Guest Highlight; Jessica Creane

Hey All,

As I close out a month in Washington DC working on Monument Lab's contribution to the Pulling Together exhibition, I'm replacing this month's Archive Highlight with a new test feature. I have many collaborators that I adore, and I'd love to occasionally introduce you to them and their work.

I'm very lucky to start with a creator I adore - Jessica Creane, who aside from being the co-creator of Fair Trade is founder of IKantKoan, a team of "thoughtful creativity scientists" with an impressive resume of games, presentations, workshops, and other delightful, curious, and difficult to categorize experiences.

Jessica did some reflecting on her own page in the space between our work this Spring and the presentation of her new show at Cannonball, "Tea Party at the End of the World"  (for which you can get tickets here, and about which you can learn more about on the No Proscenium Podcast). Since it's Festival Season, and since my cup runneth very over in the professional and personal sense, I thought we could give it a read together.


Festivals, Festivals, Festivals

For the last year, Yannick Trapman O’Brien (Telelibrary, Undersigned) and I have been collaborating on a project called FAIR TRADE. This Spring we performed the piece at WOW (Without Walls), a festival presented by La Jolla Playhouse.

I’ve been a WOW fangirl for, oh, idk, six years? They just do so much c o o l  s h i t. And sure enough, this year was no exception. We performed beside opera singers, DJs, puppeteers, giant stilt walking birds, a sweeping immersive environment based on Mexican wrestling, and a gigantic, basketball court-sized twine web/bonfire.

In addition to running FAIR TRADE 28 times over the course of a weekend (don’t worry, we had other facilitators running the piece with us!), we also closed out the hotel breakfast with some of the Dutch acrobats every morning and hung out at the La Lucha bar with some of the other artists, curators, and reviewers; making friends and experiencing work we wouldn’t get to experience back home. It was, in short, a celebration of arts and artists.

Festivals are meant to be celebrations. Leaving aside the ungodly amount of work it takes to get a show ready for one for a moment so we can focus on the community angle of festivals- festivals are central gathering places for artists, proving a place for post-show drinks (necessary and true), sharing trade secretes (kinda true?) and wild scheduling Jenga to see allllll the cool shit (exhaustingly true).

Being an artist can be lonely, especially when you make the kind of interactive work that often gets tagged as ‘solo’ but is actually the opposite of that because you need an audience for the piece to progress. It is work that decidedly cannot happen solo. But the writing… oh, the writing… is from gods ears to my mouth. Well, more like ‘the universe’s inscrutable consciousness to this asshole blank page’, but you get what I mean.

Making work for a void sucks. It’s only when I get in front of people that we really learn what the piece is about and where it wants to go next. Hence play testing, but there is only so much time and energy one can ask of their friends, which makes the work, again, a little lonely. Still, most days the promise of a festival is enough to keep me going.

Of course for FAIR TRADE, I wasn't alone. Yannick and I got to make, produce, and perform this work together, even though each performance is a "solo" show + participants. We also had the support of producers, artists, and the community that comes with festivals. The first run of FAIR TRADE was at a festival (Cannonball). So was the second (Miniball). And the third (WOW). Come to think of it, we perform the piece almost exclusively at festivals right now. These particular festivals were perfect for FAIR TRADE as it is a show meant to be watched as well as interacted with, it's easy to transport, and we’ve been, ya know, invited and accepted.

The first festival we staged the piece was Cannonball, in Philadelphia. Cannonball is an application-only festival within the broader Philadelphia Fringe Festival. It was conceived of by the fine folks at Almanac Dance Theater Company as a way to bring the Philadelphia arts community together during a festival that is large, diffuse, and provides only light scaffolding for artists to gather together with each other and the rest of the community.

I’ve met some of my favorite people in Philly and NYC while presenting at festivals. Yannick, rockstar that he is, held down fort as a performer last year at Cannonball while I was out of town for the run, so this year will be my first time performing a show at Cannonball. That show opens in about week and I am currently in the “ahhhhh! producing a show and designing and writing an immersive and interactive show is so harrrddddddd! ahhhhhhhh!” phase so I wanted to take this moment to reflect on the beauty of festivals and the community that they celebrate, which is us.

Wishing all you locals a fantastic Philly Fringe Season, and wishing all you out-of-towners safe travels on your way to Philadelphia ; )

- Jessica Creane, July, 2023