Provided by Arts & Ideas Festival
“The Thing” — aka “The Jellyfish” — is about to descend on Dixwell and Fair Haven.
“Thing” and “Jellyfish” are the nicknames dreamed up by the staff of the International Festival of Arts and Ideas for an architectural work-in-progress: a dome or yurt-like fiberglass confection that is being dreamed up — and fabricated — by students at the Yale School of Architecture for this year’s festival.
It is a portable performing area for an early edition of the big annual international fest that begins on the Green on June 15. This smaller portable early edition will hit Dixwell on June 1 and Fair Haven on June 8.
On Wednesday evening at the New Haven Museum, the architectural students and their professor, Brennan Buck, unveiled preliminary designs for a mobile, pop-up structure.
Last year’s “cheese grater” or info pavilion on the Green.
It’s the successor to the stationary, kooky info pavilion that was a center of attention on the Green at last year’s edition of the festival.
Buck, who supervised the building of that 2012 structure, approached the festival’s Executive Director Mary Lou Aleskie to build another fun structure. Aleskie jumped at the prospect of creating something that could do more than sit on the Green when the festival opens on June 15.
Why couldn’t it also serve to drum up interest in the festival before the festival kicks off? Why couldn’t something be created to tour neighborhoods whose citizens might not normally come into the center of town during the festival’s two-week run?
“Our idea is we’ll pick up sound, stories, scanned in [family and local historical] photos, and all will be moved in place to the next [neighborhood] to come together ultimately on the Green,” she said.
Aleskie enlisted local folks. The result: two mini-festivals of performance, history-recording, food, and fun organized around the pop-up Thing. Dixwell’s will unfold on the plaza in front of the old Q House and across from the Stetson Branch Library. Fair Haven’s on the terraces around the Columbus Family Academy at Grand and Blatchley.
Buck estimated that when completed, The Thing will accommodate 10 to 15 people at a time.
Local manufacturer Assa Abloy will pay for the fabrication of The Thing. ARUP consultants will support the related high-tech recording and sound engineering.
Yale architecture prof Buck (foreground) and his students.
Since January Buck and his students have worked on developing The Thing/Jellyfish as a five-domed structure that can be loaded on a truck and constructed in three or four hours.
It will have the means to take in stories, impressions, sound, scanned-in photos of the neighborhoods, including performances by local artists. In short, however local folks want to represent Dixwell or Fair Haven.
Top down view showing people flow through The Thing.
It all sounds like a grassroots version of a mobile version of WNPR’s Story Corps, but as the center of a wheel of not only local tales, but of photos, song, and performance to capture the range of the micro-culture of the neighborhood.
“We look at this [the construction] as a musical instrument,” Buck said. It has a recording booth, different channels, but the sound and the fade will be such in the different “domes” that one may record, one play back, and yet another pick up and play back sound of the people in the booth as they move through it, he said.
In future years, all the neighborhoods of the city might be represented in a kind of grand tour culminating on the Green with the voices and the faces of the whole town. That’s the dream.
It was alive and well in the minds of the organizers Wednesday and received the thumbs-up from the partners in the project, including branch librarians, members of local management teams, and area artists planning to work on it.
“It’s long overdue that the festival has reached out to the neighborhoods,” said Stetson Branch Librarian Diane Brown.
The New Haven Museum will be lending photographs of old Dixwell to Stetson to promote local folks bringing in their old photographs and their old stories. Some may be archived in the recording dome of The Thing and make their way to the Green and perhaps the museum.
Channel One’s Lou Cox, one of the organizers, has signed up seven local performers to do their thing at The Thing. The groups contributing volunteer time to put together the mini Thing festivals include the staffs of the branch libraries, management teams, local organizations like JUNTA in Fair Haven, and citywide New Haven Museum, Music Haven, and CitySeed, which will gather local recipes.
Buck said a dozen of his graduate architecture students are participating in the design and construction. Due to exams only four accompanied him and helped make the presentation: Michael Miller, Stephen Dinnen, Craig Rosman, and Dinah Zhang.
