[DANCE]
“THE ART IS IN PICKING THE MOMENTS THAT YOU CHOOSE TO COVER.”
AMIDST ASHES {BY STEVE SUCATO}
[BOOKS] The Pillow Project’s Taylor Knight at the Carrie Furnaces {PHOTO COURTESY OF JORDAN BUSH}
Call it site-specific dance on a gargantuan scale. The Pillow Project takes its improvisational “Postjazz” movement style and video wizardry to a whole new level when it invades the Carrie Blast Furnaces, in Rankin, on Oct. 12, for a daylong extravaganza titled The Jazz Furnace. Built in 1907, the Carrie Furnaces number 6 and 7 tower 92 feet over the Monongahela River. Until 1978, these were literal giants in the production of iron, at their peak turning out 1,000 to 1,250 tons a day. Now one of the few non-operative blast furnaces in the area still standing, the former U.S. Steel site will come to life once again — repurposed as an arts venue where a dozen dancers and as many musicians, along with poets, illustrators and graffiti artists, will transform the vast empty site into a multimedia happening. (The show follows Alloy Pittsburgh, an unrelated art-installation project at the site.) Three years in the making, The Jazz Furnace, funded by a grant from The Pittsburgh Foundation, consists of two events. From noon to 5 p.m., patrons will be free to explore nearly the entire Carrie site, taking in what Pillow Project artistic director Pearlann Porter calls “mini-sitespecific installations,” with performers and artists scattered throughout. “The place is epic and the dancers and musicians will be using it as an instrument ‘to play the furnace,’” says Porter. The evening session runs from 7 p.m. to midnight, in the facility’s hangar-sized powerhouse building. It will feature, on the hour, roughly 20-minute excerpts in-the-round from such past Pillow Project works as Backlit in a Whole New D, The Green Swan and Twenty Eighty-Four, re-imagined for the Carrie site along with live video, multimedia installations and performances by local bands Blue Redshift and Chaibaba. “The place was hell with the lid off when it was going,” says Porter of the Carrie site, now overseen by the nonprofit Rivers of Steel Heritage Corp. “We are using that to influence The Jazz Furnace. Dust and ash will fly. The Green Swan will become the dirty swan.” For Porter, this year’s The Jazz Furnace is just the beginning. “We want to turn this into an annual festival,” she says. “Something unique to Pittsburgh, honoring the history of the Carrie Furnace and Pittsburgh’s steel industry.”
ED PISKOR’’S WILD STYLE
{BY BILL O’DRISCOLL}
Breaking good: Russell Simmons (in hat) and Kurtis Blow (right) celebrate an early hip-hop hit in Hip Hop Family Tree.
S
OME M 40 YEARS ago, hip hop was born of house and street parties in the South Bronx. parti Pittsburgh-based Pittsburgh h-b base cartoonist Ed Piskor tells the story stor ory y in The Hip Hop Family Tree, his new large-format large-form 112-page comic from Fantagraphics Bo Books. ooks Piskor begins with DJ Kool Herc’s firstt break beats and continues bre e through key fi gures figure r s like Grandmaster Flash, Kurtis Blow, Russell and Sugar Hill Russse s ll Simmons S Records’ Sylvia Robinson. The sprawling, fastRobi biin paced book ends in 1981 — the year hip hop 1 erupted consciousness. Four erup pted into national nation n more volumes are planned. plan Piskor is known for fo his critically acclaimed computer-hacker epic Wizzywig, and for collaboW rations with the late Harvey Pekar including The Beats, which Piskor partly illustrated. Hip Pis Hop Family Tree — Piskor’s first book in full color — paints a big bi picture, from the music to the graffiti and more that comprise hiphop culture. “It’s very important to note
INFO@PGHCITYPAPER.COM
THE PILLOW PROJECT THE JAZZ FURNACE Noon-5 p.m. and 7 p.m.– midnight Sat., Oct. 12. Carrie Furnace site, Rankin. All-day pass $10-15. www.pillowproject.org N E W S
that the main character is hip hop, and all of these people are just little bits to create the whole,” says Piskor, 31, a lifelong hip-hop fan.
ED PISKOR BOOK EVENT AND WILD STYLE SCREENING 8 p.m. Thu., Oct. 10. Hollywood Theater, 1449 Potomac Ave., Dormont. $10. 412-563-0368 or www.thehollywooddormont.org
Family Tree actually debuted as a weekly serial, starting Jan. 1, 2012, on web blog Boingboing.net. That exposure didn’t just garner the Munhall native a book contract; it has also gotten him featured on Time.com and earned admiring quotes from hip-hop icons like
Ed Piskor {PHOTO BY HEATHER MULL}
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