This weekend Homer Council on the Arts brings together more than thirty performing artists and ensembles for a performance highlighting Homer’s arts community. Homer Rising will feature a collection of artists tasked with the challenge of collaborating with a different performing art form. Musicians, dancers, circus artists, writers, filmmakers, visual and textile artists reach outside of their own domains to create new multisensory experiences to share with the audience. The combination of the diverse art forms will showcase the talent in Homer and display what can happen when talents mix. The event will even feature culinary art during intermission provided by the Fritz Creek General Store.
Homer Council on the Arts director Scott Bartlett, hoop artist Kammi Matson and Jim Anderson met with KBBI to share more about what the opportunity for collaboration means for the arts community in Homer. Scott Bartlett said the idea for the performance came up in a board meeting when he proposed the idea of exploring how to challenge people to do something new and create sparks of mutual creativity that weren’t present previously. Bartlett said that almost every piece in the production will have live music with the exception of a reading by author Rich Chiappone supported with a short film by Bjorn Olsen.
Matson shared her performance intentions first: “I'm collaborating with Stephanie Cortez, who's also a hula hooper that I've never had the pleasure of hula hooping with before. And we set our piece to live music, which is a new experience for me because I usually perform to recorded music, so that part of the collaboration has also been fun…I'm also doing a spoken word piece with Brianna Allen and Lakshmi Kanter, and it will be intertwined with music, a cello piece that Manfried Funk is playing,” Matson said.
Jim Anderson contributes piano and bass to two of the pieces in Homer Rising and shared more about the history of general arts collaboration in Homer.
“I would say I got really excited about this because I think it was maybe in the winter of '89 when I was back after school in '88, '89, and Joyce was the head of the Arts Council then, and Jill Berryman and I produced Homer's Homegrown. It was pulling every performing arts group together to do a showcase at the Mariner Theater, and they were going to film it to air on PBS Alaska and all this sort of stuff. I could go through and list everybody that you would probably recognize from that time period, and I think it was the last time that the entire Kilcher family performed together on stage, including Yule, and we had Bill DeCreft, who was a notorious bagpipe player, and then we had all kinds of different groups with a big, huge kind of Broadway-ish finale. It was really, really well received. Homer has continued to be such an arts community, total arts, cultural arts, you know,” Anderson said.
Jumping from the past efforts to what Homer Rising offers in terms of new opportunities for collaboration, Anderson concluded with these thoughts:
“I am excited about getting this across the finish line, and I think it's going to be really meaningful for the performers. I think it'll be inspiring for the people that come and witness it, and inspire more people to get on board. And, I think if we really push the narrative that this is just the beginning of reinvigorating that whole cultural arts feeling here in Homer…this is an excellent chance for people to just relax and come and celebrate the arts in Homer in a very collaborative way and be inspired and be energized. Then, they can rethink on how they can be a part of future opportunities. There're a lot of really talented people out there that are kind of keeping their talent quiet, or kind of doing it in their own little niche, and we want to try to really inspire people to step forward without the fear of being swallowed up in something, but lending their talents to the level that they're comfortable with,” Anderson said.
Tickets to Homer Rising are available at the HCOA office on Pioneer Avenue, will be at the door at the Mariner Theater or are available online at homerart.org. A visual image of most performers is highlighted there also. Performances will start at 7 pm on September 25th and 26th.
Reporting from Homer, this is Emilie Springer.
