At Parc Lafayette

Strike a pose

Leap Night!

Last week I hosted LEAP NIGHT, a screening of seven short dance-for-camera films at Play House in Detroit. Play House, developed by Power House Productions, is the home of experimental performance group The Hinterlands, who invited me to curate a selection of historic dance films. (Well, six are historic, and one is a more recent, local production.)

It was so great. Great turn out (about 30 people showed up, just enough to fill the room), great energy, great opportunity. My pal Sarah Rose Sharp published a really nice write-up about it in KnightArts.

As I was preparing the program, I couldn't shake the feeling that I ought to write something about what I was showing, hence the following notes, comprised of a brief paragraph about each film, as well as a collage by the one and only Michel Francois Soucisse!

(click images to enlarge)

(If you haven't seen any of the films, they're all available to watch for free somewhere online, whether Youtube, Vimeo, or Ubuweb.)

On Color Cubes and David Rubello

Since last Spring, I've been researching and writing about Color Cubes, one of my favorite pieces of public art in Detroit, and David Rubello, the artist who designed it in the early '70s.

Here's Color Cubes (and a sun-soaked Washington Blvd.) shot from the Broderick Tower 
in Fall 2011. Image copyright Matthew Piper (CC BY-NC-4.0)

I've admired Color Cubes for a little more than ten years, I guess -- since I really started paying attention to the downtown landscape. That admiration deepened in 2009, when Michel and I stumbled upon a poster-sized version of it, painted in acrylic, at a local junk shop and happily hung it in our home. (I later learned that Rubello had originally painted it in 1973 for the downtown offices of New Detroit, the group that commissioned the mural.) But it wasn't until Color Cubes was painted over last May that I became seriously interested. Over the last five months, I've spent a considerable amount of time conversing with the artist, photographing his work, and doing historical research about the circumstances surrounding Color Cubes' creation and destruction.

This work has led to the publication of three pieces in the last three months that explore Color Cubes and David Rubello in different ways. Since the most recent just came out last week and I have no plans to write anything else on the subject in the near future, I figured it was time to collect all three in one place. Without further ado, here they are:

David Rubello 

(Essay'd, 2/10/15)

Hamtramck-based artist, writer, and gallerist Steve Panton is currently leading Essay'd, a great effort to publish short, illustrated biographies of Detroit artists online. When he asked me to contribute one on Rubello, who has had a long and interesting career, I was glad to oblige. 

Remembering 'Color Cubes,' downtown Detroit's lost public art landmark 

(Model D, 2/3/15)

This feature article, published in the Detroit-focused online magazine Model D, introduces David Rubello to Detroitophiles and explores the remarkable circumstances under which Color Cubes was commissioned in 1972. I'm grateful to Model D's Matt Lewis for the opportunity to tell the story in this form, which gives it the chance to reach a wide and enthusiastic audience.

matrix for color cubes 

(Infinite Mile, 11/11/14)

This is the big one. It was the invitation to contribute something to the November 2014 edition of Infinite Mile, an online journal of art and culture in Detroit, that originally inspired me to learn more about Rubello and his lost Color Cubes. Over several months of research, I became convinced that I needed to find a new form in which to tell this story, a form that was inspired by the mural and that freed me from the familiar constraints of the essay. Encouraged in this pursuit by Stephen Dewyer and Jennifer Junkermeier, Infinite Mile's editors, I partnered with my friend Jonathan Gabel, a gifted artist and web developer, to make "the matrix," an interactive web feature that investigates Color Cubes aesthetically, culturally, and historically. Since it's meant to be explored over time rather than digested all at once, the matrix is very information-rich. As a result, it also serves an a kind of reference work for people who are interested in Color Cubes, David Rubello, and/or early '70s public art in Detroit in general.

After 25 years of growth in the city, the Greening of Detroit comes of age

Photo by Marvin Shaouni

(originally published 7/15/14 in Model D)

It isn't easy being a tree in the city.

The average lifespan of an urban tree is just 20 percent what it would be in the wild. For every tree that's planted in Detroit, four are lost. A number of stressors contribute to this high mortality rate: compacted soil, nutrient deficiencies, and greater susceptibility to pests. Improper pruning doesn't help matters, and neither do the wounds inflicted by people and machines.

But we need trees in the city, and for more reasons than the obvious ones. Sure, we need them to take our carbon dioxide and give us back oxygen, to provide cooling shade, and to play their part in complex urban ecosystems. Yet a growing body of research suggests that we need them for much more than that. Trees absorb stormwater, helping reduce runoff. They clean the soil. They promote economic vitality, raising property values and subtly encouraging shoppers to spend more time spending money. They reduce our stress levels and might even help reduce violent crime. (Readers ready to dig into some of the research supporting these claims -- and a host of others related to the benefits of trees -- will appreciate this handy resource list.)

None of this is news to the folks at the Greening of Detroit, a nonprofit working to grow a greener, leafier city since 1989. And while the Greening is well-known for its work promoting, planting, and caring for trees, it remains what Rebecca Salminen Witt, president of the Greening of Detroit, calls "an organization on the move" and is continually finding new ways to support a more sustainable Detroit.

Read more at Model D.

How It Happened: a conversation with Biba Bell about her apartment dance

Photo by Norman McDonald

(originally published 4/14/15 in Infinite Mile)

For six evenings in late February and early March 2015, dancer & choreographer Biba Bell performed It Never Really Happened (Part One) in her fifth floor, corner apartment in the Pavilion, a 1958 Mies van der Rohe high rise in Detroit's Lafayette Park.

Bell describes It Never Really Happened as a "triptych," a dance in three parts taking place in the same apartment in the winter, summer and fall of this year. Part One was a solo, Part Two will be a duet, Part Three an ensemble piece.

Part One featured a soundtrack curated by DJ Scott Zacharias as well as a performance by photographer and musician Nicola Kuperus, who played "the hostess."

Bell was born in 1976 in Sebastopol, California and earned a Ph.D. in performance studies from N.Y.U. this year. She first became interested in creating an intimate, site-specific performance that would explore the intersection of dance, domesticity and modern architecture when she encountered Buckminster Fuller's Dymaxion House at the Henry Ford Museum. But it is in Lafayette Park, the mid-century superblock just east of downtown Detroit, that the dance continues to take shape.

I have known Biba for about five years and have admired and written about some of her previous work in Detroit. After attending two performances of It Never Really Happened (Part One), I decided to interview her to learn more about the performance's development, execution, and many shades of meaning.

On the evening of March 23rd, I walked from my apartment in Lafayette Towers across Lafayette Plaisance to the Pavilion, where I joined her for a homemade dinner, a bottle of wine and two hours of conversation. What follows is an edited and illustrated transcript of our talk, divided into ten sections and preceded by a sketch of the performance for readers who did not have the chance to attend it.

Read the rest at Infinite Mile.

Two about the Hinterlands

Two articles that I wrote concerning The Hinterlands, a marvelous experimental performance group in Detroit, came out this week in two different publications.

The first, in Model D, tells the story of Play House, the Hinterlands' home in Banglatown, which was created with the help of Power House Productions as part of their innovative neighborhood stabilization work. 

Photo courtesy The Hinterlands. 

The second, in Infinite Mile, a new-ish online journal of Detroit art & culture, is an account of my experience attending a Hinterlands "open training" session. Open trainings are weird, wonderful, intensely physical workshops for performers and non-performers alike that take place monthly at Play House (the next one is tomorrow!).

Open training 2012 at the Jam Handy. Photo by Richard Newman.