Summer Arts Festival: Fiddler Mark O’Connor headlines annual event

By Nancy Wick
University Week

The UW Summer Arts Festival kicks off July 17 with six days of continuous events both indoors and outdoors on campus. “We’ve tried to build on what we did last year and make it even better,” said festival director Hannah Wiley.

Last year marked the University’s first attempt to stage an arts festival, and attracted about 10,000 people to a variety of events clustered around the theme, “Quartets.”

“Pangaea,” this year’s theme, is the name given to the world’s land mass before it broke apart to form the continents we know today. Similarly, the festival’s program notes, societies form, peak and dissolve. “Only memory is left,” it says, “encased in art and science.”

The theme came to her, Wiley says, when she went to see the movie Topsy Turvy, which chronicles the making of Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Mikado. “I thought about the fascination with the Orient in that age,” she said. “Artifacts from the Orient appeared at a Paris exhibition and it affected not only Gilbert and Sullivan, but all the arts. The whole world was brought together through this single idea.”

Wiley sees the current information age as one in which ideas travel quickly, bringing the world together once again. From there it was an easy leap to the theme Pangaea, which in turn opened the festival to science as well as art. Several of the week’s lectures will be given by scientists.

Like last year, the festival will include some “headliner” groups. This year’s top billing goes to violinist, composer and fiddler Mark O’Connor, who will perform Saturday, July 21. Turtle Island String Quartet will appear Sunday, July 22 and Irish group De Dannan on Wednesday, July 18.

The School of Art will host an exhibition of Jacob Lawrence’s work, while the Henry offers a sound art exhibition called Volume: Bed of Sound. A series of films representing the major aboriginal cultures of Canada will play in the HUB Auditorium. And if theater is your bag, there will be a production of Twilight: Los Angeles in the Penthouse Theatre, while over in dance, the Chamber Dance Company will perform a suite of early modern dance solos.

But while all these events - many of them ticketed - are going on indoors, there will also be free events to see outdoors. Drama and dance will team up to perform Bodies in Verse - presentations of poetry from each of the seven continents - in Grieg Garden. Dance will offer Dance on the Quad amid the cherry trees. Nearby, art students will be selling their work.

Woven throughout the performances will be an educational component, with performers speaking to the audience about their work. “This was something people seem to be hungry for,” Wiley said. “Our feedback from last year was that people really liked that and wanted more of it.”

The interest in education was also expressed in attendance. The lectures last year were crowded, prompting Wiley to move some of them to bigger rooms. This year’s festival includes a festival lecture course by Philosophy Professor Ron Moore, a midday lecture series and an evening lecture series. All are free.

Wiley said other changes to the festival have been made in response to audience requests. Credit cards will be accepted in payment at all venues, and tickets will be sold at events (not the Arts Ticket Office) one hour before a performance. And the Henry Café will have a food booth on Red Square for hungry festival visitors.

A complete schedule of events can be found at the festival Web site: http://www.summerartsfest.org. Or, you can request a brochure at 206-685-6696 or artsfest@u.washington.edu.

Summer Arts Festival: Harry Bridges comes to life in one-man show

A bust of Harry Bridges is in place in the UW Libraries.

An original one-man show during the Summer Arts Festival will pay tribute to a legendary labor leader in the centennial year of his birth. The Harry Bridges Project was written and will be performed by Los Angeles-based actor Ian Ruskin.

The Australian-born Bridges first came to prominence in 1933 when he led a general strike of longshoremen that laid the groundwork for the creation of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU). He served as the union’s president for 40 years.

“I first had the idea of doing this project about seven years ago when I was performing the part of Harry Bridges in a play,” Ruskin said. “I really got interested in Harry, and I reasoned that if I had a one-man show, it would be easier and less expensive to mount.”

Another three years elapsed before Ruskin began doing research and seeking funding on the project. With the backing of the California Humanities Council, he found consultants, recruited an advisory board and did a series of interviews that became a radio documentary on Bridges, which he narrated. It went out to about 80 stations through Public Radio International.

Using material uncovered for the radio show, Ruskin was then able to create his one-man work, which consists of monologues and two question-and-answer periods, one in which audience members question the character and one in which they question the actor.

“I wanted to do this because I feel a connection to Bridges’ philosophy,” Ruskin said. “He’s such a fascinating character, but he really isn’t well known outside the world of organized labor.”

Ruskin is currently working on another radio show focusing on the work of Bridges’ union in Hawaii. “Over the years representatives of many different groups were brought into the islands to work on the plantations,” Ruskin explained. “The ILWU was the first to organize those workers across racial lines.”

Ruskin does appearances as Bridges at labor conventions, and says he is now beginning to work on an idea for a museum exhibition. He also hopes that Bridges’ story can be brought to film or TV.

The Harry Bridges Project will be performed at 7:30 p.m. Thursday, July 19 and Saturday, July 21 and at 4 p.m. Friday, July 20 and Sunday, July 22. All performances are in the Cabaret in Hutchinson Hall. Admission is free.

- Nancy Wick