains highly melodic, albeit in a sense that some won’t immediately recognize or appreciate.

The key behind Faust’s visit to Athens is local musician and AUX arts organization founder Heather McIntosh. Her relationship with Faust’s music is a deep emotional bond, and this event is the culmination of several years of, for lack of a better term, wishful thinking.

“I was thinking about doing stuff for AUX for the festival, and I always have my wish list of folks. I was concentrating on getting Tony Conrad for the spring, and I had a friend who knew his booking agent so I had that initial contact,” she says. “Then, I found out that Zach Gresham (Summer Hymns) was recording with Faust’s soundman. He told me Faust was touring, so I got in touch with Faust’s booking agent, and it was the same person who books Tony Conrad!” This visit is coming even sooner than McIntosh had hoped. “Faust was always on my big ‘wish list’ of bands, and I wanted them for the fourth AUX Festival, but once I found out this tour was happening I started trying to get them here now.“

In addition to the group’s performance at the 40 Watt, Faust will conduct a special workshop in the lab of arthouse theater Ciné the following day. Conceived as a sort of casual master’s class, the workshop is open to approximately 30 musicians who want to play with Faust. Ideally, McIntosh says, those chosen to participate will posses several different levels of skill. “I’d love it if someone only knows how to play a kazoo but gets involved because they love Faust,” she explains. “It will be selective, but there’s more than just musicianship taken into consideration.”

The lineup of Faust that will be in Athens includes founding members Jean-Hervé Péron and Werner “Zappi” Diermaier joined by James Johnston (Gallon Drunk, Lydia Lunch, Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds) and visual/video artist Geraldine Swayne. The group has only twice before visited the U.S., briefly in 1994 and 1999. Although it’s not really conscionable to think of Faust as a group that tours in support of an album, their latest release is C’est Com… Com… Compliqué, released by label Bureau B in March of this year.

For the uninitiated, even if you’ve never heard Faust, you’ve heard them. Their influence, particularly with regard to heavily rhythmic, continually rolling and tuneful structures, loose and open arrangements and many other innovations have been heard through artists as diverse as Stereolab and Athens’ own Japancakes. For the classical and 20th-century composer fan, Faust represents a continuum that includes Terry Riley, Karlheinz Stockhausen and Tod Dockstader, among many others.

Unique, perhaps, to this group, who coincidentally coined the term “Krautrock” on its 1974 album Faust IV, is its clearly populist agenda. At least inasmuch as Faust has an agenda at all. That is, this is not concert hall music. It’s meaty and sweaty. Neither, however, is it a music that should be absorbed only by its record-collecting fan base. McIntosh concurs by saying, “I agree. A lot of people are record snobs, but if you were to go to a warehouse space or the 40 Watt you’d find it a lot more inviting than a concert hall. But it should be inviting for those who are used to a concert hall, too. In theory, it’s a rock music show but performed by artists, for lack of a better term.” So much physicality can be lost in a more traditional, formal setting, too. “The hands-folded style of seeing a concert, I don’t know, I like seeing shows in traditional settings like concert halls, but it’s a bummer that the audience is lost a lot of the time because of the somewhat sterile environment.”

McIntosh has intentionally kept ticket prices very low in an effort to really reach the population with this performance. It seems she shares in a practical sense what Faust presents in a musical one.

“In the end,” she says, “that’s kind of the goal, to bring the music to the people.”