Brian Slattery Photos
For its concluding day on Sunday, the International Festival of Arts and Ideas hosted or facilitated a slew of activities on the New Haven Green that kept people there from morning to night, beginning with circuses and magicians, continuing through jerk chicken and dancing, and ending with a drag show about the need to reconnect with a sense of pride.
One of the first events of the day — a circus workshop and performance by the Woodbridge-based Air Temple Arts — also illustrated how Arts and Ideas, criticized in years past for ignoring the arts scene around it, has recently included far more artists from nearby, from musicians Manny James and The Split Coils to poet Reginald Dwayne Betts and fashion designer Neville Wisdom.
“In the past I’ve reached out to them and haven’t really gotten a response. This year, they reached out to us really early about doing some programming for their free outdoor stuff, which obviously is super exciting for us,” said Air Temple owner, founder, and creative director Stacey Strange. To her, the festival has done a “much better job” of tapping people in the New Haven-area arts scene. “There are some amazing artists in this area, and it’s great for us to see other things that are happening in New Haven that we didn’t know about.”
Steal the Stars — the show that Air Temple Arts brought to the Green — isn’t the circus group’s first outdoor show, thanks to Covid-19. “Prior to the pandemic, we didn’t do shows outside,” Strange said, until last summer, when the troupe staged Heaven or California, an original show retelling the story of the Donner Party, in the cul-de-sac outside Air Temple Arts. “It was definitely a huge learning process, but at this point it’s gotten smooth,” Strange said. “I think Heaven or California was the last big push in the learning process because we had never set up a Chinese pole outside prior to then, so Nick” — Nicholas Strange, owner and technical director — “had to do a lot of work to figure out how to do that. But with concrete blocks, it went up really quick yesterday and today. And much quicker today than it did yesterday. Each time it gets a little easier.”
Doing a circus show outside is still more challenging than it is inside a theater, “but it’s definitely worth it for something like this,” Strange said. “It’s really great to bring circus to people who wouldn’t necessarily be able to see it otherwise.”
Air Temple’s time on the Green thus started with an open workshop, in which adults and kids alike were invited to learn a few circus skills, from using a diablo to spinning plates and hula hoops to juggling bean bags. Dozens joined in with relish, discovering in part that one could do more with hula hoops than just spin them.
Stacey Strange said Air Temple Arts began developing Steal the Stars as a “cute little fairy tale,” in which urchins steal the stars from the Moon Queen because they don’t have any light of their own because they live underground. She decided the show needed little interludes between the routines to keep the plot moving, and Nicholas wrote “a joke version, which was hysterical and incredibly socialist, and we ended up keeping most of it.” The Moon Queen, the cast joked, is a “space fascist” who “comes to see the error of her ways” in “hoarding all her wealth” and “spreading it amongst the people.”
Joking aside, “it is really fun,” Strange said, “and very different from our usual style because we’ve never written anything to specifically appeal to a super-family-friendly audience, so that was a fun challenge. The show is definitely funnier and goofier than anything we’ve ever done. We had a really good time putting it together.”
“And there’s less cannibalism,” a cast member joked, referring to Air Temple’s previous show.
All joking before the show aside, the cast were serious about being entertaining, and audience members of all ages were taken in by the fleet, comic story of a Moon Queen who learns she must share the stars with those around her, one way or another. Every performer (perhaps not surprisingly) turned out to be a skilled comic as well as a great acrobat, performing death-defying maneuvers in the open air with beaming smiles and sometimes looks of mock horror on their faces. The lightheartedness of the piece couldn’t detract from the sometimes audible gasps that preceded a particularly harrowing move, or the applause that followed.
As the Air Temple Arts production wound down, on the other side of the Green, the New Haven Caribbean Heritage Festival — celebrating its eighth year — was just beginning, as vendors selling clothing, perfume, jewelry, books, and many other items began to line Temple Street.
Food trucks selling jerk and curry dishes, barbecue, ice cream, and other treats soon starting doing a brisk business.
The stage set up in that part of the Green first hosted a DJ, who gave way to BRAATA, a group of singers from New York there to sing Jamaican folk songs as well as a medley of Bob Marley songs, which have, of course, effectively become folk songs. Their energy and spirit spilled off the stage, especially as they began to incorporate dancing into their routines, making a hot day hotter.
It got positively smoking when students from the Hamden Academy of Dance and Music brought routine after increasingly difficult routine, spinning, jumping, and kicking to the insistent rhythms the DJ provided. The crowd’s cheers only got more appreciative as time went on.
The dance moves even reached a woman on stilts, who in her echo of Caribbean carnivals also provided anyone who’d been to the Air Temple arts show just before a visual connection to another aspect of circus arts.
With a stomach full of jerk pork, rice and peas, vegetables, and a bottle of peanut punch — and having taken in hours of sunny entertainment — it is possible that this reporter took a short nap on the Green. He gathered himself together in time to take in the drag show that closed out A&I’s main programming for the summer.
Emceed by drag performer Kiki Lucia, the drag show — like the circus show from Air Temple Arts — followed a folk-tale structure to tell a story in keeping with LGBTQ+ pride celebrations happening around the country. As Lucia told it, “the Dragons of Pride protected all humanity for centuries, until humanity decided they didn’t need pride.” Without the dragons, humanity then descended into “darkness, misery, and inequality.” To right those wrongs, Lucia added, “I am going to find the dragons and bring them back, so we can once again experience the true peace and serenity of pride.”
Each the dragons — personified in performance — embodied a certain aspect of the concept of pride. The first routine dealt with life; “life in the queer community is a gift because many who are born queer don’t get to live,” Lucia said. Another routine dealt with nature. “Without nature we can’t live or breath, or shelter ourselves,” Lucia said, “but we’ve been so awful to nature and she’s mad. Hopefully she’s not so mad that she won’t come on our journey with us. We must do what we can to repair our relationship with her.” The Dragon of Sex was perhaps the most playful of the lot, though with a serious message. Rather than thinking of sex as something taboo or sinful, Lucia said, “we understand that it is a natural part of our lives.” Following that were the dragons of healing (“because to heal yourself can sometimes be the hardest thing to do”) and serenity, which included the confidence and strength to calmly make changes in the world.
The twin dragons of art and magic seemed a commentary on the day itself, and perhaps the festival. Magic and art, Lucia said, are “two things that cannot coexist without each other, and without both, life is not worth living.” But letting them in didn’t have to be difficult. “Every day there is art, and in every day, we can find magic.” The last dragon, of spirit, Lucia said perhaps lived in all of us.
Those spirts were moved by Miss Shalae, a Beyoncé impersonator who ended the day and the festival with a powerhouse show that got everyone to their feet and crowding the stage, dancing, phones out, capturing her performance as if she were the actual Beyoncé. So effective was Shalae’s performance that it raised questions about the nature of performance itself. The audience knew Shalae was lip syncing, and of course channelling a much beloved performer. Despite a new single, however, the international superstar isn’t on tour, so maybe this is as close as anyone could get. But maybe there was something else going on, too. Even if it was borrowed, the dancing and the charisma onstage were also real, and the art lay in the tension between the two.
