Alan Faena invites you to TIDE BY SIDE Processional 2 PM to 6 PM at Faena District Miami Beach, Sunday, November 27

unnamed-42Please join Alan Faena and immerse yourself in TIDE BY SIDE Artistic Processional Performance at Faena District Miami Beach. Carlos Betancourt’s monumental participatory pinata “The Pelican Passage” sets off the festivities at 2 PM. Artistic experiences by Miralda, Marinella Senatore, Carnival Arts and Los Carpinteros.

Open to the public. Bring your friends and family, and enjoy the world of Faena.

Sunday, November 27, 2016
2 PM to 6 PM
Faena District Miami Beach
Collins Avenue between 32 and 36 Streets

UNDER THE ARTISTIC DIRECTION OF CLAIRE TANCONS IN COLLABORATION WITH ARTO LINDSAY, MUSICAL DIRECTOR AND GIA WOLFF, ARCHITECTURAL DIRECTOR. FEATURING CARLOS BETANCOURT, CARNIVAL ARTS, LOS CARPINTEROS, MARINELLA SENATORE, AND MIRALDA, WITH A SPECIAL GUEST APPEARANCE BY ERNESTO NETO.

Building upon parades, carnivals, and other public ceremonials from across the Americas and the Caribbean, Tide by Side inaugurates the Faena District Miami Beach with new commissions and American premieres of works by an international cast of artists and performers. The outcome of a two-year collaboration on an unprecedented district- and city-wide scale, with more than 30 South Florida cultural institutions and hundreds of participants, Tide by Side takes the form of a processional performance that provides a framework for a collective celebration of, and reflection on community and creation.

Drawn together by a mutual interest in the politics and aesthetics of parades, my co-directors Gia Wolff and Arto Lindsay and myself have devised an evolutive dispositive for the performance throughout the West side of the District, between Indian Creek Drive and Collins Avenue, revolving around the iconic new OMA / Rem Koolhaas / Sho Shigematsu buildings, in and out, on, off and around the Faena Forum, Faena Bazaar and Faena Park, instilling a double processional motion within and without the works, among performers and audience members alike, as in a carousel. Distributed throughout the four blocks of the district, Wolff’s intervention consists in inserting a set of elements in the raw aesthetics of road work equipment that double up as risers and bleachers for audience seating, thus setting navigational challenges on a parade route composed in equal part of the plazas designed by Raymond Jungles and two of the three lanes of Collins Avenue, Miami’s major northbound artery, forcing an otherwise linear flow to contort, and inviting rotating segments of the public, otherwise watching from the sidewalks and squares, to occupy the road and experience the parade from within, in closer interaction with the performers. In reminding us of the reality principle of traffic of which Collins Avenue was purposefully, if only partially, cleared to hold the parade, Wolff’s forces us to reflect upon the mutual accommodations necessary for the enjoyment, if temporary, of the integrated artistic and civic proposition that is Tide by Side. In like fashion, Lindsay’s soundscape introduces dissonances to the expected sonic accompaniment of a parade by way of digitally enhanced riffs on live renditions of old and new tunes from musicians ranging from conch-shell players led by father and daughter Alfredo and Yuridia Martinez of Ameyal Mexican Cultural Organization, the Rara Lakay rah-rah band under the direction of Benjamin Martineau, 305 Street Band marching band directed by Michael Randle, the classical and pop choir Nu Deco Ensemble directed by Sam Hyken as well as a steel-drum group, in collaboration with the Tide by Side artists and composers, creating a meta-melody, quite literally unheard of.

Setting off the festivities is Carlos Betancourt’s The Pelican Passage, a monumental piñata fitted with fifty-feet long multicolor ribbons (the festive game popular in Spanish-speaking communities), that invites large-scale participation under its imposing frame. A testament to Betancourt’s Cuban and Puerto Rican experiences, the participatory sculpture is a gesture toward the power of inclusion and the pleasures of belonging through common action. More powerfully yet, as a mythical figure associated with the spirit world, the tutelary pelican with which the float-like sculpture is topped confers a spiritual resonance to the life cycle initiated with the opening of the new cultural institution.

Los Carpinteros present their first rendition of Conga Irreversible in the United States, a Cuban conga performed in reverse, upended expectations associated with the dance and musical traditions of the genre. Reinterpreted through a musical arrangement by Latin Jazz musician and composer, and Harvard Jazz Band Director Yosvany Terry, choreography by Isaias Ramírez of Compaña Folklórica Ban-Rarraassisted by Yaselis Sánchez Correa, and costume design by Abraham García of Havana’s Tropicana nightclub fame, the backward motion of this retro-conga, first presented during La Bienal de La Habana in 2012, seemed a timely metaphor for the movement of the Caribbean country—and some would say, of this country as well. Displaced to Miami Beach and expanded upon with a cast in part made up from the original Cuban dancers and performers and in part drawn from Miami’s Cuban-American community, the retro-conga highlights the workings of cultural translation in relationship to political change, a year after the reopening of diplomatic relations between Cuba and the United States.

The Last Ingredients by Miralda is a mobile feast of commanding proportions that puts culinary traditions and cultural tastes into historical perspective. A vehicular processional, it is primarily comprised of food trucks, luncheras and ambulantes, the mobile kitchens and restaurants commonly spotted in Miami, and also features uncommon carriages like…a limousine-drawn barbecue. The processional’s centerpiece however, are seven of South Florida’s historic staples—palm cabbage, maize (corn), ananas (pineapple), boniato (sweet potato), alligator, turkey and conch—the likenesses of which are represented in a monumental multi-part sculptural formation carried by an ensemble of performers while the actual ingredients are reimagined into experimental menus composed by teams of renown Miami restaurant and hotel chefs such as Jeff McInnis and Janine Booth of the Sarsaparilla Club, Bradley Kilgore of Alter—as well as the Faena Hotel’s very own Francis Mallmann of Los Fuegos and Paul Qui of Pao—and food truck chefs Alfred Montero of Mr. Good Stuff, Brett Chiavari of BC Monster, Connie Lee of Inspir Asian, and many others. As global haute cuisine integrates native ingredients and mixes with fusion street food thanks to the baroque culinary imaginary of Miralda, The Last Ingredients provide a taste of the utopian, Miamian dream of a melting pot.

Marinella Senatore presents the second and to date largest iteration, in the United States, of her ongoing performative pedagogical platform, The School of Narrative Dance, a multidisciplinary nomadic school that strives to harness the emancipatory power of communal creative processes. Theatrically staged throughout the upper and lower levels of the District’s architectural icons along Collins Avenue and set into motion by the city’s myriad artistic communities and social organizations headed by Miami-based dancer and choreographer Jojo Vela, the Miami Beach School of Narrative Dance will feature cultural formations fostered by the new art district.

Under the artistic direction of Celeste Fraser Delgado and Damián Rojo, in collaboration with musical director Brian PottsCarnival Arts’s Siren Song is a tongue-in-cheek take on the meaning of luxury as imagined by youths and students from diverse backgrounds through African diasporic cultural traditions including Kongo Yoruba and Ibo rhythmic patterns and visual aesthetics. Developed throughout 2015–2016 during workshops held primarily with Miami Bridge Homestead, PACE Center for Girls, Thomas Jefferson Middle School and Barry University and led by a wide array of leading art practitioners from Miami’s extensive cultural communities including dancer and choreographer Marisol Blanco, singer Ketli and musician Arelan Torres, the three-section work—a small processional of its own borrowing from —transforms the Haitian folk character La Sirène into a contemporary figure imbued with self-affirming powers exemplary of multicultural formations thrust into the maelstrom of societal change.

Lastly, Ernesto Neto will present a new version of Jibóia, the open-form, multi-performer, snake-like wearable net that is as much a warning of the perils of climate change as it is a homage to the potency of conscious action in countering its effects. A timely intervention, Jibóia, will appear in flashes, streaming sideways through the main processional flow at various intervals, like the very flashes of consciousness that seize ever greater segments of society regarding this issue. First performed during the Global Climate March in Vienna in 2015, Jibóia is presented courtesy of Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary.

Engaging with the poetics of urban space and the experience of everyday city life along Miami Beach’s most vital artery, Tide by Side updates the tradition of the processional performance as an artistic practice and form of public address with mass appeal for the 21st century. It not only celebrates the opening of Miami’s newest cultural district with people, food, and music; it also ponders the importance of cultural communities amidst new urban developments and tests the conditions for the formation of new constituencies, tide after tide, side by side.

— CLAIRE TANCONS

Spread the love!