The Grand Marais Art Colony is bringing an interesting mix of artistic experiences to this July’s Arts Festival—watch for free outdoor dance performances and fishskin sewing workshops.
The Grand Marais Art Colony is collaborating with artist, writer and dancer Emily Johnson and the Catalyst Dance Company this summer, bringing multi-media experience to Grand Marais. Through dance, music, storytelling, demonstration and creation, Johnson strives to engage the audience within and through a space and environment, interacting with a place’s architecture, history and role in community.
Free outdoor performances will be presented at the Grand Marais Arts Festival July 13 and 14. These will be preview excerpts of SHORE, a new site-specific dance + music + storytelling event, and will take place in Harbor Park at 2 p.m. each day. SHORE traces the blurry edges between water and land, performer and audience, art and community, the pedestrian and the sublime, with local participants joining in the performances. Johnson and composer James Everest are looking for 15-20 local community members ages 8-80 from the Grand Marais area to participate in their short outdoor public performances. Participants will learn movement and singing at short rehearsals in the days before the festival: easy movements and simple singing that can be done by people of all ages and ability levels.
Johnson will also be demonstrating how she creates her fish skin lanterns. She learned sewing with fish skin from Audrey Armstrong and has led fish-skin sewing workshops for two years around the country.
A class is being offered in October in which students will learn to sew with fish skin to make a transparent fish skin lantern. Join the creator of dance performance/installation “Niicugni” (Listen), which featured 50 fish-skin lanterns, to learn this traditional Yup’ik art form whereby skin is prepared, sewn, and dried to create functional vessels. In this sewing circle style class, students will fillet, scrape and sew while building appreciation of community, salmon, dance, Alaska, and traditional and contemporary art-making. The four-day class is scheduled to be held Oct. 3-6.
Contact the Art Colony at (218) 387-2737 for more information.
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