"Rain Hero"; Photo by Jason H. Thompson
For the sixth time since 1999, arts and scientific institutions converge in and near Pasadena for the AxS (ak-sis) Festival, more than a fortnight of exhibitions, performances, public art and lectures. Most of the events are free to the public.
The nonprofit Pasadena Arts Council (PAC), led by executive director Terry LeMoncheck, oversees the venture. “We talk so often about the connections between art and science in Pasadena,” says LeMoncheck. “We have such great research institutes in Caltech, JPL, the Planetary Society and Carnegie Observatories. And it’s been our observation that the more artists and scientists talk with each other, the more their vocabularies are enhanced.”
Working together, she adds, allows artists and scientists “a greater ability to tackle the problems of tomorrow that we’re creating today.”
Echo::system; Photo by Tim Friez
The year’s theme is Fire and Water, kicking off with a staged reading of Carson Kreitzer’s The Love Songs of J. Robert Oppenheimer at Caltech’s Hameetman Auditorium in the Cahill Center for Astronomy and Astrophysics – the architecturally nonlinear building on California Boulevard.
“This is Bobby’s internal struggle of the atomic bomb,” explains LeMoncheck. “And the thing that makes this year’s festival particularly exciting is that we have significant money from the James Irvine Foundation, the [Ralph M.] Parsons Foundation and the NEA [National Endowment for the Arts] to commission new works just for the festival.”
One of the new commissioned works is Rain After Ash, written and directed by Corey Madden, the former associate artistic director of the Mark Taper Forum and founding artistic director of L’Atelier Arts.
“This is the result of a two-year obsession of mine,” Madden says. “I woke up in the middle of the night and turned on the computer, started surfing, and found on the early edition of the New York Times a story called Missing Poet.”
The poet was Craig Arnold who disappeared while hiking along a volcano’s rim in Japan, following in the footsteps of the 17th century Haiku poet Matsuo Basho. “It just got under my skin. I started to follow whether or not he’d been found. I discovered a Facebook page called Find Craig Arnold. So over the next two weeks there were thousands of posts from people talking about Craig and his life and his poetry.”
Corey Madden
The posts struck Madden as an amazing phenomenon. “All these people I didn’t know who were connected through the internet. It seemed like a weird limbo to me and it took me on a journey. I read a blog of his called the Volcano Pilgrim which he wrote in the two and a half months before he disappeared. In my mind they were filled with prophesy about his fate.”
She also read a poem of his called Hymn to Persephone. “I found it connected back to my writing, a poem I’d written about the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice and the way Persephone, the little girl who’s abducted by Hades and kept by him in the underworld, plays in that story.”
Persephone takes pity on a poet and lets him have a chance to go back. “Craig had written about his own loss of love. In this poem he visits the underworld and here, two years later, he actually falls off the edge of a volcano and never comes back.”
Madden was obsessed. “I realized there was another person in the story I hadn’t recognized. I suppose in some ways it was myself, but the person who showed up was Demeter, the figure in Greek mythology who makes the world infertile and holds out on the gods until she can either have her daughter returned to her or come to terms with that loss. I had had a friend several years before whose son had disappeared and wasn’t found until two years later, murdered. It occurred to me to tell the story about Demeter and her daughter Persephone from the point of view of a Pasadena mother who loses a 16-year-old daughter and to tell Craig’s story at the same time.”
Bruno Louchouarn
She describes the piece as a dream and mystery. It is site-specific, set at the Pacific Asia Museum in Pasadena. “You come into the garden and you’re actually following clues that you don’t completely understand. You’re going to be listening on audio to some of what Craig wrote before he disappeared. You’re seeing video of places he visited. You’re meeting characters that you don’t completely know but relate to his poem and you see a woman who looks like a docent in the museum. Someone called it kind of like scuba diving – you go on a sort of dreamy experience of these things that I experienced in a way that I hope is a fresh way to go through a live time-based theatrical experience.”
Rain After Ash features Antaeus Company member Jeff Gardner as Craig Arnold and Los Angeles Opera’s Marnie Mosiman as the docent. (Click here HERE for a sample from this show.) Original music is composed and performed by Madden’s husband, Bruno Louchouarn who composed the music for Glow, the all-night cultural experience earlier this year in Santa Monica.
Madden says she is trying to redefine the experience of drama in a new genre. “I think listening is one of the most potent ways of experiencing a story. It’s intimate. For me, the idea of separating what you hear from what you see and drawing on the way in which we all inhabit movies became very interesting to me. This piece is a lot about the contrast between what you hear and what you see.”
The AxS Festival events include:
The Love Songs of Robert Oppenheimer by Carson Kreitzer, Saturday, October 1, 8 pm at the Cahill Center for Astronomy and Astrophysics, Caltech.
enMESHED, a public art installation at the Honda R&D Americas Gallery, Raymond Avenue and Union Street.Fire and Water Mural Project by muralist Christian Alderete at Villa Parke Community Center.
Water Music/Fire Song by Pasadena Pro Musica, a concert of contemporary choral music at Neighborhood Church, Sunday, Oct. 2, 4pm.
Weather Report: Art and Climate Change with renowned art critic and historian Lucy Lippard, Ahmanson Auditorium, Art Center College of Design, Monday, Oct. 3, 7:30 pm.
Beneath the Surface, an interactive installation intended to help viewers experience the mystery of the spacecraft Juno’s visit to Mars. Pasadena Museum of California Art, Wednesday – Sunday, 12pm-5pm.
Rain After Ash by Corey Madden at the Pacific Asia Museum, various dates and times.
Picturing the Bomb, curated by Rachel Fermi and Esther Samra at the Pasadena City College Art Gallery. Various times.
Ignite/Flow by Mark So, Yann Novak and Robert Crouch and Carole Kim in the Wind Tunnel Gallery at Art Center College of Design, Thursday Oct. 6 at 8 pm and Friday, Oct. 7 at 8 pm.
Toxic Waters by Charles Duhigg, an AxS Festival Conversation Series at Pasadena Public Library, Donald R. Wright Auditorium, Saturday, Oct. 8 at 7:30 pm.
Stoked! Curated by Stephen Horn, an exhibition of ceramic work at Xiem Clay Center, Tuesday – Friday, 10 am – 6 pm; Saturday 10-5 with an artists’ talk Saturday, Oct. 8 at 2:30 pm.
Fire and Water Tour at the Gamble House, illuminating Greene and Greene Arts and Crafts-era stained glass artist John Hamm. Saturday, Oct. 8 at 3:30 pm and Tuesday, Oct. 11 at 1:30 pm.
Sunflowers in Snow, an evening of spoken word and poetry at Boston Court Performing Arts Center, in collaboration with Red Hen Press. Monday, Oct. 10 at 7 pm.
Fire Season, an AxS Festival Conversation Series with William Deverell and author Philip Connors at Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens Friend’s Hall, Wednesday, Oct. 12 at 7:30 pm.
Worlds, NASA spacecraft imagery and other objects, curated by Stephen Nowlin at Art Center College of Design, Williamson Gallery, Tuesday – Sunday 12 pm – 5 pm and Friday 12 pm to 9 pm.
Echo::system ActionStation#2 The Desert, a dance performance by Grisha Coleman, Dance Conservatory of Pasadena, Friday-Saturday Oct. 14-15 at 8 pm, Sunday October 16 at 2 pm.
