Ingenuity organizer James Levin predicted that Ian Charnas’ production Boltz — a campy mix of musical theater, dance and electrical tinkering presented by Case Western Reserve University — would be the iconic event that people remembered from Ingenuity 2009. Hopefully that’s not true. The production’s music and dance weren’t badly realized, and the sustainability message was just about right for an after-school special or a comic book, but the science failed to impress. The electrical spark that was to be the centerpiece just didn’t measure up.
Nonetheless, this year’s edition of Ingenuity — and even the
anticlimactic Boltz — captured the spirit of the
festival’s name more than previous installments. Roaming the whole
scene, Melissa Daubert’s horse on wheels amused festgoers with its
shaggy fur and whimsical gait as it rolled with electronic
clippity-clop accompaniment. It wasn’t high-tech but undeniably mixed
imagination with mechanics more sensibly than the high-tech,
high-concept installations that have attempted to capture audiences’
attention in previous years.
The art and high-tech concept is traceable to Richard Florida’s book
The Creative Class, which argues that software engineers are
artists too. But Florida was trying to attract people to cities, not
build an arts festival to enhance a city. In that regard, this year’s
less glitzy, lower-tech Ingenuity Festival was more successful than
previous ones.
Cleveland talent ruled. Local bands like the punk-, new wave-, and
noise-influenced girl group Hot Cha Cha and the experimental pop trio
Mystery of Two rocked the scene not as filler, but on the main stage
during prime time Friday night. Original music is a kind of ingenuity
Cleveland can understand. And who are we kidding if we’re trying to
promote Cleveland as an arts destination if we don’t celebrate our
own?
A festival highlight was Asterisk gallerist Dana Depew’s exhibit of
work by 50 regional artists, including Scene art critic Douglas
Max Utter, Dan Tranberg, Amy Casey, Matt Dibble and many others who
showed their work in a building slated for demolition. Depew’s work
isn’t high-tech, but his adaptive re-use of light fixtures, door
peepholes and other domestic gadgetry is not at all short on
ingenuity.
Next to one of his pieces, Dibble left a handwritten note
instructing festival organizers to leave one of the works hanging so it
could be demolished with the building around it. There’s something
endearingly Cleveland about that.
In the All Go Signs Alley, Chuck Karnak featured a collection of
Cleveland painters, including the Sign Guy, whose ingenuity is to make
his mark on the city with goofy, hand-painted signs chained and bolted
around town. If graffiti is like tattoos on the landscape, his work
could be considered its jewelry.
Ingenuity doesn’t have to go high-tech or import high-concept
headliners to live up to its name. It’s unfortunate that finances are
what drove programming this way. But here’s hoping that no matter how
the money shakes out, the festival continues to show off Cleveland
— and that crowds are interested enough to keep coming back.
This article appears in Jul 15-21, 2009.