Honk In VR at Holden Chapel
1 2019-12-04T05:11:03-05:00 Max Schaffer 91838ec1ca4b48d6e1f284de20a4537a148545d6 17 1 Honk In VR at Holden Chapel plain 2019-12-04T05:11:03-05:00 Max Schaffer 91838ec1ca4b48d6e1f284de20a4537a148545d6This page is referenced by:
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2019-10-17T02:15:02-04:00
The Activism of Unbounded Stages
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Trust & Respect in Blurring the Performer-Audience Relationship
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2019-12-21T13:10:57-05:00
Trust & Respect in Blurring the Performer-Audience Relationship
Max Schaffer
December 10th, 2019
When I think back across all my favorite events of the HONK! Festival, I notice one common thread: the lack of a clearly defined stage. The packed corridor of Davis Plaza, the street in front of the Unitarian Church, the overpass next to the detention center in South Boston, and even an unofficial Music 25 event that tested the possibilities of HONK! as a virtual reality festival all stood out to me far more than staged events like those in Harvard Square. I think this preference roots in my general discontent with traditional bounded & raised stages, which I believe fail to create connections by forcing engagement & attention, creating imbalanced dynamics of importance, and promoting more self-conscious audience & performer behavior. Defined stages reinforce a "difference" between attendees of an event, and it's why I think they fail in community festival work. In creating unbounded performance spaces, HONK! engages in truly empathetic activism by trusting its attendees to move freely and interact without oversight--and that is a very special thing.
Saturday in Davis Square was one of the best experiences I’ve ever had at a festival—it was open, fenceless, totally free, devoid of corporate branding, all while maintaining constant entertainment and emphasizing social action at community-scale. The beauty of Saturday (versus Sunday, which took place in Harvard Square) was the personal interaction I experienced as an attendee. For example, the scene of What Cheer? Brigade in Davis Plaza felt completely different than their performance on the Harvard Square stage. The attendees were far more involved, and audience members further back in the crowd were more inclined to interact with one another without a clear visual focus. I also witnessed people helping each other to climb up onto platforms, or walking around to the back of the plaza to take spots behind the performers and fully encircle
them—which felt far more immersive and communal. And to expand on this, the experience I had with the New Orleans-based Young Fellaz Brass Band on stage on Sunday, compared to when they led a small parade down the block towards an empty street corner on Saturday, was vastly different. Attendees came alive to this sudden humanity that became apparent when a performer was close enough to reach out and touch them, or even talk to them or join in on the performance. I remember seeing a guitarist performing on the street; as the band walked by, they joined into the band’s performance, taking a quick solo over the brass arrangement. That level of communal interaction isn’t possible on a static, raised stage. Activist festivals feel much more activist when you are actually on the ground with performers, and not just watching—because you feel like you’re really contributing to collective joy. Even when things like crowd-chants begin, if there is a staged area holding ultimate power and focus, the chant feels directed as opposed to simply expressed. That directionality is what the unbounded stages really nail. I would liken it to my experience with HONK! bands at the Festival-affiliated detention center march, in which we, as a group, were both the performer of the vocalizations as well as (in many ways) the audience for them.
Coming back to this idea of "closeness to performers," trusting an audience to be within arms' reach of you also creates a more intimate environment where people feel their collective humanity is being respected. It makes the prospect of joining in on the pickup band HONK! organizer Ken Field leads each year far less anxiety inducing, since you can just hop into the back row and then dissolve back into the crowd. And on the opposite side, it allows for audience members to become the spectacle of a performance without necessarily “performing”--an almost impossible concept in the context of stage-bounded performances. I personally recall a woman dancing with a small child to the pickup band that almost became like a public dance performance, as well as a stilt-walker rolling through the crowd and just picking up the donation bucket from someone to take around with them. The level of trust that goes along with allowing real fluidity between audience, organizer, and performer is what makes Honk! particularly special.
What these kinds of unbounded events teach us is that being attentive to performers, and being respectful of them, is not necessarily the same thing in public festivals. In my experience, people felt completely fine dropping in and out of different performances, talking to their friends, dancing—just doing whatever—because there was a common understanding of thankfulness and respect for the musicians who were providing both entertainment and the opportunity to gather. Plus, the organizers of the festival make a point to be mostly invisible. After an opening address, it’s actually hard to find any “staff” aside from some volunteers at booths, which contributes to the perception that the Festival is very much community run and not overseen by anyone other than bands and attendees. There is a semblance of organization in the planning of bands and performance areas, but beyond that, very little restraint aside from what attendees give without instruction. The amount of trust that goes into this lack of direct instruction is what makes festivals like HONK! feel intimate and actually communal. To expand on that concept of trust: importantly, there was not a cop to be seen within a wide radius of Davis Square on Saturday, only a couple EMTs—which translates this trust to the crowd while also acknowledging that the presence of police inherently makes a festival less accessible to many people. Comparatively, Harvard Square was full of police which to me put a feeling of surveillance, fear, and distrust into the event. It makes such a massive difference to cede some level of safety and control in order to show attendees trust & respect.
It is critical to understand that having stages on ground-level (rather than raised) is not the same as sanctioning an unbounded stage. What makes a brass festival particularly great for this is the lack of amplification, which means no wires or speakers to cordon off performers from the audience. Interestingly, I continued to think about "unboundness" of space when our class attended a test-event that asked how the logistics, socializations, and norms that drive music festivals would change if HONK! took place in virtual space. Watching organizer Ken Field on saxophone as a stand-in for HONK!--his performance streamed live to our classroom and experienced through headsets as a music festival "in outer space"--I thought about how virtual reality shares this unbounded “wireless” concept, because there are no speaker or cable elements needed inside the digital space. All of this allows for more fluidity & access in planning & mobility, which contributes to the organic and very human feelings of the events. One conflict I can't quite reckon with, though, is that of access & mobility: while it is far more accessible for performers with limited mobility to access unbounded & non-raised stages (like those on Saturday in Davis Square), it is likely more difficult for audience members past the front row to see performers when they utilize wheelchairs, cannot stand for long periods, or are not as tall as someone further ahead of them in the crowd. In some senses, VR gets around this by negating the need to stand, or even to be at the event itself—but it creates other divides in accessibility given the necessary technology and know-how required to use it. Because of this, I still see HONK!’s Saturday edition as the most accessible form of the festival.
Ever since attending, I've tried to figure out what exactly about Honk! made me feel so warm and fuzzy. And while I do believe the root of this lies in the lack of boundaries in terms of both scope and staging, the real core of this feeling seems to be: trust. I felt trusted as both an attendee and as a human, and I therefore extended my own trust to those around me. I realize this may sound overly sensitive, but I do think it's critical to recognize the intense empathy-driven activism present in removing bounded stages. Everything about HONK! is non-hierarchical--from it's planning team, to its event volunteers, to its performers, to its audience members. There are no rigid definitions, and the event reflects this. When you put trust in your community to support each other, festivals flourish, and that is the best lesson I learned from experiencing HONK! 2019. -
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2019-10-17T02:14:48-04:00
Nick Sardella
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2019-12-05T18:08:24-05:00
“Somerville wants to abuse you / Somerville wants to be used by you”The above words (which you can hear being performed by the Forward! Marching Band in the clip above) were the first thing that really struck me at the HONK! festival. A riff on the lyrics of the popular song “Sweet Dreams” by Eurythmics, this is a sort of rallying cry for HONK!
I wasn’t sure what to expect from HONK! I had been primed with some expectations, having read articles and oral histories of the festival and even meeting a couple of the organizers, so I did have an idea of what to look out for, but when I arrived in Davis Square on Saturday, October 12th 2019, I nonetheless walked in largely cold, knowing only that I would hang out there for at least a few hours and try to document as much as I could as authentically as I could in that time. So I started by simply filming everything I saw as I entered. The resultant clip (above), while admittedly unpolished (and much to my chagrin, filmed vertically - I apologize for the suboptimal viewing experience on most devices), shows you what I saw almost as if through my own eyes.
I didn’t have a clear focus on exactly what I would focus on at the festival, instead hoping to authentically document my experience and see what arose out of it. While I was primed to focus on certain things - activism, use of public space, music of course - these actually ended up being some of the most interesting things. I also wanted to see exactly how HONK! made use of its space in Davis Square on that Saturday. Did HONK! use Somerville? Did it abuse it?
What I found was that HONK! uses its space caringly, lovingly, and intentionally. View the map below. The festival is fairly contiguous, centered around an art space on Elm St., around which local businesses carry on as usual, many taking advantage of the festival for the best business day of their year. Another POV video shows my walk through part of this space, noting several of the art installations. When a spectator arrives at HONK!, they become surrounded by it. The seven stages, spread out as they are, are close enough together that one can easily walk from one end to the other in the space of a few minutes.The festival organizers cannot be accused of not paying attention to detail. Their desire to create an inclusive and conscious space is evidenced by extra recycling bins placed throughout the festival space as well as a water fountain set up on Elm St. in a central location, even having bowls on the ground so that dogs can stay hydrated as well. The water station even marketed drinking local water. HONK! made the space truly their own on that Saturday. Every stage location had a sign indicating the acts.
What I found surprisingly effective about HONK! was how well-organized it felt, even though there was minimal presence of volunteers and organizers. Attention had clearly been given to the planning, but the whole thing came across fairly effortlessly. Band transitions happened fairly quickly (even if I once did overhear a band member expressing uncertainty over where exactly they were supposed to be playing). There were information booths in Statue Park (a sort of ground zero for the festival) but that seemed to be the only place of official HONK! presence. While Elm St. was shut down and there were Somerville police barriers set up in a few spaces, there was minimal police presence as well, less so even than at least one festival-goer I overheard would have liked. In a sense, the overall atmosphere of HONK! can be described as organized chaos. And in a way this is exactly what they want - just enough organization that the thing can be pulled off with minimal issue, but not enough that it feels like a fully organized or worse, corporate, venture. HONK! is a world of its own, but a transient one.
When one enters HONK!, they are enveloped by sound and colors, often clashing against one another. But that is part of what makes it so cool to be a part of.
Ultimately I do believe HONK! lives up to its goal to “Reclaim the Streets for Horns, Bikes, and Feet”. I can’t say I saw many bikes in Davis Square, but there were a lot of feet, and a lot of horns for sure, and a lot of activism. The ways activism manifested in the space were fascinating as well. On a basic level, all of the bands are or were in some way activist. And indeed, even if you had no idea what HONK! was, it would be nearly impossible to go there without realizing it was a truly activist space. People everywhere had clipboards to sign petitions, wearing shirts proclaiming their beliefs, or waving posters. Bands chanted in a call and response: “Power to the people - no one is illegal!” A sticker worn on many people’s clothes boldly declared: “Trump/Pence must go!” Look below for pictures of many of these.
Significantly, too, all of this is free, open to anybody and everybody. In this sense HONK! is truly egalitarian; indeed, the organizing committee is non-hierarchical. HONK! lives up to the activist desires of many of its bands and organizers for all people to be truly equal. In my time at the festival, I saw people happily using public space to enjoy themselves, but also to engage in important work. Nothing at HONK! is directly doing anything to change the state of the world outside it, but for one weekend, HONK! creates a transcendent space of its own, filled with music and laughter and love.
asdfasdfAs the Forward Marching Band proclaimed, our public spaces are sitting there, often left unused. HONK! reminds us that they are there for us, to be used, wanting to be used, maybe even abused. This is a faulty document; all documents are. I cannot fully recreate HONK! through words and images and sounds; memory fades, as with any live moment. But I felt it when I was there, and hope that these words and images and sounds may at least begin to approximate what it is like to really be at the festival. But in a way the transience of HONK! is what makes it so notable. For one weekend a year, Somerville and Cambridge are transformed into an exceptional space. HONK! puts the next play in the control of the attendee. And that is how it needs to be. It lives in our memories but challenges us to go out and continue what it started.