At Arts & Ideas, New Haven Took Star Turn

The 18th annual International Festival of Arts & Ideas ended in a group hug onstage in the bandstand on New Haven Green — and rightly so.

The throng of self-congratulaters included everyone from the festival Executive Director Mary Lou Aleskie and chief programmer Cathy Edwards to acrobats, from the Les 7 Doigts de la Main production Sequence 8 to high-schoolers involved with the Arts & Ideas fellowship program for young artists to festival volunteers who’d guarded the donations boxes and helped with the lawn-chair rentals.

It takes a village to make a festival, the celebratory group photo op demonstrated. It also showed that the festival’s not kidding when it argues that it creates summer jobs, builds community, and brings people downtown at an otherwise dead time of summer when schools are out, the local theaters are taking a break, and many folks are away on vacation.

That was always the idea of Arts & Ideas: to stimulate the economy. That’s why the festival still receives state and city largesse while other cultural initiatives that can’t nail the same argument have fallen by the wayside.

The arts of Arts & Ideas, of course, need to be nurtured and justified as well. This the festival has done by establishing, and maintaining, a reputation as a festival open to world premieres, American debuts, new trends and other cutting-edge programming. One can imagine that it would be easy to simply follow a festival-opening crowd-pleaser such as this year’s Aaron Neville (pictured) concert with more of the same — bestselling pop acts with ready-made followings.

Instead, there was a whole other kind of Aaron to contend with: Aaron Jafferis, the homegrown hip-hop playwright and theater provocateur, with his challenging new musical Stuck Elevator, co-created with composer Byron Au Yong.

Considering how much arts funding has dried up in recent years, it’s remarkable that so much Arts & Ideas programming is refreshingly risky.

Some bookings were helped by New Haven’s location, a desirable stop on a touring act’s route to other cities. The two key dance shows in this year’s festival, the acrobatic Brazilian hip-hop Compagnie Kafig (who did high-energy conceptual pieces around the general themes of hectic workdays and water conservation) and Indian dancer Shantala Shivalingappa’s one-woman-plus-four-musician work Akasha, both also played last month at the Jacob’s Pillow dance mecca in Massachusetts.

Shivalingappa’s piece was precious, refined, and hard for some audience-goers to get into. The Co-op High School auditorium, where she performed, was underfilled on opening night of her three-night stint. The show, a world premiere, made it easy to see why Shivalingappa is a beloved dancer who respects classical Indian traditions yet has appealed to modern directors and choreographers such as Peter Brook and Pina Bausch. She has a radiant, endearing personality which exudes from her no matter how many centuries of formal dance styles may threaten to constrain her. Her arm gestures are human and theatrical, not robotic as we can sometimes see in Indian dance. Her dancing, like that of the almost circus-tricky Compagnie Kafig, is as impressive for its acts of balance and grace as for its fluidity. But there’s no mistaking that to many in the audience, Akasha needed more variety and perhaps a more explanatory framework to grab American audiences. Extensive program notes and brief spoken-word intros to the dances weren’t enough.

At the same time, Shantala Shivalingappa earned her place as a literal poster child for Arts & Ideas 2013. She was a prominent face of the festival on posters and programs. Her show came in the final days of the two-week event, when attentions start to lag and new thrills are hoped for. She represented both old-school artistry and modern cultural adaptation and assimilation. This world premiere was a coup for the festival regardless of how audiences might respond.

Likewise, Arts & Ideas’ identity as a New Haven festival as well as an international one made the support for a locally-wrought world premiere, Freewheelers by A Broken Umbrella Theater, significant. It scarcely mattered that the show paled next to the last few works by this audacious local theater company, which does site-specific works based on true-life events from New Haven history. Freewheelers used the convergence of Connecticut innovations in corset manufacturing and newfound interest in bicycling in the same area and era as a pretext for exploring women’s empowerment in the late 19th century. Freewheelers didn’t have the depth and detail of previous ABUT productions such as Vaudevillain and Play With Matches, but it reeked of local color and community involvement nonetheless.

At the Arts & Ideas festival, even the most fun-loving shows have an essential artsiness to them. Sequence 8, an outstanding circus-theater revue concocted by the Canadian acrobatic conceptualists Les 7 Doigts de la Main, not only felt right for the Shubert Theater, it challenged the floors and walls of the place and instilled genuine fear in the audience amid the thrills—on such a tight stage, without much fly space and no safety nets, the Sequence 8 stunts seemed genuinely dangerous. This is a tradition of immaculately designed derring-do which dates back to the festival’s earliest years, when the French troupe Cirque Baroque brought crowded, chaotic circus-styled adaptations of Voltaire and Mishima to the same Shubert.

The festival truly upped its New Haveness and Connecticutness this year. Not just by anchoring weekdays on the Green with local bands (as it’s done for years now). Not just by booking, as some of the fest’s main indoor theater attractions, homegrown projects like Stuck Elevator (which had an important development phase at the Yale Institute for Music Theater, attended by Arts & Ideas audiences three summers ago) and A Broken Umbrella—not to mention the extraordinary new chamber opera My Friend’s Story concocted by Yale professors Martin Bresnick (composer), J.D. McClatchy (writer) and David Chambers (director). There was a general sense of New Haven as an ideal place for artists to visit, perform and be understood. The Handspring Puppet Company’s daring, saucy and energetic new production of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream got to play in a city that not only gets Shakespeare—the bard got a whole “Shakespeare at Yale” year of exhibitions, shows and other events devoted to him last year—but gets puppets. Handspring played in a venue which has hosted puppet-rich productions by Mabou Mines.

Aaron Neville’s festival-opening June 15 concert was preceded by a ceremony honoring the recipients of the 2013 Governor’s Arts Awards, the first time that presentation has been made in New Haven in around two decades. Two of the awardees, saxophonist Jimmy Greene and poet Olu Oguibe, spoke at one of the A&I “Ideas” talks on the same day as the ceremony, and Greene fronted an all-star jazz band that played on the big New Haven Green stage just before Aaron Neville did. Members of Neville’s band watched Greene’s whole set from the sidelines and made many admiring comments.

But even that outpouring of local spirit and grooving to doo-wop from a monarch of New Orleans soul (and the rumors that the producer of Neville’s latest album, Keith Richards, might turn up at the show, a possibility that had been seriously pursued by the festival but didn’t pan out), couldn’t hold a candle to closing night, when all those organizers and staffers and artists and volunteers got up on the Green to mark the final moments of the colossal two-week achievement they’d help bring about.

This was the culmination of a hard-fought goal: not just crowds but community. Not just entertainment but high art.  And not just anywhere: New Haven.