Many aspects of the 2017 International Festival of Arts & Ideas will seem familiar — well-known bands playing for thousands of people on the New Haven Green, world-premiere music and theater works, cutting-edge dance troupes, clowning, lectures, discussions, food…
But Chad Herzog makes it clear that “this festival is going through a major reset.”
Herzog joined Arts & Ideas two years ago as its director of programming. When longtime Executive Director Mary Lou Aleskie announced in December that she was leaving that post after 11 years, Herzog became one of three interim co-executive directors, alongside Director of Development Tom Griggs and Managing Director Elizabeth Fisher. The festival hopes to have a new executive director in place by October, when the organization’s fiscal year begins.
This year’s festival had a much smaller budget, partly due to uncertainty about state and federal arts funding.
“We’re a fiscally responsible organization,” Herzog says. “We started with less.”
And yet, he continues, “Four world premieres! Commissioned pieces that we’re very proud of. The new Altar’d Spaces series at churches on the New Haven Green. We’ve brought the Pop-up Festivals” — stand-alone events in the Dixwell, Fair Haven and Hill neighborhoods that have been a precursor to the main festival for the past five years — “into the fold. They’re part of the festival now. We’re calling June Festival Month.”
(The Dixwell and Fair Haven festivals happened last weekend. The Hill festival happens June 10. The New Haven Documentary Film Festival, which Arts & Ideas co-sponsors, began June 1. )
Herzog has used the budget setback as an opportunity to tidy up the schedule a bit. In the past, it was often impossible to see all the major ticketed events because many were programmed opposite each other, or against the big free concerts on the New Haven Green. In 2015, Taylor Mac complained from the stage of his show “The 1990s” that he was missing rock diva Darlene Love. This year for the first time, the concerts on the green don’t compete with any ticketed events.
This year’s free outdoor concerts, a mainstay of the fest since its early years, are the Mexican rock-fusion act Troker and Latin party band Fulaso (both on June 17); Connecticut-based jazz saxophonist Jimmy Greene fronting the New Haven Symphony Orchestra June 18 and an intriguing double-bill of The Wailers Band (led by Bob Marley’s bassist Aston “Familyman” Barrett) and jam band Rusted Root on June 24.
Herzog seems particularly proud of the new Altar’d Spaces series, which not only takes advantage of strong local and regional talent but showcases the three historic churches on the green (plus a fourth that’s very nearby) as performance venues. Connecticut-based jazz musician Taylor Ho Bynum, Herzog says, “has performed around the world, but he’s never performed on our festival stages until now” (June 11 at 6:30 p.m. in Center Church). There are 14 Altar’d Spaces shows in all, including Baba Brinkman’s “Rap Guide to Climate Chaos” (June 13); Olive Tiger, the local pop ensemble which features a cellist and violinist (June 14); the Happenstance Theater clown troupe (June 14); the Afro Peruvian New Trends Orchestra (June 19) and the Word Citywide High School Poetry Jam (June 21).
The Altar’d Spaces shows are in addition to the Connecticut acts that are booked to play on the green during the “Scene on the Green” series June 17 to 24. “Scene on the Green” features the musical acts Abbie Gardner (June 21), The Bossa Nova Project (June 23) and Ginga Brasileira (also June 23). It also offers yoga on the green and many children’s entertainments, including the urban-planning exercise “Box City,” where kids create buildings from cardboard boxes but then have to apply for zoning permits to display them.
The “Ideas” side of Arts & Ideas has been rethought as well. There are fewer events overall but some are taking place outside the Yale art gallery lecture halls, which have been the main location of “Ideas” lectures for years. A discussion of immigration, for instance, is taking place in Wooster Square Park, the heart of the city’s historic Italian neighborhood.
As for the main-ticketed events, they include a new work from Aaron Jafferis and Byron Au Yong, whose “Stuck Elevator” was a highlight on the 2013 festival. “(Be)Longing” (June 17 and 18 at the Long Wharf Theatre) explores communal grieving in the wake of “large-scale tragedies” such as Virginia Tech. Herzog says the festival got involved with “(Be)Longing” when Jafferis and Au Yong were asked at a “Stuck Elevator” talkback what they were working on next.
Camille A. Brown, who’s bringing her modern dance piece “Black Girl: Linguistic Play,” returns to Connecticut for festival dates June 15 and 16. The piece, scored with hip-hop and street rhythms, concerns black female identity. “Black Girl” was performed at Wesleyan University in October, but the festival booking is special. When Chad Herzog was director of the performing arts at Juniata College in Pennsylvania, he commissioned “Black Girl” and a previous Camille A. Brown social-issues dance piece, “Tolerance.”
Brown, in a phone interview from her New York apartment, sees a college engagement like Wesleyan as a different experience from from festival dates. “It’s wonderful any time we get to be part of a group of other artists.”
The Chicago-based experimental multimedia theater troupe Manual Cinema is presenting its latest work “The End of TV” June 19 to 22 at the Yale University Theatre.
“We first approached them about 18 months ago,” Herzog says. During that time, the troupe has become an international sensation, earning praise in New York and at the Edinburgh Festival in Scotland.
The influential modern composer and Yale professor Martin Bresnick will world-premiere “Whitman, Melville, Dickinson — Passions of Bloom“ June 20 at Yale’s Sprague Hall. It’s an oratorio inspired by the writings of lionized Yale literary critic Harold Bloom. Theatre of the Oppressed NYC, which has brought its community-based political theater work to New Haven several times in the past decade, returns this time as an official festival event with “We Are Citizens,” June 21 at the Bregamos Theater in Fair Haven.
Like dance, theater and music, clowning and circus theater has always been part of the festival. This year’s acrobatic delight is “Leo: The Anti-Gravity Show” June 23 and 24 at the University Theatre. Clowns, acrobats and jugglers can also be found some days on the green.
The Chinese pipa player Wu Man performs with the Miro Quartet June 22 — playing a new work, “Gardenia,” which the festival commissioned from composer Xiaogang Ye.
There are the usual readings of new musical theater works which were developed at the Yale Institute for Music Theatre. A newer tradition is performances and art displays from the Yale-China HKETO-NY Arts Fellows, a cultural exchange the festival set up that allows Chinese students to study at Yale and work on their art for 18 months. The festival is also, as it has a couple of times in the past, taking part in the national “Big Read” where a community reads and shares their feelings about a single book. That book this year is Luis Alberto Urrea’s “Into the Beautiful North.”
Arts & Ideas also organizes master classes with festival artists, walking and bike tours of New Haven neighborhoods, foodie excursions and even boat and kayak tours.
The International Festival of Arts & Ideas continues through June 24 in and around downtown New Haven. Printed schedules are available at an information tent on the green during the festival. Full descriptions of the events, including prices for the ticketed events, are at artidea.org.
