All-volunteer organization Arts in Bushwick is promising a lot of fun and performance art this weekend in our beloved neighborhood. Performance artists, dancers and musicians will offer a condensed, two-day sampling of work at five hub spaces and a number of satellite venues. Make sure to pick up your map today, they are all over Bushwick, because SITE Fest ’11 offers so much stuff that you can easily get lost! We invited the festival’s organizer, Chloë Bass, to talk about SITE Fest.
So what kind of events can we look forward to?
You name it. If it falls under the performance umbrella, we’ve got at least a little bit of it. Performance art, durational and short form nature. Dance. Theater. A lot of comedy. A lot of bands are playing. People are going to be doing public street interactions. We even have writers interacting with artists, making live pieces in front of us in one of the satellite spaces…
Arts in Bushwick is known for Open Studios and Beta Spaces festival, what inspired you to organize a performing arts festival?
On both Open Studios and Beta Spaces, we noticed that there were a lot of performing artists that were part of it. It wasn’t just visual artists. I am a performing artist myself, and I wanted to create a festival where I could showcase them. Often it’s a crucial thing for performers that they don’t have access to space to perform in, so I thought that Arts in Bushwick could use our existing relationships to offer space to performers for one weekend.
Are there a lot of performing artists living in Bushwick? We know Bushwick is home to so many visual artists, because we saw their studios, thanks to Arts in Bushwick.
There are definitely a lot of performers. And it keeps growing every year… Site Fest includes both artists who live in Bushwick and artists who don’t live in Bushwick, but they are all happy to make work here for the weekend. I know there is a large dance and theater community based in Bushwick and over the years I’ve seen the number of performances and music shows increase.
So how does it work with the spaces that will be featured on Site Fest?
Thanks to Open Studios and thanks to our long-term existence and good reputation in the neighborhood, and because of my own work as a performer at The Bushwick Starr, 3rd Ward, Chez Bushwick and Grace Exhibition Space, these wonderful organizations donated their spaces for the weekend, as they have done for the past two years. And I have traded performances,so there is going to be something going on at all hub spaces at all times!
How many spaces are participating?
There are five hubs: 3rd Ward, Chez Bushwick, The Bushwick Starr, Grace Exhibition Space and Goodbye Blue Monday and 26 satellite spaces, which are produced by people who wanted to curate and produce their own shows.
There will be so much stuff… Which performances are you personally not going to miss?
Gosh, that’s so hard. There is so much amazing stuff. I am definitely excited to hear Not Blood Paint play at our launch party on Friday night. They are friends of mine but also I love their music and it’s great that they are going to be playing at the party, because they incorporate a lot of performance aspects into their band presentation. I am excited for BabySkinGlove presentation, which is taking place at their house. And I am excited to see the relationship between the duration-based work at Grace Exhibition Space and sort of more momentary performances that are also going to be happening there. Some stuff is going to be 7 hours long and some stuff is going to be 10 minutes long. And we have three people who are doing street performances and one of them is actually coming all the way from Belgium to do it. Her name is Margarita Isola.
