abrady – Creative Campus

Aletta Brady ’15 talks to Kelsey Siegel ’13 about MiddletownRemix Festival (May 11)

May 6, 2013 by abrady

Music & Public Life Intern Aletta Brady ’15 talks to Kelsey Siegel ’13 about MiddletownRemix: Hear More, See More – A Festival of Art and Sound, taking place on Saturday, May 11, 2013 from 2pm to 5pm. The festival will feature a commissioned flash mob dance choreographed by Kelsey Siegel to a hip-hop soundtrack created by DJ Arun Ranganathan, incorporating sounds from MiddletownRemix, at 2:30pm on Main Street between Liberty and Ferry Street. The flash mob dance is open to all levels of dancers. Learn the dance on YouTube here: www.youtube.com/wescfa and perform it as part of the flash mob on May 11 (participants should plan to arrive at the Festival Information Center, located at 575 Main Street in front of It’s Only Natural Market, at 2pm, and then perform the dance at 2:30pm).

Kelsey Siegel '13 (center) teaches her flash mob dance to Wesleyan University students outside of Fayerweather Beckham Hall. — Kelsey Siegel ’13 (center) teaches her flash mob dance to Wesleyan University students outside of Fayerweather Beckham Hall.

Kelsey Siegel ‘13 is choreographing the flash mob dance for the MiddletownRemix festival. She’s enthusiastic about the dance and excited to see members of the Wesleyan University community as well as greater Middletown residents dance together. I asked Kelsey a few questions about her participation with the MiddletownRemix festival, and here is what I learned:

Aletta Brady ’15: Tell me a little bit about yourself.

Kelsey Siegel ’13: My name is Kelsey Siegel. I’m from Port Washington, New York. I am a Mathematics and Dance double major at Wesleyan. I am currently the director of FUSION Dance Crew, and serve as the Dance Production Coordinator for the Dance Department at Wesleyan. I have always loved dancing, and being active in general. Hip hop has been my favorite form of dance for a while, but Wesleyan recently opened me up to other forms. I have also begun to see dance as somewhat formless and rather more of a way of communicating my own, unique style with movement.

Why did you decide to get involved with the MiddletownRemix project?

I was interested in getting involved with the MiddletownRemix project for several reasons. For one, I really enjoy working with students from Middletown, especially dancing with them. During my freshman year at Wesleyan, my dance crew would go to MacDonough Elementary School a few times a semester to dance with students in the afterschool program. Due to scheduling conflicts, however, we were unable to go after those few times. Reflecting back on it, I realized what a great time we had with the kids, and saw what a great time they had with us, and I knew we needed to find a way back into the community. I saw the opportunity to dance with students in the community again through the MiddletownRemix project, and immediately wanted in. Additionally, as an AmeriCorps volunteer at MacDonough Elementary School for two years, I spent a lot of time working with students in class and on their academic work. I realized that this project offered Wesleyan students a way of connecting with Middletown residents/students on a level that was beyond academics. I was excited to dance with students again, and to help show them how to be creative and expressive with both their bodies and their minds. I was excited to find a way for the Wesleyan and Middletown communities to connect through dance while also having fun.

Can you tell me about the dance that you choreographed?

The dance I choreographed is to the hip hop soundtrack of DJ N.E.B [Arun Ranganathan]. It has more of an old-school hip hop vibe to it, but also takes on a lot of my own style. I tried to keep the movements fairly simple and repetitive, so that anyone could learn the dance. I also wanted the movements to be simple enough for anyone to add their own style to it. I’m all about individual style, and wanted to showcase everyone’s personality through this dance, especially since most of the sounds featured in the track came from the MiddletownRemix website, where anyone could upload their own sound. This dance is all about getting funky and having fun!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0P22nw3II7U

What are you most looking forward to about the day of the MiddletownRemix festival?

I’m looking forward to the entire day of the festival, but especially the flash mob dance! I can’t wait to see all the kids out there who put so much work into learning the dance. I’m excited to see them own the dance and have fun dancing on the sidewalk together. It’s going to be awesome.

Is there anything else that you’d like to add?

Everyone should come to the MiddletownRemix festival this Saturday May 11 from 2pm to 5pm! It has something for everyone and isn’t something you can find anywhere else. I feel very lucky to have been a part of this project, and cannot wait for the festival. It’s going to be an incredible day.

For the complete MiddletownRemix festival schedule, and to capture, contribute and remix sounds from Wesleyan and Middletown using the free UrbanRemix app for iPhone/iOS and Android devices, visit http://www.middletownremix.org

Aletta Brady ’15 talks to Joe McCarthy and Peter Albano about MiddletownRemix Festival (May 11)

May 3, 2013April 29, 2013 by abrady

Music & Public Life Intern Aletta Brady ’15 talks to photographer and filmmaker Joe McCarthy and woodcut artist, bookbinder, papermaker, and muralist Peter Albano about MiddletownRemix: Hear More, See More – A Festival of Art and Sound, taking place on Saturday, May 11, 2013 from 2pm to 5pm. The art/sound installation “Camera Obscura,” a temporary 16′ X 8′ “camera” commissioned for the festival, will be installed on the corner of Main Street and Grand Street by Mr. McCarthy and Mr. Albano. The installation will also be featured outside of the Usdan University Center at 45 Wyllys Avenue the week leading up to the festival, from Monday May 6 through Thursday, May 9, 2013.

Photographer and filmmaker Joe McCarthy (left) and woodcut artist, bookbinder, papermaker, and muralist Peter Albano (right), working on their art/sound installation “Camera Obscura,” commissioned for the MiddletownRemix Festival, taking place on Saturday, May 11 from 2pm to 5pm.

In mid-April, I biked over to Peter and Joe’s house after I got off of work at the Center for the Arts. When I arrived, they were out in their backyard working on building their art installation that will be featured at MiddletownRemix: Hear More, See More – A Festival of Art and Sound on Saturday, May 11 from 2pm to 5pm. The installation is titled “Camera Obscura.” They happily showed me around the frame of the piece that they were working on, and invited me to join them around their coy pond for our interview.

Peter Albano is a graduate of the University of Hartford Art School where he studied printmaking, and Joe McCarthy studied photography and film in Boston and Los Angeles, before the two of them met in Middletown, and collaborated as artists on the Hog River Revival Project in Hartford. They described their project for the MiddletownRemix festival as “pinhole photography, just on a much larger scale—a pinhole camera that you can walk inside of. The sound element going on will [make it] a full sensory experience inside the camera”.

They had a lot of great things to say about the MiddletownRemix festival, and their role in it. Here are some highlights from our conversation:

Aletta Brady ‘15: Tell me about your art/sound installation “Camera Obscura” that will be displayed at the MiddletownRemix festival.

Joe McCarthy: We started thinking about the idea of creating this soundscape that was basically just taken, much like the [MiddletownRemix] project, from the streets. Nothing really created, more just arranged. And then we thought, “well, what kind of visual can match that sound element?” And, you know, the most bare bones, un-augmented camera is just a simple pinhole lens. There’s nothing to focus it, it is what it is, it’s just light. It use[s] the visuals from the streets of Middletown that are literally just what’s in front of your eyes. Its kind of like removing people from Main Street in order for them to more clearly view Main Street, or more clearly experience Main Street.

Peter Albano: One of the issues that we encountered was incorporating a sound element that highlighted the visual elements, because those are two completely different senses, and we landed on the idea of creating and taking one out of the environment, and that’s what the structure to walk into was, rather than any structure you just observe.

Aletta Brady ‘15: Why were you interested in creating an installation for the MiddletownRemix festival in particular?

Joe McCarthy: I think that we were both really excited that [the festival] is all about Middletown, like two blocks from where we make work, you know? ‘Cause the area that you choose to be in definitely has an influence on your work, and this sort of opportunity has allowed that influence to come to the front, which is healthy sometimes.

Conceptual drawing of “Camera Obscura,” a temporary 16′ X 8′ “camera,” which will be installed on the corner of Main Street and Grand Street during the MiddletownRemix Festival on Saturday, May 11 from 2pm to 5pm.

Aletta Brady ‘15: Tell me about yourselves as artists and your own personal journeys.

Peter Albano: I come from a much different background technique-wise than Joe. I’m much more of a drawer. I studied printmaking in college. I never dabbled in photography until the Hog River project. What drew me to this project was the scale of it, and the idea of getting it to work, making it work. It’s an endeavor. On a more broad scheme, I think most of our work revolves around the idea of highlighting the citizen that passes [and] community involvement. The Hog River project was a Hartford-centric project, and it revolved around the gathering of people and the sharing of information, and I think this project is a nice step up from there.

Joe McCarthy: All of my work, it just is a kind of way for me to break down something that I’m curious about. The subject matter is always on a personal level derived from me trying to reconcile my thoughts about one thing or another. Technically, the work I do has a lot to do with light, and in the Hog River project, that was all about [light], because there wasn’t any of it. That kind of became [the “Camera Obscura” project], where you have all the light in the world, and it’s all about limiting it and blocking it out and controlling the light.

Aletta Brady ‘15: What are you most excited about for Saturday May 11, the day of the MiddletownRemix festival?

Peter Albano: The flash mob dance [at 2:30pm in front of It’s Only Natural Market at 575 Main Street].

Joe McCarthy: I always get a kick out of being able to stand away from my work and watching how people interact with it, its always fun. Its cool to make something and there’s nothing you can do, it’s out there now, so all you have to do is just stand back and no one knows like, “oh those are the guys that made it.” So you can just stand there and watch someone, or go into the camera with someone, and really just pay attention to how that stranger interacts with this completely new thing to them. Its impossible to be objective. By the end of this camera, neither one of us will be able to say its good or bad, or if it worked or it didn’t, ‘cause we’re way too close to it, so I’m always curious about what the reveal on a finished piece of work is to a clean set of eyes.

Aletta Brady ’15 talks to DJ Arun Ranganathan about MiddletownRemix Festival (May 11)

April 26, 2013April 22, 2013 by abrady

Music & Public Life Intern Aletta Brady ’15 talks to DJ Arun Ranganathan about MiddletownRemix: Hear More, See More – A Festival of Art and Sound, taking place on Saturday, May 11, 2013 from 2pm to 5pm. Arun has been commissioned to create a 30-minute remix based on the sounds of MiddletownRemix, which will be performed live at both 2pm and 4pm on the main sound stage outside of It’s Only Natural Market at 575 Main Street, interspersed with remixes by Wesleyan student DJs.

I had the pleasure of sitting down and talking with Arun Ranganathan—also known as DJ N.E.B.—a local hip hop artist, producer and DJ from Middletown’s North End. DJ N.E.B. will be dropping beats on the main stage during MiddletownRemix: Hear More, See More – A Festival of Art and Sound on May 11. A beloved member of the Middletown community, he told me about his work, and why he’s excited about the upcoming festival. Here are some excerpts from our interview:

Aletta Brady ‘15: How did you get in to DJing?

DJ N.E.B.: Friends of mine back in the day, like, 1983, got me into hip hop break dancing, and then they were like “Oh you gotta see this guy DJ,” and we went out to Plaza Drive, and one of the kids there, this Puerto Rican kid named RC, used to set up his turn tables and DJ for the entire courtyard, and we’d all get together and dance, and that was when I was like “Ah man I gotta get myself a pair of those.” I started in 1985, I was eleven, and then I never stopped.

Why did you decide to be a part of the MiddletownRemix festival?

I got a call from a few friends of mine saying that there was this cool remix project. My buddy Topher showed me [the MiddletownRemix] website and I signed up for it like six, seven months ago. I would go there once in a while and listen to what other people did and I was like “wow.” When Erinn [Roos-Brown, Program Manager at the Center for the Arts] called me up [in the spring] and explained it to me, I just liked the idea. I’ve always wanted to get into recording ambient sounds like we used to do it a long time ago, just gather stuff. I like to experiment with sound and record samples through speakers or in hallways and see how it sounds. And people were gathering sounds already. All I had to do was take them and manipulate them. When [Erinn] said “do you want to do it?” I was really excited about that ‘cause its something that I’ve always wanted to do. It’s a step away from sampling records or creating my own sounds out of samples, ya know? That was a new challenge for me, something refreshing, something I haven’t done before.

Tell me about the remixes that you’re creating for the MiddletownRemix festival.

So far, I have three that I’ve done, and I have a couple concepts for the next two. I’m going to make about three ½ minute pieces, but I’m going to be DJing them live, so they’ll end up being five minutes a piece, ‘cause I’m going to do some turn-tableism with them. I just try to be inspired by something, so I just go through the samples that I grab from the [MiddletownRemix] website, and I don’t really have any plan, but when something is just like “Oh yea that was really cool” I’ll experiment and something happens, something comes out of it. [One] song was inspired by my friend Brian, he’s sort of like a grumpy artist around here, and the recording that the person got was perfect, ‘cause they were like “hey talk” and [Brian] was like “no, we’ve already been through this, stop recording,” and I thought that was hilarious, ‘cause it illustrated him, so I made a beat, and then just used that as the main. Another one that I most recently made was entirely off of sounds, I got somebody banging on a table for a kick drum, and I created a snare out of it, and somehow somebody made a weird sound with their mouth, and it sounded like a high hat, and I strung together a piece called “bells,” the St. Johns Bells, and that sounded really cool. It also incorporated a sample of a kid, a rougher sample. The contrast of these kids getting into trouble and the pure bells in the background seemed like a cool contrast.

How does the MiddletownRemix project connect with your community?

I’m recognizing people, and I know a lot of people that uploaded stuff. I’m familiar with the ambient sounds, it reminds me of my neighborhood and it just feels good that I’m able to do that, living in that neighborhood, using sounds mostly from that neighborhood. It’s truly a collaboration, because I’m using other people’s recordings which [is] fun. It’s a lot of fun. I feel like I’m connected to my community even more now, ‘cause I can take audio samples and make a piece out of it.

What are you most looking forward to about the MiddletownRemix festival?

I hope that people come out and recognize things that I sampled, and maybe like “ah that’s something I recorded.” I’m looking forward to being able to just mix my own pieces that are from that environment and hear it loud. That’s the best part of it all.