2020 & 2021: THE FESTIVAL, REIMAGINED

The 2020 and 2021 seasons proved to be festivals of agility, innovation, and transformation. Just as the programming was finalized in March, COVID-19 shut down the country and the Festival joined our peers locally and nationally in jettisoning in-person events. During this time of fear and uncertainty, the arts became all the more vital as an anchor in hope and community. We honored all extant seasonal contracts and pivoted to create a two-month-long, all-digital Festival with 200+ events. The 25th season, 2020, was very different from its original vision, but became so much more significant as we found a way to gather virtually, earning us the moniker the “little Festival that could” (Politic).

The following year, we built upon the successes of 2020 to develop a Festival that combined virtual programming with the return to in-person concerts, kicked off by an aweinspiring performance by Wynton Marsalis and Jazz at Lincoln Center. Under the leadership and vision of Shelley Quiala and Malakhi Eason, we showcased new-to-the-Festival art forms like hair art presented live with on-stage sculptural, high-fashion renditions of Black hair styles, and an inaugural Drag Show on the mainstage.

Throughout these past two years, the Festival experienced dramatic changes with new leadership, new visions, and new horizons. Here are just a few highlights from these dynamic seasons.

BIG IDEAS

The 2020 Ideas programming, themed around “democracy,” streamed live online from around the world and right here in New Haven. Author and politico Anand Giridharadas, philosophers Todd May and Pamela Hieronymi, advisors on the hit show The Good Place. blended ethics and pop culture. We continuously revisited the Ideas programming to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic and other pressing issues that rose to the community’s attention, like the murder of George Floyd which led us to bring together Anand Giridharadas local leaders and nationally renowned journalists, activists, and artists to address these timely issues and to reckon with the enduring legacy of slavery in our community, including Pulitzer Prize winner and creator of the 1619 Project, Nikole Hannah Jones.

In 2021, we continued to build on these conversations with an Ideas series that imagined new worlds and different ways of being with 18 talks. Activists explored mutual aid and gratitude in panels with Raven Amandla Blake, executive director of Love Fed New Haven; Black Lives Matter co-founder Alicia Garza; and the Narrative Project’s founder & president Mercy Quaye. Audiences considered the urban form in an international Alicia Garza panel on the “15-minute city” and contemplated radical futures in a panel featuring the awardwinning musician Toshi Reagon in conversation with activist and writer Walidah Imarisha and New Haven’s own Hanifa Nayo Washington.

EXPLORING STORIES

At the Festival, we love a good story. For many years, we have been proud to lead New Haven’s NEA Big Read to broaden understanding through shared readership, in partnership with the New Haven Free Public Library and others throughout the community. The 2020 NEA Big Read invited readers into poet Stephanie Burt’s collection Advice from the Lights, a deep dive into gender and identity that prompts readers to consider the question: how do any of us achieve adulthood? We programmed Ideas events that tied into the book’s themes, as well as an author Q&A with Burt, and partnered with the New Haven Pride Center to host panels on trans identity and the New Haven Free Public Library to stage read-alouds of children’s books featuring gender-non-conforming characters. These events sparked deep discussion of how we construct our identities.

The 2021 NEA Big Read selection, National Poet Laureate Joy Harjo’s compelling poetry volume An American Sunrise, continued the exploration of identity and the Indigenous experience of living on land stolen from your ancestors. Under the guidance of three local Indigenous leaders, we developed a suite

of complementary programming that included Indigenous cooking workshops with Brian Yazzie and Rachel Sayet and Ideas panels on Indigenous climate futures and Indigenous writers. We also hosted a conversation with Harjo and awardwinning Indigenous theater-maker Madeline Sayet, who performed and wrote Where We Belong, a one-woman show depicting Sayet’s experiences studying Shakespeare on the verge of Brexit and grappling with the legacies of colonialism.

Storytelling is another component of our commitment to good stories, with performances, workshops, and a “Story SLAM” during Festival 2021, featuring both national and local voices across disciplines of storytelling. Founding member of the Last Poets, Abiodun Oyewole, performed and led audiences in a poetry workshop, while New London’s Poet Laureate AnUrbanNerd flowed over beats by DJ LuxPro during our Arts for Labor Sunday Vibe concert.

CREATIVE COLLABORATION

The Festival brought Broadway to New Haven with choreographers Larry Keigwin and Nicole Wolcott, whose workshop “Let’s Make a Dance” invited audiences to collaborate and perform a co-created dance. Activist Songbook, facilitated by Aaron Jafferis and Byron Au Yong, led audiences to blend voice and melody to create a unique protest song. After beginning the process of both in person in fall 2019, the shift to virtual programming caused these artists adapted their work to Zoom, offering new ways for Festival audiences to connect with art, and each other. Other artists used the shift to virtual as an opportunity for a new kind of engagement. Director Karin Coonrod’s Compagnia de’ Colombari also leveraged Zoom to create boundaryless international theater in which company members participated from throughout the world in More or Less I Am, a dramatic recitation of Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself.” Aired on-demand to Festival audiences, this piece

COMING HOME TO THE GREEN

The popular Arts on Call program gave people throughout Greater New Haven an opportunity to book artists on the Festival’s website to perform in socially distanced outdoor locations. In a time where live performances were nearly nonexistent, this brought much-needed income directly to artists—$9,900+ in 2020 and $5,500+ in 2021. In May 2021 the rising scaffold of the Green elicited excitement and a feeling of homecoming after the Festival stage’s 2020 hiatus—we Artist: Wynton Marsalis, Photo: Judy Sirota Rosenthal could gather again safely at our performance home. The Festival welcomed to the Green luminary artists like jazz phenomenon Grace Kelly, Ronald K Brown and EVIDENCE: A Dance Company, and hometown heroes Movimento Cultural and Thabisa Rich. We were also thrilled to host both Long Wharf Theatre and New Haven Symphony Orchestra to host a small taste of the work these preeminent organizations and long-time Festival partners have been doing while their venues have been dark. And—for the first time—we were able to bring the magic of the Green to households around the world: nearly all 2021 in-person Festival events on the Green were live-streamed to the global audience cultivated in 2020, allowing us to reach new audiences and for our work to be accessible to all.

CELEBRATING NEW ART

The Festival is proud to continue our legacy of challenging traditional norms of performance. The Festival first brought the high art of drag to the mainstage on the green, capping off Festival 2021’s live performances with a drag show. In partnership with the New Haven Pride Center, the Legend Drag Show celebrated LGBTQ+ history by the decade and introduced the royalty of the local drag scene, including Bubbles, one of New Haven’s first drag artists.

The Festival collaborated with New Haven communities to develop vibrant Neighborhood Festivals, virtual in 2020 and 2021. Dixwell and The Hill hosted festivals in 2020, and in 2021 West Rock/West Hills and Newhallville joined their neighbors with their own festivals. Artists ranging from dance ensembles like MegaHurtz Entertainment to musical powerhouses like Chris “Big Dog” Davis celebrated home on our virtual stage.

In 2020, we celebrated our community artists on a national stage by partnering with the Kennedy Center and the Autorino Center to produce “Celebrating New Haven,” an installment of Arts Across America that featured artists including Chris “Big Dog” Davis, Aleecya Foreman, Manny James, Rahsaan Langley, and Rohn Lawrence. The Kennedy Center broadcast the event on its site and across social media to an audience of thousands around the country.

Artists: Manny James, Thabisa, John the Violonist, Corey Staggz Sax, & Chris “Big Dog” Davis Photo: Joel Callaway, Thabisa Photo : Fernando Payano

KEEPING THE MUSIC GOING

The Arts for Labor weekend, in 2021, honored frontline workers and celebrated those who continue to show up for the community throughout the pandemic. Featuring two days of performances as well as a mobile vaccination clinic, Arts for Labor brought to the stage Durand Bernarr and a lineup of local legends like Dawn Tallman and New London’s Poet Laureate AnUrbanNerd (Josh Brown) along with Ecuador’s accordion virtuoso Paco Godoy, and NYC’s Kennedy Administration. The Festival helped usher in a return to live performing arts for many in our community. In a survey we conducted this year, more than 50% of audience members listed 2021, the year of Imagine, as their first in-person performances of the COVID-19 pandemic, and nearly every evening on the Green sold out on preshow reservations. Picnic spreads dotted the Green from socially distanced pods every night. The “Imagine” theme invited audiences not only to gather safely and experience the Festival, but to imagine together.

Artist: Salwa Abdussabur, Photo: Judy Sirota Rosenthal

Artists: Movimiento Cultural, Photo: Leigh Busby