Processional Arts Workshop: Contact

On April 1, 2007 Ann Arbor held its First Annual Festifools, the brainchild of artist/teacher Mark Tucker and social worker Shoshana Hurand, who were leading a class of University of Michigan students in community-based festival arts. We were invited, as Roman J. Witt Visiting Artists, to augment their creations by working with students at the University's College of Art and Design and at the School of Urban and Regional Planning. We returned in 2008, this time as guests of the Lloyd Hall Scholars Program, to help keep the momentum growing for this newly seeded urban ritual.

We divided our time between Mark Tucker's festival arts course and Nick Tobiers 150 freshman students in “Art and Society”. Nick had organized his students into “micro-societies” of five or six people each, complete with manifestos and a set of pre-ordained cultural values. Our task was to help them create a “King of Fools” for each society and then present them at Festifools. At the same time, we worked with Paul Barron's creative writing class to create a mobile Boca Della Verita that spooled out absurdist narratives from his mouth, which were sliced up into narrative fragments and cast to the bemused spactators.

The seeming Bacchanalian chaos of Carnival has belied its reliance on ordered clans, tribes, and societies that have all the complexity, ritual observance, and hierarchy of the ordinary culture they seek to burlesque. The Krewes of New Orleans, the Sailor Bands of Trinidad, and the Peliqueiros of Spain all constitute a “rule of misrule” in which existing hierarchies are not merely cast off, but are meticulously reconstructed according to topsy-turvy principles. Boy Bishops are crowned, paraded on donkeys, and perform backwards masses; pale-faced Devils wear the images of Christian Saints or the spectacles of beaurocrats; and ersatz but fully functional “Black Indian” languages are spoken only during Carnival as chiefs perform sacrifices and chants. These Carnival societies transcend mere buffoonery and base parody by enacting their own ceremonies of inversion, presided over by their own shadow Kings creating, in Mikhail Bakhtin’s words “a second life, a second world “ that “revives and renews.”

The range of Fool’s Kings concocted by the students was impressive, reminiscent of a sampling from of Calvino’s Invisible Cities. A society espousing solitude and avoidance wore mirrored sunglasses and built a giant ostrich. Another celebrated global warming with industrially-inspired head attended by masked and white-suited technicians. Some commentaries were technological – a giant photo iPod (the observer culture). Others fantastical – a tree-born culture festooned with rope bridges. And still others were epistemological – a society of duality and anti-duality created twins that were actually opposites. Post-modern dragons, materialistic amoebas, Olmec-inspired Mexican wrestlers, Post-it note encrusted fetish objects, and others added to the already impressive array of puppets brought by Mark and Shoshana’s students. The Carnivalesque ethos was made complete with the addition of Kelley Quinn’s urban planning students, with whom we made traditional Tyrolean screen-masks and explored the influence of unchained ephemeral festivals on an urban environment. A thousand people turned up to watch this inaugural foray into foolishness, which bodes well for the arrival of another much-needed celebration on the festival landscape.