| October 12, 2008 |
Dear Friends and Neighbors,
I am part of a group of Somerville and Cambridge residents organizing the third Honk! Festival of activist street bands, and I wanted to extend an invitation to all of you to take part in the Honk Parade from Davis Square to Harvard Square on Sunday, October 12. It’s a great community event, and we invite you to invent a parade contingent with your friends, colleagues, and/or family; or to join us as a volunteer to help Bread and Puppet Theater and the Puppeteers Cooperative carry puppets.
I am appending a further explanation below. Contact me at parade@honkfest.org if you might have questions. Thanks for your attention!
john bell
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We invite YOU! to Join us! to Create….
The 2008 Honk Parade:
Reclaim the Street
for Horns, Bikes and Feet!
Sunday, October 12, 2008
An Ambulatory Street Spectacle with 20 Brass Bands and
20 Parading Groups—including yours?
from Davis Square to Harvard Square
A Celebration of Public Space through Ambulatory Spectacle!
For the 2008 Honk! Festival we once again want to a Giant Participatory Processional Spectacle, to take place on Sunday of the festival weekend. It will start in Davis Square in uptown Somerville, and process to Harvard Square to join the Oktoberfest there. The parade will feature all twenty Honk bands interspersed with twenty different contingents of creative street spectacle and choreography created by artists and community groups, like you and yours, all united by their desire to Reclaim the Street for Horns, Bikes and Feet. Parade participants will honk, roll, strut and stroll from Davis Square to Porter Square, and then down Massachusetts Avenue to Harvard Square.
The Honk Parade will celebrate streets for people, streets for feet, streets for music, and streets for festival. Our goal is the temporary liberation of public thoroughfares from the dominance of car culture, and its replacement with music, colorful spectacle, and dance.
We Invite You to Join Us!
We invite community groups, artists, creative bicyclists, dog-owners, skateboarders, wheelchair dancers, parents with baby strollers, kids with cool bikes, street dancers, theater companies, and All others interested in celebratory public performance (no experience necessary) to create colorful, ambulatory, and festive spectacles to be performed in twenty separate moving street spaces approximately 25 feet wide, 60 feet long and 15 feet tall (watch out for trolley wires!), that will alternate with brass bands in the parade order. We propose that each parade group design images and movements that take up space (both horizontally and vertically) and present compelling images to parade watchers.
Our theme is Reclaim the Street for Horns, Bikes and Feet, and we ask each participating group to articulate their version of this theme in a striking visual manner. We imagine the parade filled with colorful costumes; large flags and banners; giant puppets; weird wheeled contraptions; interesting large-scale choreographies of humans on foot, on bicycles, skateboards, stilts, and wheelchairs; and of course the twenty brass bands separating the parade groups.
Things to consider:
- The bands will provide sound (and lots of it!)
- The parade will travel at a leisurely walking pace (bicyclists should invent choreography to match).
- We are looking for movement and images that go beyond the normal definitions of parading as a simple march down the street, and would love to brainstorm about different possibilities with the parade groups.
- Think of using height as well as width and depth.
- You don’t necessarily need a lot of people; just innovative ways of moving around and filling the performance space.
- Consider using big banners and pictures (hello visual artists?).
- We also need volunteers to help us organize the parade on October 12.
Our group represents considerable experience in the creation and production of parades, pageants, and street spectacles, and we are confident we can make the 2008 Honk Parade an exciting spectacle for the Somerville/Cambridge community.
Interested?…
Contact John Bell at john.bell.puppeteer@gmail.com or 617 599 3250.
And check out the HONK! website:
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Posted in Announcements, Arts and Culture, Events, Transportation
