Vox Populi — Attraction in Philadelphia

Vic Populi is a home for experimentation. It encourages artists in many genres to try different approaches and forms of collaboration. It encourages artists to speak from personal perspectives on social and political issues. The art is very personal and there are many different experiments both in terms of message and method for conveying message.

As a result, there are going to be messages that are clear and messages that are muddled. There will be messages that seem important and messages that don't make an impact. A lot of what you get out of it depends on what you bring to it.

I went for the work of the impermanence collective. This group throws together musicians, dancers, artists and spoken word artists who have never worked together before to see what happens. The artists who will work together are thrown together somewhat randomly.

What happens interested me more for watching these artists struggle to communicate to each other than it did as a coherent communication. They didn't know what they would say together. Maybe they had individual agendas and maybe not. What emerged depended as much on their willingness to be giving to each other and listen to each other as it did on their own skill and ideas. I would say it was a struggle. A messy struggle. A struggle that was beautiful more for its attempt than for it's product.

The impermanence collective believes that they are plenty of places for people to work together over time and learn how to collaborate. But this is a place that will rigorously throw people together who don't know each other or each other's work just to see what happens. They don't want to see the end result of what happens after people worked together for a while. They want to display the first efforts.

It's a sink or swim approach, which I don't think is very kind to the artists. Artists are human beings who want connection; more connection than you can get in twenty minutes. This format is more of a tease, maybe even a form of bullying. It doesn't do anything to facilitate the getting to know you process other than put people in close proximity to each other. There are no efforts to allow the artists to introduce themselves to each other. No guidelines for how to interact. It's a form of free for all that reminded me more of a Roman gladiator contest than anything else.

Some artists rebeled against this unkindness and tried hard to reach out to each other and break the bonds of the format but there was only so much they could do. I felt bad for them. It felt like there was a huge bureaucratic authority that was deliberately sabotaging them by refusing to let them interact except under these circumstances. That they were able to connect in any way at all seemed a triumph of humanity and artistry over Big Brother. But it was deeply saddening to be knowing that so much more could have happened if the artists had really been allowed to consciously develop a process instead of being forced together to perform for an audience without any conscious acknowledgment of each...

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