Reclaiming Public Space at HONK!
My first response to this distinctly activist purpose was to ask what exactly constituted a reclamation of public space. Is there any point at which it can be said that a public space has undergone conditions sufficient for it to be considered reclaimed? I think that the answer here is no—HONK! does not simply reclaim space after a single iteration because it returns year after year to Davis Square with the same goal in mind. Reclamation in the long-term seems to be more of a mindset or cultural shift away from the corporatized allocations and systematic injustices that crowd our space. In the short-term, then, I view a single year of HONK! as a sort of purposive disruption—a disruption of the neoliberal forces that shape how people act in the city and how the cityscape itself appears.
The act of reclaiming, which implies both an antecedent claim on the space and an unjust seizure, is realized in this momentary disruption. In one weekend, HONK! intrudes and floods the streets with people inspired by the values of democracy and the embrace of difference. These values are imbued at every level of participation, from the confused passerby to the active spectator to the activist performer. At HONK! 2019, I perceived this disruption in three discrete, multisensory ways.
Visually, HONK! stimulates an intense juxtaposition that defies expectation. This is true in several capacities, the first of which relates to the carrying capacity of space itself. I attended HONK! on the rainy Friday night of October 11, walking the barren route from Davis Square where I volunteered at the festival’s All-Band Dinner to the All-Band Revue at Bow Street Market in Union Square. Maybe it was the grey emptiness of my trek through Somerville or my low-turnout expectations considering the bad weather, but when I arrived, I was surprised to find Bow Street Market already overflowing past its public capacity. Normally a double-decker courtyard lined with independent businesses on both levels, the space was so full that it took on the appearance of an arena. The disruptively enormous number of people that HONK! brought to Bow Street on that rainy night was juxtaposed, in my mind, with the modest foot traffic it might receive on any other day. A similar scene on Sunday was overlaid on the whole of Harvard Square when the HONK! parade collided with the center of the Square to produce abnormally large crowds. Moreover, the stark juxtapositions at Bow Street Market continued even when I left the festival-designated courtyard to the unaffiliated public space on Somerville Avenue. Between the people hurriedly walking by or standing in restaurant doorways was the strolling figure of a musician holding the identifiable School of Honk sousaphone with an additional trombone hanging from his arm. The juxtaposition of the bright polka-dots and Seussian instruments with the grey landscape of the city seemed to symbolize HONK! as a force of its own kind, external to the day-to-day life of Cambridge and Somerville. Whether or not the woman looking at him in the picture was aware of the festival or not, the amused expression on her face reiterates the way in which HONK! disrupts normal experience in favor of something that grabs the attention of anyone that happens to be nearby.
This disruption also takes the form of spectacle. Similar in many respects to the disruption of visual expectations caused by juxtaposition, the spectacle draws on the disruption of metaphysical expectations; take, for example, a similar scene to that just discussed with the sousaphone player. This time set in the center of Harvard Square, this snapshot of HONK! features a member of the Brass Balagan, a brass band founded on anti-imperialist sentiments that makes an annual appearance on the streets of Somerville and Cambridge. Nothing about this image aside from his presence is suggestive of the HONK! Festival. In the background, a moderate number of people appear to be going about their everyday business as they normally would on any day in Harvard Square. Still, the sousaphone player clad in red and photographed from two different angles adds a spectacle to the scene that is characteristic of HONK! as a whole. In this sense, any individual representative of the festival’s colorful vibrance and energy can be zoomed in on and considered in disruptive opposition to their mundane surroundings; this element of spectacle is marked by a defiant transcendence of context and category. The claim that “these bands don’t just play for the people; they play among the people” blurs the boundaries between audience and performer in this exact way. At Bow Street, the School of Honk exhibited this concept with surprising clarity to me. Taking the stage on both floors of the courtyard (the top level lined with nearly twenty trombones), they proceeded to envelop the space by dominating both sightlines and soundscape. As a branch of the festival organization itself, the School of Honk embodies the breakdown of social hierarchy; any person from any background with any level of musical talent is welcome to tap into their energy and excitement. This inclusion functioned as an interruption of those labels and hierarchies generally propped up by neoliberal allocations of space. As I was filming the performance, I noticed that the portion of the band on the ground-level (beneath the trombones) became nearly indistinguishable from the audience, dancing and playing music together as one.
The School of Honk also displays the last, perhaps most evident, example of disruption with even greater clarity. Sheer volume as a means of reclaiming public space is obvious to anyone that happened to be close by and within (a particularly wide) earshot. For anyone within range of Bow Street Market, the wall of melodically unison trombones would have penetrated through the rain that night.
Looking back on the first-person footage of my arrival, I noticed that the volume was already loud enough to be distinct on Somerville Avenue as I walked towards the inlet leading into the makeshift venue. The band playing at this time, however, was likely of a reasonable, modest size that could not even closely match the volume produced by the dozens of musicians making up the School of Honk (which performed later in the evening). I would not have been surprised to hear the trombone melodies piercing through the whole of Union Square. And, even though it was not the activist chants of bands that came before (e.g. “All you fascists bound to lose” was especially common that night) that were projected in this way, the overwhelming volume of even purely melodic noise was enough to affirm HONK!’s existence and power in the streets they sought to reclaim.
Having said that, understanding this purpose as disruption caused by juxtaposition, spectacle, and volume does not fully account for every dimension of the local festival’s objective. My second response after asking what constituted a reclamation of public space was to ask to what end this reclamation was pursued. Based on the ephemerality mentioned earlier, I think it makes sense to understand this goal with a primarily internal end in mind. What I mean when I say this is that HONK!’s brand of activism exists independently, conferring a sort of communal value onto itself that is experienced by participants in the moment. Since the streets can never decidedly be “reclaimed” forever, it is the fleeting process of reclaiming that has internal value for those that are a part of the HONK! community.
Art physically covers the streets and music fills the soundscape of a single weekend anticipated by many. What’s worth noting here is that HONK! is not simply a “Festival of Activist Street Bands”—it is designed for the people and, above all, for their enjoyment. The Lantern Parade that I planned on attending Friday afternoon was cancelled because weather threatened the fun and safety of kids and their families. In this respect, HONK! is not so different from other festivals in that its goals reasonably prioritize the internal wellbeing of its participants over any sort of external messaging or activism. As seen in this clip from the Sunday Parade, acts with a clearly activist element were followed by acts with no political intention at all.
Still, even just to reclaim public space ephemerally and internally is an accomplishment in a world of modern constraints. The festival’s cooperation and support from local police enforcement and city officials, including the mayors of both Somerville and Cambridge, slightly conflict with goals of spontaneous activism. To align themselves with aspects of the power structure that feed into the current use of public space, however, is a necessary tradeoff for the sake of HONK!’s internal success. Nevertheless, the nature of this internality and self-containment is such that from the outside, its goals may never fully be realized. When discussing HONK! with a professor for one of my other classes, she appeared to know very little about it and claimed to avoid it each year in spite of living quite close to the end of the parade route in Harvard. In this professor’s eyes, disrupting public space is not purposive or important, but rather annoying because she exists outside the self-contained community of HONK! Perhaps that’s just the point though: to reclaim public space is to envision and enact new ideals that can be learned from only if you are willing to embrace a momentary world of disruption. There will always be people more comfortable with the status quo.
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