‘Why not Santa Cruz as an arts destination?’ asked Rose Sellery over margaritas with her gallery partner Melissa Kreisa and MAH Deputy Director Marla Nova.
In the right hands margaritas can have creative powers. And thus was born the upcoming whirlwind of performance, music, artwork, installations, dance, photography, workshops, painting, and theatricals called Ripple Effect Santa Cruz Arts Festival (let’s just call it Ripple Effect). Starting with an outdoor dance party in downtown Santa Cruz to the powerhouse musical finale at The Grove, Ripple Effect promises to live up to the phrase, “Something for everyone.”
“It began as a way of supporting the organizations that support the arts,” Sellery explained. And many of those organizations—Kuumbwa Jazz Center, Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music, Marea Ensemble, Santa Cruz Shakespeare, Radius Gallery—are collaborating in new and exciting ways to create yet newer styles and formats of events. Think Edinburgh Festival, San Francisco Arts Week, Burning Man.
“It’s been a conversation going on for years,” Kreisa agreed. “Then Rose wrote a grant through the City of Santa Cruz, and the money awarded sat quietly all through COVID and much to our surprise, was still waiting to be used.”
The original concept was relatively modest, the M.K. Contemporary Art Gallery partners noted. Centering around the Tannery Art Center, there would be hands-on printmaking or a dance workshop to get people up on their feet. “Someone might be singing and then do a choral piece all together,” said Sellery. “I believe that the chance to participate embeds the joy of art-making more deeply than just being in an audience.”
The idea was quickly shopped around.
Visits to other arts organizations were made, the goal being to bring more people into the arts by “creating this big noise together. A ripple effect. Multiple choices every day. Maybe frustrating, but in a good way.”
The list of participants in the first-ever Ripple Effect festival is impressive. And lengthy. No one visiting or dancing or applauding during those days will be bored.
Think of it as a giant chance to show off, to strut our stuff. Undeniable hotspots in the torrent of potential experiences have bubbled up. For example the April 21st live cabaret and dinner show at Rose and Melissa’s Gallery.
That would be Smoke Cabaret, the luscious show by Joe Ortiz featuring the vocals of Lori Rivera surrounded by a huge new photo-sculptural installation by Burning Man artist Michael Garlington. The evening of sit-down dinner by Chocolate Restaurant and Gayle’s Bakery forms the chic background for two half-hour sets of original music sung by renowned actor/singer Rivera.
Artist/author/entrepreneur Joe Ortiz is a one-man ripple effect, tossing off books, music, and paintings while most people are still brushing their teeth. There’s not a performative opportunity he’s not on top of, and the upcoming Ripple Effect festival is made for his can-do sensibility.
Bringing his cabaret creation, “Smoke” into the spacious exhibition space of M.K.Contemporary, Ortiz relished the final touches of his latest ambitious project. “We’ve known Rose for many years, have done a show with her, and even though I’m working on an Actors Theater show, I was anxious to finagle my way into Ripple Effect,” he explained. “Why not do a show with the Gallery? And why not make it a dinner show?”
Ortiz is an old hand at this sort of multi-experiential event, and he reminded me he’d brought one of his dinner shows to Michael’s on Main back in the day.
“Rose wanted to keep it manageable, so I went over to pitch the show. They were so willing to have an event and to make it exciting. I checked with Lori to see if she could do it, and it came together,” he beamed.
“They are such a great team. It will be 64 covers—it’s perfect for the space, with two half-hour musical presentations.” Smoke is a popular show, with music by Ortiz, and lyrics by his frequent collaborator (many swear they’re joined at the hip), Greg Fritsch. Ortiz had spent the day polishing his Actors Theatre piece, “Escaping Queens: Over the Roof,” before heading over to sign books at Bookshop Santa Cruz.
International stars including Frans Lanting have stepped up to the Ripple occasion, in this case by staging a photo shoot at dawn with dancers from Ocean Pacific, for photographers to come out and shoot in the morning light at Lighthouse Point.
Ocean and surfers in the background. Sellery grins at the very idea. “Now that’s a beautiful, intentional event, exactly what we had hoped for. You get the beauty of Santa Cruz and the gorgeous sunset over the waves with the surfers in the background,” she sighed.
And Lanting fans will be able to feast on more adventure photography at The Frans Lanting Studio and Gallery tour at 3pm on April 18th, in the new location across from Venus Spirits on the Westside.
Another April 21st performance is the 44th annual In Celebration of the Muse, presented by the Hive Poetry Collective. Downtown Santa Cruz’s Resource Center for Nonviolence will host two hours of fierce and original poetry, read by a selected group of adventurous poets starting at 6:30pm.
Did we mention that Emmy Lou Harris will be in town for an engagement at the Civic Auditorium on April 18? Her concert happens right after the gala Cultural District Celebration, taking over the city of Watsonville for the entire day.
Think live performances, rooftop dance party, lots of interactive art stuff. A ripple through the heart of the city.
And impresario extraordinaire DNA presents a choice lineup of comedy nights in saloons, breweries, and boites throughout greater Santa Cruz.
Catch an intense author reading at Bookshop Santa Cruz April 22 when Pulitzer-Prize winner Jane Smiley brings her latest book into the ripple zone.
Stop by The Tannery April 23 and try your hand at making a one-of-a-kind monotype print. Or catch a performance of the one-man show “Vincent” by Santa Cruz Shakespeare Artistic Director Charles Pasternak, at the downtown Santa Cruz Vets Hall. Up for a Poetry Scavenger Hunt? All through April, poems have been installed in 16 county parks. With 16 prizes. All part of the ripple.
The finale is a special big-deal moment in the 10-day festival. The team of Chanel Enriquez, director of Kuumbwa, and Christie Jarvis, who runs the Minnow Arts Gallery, is steering the effort to produce the finale.
“They’ve got a great headliner, an Ecuadorian artist named Helado Negro who’s coming here from Brooklyn,” enthused Festival co-founder Sellery. Helado Negro genre-blends electronic soul, Latin rhythms, texture, and pop. The artist creates a rich sonic landscape of mood, emotional connection and pure excitement. Those gathering to celebrate the Festival’s conclusion will experience dynamic interactive art installations all evening long — the kind of work that invites you to dive in and participate in the artwork itself.
And there will be live music and performances by local artists and collaborators, including D. Riley Nicholson, Angela Chambers, Don Porcella and yes, many more. (Ripple Effect Finale, April 26 at The Grove, 6:30—9:30; tickets from $60) [Full details of every single event at www.rippleartsfestsantacruz.org/events.]
“It’s a ripple effect because we want people to tell each other what’s happening. Let’s go check this out, and let’s check this out and then they can fall in love with opera, or fall in love with dance and then they want more of it, and they come back, and then they tell other people.” That’s the vision of Rose Sellery.
Co-founder Kreisa agrees: “Exactly, that’s exactly right, and not only that, but also it will build relationships between people that have come together that wouldn’t necessarily get to know each other. Now our community is bonding much more closely. For example, we have 10 new friends on our speed dial that we didn’t know before. Collaborations are happening, like Marea at the MAH and Riley from the Cabrillo Music Festival with the UCSC Music Department.”
Riley Nicholson is totally on board with the Festival ripple concept.
“Here’s a bit about how our involvement came together,” he explained.” Teagan Faran, is a beloved member of our orchestra. She also is a member of Palaver Strings, and they are on tour with a program, ‘A Change is Gonna Come.’
“It’s a cross-genre program exploring the legacy of American protest songs featuring tenor Nicholas Phan that connects well with what Kuumbwa presents, and it connects powerfully with the Cabrillo Festival’s upcoming summer season theme, We the Dreamers.
Celebrating the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, our upcoming season spotlights music that speaks to our American ideals of equality, democracy, and unalienable rights – and the growing distance between those ideals and contemporary reality. The program includes arrangements of historic songs such as Bob Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind ,” new commissions by composers like Errollyn Wallen, and world premieres of works by UCSC composers Siamak Barghi and Lukáš Janata,written expressly for Palaver Strings.
As a long-game visionary, Sellery is optimistic.
“We hope we’re laying down the foundation for something that outlives us the way that other organizations have done. Destination is such an important part of it, because there are people who just don’t know about us and how rich we are in creative possibilities.
So for this year and next year, we can really hone in on getting Santa Cruz excited and then keep broadening our audience to the West Coast and nationally. I mean, we’ve got the two airports right here. We’ve got the hotel infrastructure. We’ve got great restaurants.”
And so why not start up a Ripple Effect.
Ripple Effect: when one thing starts another, and those start others, and the network grows from that central impulse into a web of connectivity.
Starting with Dancing in the Streets April 16 —easily the most Santa Cruz activity on record—filling the downtown with whirling bodies from 5-9pm – every museum and gallery will be bulging with installations, exhibitions, events, from the Museum of Natural History to Pajaro Valley Arts, the MAH, Radius, UCSC’s Mary Porter Sesnon Art Gallery, San Lorenzo Valley Museum. Catch Jennifer Cordery’s show at Felix Kulpa Gallery, and the Indexical presentation of Moons at Radius Gallery.
Lots of theater projects, from Santa Cruz Actors’ Theatre to DNA Presents comedy and open mic nights. Live music of every possible kind as Marea Ensemble pops up in the sunny atrium entrance of MAH, Cabrillo Festival collaborates with the UCSC Music Dept at Kuumbwa Jazz Center. Lori Rivera fills the M.K. Contemporary Gallery with the sounds of Joe Ortiz’ cabaret music in a dinner show on April 16.
And Motion Pacific Dance gets it on with a queer Dance Party on the 18th. An overflow of events. Exactly. And such abundance is the whole point. The ripple has already begun. Peruse the complete listing and start making your plans!
rippleartsfestsantacruz.org/events
Read on: Cabrillo Gallery’s Student Exhibition teams with Ripple Effect
