A Summer Solstice Celebration

This year's Summer Solstice Performance Art Festival, "Alchemy and Intention," would have been a wonderful event on any occasion. The weather was perfect, the cost of entry (and parking) a mere five dollars, and the refreshments plentiful and inexpensive. A beautiful, lush park, full of native plants, trees, and large, site-specific sculptures, served as the setting for the thirteen commissioned performances. The artists and artist collectives performed in, around, and even on top of sculptures as the sun slowly set on the newly minted federal holiday, Juneteenth. Although billed as a summer solstice event, the festival, which concluded after midnight with a ritual bonfire, took place a half-day shy of the actual solstice.

Adding to the general feeling of joie de vivrewas the fact that the pandemic was in recession and people could get out and socialize once more. The celebration of the solstice coincided with the commemoration of June 19, 1865, the day the slaves in Galveston, Texas were told that they were free. Minneapolis, the epicenter of the Black Lives Matter demonstrations following the death of George Floyd, is just fifty miles south of the Franconia Sculpture Park. Many of its artists-in-residence during 2020 and 2021 were involved with the protests, which ultimately informed the work performed at the festival. The conviction of Derek Chauvin, the police officer who kneeled on Floyd's neck and suffocated him, was greeting with relief. People could finally move on. "Alchemy and Intention" had been slated for 2020, but, as curator Ginger Shulick Porcella wrote in the event program, the festival "was derailed because of the Covid-19 pandemic and the social justice uprisings spurred by the murder of George Floyd, and I couldn't stomach the idea of hosting a performance art festival online. I think now more than ever people are hungry for live performances—artists and audiences alike."

Judging from the crowd, Porcella was right. The audience was eager for live performance, and the artists, most of whose work was themed loosely around magic and the occult, obliged. The evening kicked off at 5:00 p.m. with Tsohíl Bhatia's performance Run-IV. Clad in a red dress and high heels, and accessorized with a thermometer, pulsometer, and megaphone, Bhatia ran around the fifty-acre complex, periodically using the megaphone to share their vital statistics with the audience. Run-IVdidn't directly address the occult (that came later with Bhatia's What A Wonderful Sunset, a separate performance that celebrated the setting sun), but it did suggest the Heb-Sed, the ritual run that ancient Egyptian pharaohs would complete after a reign of thirty years, which was used as a means of reinvigorating their power and strength.

Kristen Bauer's Counter(Clockwise)was based on the maypole dance, a pagan Germanic fertility ritual that traditionally marks the beginning of spring. The performance began with Bauer, clad in a dirndl-like band of red ribbons, attached to the side of the maypole. She demarcated the ritual circle while unspooling herself from the dirndl. Bauer then invited audience members to untangle the ribbons attached to the top of the maypole, and to engage in a maypole "dance" that included a clockwise and counterclockwise procession. The names and definitions of the four essential elements (earth, air, fire, and water), a reference to the maypole's pagan origins, were written on the ribbons. The significance of the maypole dance is premised on the idea of circumambulation—to move around a sacred object or idol in order to enact the transition from daily life to spiritual perfection. Circumambulation is a journey of spiritual enlightenment, a ritual commonly performed in Hindu and Buddhist devotional practices, but is present in other religions including Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. It is also an affirmation of fertility and fecundity, a ritualistic means by which the participants ensure that life can continue. Bauer's joyful performance complemented Bhatia's Run-IV, an athletic work of endurance included a circumambulation of the entire park, a journey...