Up until this year, heading to the Clapperclaw Music and Arts Festival meant putting on your fat pants and bringing along some Alka-Seltzer.
The event -- encompassing all elements of Twin Cities creativity, from theater shorts to independent film, from live runway fashion to raucous hip-hop acts, from visual art exhibitions to thumping dance parties -- aims to be an artistic smorgasbord. But well intentioned thoroughness can easily turn into glut. And in its first two years, Clapperclaw felt more like an indigestion-inducing buffet, piling too many dishes onto a single plate. Competing artistic energies made it tough to savor a single work, and pieces that would otherwise demand quiet, prolonged focus (last year's wry, episodic films, for example) often struggled to tempt the audience away from the warehouse party vibe.
Now in their third year, organizers Matt Perkins, Carl Swanson, Dom Davis, Jeremy Catterton and Kristina Perkins are a little older and wiser. And the event has come a long way since the inaugural festival in 2007, when the lineup was so unmanageable that it had to be split in two, noon-to-midnight servings, each at a different venue. But questions of balance still remain -- especially since the live bands this year promise to be more ferocious than in the past, and the visual art more critically engaging. How do you ensure that none of the "quieter" works get drowned out? How do you keep the aesthetic salad from blending together into an unpalatable mush? How do you steer the audience's attention through the peaks and valleys?
"We traffic in distraction," says Swanson, Clapperclaw's art and fashion director. "If someone comes for the music, we want the art to be engrossing and dynamic enough to distract them. If someone comes for the fashion, the theatre should be innovative and intriguing enough to distract them. It's not competition between various media. It's symbiosis."
"It's hard," added Perkins. "All of these things are so delicate and the last thing we want to do is create this smattering that looks cool on paper but doesn't hang together as a well executed event."
Another venue change seems to be the key to this year's strategy. Taking over Intermedia Arts, Clapperclaw hopes to make use of the Uptown center's versatility, which includes an outdoor performance space, a black box theater and a traditional art gallery. The goal is to use the various rooms to create a pleasant meandering feel, allowing visitors to choose their own adventures, flowing from one spectacle to the next in a way that facilitates shifting moods.
So we'll see. There's no doubt that the event will be packed. With a grindhouse theme, the festival will indulge in violence and camp, flirting with kitsch and pumping up the sex.
"On one hand it facilitates a glossy, lurid and colorful take, a very surface thrill of action," says Swanson. "And on the other, it enables a critical engagement with why that thrill exists, which is a darker social and cultural challenge."
