“Radical interconnectedness” could be a good description of this village where daring things have had a way of coming together for decades.
And it’s a fair way of describing Linda McInerney, whose Eggtooth Productions always seems on the cusp of an array of unexpected, daring creations.
It’s also the theme of McInerney’s Full Disclosure Festival, which Eggtooth is producing along with Turners Falls RiverCulture on Saturday, April 14 — its first such festival in the village.
Eggtooth’s Full Disclosure festivals, presenting a melange of art performances around a central theme, using vacant or underused spaces, are in a way an exploration of their host community’s identity — shining a light on vast potential expression and the community artistry that’s possible in spaces otherwise thought of as empty.
The upcoming festival’s exploration of interconnectedness and identity seems fitting in “a village that has a long history of reinventing spaces,” explained RiverCulture Director Suzanne Lomanto.
With five diverse works by various artists, some of whom were first introduced at the last Full Disclosure Festival in Amherst in October, the Turners Falls event will begin at 4 p.m. and will entertain audiences as it moves around gathering spaces in the village, culminating with an 8 p.m. performance of “The Pass” at the Shea Theater, 71 Avenue A.
A new performance by Northfield musician, poet and artist Terry Jenoure, “The Pass” weaves violin, voice, komongo, piano and flute music together with dance and video. Performing with Jenoure on violin will be New York pianist Angelica Sanchez, German flutist Sibylle Pomorin, Korean komungo virtuoso Jin Hi Kim and New York dancer Maria Mitchell.
Jenoure’s work, “about a canary that looks like a cat, and decides to get out in the world and try his way as a cat,” according to its creator, is about “trying one’s hand at being different than we are. He decides to get away. He doesn’t want to be caged anymore in an apartment and moves out, to Central Park.”
Jenoure grew up in a Puerto Rican and Jamaican family in the Bronx and moved to Amherst in 1974, then back to New York in 1980 to pursue her musical career, returning to Greenfield for 22 years until last year.
She said she began working about eight years ago on the idea of “racial passing,” the ways that so many people over time have tried to pass through society, by changing their last names, by disguising their true racial, ethnic, cultural or sexual identities, “and all the kind of ways people move about in the world just trying to fit in, trying not to be caged, to be devoured.”
That idea emerged from the creation of Jenoure’s autobiographical work, “My Bronx” five years ago.
Her new work “has to do with my mind life, my heart life,” said Jenoure, who began working with McInerney on it last year. McInerney became enthused about it after seeing Jenoure’s interdisciplinary installation at the University of Massachusetts Amherst’s Hampden Gallery of cloth figures, paper dolls, writing excerpts and a multi-track soundscape of violin and voice.
Jenoure and McInerney collaborated over the past year to produce “The Pass” as part of the April 14 festival.
“It’s not a story for all time,” Jenoure clarified. “It’s a story for April.”
Yet, she added, “I just feel … it’s a time when there are a lot of people who will have to go undercover, and have to make decisions about how they live, about who they expose selves to, for their safety. It’s not new, it’s always happened. It’s become the topic of the day, but it’s not new.”
A work, “From Walt, From Me, to You,” by Northampton movement artist Katherine Adler, performed at 4 p.m. at the Great Falls Discovery Center, will explore the universality and depth of Walt Whitman’s “Leaves of Grass” through movement. McInerney said the piece “transcends place and time (to) promote inward scrutiny and interpersonal empathy.”
Choreographer and dancer Crystal Nilsson will create a multimedia work, “Unsuitably Appropriate” at 5 p.m. at 67 2nd Ave.
The piece conveys what Nilsson — Deerfield Academy’s former director of dance, with teaching experience at Springfield College and Smith College — describes as the “intersections between archetypal relationships, digital personas, and a detached fragile self-image through appropriation and a comic book/pop art aesthetic. Every day is the same, memory lurking just out of reach … How do we connect, disconnect and reconnect within the constructs of social media and technology?”
At 6 p.m., artist and writer-editor Samantha Wood will present a sound installation with rocking chairs, “Hauling Toward Home,” at the Gill-Montague Senior Center, 62 5th St.
It’s a work that will explore the definition of home through the human voice, presenting a dual metaphor of soothing motion and the effort of rowing across dark seas to reach a familiar harbor. With different soundscapes for each of the chairs, the installation conjures up ways we find peace within ourselves, and what brings us out of a state of peacefulness.
Katherine Adler will reappear at 7 p.m. with Greenfield theatrical makeup artist Joe Dulude II in the talk show cabaret piece “Mr. Drag and Karl” at Great Falls Harvest, 50 3rd St.
McInerney calls the piece, with Adler as Karl, “a full-action experience, engaging fully with the audience. It’s very light.”
Their talk show, Morning Vodka, fits the festival’s theme by poking around the notion of identity.
Dulude, who takes the stage as “Mr. Drag,” his bearded drag manifestation, is best known as the makeup designer for such Broadway hits as “Wicked,” “Beautiful,” “Anastasia” and “Spongebob.” He is also a freelance makeup artist, a fine artist and performer.
McInerney is the former artistic director of Old Deerfield Productions, which has helped create and stage original operas like “The Captivation of Eunice Williams” and “Truth,” as well as productions like “A Christmas Carol.”
Through Eggtooth Productions, she has presented Full Disclosure festivals in Greenfield in the summers of 2015 and 2016,and before that, the Double Take Fringe Festival in the autumns of 2014 and 2015 in Greenfield, making use of vacant storefronts and empty downtown buildings to produce artwork with collaborators.
Acknowledging she loves to present “rough-and-tumble guerilla theater stuff,” McInerney said, “It feels really important not only to make things in place and make art that can help implement change, but also to lift the level of the work and to get this incredible family of artists to be more interconnected.”
Tickets are available online at https://www.eggtooth.org.