A Three-Course Meal of the Arts
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
Three years ago, as established New York,arts festivals like the Fringe Festival, the CMJ Music Marathon, and the New York Film Festival rolled out their annual surveys of the brightest art in their respective genres, the Crown Point Festival was quietly launched on a platform that staunchly rejected the traditional focus on just one form of art. It wasn’t easy in a city a with arts, but the new festival confidently offered unsuspecting audiences a three-week multimedia experience, curating nightly performances that fused the empathy of film, the energy of live theater, and the electricity of a concert.
“People didn’t know what to make of it at first,” a Crown Point Festival founder, Kelly Markus, said. “But even without any sponsorship or promotion, we noticed that the audience kept building week to week, almost solely by word of mouth, and by week three, it was practically a blowout.”
With a 2004 budget of less than $50,000, and lacking any established donor base or board of directors, Ms. Markus and a small band of local artists brought together more than 225 performers, an array of musicians, stage actors, and filmmakers whose works were intermingled to form 21 specially curated evenings. It was a modest venture, and caused a modest ripple among the city’s artistic community — particularly among up-and-comers who felt squeezed out by the elitism of so many other entrenched festivals.
“New York City needs an open and encouraging — and at the same time discriminating and well-produced — festival like this,” Ms. Markus said. “That’s why we felt compelled to start it. It’s insane to think that people are premiering works in other cities, whether it’s new plays or new bands or new filmmakers, that they have to start somewhere else before it’s ‘ready for New York.’ We used to be the city where new acts could find the audience.”
It’s with this mission in mind that the Crown Point Festival (www.crownpointfestival.org) returns to the city this year with the same multimedia format and an improved organizational structure. Beyond advisers and sponsors, the festival has secured a single location for its three-week run — the Abrons Art Center, on the Lower East Side — and an additional $100,000 to attract talent and audiences to the event. With the festival set to run through November 17, Ms. Markus said she’s already started to notice a shift in audience members (tonight’s performance marks the 10th day of the festival), who are beginning to better understand the way that film, stage production, and music can be interwoven to achieve a unique sensory experience.
For some of Crown Point’s featured artists, a notable side benefit of this curatorial approach is the way it offers a swath of unsung playwrights and filmmakers a chance to shine for the very first time. For those who spend their days writing one-act plays or crafting short films, it’s often difficult to find a mainstream forum in which to present work. For years, they have been relegated to screenings before or after a feature-length work, or restricted to specialized one-act theater festivals, or short-film festivals.
But not Crown Point. Naftali Beane Rutter, the festival’s film producer, has programmed considerably more short films than features (at a ratio greater than 4 to 1) for his schedule. The strategy is partly rooted in the festival’s time restrictions — working with three elements naturally requires each concert, play, and movie to be shorter — but Mr. Rutter said there’s something about the economic, efficient, and more visual artistry of so many short films that he wanted to offer audiences.
“Really, we’re programming an entire evening, not just one type of film or one type of play,” he said. “So each short film is essential to us in helping to set the mood, in charting a course. They interact with the other works chosen for that night almost like musical instruments. Really, short films offer a different type of language, they are their own distinct art form.”
Three of the festival’s five feature films have yet to screen. David Redmon and Ashley Sabin’s New Orleans documentary “Kamp Katrina,” which made its New York premiere at the Two Boots Pioneer Theater this summer, will show as part of Saturday night’s Crown Point program. Branko Schmidt’s “The Melon Route,” about a group of Chinese refugees being smuggled out of the country into the Balkans, screens Sunday. And the bizarre and bewitching “Made in Secret,” part fiction film, documentary, and film experiment about a feminist pornography collective in Vancouver, will screen as part of the festival’s closing weekend on November 16.
But Mr. Rutter said it’s the evenings that feature at least one short film that may intrigue festivalgoers, and film lovers, far more.
Discussing this week’s program, he noted the way that the short films play crucial roles in establishing each evening’s central theme. Tuesday night, he said, the program will try to ask the audience questions concerning “meaning and value amid apocalyptic events.” The short films follow suit: Margot Buff’s “Fish Eye” captures the life story of a fish in Prague, where carp are considered a delicacy, from birth to beheading, as told from the perspective of one of the fish. Matthew Lessner’s “By Modern Measure” contrasts the frivolous road trip of a few young artists with a voiceover that reads increasingly bleak and disastrous global headlines. Both films help to augment the evening’s play, Eric Sanders’s “Ixomia” (also being performed Saturday evening), a story about the apocalypse descending on a middle-American town during an election.
“There’s a give and take between all these, and the end result is more of a mood, more of a feeling, something you have to experience to really understand, because this experience would never occur if you didn’t pair these particular works together in just this way,” Mr. Rutter said.
The experience continues Wednesday evening with the short film “Mouseholes,” a movie Mr. Rutter dubs an “animated experimental documentary” that mixes “a folk feel with this sense of magic,” from a filmmaker he discovered in New Orleans, Helen Hill, prior to her recent death.
And on Thursday, the themes of Jenna Friedenberg’s film “Puerto Rican Squirrels” parallel those in Bridgette Dunlap’s play “The Girl Detective” (also being performed November 13 and 17). Each offers a coming-of-age story from a female perspective. Mr. Rutter describes Ms. Friedenberg’s film as “a mere moment of a film, just a fraction of a story about a girl in Los Angeles who has the slightest of interactions with her brother. It works so well with the play, offering up these questions of women and life that we don’t often see.”