Festival

Manifest Urban Arts Festival

May 15, 2008

It’s kind of like Groundhog Day: Every spring, college students all over America stick their heads up out of their WiFi-enabled burrows, blink and look around, realize they’re graduating, and do a little dance. Maybe in Cancun, without a top on.

The little dance new Columbia College graduates do is called the Manifest Urban Arts Festival, and it’s really not so little. An annual event now in its sixth year, it’s a marathon, multivenue talent show highlighting work by the arts and media college’s roughly 2,000 departing seniors and grad students. This year’s party, set for Friday, May 16, promises theater, dance, music, performance art, gallery shows, screenings, various -casts (Web, radio, and TV), readings, a parade, and a 2000 Volvo station wagon in a hand-knit green sweater—all free and open to the public (though if you’re determined to spend money, you can visit the Manic Annex, 623 S. Wabash, where student art is available for sale).

Things officially kick off at noon with a performance by “circus punk” marching band Mucca Pazza (outside at 640 S. Wabash). They’ll also be on hand for the Spectacle Fortuna Parade, which steps off from Balbo and Wabash at 6:45 PM. The work of making flamboyant masks, costumes, and giant puppets for the parade crosses all departmental lines. This year’s theme, “Salvage Dreaming,” emphasizes recycling—so those magnificent, outsize Elizabethan-style gowns you see will be made of 21st-century detritus like trash bags.

Besides Mucca Pazza, musical attractions include venerable jazz saxophonist David “Fathead” Newman—a longtime Ray Charles sideman—teaming up with the Columbia jazz and vocal jazz ensembles for a performance in the theater of the new Spertus Institute of Jewish Studies building (610 S. Michigan, 4:30 PM), and a free outdoor concert by OK Go at Grant Park’s Upper Hutchinson Field at 8 PM. (Though the OK Go show is free, tickets are required, and Columbia students, faculty, and staff get first dibs. Any leftovers will be announced at the Manifest Web site and made available on May 16 “somewhere on campus.”) There will also be brief sets by student bands and solo acts throughout the day at 640 S. Wabash (see our music listings for details).

From the long list of theater and performance art offerings: Local comedy troupe Schadenfreude joins Columbia journalism alum Justin Kaufmann to lead a tongue-in-cheek “self-help workshop” titled How to Act Like a Cowboy. It’s designed to “give anyone the power and confidence to take on the rigors of a non-cowboy life” (under the big skies in front of 1104 S. Wabash, 1:30 PM). If you prefer broadswords to six-shooters, you can watch Columbia theater students have at one another in the Stage Combat Extravaganza (72 E. 11th, noon). Or opt for undergrad David Seeber’s softer weapon, the grape. His Grape Play—really, more of a game—offers the elegance of simplicity: the rules are “1. Catch grape in mouth, 2. If mouth is missed, squash grape on head” (sidewalk at 624 S. Michigan, 5 PM).

Meanwhile, Monica Ecchs self-lacerates for your pleasure in Who Gets the Privilege of Disappointing Me Next? Armed with a bullhorn, a triangle, and a new BFA in fiction, Ecchs will wander the festival from noon to 6:30 PM, testifying to a love life so miserable that she considers hospitalization a highlight.

Musical theater students will try to tap-dance their way into your heart (72 E. 11th, 2 PM) not long before the zombies of undergrad Nicole Huser’s spectacle, Res Corporealis: Material Bodies, attempt to eat it (roaming, 3:30 PM).

New at Manifest this year is the Transmission art car festival, “an environmentally mindful street exhibition of provocative auto and auto-inspired art” (Wabash between Harrison and Roosevelt, 11 AM-7 PM). The Volvo sweater was knitted for it by Columbia’s assistant dean of student life, Kari Sommers. Also on view, a 1991 Subaru station wagon made of recycled paper and the results of an automotive origami project that produced 1,000 paper cars.

As for literature: newly minted poetry MFAs read from their final projects and theses at intervals punctuated by hors d’oeuvres (Great Room, 525 S. State, 11 AM, 1, 2, 4 PM). And the fiction writing department presents You Gotta Hear This, a celebration of student work incorporating readings, videos, music, and refreshments (731 S. Plymouth Court, 3 and 7 PM).

For more information and a complete schedule of events, see colum.edu/manifest_2008. —Tony Adler

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