Arts Briefs: Young filmmakers, a laser show and a walking tour
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FilmNorth in St. Paul has launched Studio Thirteen Future Filmmakers Lab, a program aimed at supporting the development and advancement of emerging filmmakers.
The program offers labs for students in grades 9-12. They work in teams to create short films over a period of 13 weeks.
Alas no Laser Floyd
Minneapolis Park and Recreation Board is offering an alternative to traditional fireworks at Boom Island in Minneapolis on June 3 starting at 8 p.m.
The show will instead use lasers, set to patriotic music. It’s scheduled to start at 10 p.m.
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The lasers will only be visible from Boom Island Park and not from across the Mississippi River. No seating is provided, so attendees are encouraged to bring blankets.
Audiobooks to watch out for
The creator of a cult classic comic strip with roots in Minnesota has begun offering the comic in a new medium.
Alison Bechdel's “Dykes to Watch Out For” is now available as an audiobook via Audible. It features a who's who of voice actors, including Carrie Brownstein from the television show “Portlandia,” and Jane Lynch from “Glee.”
The comic developed an ongoing storyline and recurring main characters when Bechdel was living in St. Paul in 1987. Many of the elements in the comic were based on fictionalized versions of Twin Cities locations.
Back to nature
A residency program that aims to connect Black artists with nature has announced its first two participants, both from Minnesota.
The program is a partnership between Belwin Conservancy and the Minnesota African American Heritage Museum and Gallery. For the month of June, the artists have a studio space at Belwin Conservancy in Afton, Minn., and will learn about land restoration from Belwin staff.
The two artists are Tomas Alvarez and Whitney Terrill.
Public art news
Bloomberg Philanthropies has selected the city of Minneapolis as a finalist for a $1 million public art challenge grant.
Minneapolis is one of 17 finalist cities out of 150 entries from 40 states.
The grants support “public art projects that address urgent civic issues” such as equity, urban revitalization, environmental crisis and gun safety. The city of Minneapolis proposed a project called “Minneapolis Reckoning.” If chosen, the project would place art installations in the vacant areas of seven “cultural districts” to address “institutionalized racism towards the Black community as part of ongoing efforts” to address the police murder of George Floyd.
Ten winners will be announced in fall 2023 and will be allocated up to $1 million in grants. The chosen cities must complete the projects within two years.
Other Briefs
Mixed Blood Theatre is offering a guided walking and tasting tour of Little Mekong with artist Katie Ka Vang on Sunday. Stops will include Thai Garden, Little Mekong Plaza, Thai Cafe, Little Saigon Supermarket, 88 Oriental Foods, and Springboard for the Arts.
Bryant Lake Bowl presents a Pajama Party Comedy Show on Saturday, where everybody, including performers and audience members, is encouraged to attend in their sleepwear. Performers include Emma Dalenberg, Tobi Shamu and headliner Maggie Faris.
Playwrights’ Center and Venturous Theater Fund have announced the 2023–25 Venturous Playwright Fellowships. The program began by asking 50 playwrights to nominate scripts that are “formally adventurous, epic in scope, and full of bold ideas.” The winners: Harmon dot aut, with their play “Tornado Tastes Like Aluminum Sting,” L M Feldman, with her play “Another Kind of Silence” and Jessica Huang, with her play “Mother of Exiles.”
Tanya Gertz has been named the new vice president of programming and community impact at the Ordway Center for the Performing Arts. Gertz was previously director of campus programming at Luther College in Iowa
Absolute Bleeding Edge
The MPR News arts team offers suggestions for the best in avant-garde, experimental and off-the-beaten-path arts and culture.
MUSIC: TikTok - Grimace Shake
Although TikTok, the Chinese short-form video app, generally seems filled with dance and makeup videos, along with political infighting and genuinely atrocious prank videos, every so often it houses a delightfully baffling trend.
The latest starts out like typical response videos, where young people pose in front of a restaurant or similar location, holding a recently purchased item and trying it out for the audience. In this instance, the location is McDonald’s and the item is a purple, berry-flavored milkshake named after one of their mascots, Grimace.
The youths cheerily sip the drink and sometimes offer a moment of anodyne commentary before being interrupted by a jump cut. What follows the jump cut is a moment of horror — early videos simply showed the kids lying on the ground in puddles of purple fluid. Later ones added moody, seemingly slowed-down old-timey music and images of the respondents slumped against walls or stuffed into garbage cans. And most recently, they have the production values and surrealism of an underground horror movie — one features a woman skittering across the ceiling, insect-like and impossibly defying gravity.
In the best tradition of the avant garde, these videos refuse to explain themselves and don’t need to. They instead offer a sort of anti humor setup/punchline: Grimace shake is drunk/something terrible happens.
So far McDonald’s had declined any official response, but for a single Tweet of their Grimace character, smiling at the camera and saying “meee pretending i don't see the grimace shake trendd.”
