On the evening of April 8, a few dozen white-clad walkers will approach the Utah State Capitol slowly, methodically, on their way to participation in a large-scale performance, called "Awaiting." The performers will appear throughout the city and gather on the south steps of the Capitol at sunset, then spend the night and early morning ascending and descending the Capitol's iconic stairs.

The performance piece is the work of Ernesto Pujol, an artist born in Cuba and currently in residence at the University of Utah's department of art and art history. Pujol is gathering the performers as a commentary on consciousness, landscape, architecture, meditation, and, of course, waiting.

Ernesto Pujol

The piece, also part of his residency at the University, has participation from visual arts and dance students, as well as the work of local artist Rosi Hayes, who is designing a soundtrack for the piece. Pujol did undergraduate work in humanities, visual arts, art history, philosophy and theology, and graduate work in education, art therapy, communications and media theory. He has an MFA in interdisciplinary art studio practice from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

But it's his meditative work that stands out in "Awaiting." Each performer brings his or her silent thoughts to the piece, communing with the audience, which forms a "permeable urban cloister wall, the outer circle of the performance, completing it with their own patient, silent thoughts as they witness it," Pujol said.

The performance runs overnight from 6 p.m. April 8 to 7 a.m. April 9 at the Utah State Capitol. For more information, visit the performance site.

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Highlights include a battle of the tribute bands, with echoes of The Beatles, Nirvana, and KISS. And "eBay It Forward" allows folks to re-gift items to charity. The gifts, along with the story of why the item was important to you, will be collected at the Gateway, and proceeds will be donated to Family Promise, a program that assists homeless families.

EVE organizers have mapped out alternate transportation to the festival, spots to stay the night, and multiple ways to buy tickets. And Salt Lake City will still ring in 2010 the old-fashioned way -- with a giant fireworks display at Gallivan Center. See you there!

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We love the 337 Project around here (if you haven't bookmarked their site, do and check them often!), and we also love to see 337 artists branch out to other art forms in the community.

That's why I'll be checking out "unravel, REVEALED" this Friday night. I can't say that I'm entirely sure what the performance will be or look like, but 24 hours straight of dance? That has to be interesting!

It looks like the performance kicks off around 9:30 p.m. You can stop by right at the beginning, at any point during the night or next day, or for the closing portion on Saturday at 8:30 p.m. -- 1700 South between 1200 and 1300 East. See you there.

Update: This was great. Visitors sat or stood near the parking strip grass, facing this scene:

The program attributed the piece to a community-wide collaboration (and I believe them -- it takes a lot of support staff and caffeine to pull off an overnight dance performance). I can't vouch for all 24 hours of the performance (saw some on Friday night and again on Saturday afternoon), but it was very cool to see this type of art happening around town.

"InterPlay: AnARTomy" features two dancers, poetry, a host of sketch artists, and digital animators, and requires nearly a dozen computer systems to compile live video feeds from four other universities. The video feed of the sketchers and performers in other locations --Indianapolis, Indiana; Fairbanks, Alaska; Long Island, New York; and Cardiff, Wales -- are projected and "mixed" on a large screen behind the dancers. InterPlay is the work of Jimmy and Beth Miklavcic.




During the year-long development process, the Miklavcics meet with participants via open-source video conferencing software. Then, the "telematic" performance is woven into a multi-leveled, live performance and cinematic work that incorporates feeds from artists, musicians and technicians at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianpolis (IUPUI),University of Alaska-Fairbanks, Long Island University in New York, and Cardiff University in Wales (full bios of the cast and crew can be found here). The performance is designed specifically for viewing at the University of Utah Intermountain Network and Scientific Computation Center (INSCC), giving Utah audiences the best seats in the country.


An operator during the performance arranges the screens dependent on what the dancers, animators and artists are doing. Digital MC Jimmy Miklavcic manipulates the relationships between the various performances by combining the video streams into the center digital mix of the display -- all to create a dynamic, collaborative performance. "This thing is so intertwined that calling it art and technology isn't correct because they're so symbiotic in a way," Beth and Jimmy Miklavcic tell us.




Beth and Jimmy will be giving a presentation about their previous InterPlay project -- Nel Tempo Di Sogno (2007) -- Thursday, April 16, at 1 p.m. at the University of Utah's Center for High Performance Computing. They'll talk about the scene-by-scene tech requirements to pull off an InterPlay performance.