{"id":74538,"date":"2024-03-29T06:12:18","date_gmt":"2024-03-29T13:12:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/?p=74538"},"modified":"2024-06-05T18:43:28","modified_gmt":"2024-06-06T01:43:28","slug":"the-slc-peformance-art-festival-is-ready-to-school-you","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/the-slc-peformance-art-festival-is-ready-to-school-you\/","title":{"rendered":"The SLC Peformance Art Festival is Ready to School You"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"<\/a>

Kristina Lenzi’s classroom at the City Academy in Salt Lake City, which will be the host of the 11th annual Salt Lake City Performance Art Festival. Image credit: Kristina Lenzi<\/p><\/div>\n

Long live the SLC Performance Art Festival.<\/h4>\n

In an article published last year<\/a>\u2014a profile of Salt Lake City artist Kristina Lenzi and the festival she has helmed for more than a decade\u2014we reported that the Salt Lake City Performance Art Festival was soon to be homeless. After ten years, the Salt Lake City Library had announced it would no longer host the international event. Paul Reynolds, Lenzi\u2019s longtime collaborator on the project and her liaison at the library, was the one who informed her. \u201cIt was a total surprise to me,\u201d Lenzi says.<\/h4>\n

A year later, Lenzi is preparing for the 11th iteration of the event, to open at City Academy on Saturday, April 6.<\/h4>\n

As late as September of 2023, Lenzi was still exploring options for the festival. In addition to providing a dynamic venue and built-in audience, the Salt Lake City Library had also been a principal financial sponsor of the festival, helping to provide stipends for the artists and a marketing and administrative budget. For the 2024 event, Lenzi had been able to secure a grant from the Salt Lake City Arts Council, and a promise of generous private support from T.K. Stephens\u2014but she still had no venue. She was talking about the problem with colleagues at City Academy, the charter school where she has worked for the past two years, when the school\u2019s executive director, Sonia Woodbury, overheard. She suggested Lenzi use the school.<\/h4>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s a small school. It\u2019s nothing fancy,\u201d Lenzi says. But like the festival, the school is focused on community (students are required to perform community service to graduate and they participate on different committees within the school to keep it running). It\u2019s also downtown, a few blocks from the library.<\/h4>\n

Lenzi is honest about how much they\u2019ll miss the old venue. \u201cWe\u2019re going to miss the magnificence of the building. There\u2019s so many more options at the library,\u201d she says. But the heart of the festival remains. \u201cIt\u2019s still a family-friendly kind of thing. It\u2019s still weird performance art.”<\/h4>\n

The festival will consists of eight performances happening over eight hours, which is about half the size of previous festivals. Performances are staggered, so visitors can come and go. \u201cThere\u2019s a lot of stuff within walking distance,\u201d Lenzi says.<\/h4>\n

\u201cThe biggest difference is we don\u2019t have passersby like we did at the library. So we have to get as many people as we can there.\u201d She says the nature of the audience may change the performances. \u201cIt will likely affect the performances in a way. \u2026 You as a performer react differently based on who\u2019s there.\u201d An audience who comes specifically to experience performance art is different than one who stumbles across it on their way to drop off a borrowed book. Audience size may also affect longterm viability of the event. \u201cIt makes me nervous we won\u2019t get the audience we need to continue to get funding,\u201d Lenzi notes.<\/h4>\n

The nature of the venue will likely affect the performances as well. It\u2019s been a challenge to communicate the possibility of the space to artists who are coming from out of town. They\u2019ve sent images, but some are waiting until they get here to plan their performance. A few have chosen to respond to the new venue specifically. Marilyn Arsem, a Boston artist who has been a regular at the festival, will be in a math classroom for her performance, \u201cTeach me.\u201d She has asked people sign up to come in one at a time and teach her something. \u201cThey can even give her a test and a grade,\u201d Lenzi notes. Eugene Tachinni, another regular, is bringing soil from the Navajo Reservation, where he now lives, to create a sense of a common center. Other performers include Swedish artist Gustaf Broms, Jeff Huckleberry from Boston, Preach R Sun, Sam Forlenza and Dawn Oughton, all previous performers.<\/h4>\n

For the first time in the festival’s 11-year history, Lenzi won\u2019t be performing. \u201cI just decided I had so much on my plate this year that I couldn\u2019t perform.\u201d<\/h4>\n

Paul Reynolds, Lenzi\u2019s long-time administrative collaborator, was also scheduled to perform. It was to be his first performance, but to the surprise and dismay of the Salt Lake City art community, he died on March 15. Reynolds had created a-four sided, square easel on which he was to place freshly painted panels. During his performance, he was going to very slowly, and without looking, make a mark across the panels, similar to works he has created at Finch Lane<\/a> and Modern West. To honor Reynolds, Lenzi has decided to place Reynolds\u2019 structure on the school\u2019s sports court. She is asking performers to walk around the structure slowly and silently, and asking the community to do the same. \u201cIt\u2019s very sad,\u201d Lenzi says about Reynolds\u2019 passing. \u201cThere\u2019s a lot of grief in the community right now but I hope [the memorial performance] will be a healing thing for the community.\u201d<\/h4>\n

The same could be said of the festival itself. The library will be missed as a venue, but the SLC Performance Art Festival lives on, a fact can be healing for the community. If the community will come.<\/h4>\n
\"A<\/a>

Paul Reynolds explains his process in preparation for a performance at Modern West gallery in Salt Lake City. Image credit: Liberty Blake<\/p><\/div>\n

SLC Performance Art Festival<\/a>, City Academy, Salt Lake City, Saturday, Apr. 6, 10 am – 6 pm<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Long live the SLC Performance Art Festival. In an article published last year\u2014a profile of Salt Lake City artist Kristina Lenzi and the festival she has helmed for more than a decade\u2014we reported that the Salt Lake City Performance Art Festival was soon to be homeless. After ten […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":74539,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_piecal_is_event":false,"_piecal_start_date":"","_piecal_end_date":"","_piecal_is_allday":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-74538","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-visual_arts"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/04\/20240201_124103-scaled.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-06-23 20:07:22","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/74538","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=74538"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/74538\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":76049,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/74538\/revisions\/76049"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/74539"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=74538"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=74538"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=74538"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}