Northern Spark 2014 - Update #9
Thursday, May 22, 2014 at 3:00AM
See the City in a New Dimension through Minneapolis³
Minneapolis³ is an interdisciplinary performance site that utilizes music, puppetry, dance, song, poetry, and interaction to create a unique experience of the city. Performances take place inside a large cube temporarily installed on the Minneapolis Convention Center Plaza. Participants randomly select what they will see and hear, enter the cube, and are immersed for three minutes in sound and visuals that explore Minneapolis and our relationships to it.
Minneapolis³ is conceived and directed by multi-discplinary artist and puppeteer Eric F. Avery, working with a group of collaborating artists including composers Ted Moore and Laura Leffler-McCabe, and performers Blake Bolan, Mason Mahoney, and Lindsey Cacich. Their collective take on Northern Spark’s theme “Projecting the City” is based in the collaboration's emotional experience of Minneapolis: "We want to break down the city to its essential elements—natural, human-made, personal, and public—and expose the difference between what makes the city and what we make it into."
Mizna Projects the Euphrates over the Mississippi for Northern Spark
Mizna plays with this year's Northern Spark festival theme of "Projecting the City" by projecting a river onto the city in Confluent. All night long, the Euphrates River will flow above the Mississippi River, at a special site on the riverfront under the Hennepin Avenue Bridge.
“Confluence” means the meeting of two rivers. During the night of Northern Spark, one of the Arab world’s major waterways meets one of North America’s under the Hennepin Avenue bridge in a poetic and visual dialogue. Viewers can sit at the banks of a strange confluence of the here-and-now and the there-and-now and contemplate the many layers of meaning and metaphor between two flowing bodies of water half a globe apart.
Mizna’s rivers project also plays on the idea of “fluency” in communication and communing. When it comes to Arab and American worlds and the people who straddle both, the concepts of confluence and fluency are very alive, literally and metaphorically. To read more, and to learn more about Mizna's mission and programs, visit mizna.org.
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