Of A Feather

Bowerbird and Ladybird flock together to draw local artists out of their comfort zone.


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Published: Feb 23, 2011

[ music/dance festival ]

The music that Dustin Hurt has been presenting under the Bowerbird banner over the past five years has traversed a remarkably wide range of styles, from minimalist atmospherics to ear-punishing noise, spontaneous improvisation to exacting composition. But one thing that all of the artists who have played a Bowerbird concert share is an existence on the periphery of mainstream audiences' awareness.

Hurt hopes to change that, at least a bit, with Blindspot, an innovative music and dance festival taking place over the next week and a half at historic Christ Church. The event, undertaken cooperatively with Ladybird — the development, production and dramaturgy guise of Anna Drozdowski — thus follows in line with Bowerbird's concerts at historic houses in Old City, which raised awareness of avant-garde music simply by placing them in unusual spaces.

For both presenting organizations, Blindspot represents a shift in tactics. For Ladybird, it's stepping out from behind the scenes to a more prominent role; for Bowerbird, it signals a shift from prolific concert presentations to fewer but larger-scale offerings.

"Our two histories are taking a right-angle turn at the same moment and now we're headed in the same direction," Hurt says. "We want to create things that feel unmissable, unrepeatable, and we want to do things that have a bit of a legacy. I've come to realize that it's important to put this work in a variety of contexts. I hope people will draw value from comparisons, not just when things are similar but how they're different."

In the festival's case, the titular Blindspot refers not to potential listeners, for once, but to the performers, each of whom will be faced with unusual challenges. "The origin of the name Blindspot is this idea of doing things and seeing possibilities that you didn't think existed," Hurt explains. "To not necessarily answer these questions but to be willing to ask them in a very public way. I think the thing that unifies everyone that's involved is their willingness to engage in these questions in a very public forum."

For most of the musicians, the main question will be how to engage with an unfamiliar and unwieldy instrument — the Christ Church pipe organ. Most of the instrumentalists are not known as organists, but were invited based on their willingness to take on daunting musical challenges. Saxophonist/composer John Zorn, minimalist innovator Tony Conrad, conceptual artists/Man Man co-founders the Dufala Brothers, Sun Ra Arkestra leader Marshall Allen and keyboardist Farid Barron — these and other performers will each inevitably approach the organ in distinct and unusual fashion. The only traditional organist on the program is Christ Church's new musical director, Parker Kitterman, who Hurt expects "to see the possibilities that he didn't know existed in his everyday instrument."

For the dancers, the opportunity will be to mount their work in a new space, the church's newly renovated Neighborhood House. The festival was sparked by the work of Meg Foley and Subcircle, both of whom will adapt previously premièred work to the theater's confines. The shift in venues is even more drastic for Melisa Putz's PIMA Group, which typically works only in site-specific situations, so that the typical proscenium setting will become an alien environment. Two "Blind Date" evenings will pair musicians and dancers unfamiliar with one another for improvisatory performances.

By combining forces, Hurt says he and Drozdowski hope to "bring two communities together that really don't interact that much. The reason we're working together is because we basically believe in the same things: We like the idea of working independently to support the artists that we believe in that live in Philadelphia, but also to give them an opportunity to do something really new."

(s_brady@citypaper.net)

Feb. 24-March 6, $10-$100, Christ Church, Second Street above Market, and Christ Church Neighborhood House, 20 N. American St., 267-861-4773, blindspot2011.org.