Sidewalk Festival of Performing Arts

I met Ryan Johnson, the powerhouse woman behind Sidewalk, at Detroit Soup on my little piano//Big Mouth tour. Here’s how Detroit Soup, a heart-warming community gathering invested in making a tangible difference, works: Attendees donate $5 for soup, salad, bread, and a vote towards one of the handful of community projects presented during the evening. The winner is given all of the night’s donations to facilitate the accomplishment of his or her project. Although Ryan’s proposal for the Sidewalk Festival of Performing Arts wasn’t elected for the donations, I was very much enamored with her vision for an outdoor celebration of site-specific performance and installation art in the heart of Detroit.

My love for the architecture and atmosphere of Detroit made the opportunity to create a site-specific composition impossible to pass up. I teamed up with visual artist Kevin McCoy to orchestrate an audio/visual experience in Art Alley entitled “Handle With Care”, inspired by a nearby mural of a package sporting the same phrase. For the visual component, Kevin painted a choreographed mural with a site-specific palette on a modular plastic wrap substrate roughly 8′ x 10′ that visually echoed the minimal lyrical motif of my composition. For the aural component, I manipulated a site-specific recording of the everyday landscape of Art Alley. I layered in midi melodies that evoked a sense of the surrounding neighborhood and its history. The live performance included a found percussion “drum set” made out of a discarded chair and a PVC pipe cap, found umbrella noise-maker, toy glockenspiel, kalimba, and my infrequent vocals repeatedly singing “handle with care, handle with care for me, care for me”.