Variety, Diversity Mark New Arlington Summer Pop-up Arts Series

Commission for Arts & Culture Launches Live Arts Arlington to Enliven Unusual Spaces Around Town This Summer

By Hattie Bernstein

Ladies and gentlemen, children and pets, step right up and don’t be shy: Live Arts Arlington, a program of the town’s Commission for Arts and Culture, is coming to a sidewalk near you.

You can travel the world to see amazing art. But why not opt for the hometown advantage? Just step outside, walk to the corner, and there you are.

Like the flowers blooming along the Minuteman Bikeway or the fair trade coffee served all day at the Kickstand Cafe, this May-and-June pilot, a series of pop-up performances and demonstrations, represents the work of many hands.

Live Arts Arlington was organized by the programs and festivals committee, a newly-created group formed by the Arlington Commission for Arts and Culture. Its charge is to recruit local artists, showcase their work, and invite everyone in the community to come out and enjoy it.

FROM MIDDLE EASTERN DANCE…

On a recent Saturday afternoon, when a spate of gloomy days and drizzle made way for the sun, a Middle Eastern dancer whose stage name is Seyyide Sultan, mesmerized audiences gathered on Broadway Plaza.

Seyyide is a native of Argentina, worked as a biochemist, and changed careers after she became a mother. She’s lived in East Arlington for about eight years.

“I worked full-time as a scientist, and dance was a side gig,” she said.

Now, she dances professionally, teaches, runs a dance company — and coaches her son’s soccer team.

Middle Eastern dance is a centuries-old art form that isolates the movements of the body’s midsection — hips, belly, and upper trunk — and emphasizes a layering of maneuvers, with the arms and legs supporting the torso.

It reflects a mix of Egyptian, Arabic, and Lebanese influences.

To call it belly dancing, as is common in the west, is to miss its subtlety. But it’s also understandable given the emphasis in western dance on the movement of arms and legs around the body’s core.

Seyyide said that Middle Eastern dance should be regarded with the same appreciation shown for flamenco, an ancient art from southern Spain which shares common roots.

“You’re not just following the tempo. You’re following the quality of the music with your body,” she said. “It’s as if your body is making music.”

To see for yourself, attend her next public performance, scheduled for June 8 at Porchfest.

… TO DRAMATIC PUPPETRY

During the gap year she took after high school, Arlington puppeteer Margaret Moody, who grew up in Arkansas, lived and worked in a Vietnamese refugee community based in a trailer park in western Arkansas.

Her job was to teach preschool to the toddlers.

“They were shy of me, and just becoming fluent in their own language,” said Moody, a 27-year resident of East Arlington who raised her three kids in town. But, “if I got a puppet out, everybody wanted to take one.”

When her own children were young, Moody wrote stories and used puppets to help them negotiate the challenges of growing up.

She also brought her stories, and her puppet shows, to her children’s school, birthday parties, and performances at the Fox Library, where she often met her neighbors.

“Children who watch puppet shows want to do it themselves,” Moody said.

At 11 a.m. on June 1, at Uncle Sam’s Plaza, just before she begins the first of two, hour-long performances, Moody will invite children to try out the soft puppets she plans to bring and make available.

Her first piece, scenes from “Cow and Mouse’s Picnic,” suitable for children three, and older, is about two good friends who get along famously until it’s time for dessert, and Cow realizes that she’s not so keen on sharing.

The second performance, suitable for children four and older, will draw on vignettes from the acrobatic and Mischievous “Monkey King,” presented with traditional Taiwanese Bu Dai Xi-style puppets.

Moody trained in Taiwan where she came to respect an art that reveals character through movement — an exacting practice that she said looks easier than it is.

“Movement is key to believing,” she said.

So are the collaboration with set designer, Sandra Pastrana, an Arlington visual artist, and the roughly 100 hours of preparation in the studio behind every hour on stage.

“I was lucky to study in Taiwan, to learn about the beautiful puppetry. … apply that to my own fairy stories,” said Moody, who on June 8 will be performing “Badger Meets the Fairies” at Porchfest.

…AND HANDS-ON FINE ARTS DEMOS, TOO!

At 10 a.m. on June 22, Kimberley Harding will take the stage on Broadway Plaza, to demonstrate another ancient art: basketweaving.

A former special education teacher, Girl Scout leader, loom weaver, and fiber artist, Harding learned the craft at Snow Farm, a residential crafts school near the Berkshire Mountains, where she used paper to construct baskets.

But it was a Girl Scout clean-up project about three years ago, pulling up English ivy, an invasive plant, that led to her first basket made with natural materials she harvested herself.

“I felt like I’d done this in a previous life,” she said.

While construction of baskets has changed little over the course of human history, appreciation for the process has waxed and waned. Native cultures honored baskets as sacred objects; modern ones have undervalued basketweaving, saying it is nothing more than busywork.

“Baskets are one of the few things that can’t be made mechanically,” said Harding, a town resident for more than 30 years and the mother of two young adults whom she home-schooled.

“If you buy a basket at Target for $12, made in Southeast Asia by someone earning pennies, it was made by hand. The actual weaving has to be done by humans.”

It’s for these reasons that the artist is intent on passing on her craft to future generations.

And she’s bound to get a head start on June 22 at Broadway Plaza from 10 a.m. to noon.

“One of my fantasies is to get into the schools and teach kids basic baskets or get them to be aware of baskets as art or craft,” she said. “Getting younger people to keep the craft alive is really important.”

AND MUCH MORE!

Live Arts Arlington also features accomplished and award-winning musicians, from jazz guitarist Ethan Kaczowka and duo Scott Samenfeld and Erik Van Dam, to a four-band revue presented by Morningside Studios and a post-Porchfest GARAGE BAND dance party at Arlington Service Station.

For additional information about the new Live Arts Arlington program and upcoming events, see http://artsarlington.org/livearts/