Art for a City: The Pop-Up Project comes of age
A guitar trills as paint-splattered statues breathe, spread their arms, clap! We’re up close, craning over shoulders. Travelers in 1930s-style trousers, button downs and suspenders rock and stomp along the aisle of the dining car. We’re elbowing past them, crowded tight.
Seamstresses turn their bodies into machines, needle down, bobbin thread up, ghosts in the old factory. We’re flying with the drone cam, swallows in the eaves.
Historic photos and information about the Chattanooga sit-ins and the police brutality that followed fade into a shot down Main Street, closing in on a posse of dancers. We’re in a car, maybe, or pounding down road on foot. Something’s happening. We hear sirens. We walk backward, backward, until poet Arc Twitty comes into frame.
Tears and dust from a thousand marched miles muddy my feet…
These are all scenes from The Pop-Up Project’s recent works, and that’s just a taste. There’s really no way to understand The Pop-Up Project besides watching a performance live or on video; the work is multifaceted yet situated, of many genres yet dance-specific. There are whimsical projects and heavy ones, celebrations and memorials. Every work is located in a site in or around the city, and informed by that site’s history.
“We’re storytellers,” says Mattie Waters, one of The Pop-Up Project’s artistic directors, along with her colleague Jules Downum. “We take in as much information as we can about a site, which dictates the piece we create. We leave it to our city—our viewers—to have their own thoughts and feelings.”
This work of reflection and creation has been underway for more than a year now. The Pop-Up Project, now a chartered non-profit, has assembled a go-to cadre of artists in virtually every medium—fine art, music, videography, make-up, costume—with whom they work regularly. They’re constantly collaborating with new artists, too—up to 40 so far.
And while many arts groups in Chattanooga compensate their collaborators only with praise, The Pop-Up Project is committed to paying people a fair wage, Downum says. They’re a leader among several groups moving the needle, albeit slowly, toward an innovative, professional performance art culture in Chattanooga.
Civic Art
With themes spanning the Depression, Appalachian womanhood, sit-ins and terrorism, is The Pop-Up Project creating civic art? I ask. Is theirs a patriotic mission?Downum resists the term.
“I would not use the word patriotic,” she says. “Our work is about creating connections. It’s easiest when we have common places. [We explore] the things that happened there. They’re not all good, not all beautiful. The sit-ins, fire hoses…that was not good. But it all happened here. We have a connection to it, here, together.”
Big Work: Anchors at Sculpture Fields
The Pop-Up Project’s latest video is Anchors, a piece choreographed in commemoration of the five servicemen who lost their lives in a terrorist attack in Chattanooga in 2015. Shot in the Sculpture Fields, Anchors features an original composition by Tim Cofield, who is also the Project’s videographer.
Choreographers Emma Pannkuk and Maddie Lane added their skills to those of Downum and Waters. The cast of more than 60 dancers included well-known local professionals, students from Ballet Tennessee, and BTN guest artist Fred Davis, formerly of Dance Theatre of Harlem.
This large (and very partial) credits list is merited because Anchors is big. Shot in and around a statue also commemorating the Fallen Five, Anchors starts as the five principal dancers fall flat to the ground, then whirls dizzily around the statue, scales the heights and descends, follows Davis’ powerful movements, tracks close-up and he catches a procession of child dancers leaping toward at him, and finally pans out to encompass a crowd of people, silhouetted, pounding their hearts and dropping, over and over.
I thought that this is how children feel after a disaster. They want to know the grown-ups will catch them.
What’s Next?
On Friday, Aug. 3, The Pop-Up Project performed at the Hunter Museum of American Art. And then—the schedule’s more or less open. Supported by grants and private donations, they need money. And that’s too bad, because what they do is important. Their work suggests that of national-scale site-specific dance groups; Wales’ Ballet Cymru comes to mind.
“We take art out of traditional settings into a found space,” Waters says. “We’d like to do a full-length production inside a building. The audience could follow the musicians and dancers as they told a story. This is what Punchdrunk [a performance art theater] is doing in London. It’s where theater is happening, internationally.”
Give these people the right budget, and they could create an evening of site-specific dance that would keep you entranced and put the city on the map. They’re that good.