Judging from Friday's mini-infringement fest, I'd say the gallery was a great fit for the fest after all. The lineup, like the rest of the festival, was an uncurated grab-bag and unfolded in numerous sites around the museum. Sadly, I missed the site-specific production of The Staircase (after missing every one of its performances at Nickel City as well, dammit) and the dance piece by Janet Reed and her company, and I only caught the final moments of Kathleen Foster's poetry-and-visual-art piece, ...And So I Moved to Buffalo:
I did manage to see the strolling madrigal singers the Western New York Chorale performing first in the auditorium and then in the sculpture court:
Anyone who thinks the festival is nothing but a collection of oddball avant-garde bizarreness (not that there's anything wrong with that) might be advised to take note of this community chorus performing music from the pre-medieval era through the 19th century in a fairly straightforward (if informal) way. I had misread the description of their program and expected a full bill of ballads from the early days of sailing on the Great Lakes, but those didn't come along until fairly late in the set. Perhaps because that was what I was expecting, I thought those songs were the strongest part of the performance, and I also thought the show worked much better outdoors than in the auditorium, but I loved the very fact that these men and women were part of Infringement.
Where else could you go from sea shanteys and medieval polyphony to hiphop in the space of an hour? I'd really enjoyed Aaron Piepszny's dancing in the Temporary Dream/Nimbus show the night before, and I wasn't quite sure at first if it was the same guy wowing the crowd in the Lower East Gallery,but it was:
That photo absolutely does not do justice to the power of Piepszny's performance. For one thing, he was constantly in motion, his body a veritable museum of classic breakdance, locking, robot, and other pop culture moves spiced up with the language of contemporary dance. You also don't get to see the impressive audience he gathered--young and old, black and white, (ahem) "mainstream" and "alternative," etc. A delightful festival moment.
As was the segment that followed, in which Annette Daniels Taylor (a Gusto regular by now) and the Flawless Records team offered up their signature blend of spoken word, R&B, gospel, and hiphop.
Throughout all of this, people were strolling all over the gallery wearing the unmistakeable headgear of The Zero Hour:
I'll say more about this incredibly fun mobile radio broadcast in a separate post (since I revisited it the following day in its Allentown digs), but let me just say it was a mind-expanding way to experience the Albright. As a friend and I wandered aimlessly wherever the signal allowed us, we'd bump into other foil-hat-wearing gallery goers, and many bemused newcomers. I talked to another (non-equipped) friend for at least 5 minutes before she caught on that we were listening to something in the headphones beneath the crazy headgear. "Ohhhhhhh," she said when I finally let her listen in. "I thought you just got really high before you came to the gallery and decided to wear foil on your heads."
After we left the museum, we headed even farther away from Allentown, to the Kenmore Lanes for a taste of Rock-n-Bowl 2006:
This WBNY-sponsored event would have gone on with or without the festival (and I doubt there was much crossover in terms of audience), but it looked like folks were having a great time. We couldn't stay long because we had to meet up with still more friends returning from the previous night's Flaming Lips/Death Cab for Cutie show in Cleveland to compare notes. I would have loved to have seen the Cleveland concert, but nothing on earth could have dragged me away from Buffalo this week.
No comments:
Post a Comment