What's Up - Your guide to what's happening in Fayetteville, AR this week!
Issue link: https://www.epageflip.net/i/1369423
8 WHAT'S UP! MAY 9-15, 2021 COVER STORY JOCELYN MURPHY NWA Democrat-Gazette A pillar of the Artosphere Art+Nature Festival in Fayetteville has always been its free programming. The Walton Arts Center's annual festival continues through the end of May — back after its covid cancellation in 2020 — with ticketed and free events outdoors and indoors to offer broad accessibility. Artistic offerings include singers and dancers; folk, classical and jazz musicians; films; and larger-than- life bicycle animals to celebrate and connect with nature. On the next few pages, read more about the free programming — Trail Mix, Off the Grid, Artosphere Film Series — followed by interviews with two festival favorites, the Dover Quartet (page 12) and Jayme Stone (coming in next week's What's Up!). Off the Grid In a usual year, the Off the Grid event draws musicians from the 90-member Artosphere Festival Orchestra into bars and restaurants in downtown Fayetteville. The performance lineups are often impromptu, with spontaneous tunes and jam sessions breaking out as the musicians interact with audiences in the nontraditional settings. In accordance with best safety practices, the AFO will not see its 90 members traveling to Fayetteville from across the globe this year. Instead, explains Sallie Zazal, WAC director of Learning and Engagement and Artosphere coordinator, Off the Grid engages local artists in a pub crawl- type evening on Block Avenue. "I think the sunset is at like 8 o'clock that night. So it should just be a nice night outside in the middle of May," Zazal says of the walkable May 11 event. Performances will be outdoors and staggered so guests can move seamlessly from one to the next. Those who complete a "passport" by attending each performance can turn it in at the end of the night to enter a drawing for passes to "Art Heist," one of the ticketed programs during the festival. Fayetteville folklorist and multi- instrumentalist troubadour Willi Carlisle kicks off the event at Maxine's Tap Room at 7 p.m. Cellist Christian Serrano performs at The Vault beginning at 7:30 p.m., and Route 358 wraps up the evening with a 8 p.m. performance at The Experience Fayetteville Stage at the Fayetteville Town Center. Just ahead of the festival, Carlisle has been in the studio for 12- to 15-hour days cutting his new record, "Peculiar, Missouri," coming soon. It's about "magic, bisexuality, death and capitalism," he says, mostly yarns and tall-tales with some whoops and hollers thrown in for good measure. "There's a lot of stuff about being queer, angry and uncontrollable on it," too, he adds. "I do feel like covid gave me some time to compromise less, to be messy, to end midthought." Carlisle has performed — and garnered abundant praise — all over the world. The largest place he's really filled, he shares, was around 300 people. That type of performance requires an entirely different energy, he says, an energy where your love is more general, your focus more diffuse. Smaller, closer performances like he'll give at Artosphere, though, are Carlisle's bread and butter. They're often more intimate and, therefore, Art + Nature = Joy Hope flutters in on Artosphere wings "We could put any animal on wheels, but we go for ones that we think will have the most impact," explains Bike Zoo ringmaster and co-founder Jeremy Rosen. Thinking on his own preferences, he adds, "I think my two favorites are the butterflies because they are so tall, bright and colorful, and the snake because of its size and the way it moves — slithering in motions that put spectators and myself in awe. I like all of the other creatures we have, too." (Courtesy Photo/Jeremy Rosen)