Art + Nature = Joy: Hope flutters in on Artosphere wings

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 two 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 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 cellist Christian Serrano kicks off the event at The Vault beginning at 6:30 p.m., folklorist and multi-instrumentalist troubadour Willi Carlisle performs at Maxine's Tap Room at 7 p.m., and Route 358 wraps up the evening with a performance at The Experience Fayetteville Stage at the Fayetteville Town Center beginning at 7:30 p.m.

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, more impactful, he says. "The personal is the political when you can talk directly to someone."

"There's only one time when I feel like a full animal, like a tame, soft, somewhat domesticated animal, like a neighborhood possum or a chicken that tolerates being held, and that is when I am singing with people, dancing, laughing," he shares. "I look forward to returning to that because nothing else really makes any sense to me."

Though he admits covid and isolation have had him feeling defeated, you wouldn't know it to look at the volume of work Carlisle has completed in the last year.

"But I'm not satisfied. I'm mad," he reveals. "Every day, even in antediluvian times, I felt as if the work I made was not good enough, didn't do enough. I still feel compromised a fair bit by being an artist at all: I want to be a public servant, but 'public' isn't the same as it used to be in the folksinging profession. There's work to do, eh?"

Plenty of work to do, too, to better love our habitat, he says. In an age of climate crisis and mega corporations, it's important to maintain a human scale, Carlisle goes on. "A scale where we can look people in the eye and tell them that we love them, that we care for them, that we see them, even that we expect more from them."

But Arkansas is a blessing, he says.

"It is full of critters. Nature is slow. Nature knows the fundaments: the mating ritual, the hunt, the nest," Carlisle offers. "These things are easy to forget on your phone on the couch. I certainly want things like Artosphere to bring people to each other and to make uncurated encounters with something wild."

Artosphere Film Series

The Artosphere tradition of screening family-friendly films with a strong Earth or sustainability theme continues in the festival's 11th year. The four films will show on May 15-16 in Baum Walker Hall at the WAC, with social distancing between groups, limited audience size and other covid precautions still in place.

May 15

2 p.m. -- "FernGully: The Last Rainforest"

A group of fairies living in the Australian rainforest defend their home from loggers and the evil polluting force of destruction, Hexxus. Along the way, Crysta the fairy helps young logger Zak see the damage the company is causing in this magical story. Starring Christian Slater, Robin Williams and Tim Curry. G.

7 p.m. -- "Boy and the World"

"It's a film that's almost told entirely with music, and what dialogue there is is actually Portuguese being played backwards. So it has its own language to it," Zazal explains. "It's about this small boy who leaves his village on an adventurous quest to look for his father and finds himself in a world dominated by machines, animals and aliens." PG.

May 16

2 p.m. -- "Mia and the Migoo"

A stunning animated film created from 500,000 hand-painted frames, "Mia and the Migoo" is about a young girl's search for her father in a tropical paradise. On her journey, Mia is aided by ancient creatures called Migoo who protect the sacred Tree of Life now threatened by the construction of a gigantic hotel resort. PG.

7 p.m. -- "Welcome to the Space Show"

Five young children rescue an injured dog who turns out to be an alien that then whisks the children off on an amazing adventure through space. Not Rated.

Trail Mix

On May 21, Artosphere's signature event, Trail Mix, will take over downtown Fayetteville and the Frisco Trail System. Live music and interactive activities will be offered at various points along the trail, featuring local and regional musicians and two festival favorites, Jayme Stone and Bike Zoo.

"They came to be a part of Artosphere three or four years ago and at that point, I had a really young daughter," Zazal says of Bike Zoo. "She got so excited because she got to ride the grasshopper bike. These gigantic, like 10-foot-tall bugs were just so exciting to all of these kids -- and adults. I remember our facilities guy got out there and rode one of the butterflies. They're just a fun time."

"Bike Zoo loves celebrating nature with art, so it makes all the sense in the world to see Bike Zoo at Artosphere / Trail Mix," adds ringmaster and co-founder Jeremy Rosen.

"Everyone is mystified and enamored by butterflies. How many people know what a butterfly's head looks like? I did not know what a butterfly's head looked like until Bike Zoo started building butterflies. A picture is worth a thousand words, and with Bike Zoo, pictures are worth much more."

The Zoo will roll into town -- the area around Nadine Baum Studios, to be precise -- with animals that demand attention, Rosen says. The magical and interactive experience combines puppetry and bike-riding for a captivating festival superstar. Larger-than-life animals fixed atop the wheeled carrier inspire wonder and imagination with their bright colors, intriguing design and engaging kinetics. Butterflies, an 80-foot-long snake, eagle, owl and more, each creature is in a class of its own, Rosen shares.

"I think that the best day of my life was our first international parade across the border into Mexico," he recalls. "That was very special, riding the 80-foot-long giant pedal-powered rattlesnake across the international bridge, with the local Mexican Consul and staff riding along with us, all lit up, into the night -- we were very well received.

"I also have fond and vivid memories of our butterflies visiting one of the children's hospitals in Austin. There are so, so many great memories, so many smiles, so many compliments. But those two do stand out."

Northwest Arkansas Ballet Theatre will also be on the trails May 21, in the parking lot at the corner of Center Street and Frisco Trail.

"I think all art, ballet included, should be reaching for the scope and awe-inducing quality that being in nature brings to us," muses Kerridwyn Schanck, choreographer with the company. "The beauty in ballet is meant to transport you, and yet it is comprised entirely of what is physically in front of us. No special effects, no photoshop, what you see is what is truly there. The beauty in nature is not dissimilar: you can be surrounded by nature so beautiful you can hardly believe it is reality -- and yet, it is."

"As I started dancing, I noticed if I struggled with a movement quality or a certain dynamic a choreographer was wanting, if I took it back to different things I had seen in nature or sensations I had felt in certain weather, it helped my body grasp a concept or change the way it responded," dancer Justin Rainey shares in considering his own relationship with nature. "For example, one time I was asked to make something flow, and the first vision and sensation that came up and I tried to pull from was me watching the water pass by as I stood in the creek."

As ironic as it sounds, Rainey says, performing in nature can feel unnatural. As the artists anticipate taking their dancing outdoors for the festival, spacial awareness, ground material and increased distractions are all elements unique to the performance that Rainey and fellow dancer Lilly Hill find themselves specially preparing for.

"That being said," Schanck adds thoughtfully, "I feel the most important thing is to revel in the joy of the sun and wind on your skin. It's not an opportunity we get often, and should therefore appreciate all the more."

Hill concludes, "I don't hope to portray any particular concept with this performance, but I do hope to introduce some new people to the art of dance. More than anything, I hope to provide something we all have greatly been missing: live performance!"