Title: spark! Mesa’s Festival of Creativity
Location: Mesa Arts Center, One East Main Street, Mesa, AZ
Link out: Click here
Description: spark! Mesa’s Festival of Creativity is a free, immersive event for all ages. Held during spring break and in the heart of Cactus League Spring Training month, spark! celebrates the arts, innovation and boundless creativity through participatory activities, music, original performances, interactive art, and more.
Choreographer Elizabeth Johnson is coordinating a community dance exploring the concepts of resilience and balance. Two rehearsals are required for participation: Sundays, March 2 and March 16, 5 – 7:00 p.m., for two performances, March 22 and 23 at 3:30 p.m. Rehearsals and performances will be held at the Mesa Arts Center in the Wells Fargo Garden.
Features of the festival will include Austin Bike Zoo, an imaginative collaboration between bike-builders, puppet-makers, and performers. Animals from the Bike Zoo menagerie that will make an appearance at the festival include a giant rideable rattlesnake bike that measures 80 feet in length, many butterflies ranging in height from 10 to 18 feet, and animated bat and owl bikes.
Performances will include spoken word and hip hop performances led by Phonetic Spit, movement and stilt-walking performance by San Francisco’s Carpetbag Brigade, Pop-Up performances by Mesa Arts Center’s resident companies, a zoo of Weaving the Wild characters in detailed frog, lizard, bird and insect costumes, and a variety of popular local and regional musical acts in Western, Rock, Blues and Jazz that will take place throughout the event.
Hands-on art making activities will include a Jungle Scene Color by Number mural, two giant community-built Lego Giraffes, a make your own Glow-in-the-Dark Dragonfly, Finger Knitting and Beast Your Bike workshops ($5.00) wherein participants can create attachable art that will turn their bicycles into a beast!
Art exhibitions will include an outdoor, overhead installation of dozens of iridescent and solar-powered dragonflies by Arizona artist Jeff Zischke, and 5 exhibitions in the Mesa Contemporary Arts Museum, including the 35th Annual Contemporary Crafts Exhibition. Like a page out of a Dr. Suess book, the campus will be covered with colorful knitted tree sleeves created by members of the community.
Interactive projects will include the Wonder Dome by Dan Fine, a 360-degree immersive dome with an interactive system for live performance; The Amyloid Project, a new steel sculpture and performance by UrbanSTEW, which will bring complex research to life through interactive sound and dance performance; and TubberKnockers by Doug Boyd, which will offer a musical playground that invites everyone to get involved in music-making. Inside MADE Garden, conceived by Megan Flod Johnson and created entirely out of recycled materials, insect performers will guide visitors on a personal tour.
New this year, Spark! After Dark on Friday and Saturday nights from 7:00 p.m. – 10:00 p.m. will include the Dance Lighthouse and Digital Light Painting by Glowing Pictures; It’s You, an interactive projection piece by Karolina Sobecka; Fractured Future by Moheeb Zara, an interactive DJ/VJ installation that invites participants to change image and sound on a projection-mapped installation from a built-in DJ/VJ kiosk; and fire and glow performances by circus artists Martin Taylor and Juggler James Reid.
All festival activities and outdoor performances are free of charge with the exception of ticketed performances in the MAC’s theaters, studio sampler workshops in the MAC’s arts studios or Beast Your Bike Workshops led by Austin Bike Zoo artists ($5/person). Click here for workshops and schedules.
Start Date: 2014-03-19
Start Time: 12:00
End Date: 2014-03-23
End Time: 19:00
