Arts Future Showcase
NextNow Fest celebrates UMD's The Clarice as a D.C. arts incubator
Everyone knows football and the arts don’t mix, right?
“Typically we sort-of close the doors and batten down the hatches,” Martin Wollesen says, half in jest, about Saturday home games on the University of Maryland campus. Wollesen runs the Clarice Smith Center, which is across the street from Byrd Stadium, where the Maryland Terrapins play.
But this Saturday, Sept. 13, Wollesen is working to flip the script. “We’re working with artists and tailgaters to build and create instruments and become part of a DIY marching band,” he explains. This Arts Tailgate will also feature other performances including aerialists on the lawn at the Clarice.
“It’s a way to demonstrate the creative nature of the University of Maryland and the students and the community who are a part of that,” he says. And the Arts Tailgate is just one event in a new four-day-long festival that the center inaugurates as a way to both celebrate the school as an arts incubator and as a means to reach new audiences. For the NextNow Fest, Wollesen and his staff have lined up a full schedule of mostly free events featuring many emerging artists, such as local singer Lena Sikaly and ensemble the Inscape Chamber Orchestra, and other innovators, such as experimental theater companies The Neo-Futurists and dog & pony dc. “We’re looking at all these different ways in which audiences engage and interact, and think differently about audiences and how they participate in the creative process.”
A native of California, Wollesen was drawn to the Clarice Smith Center last year on account of its strong music and theater schools and their equally strong ties to D.C. In fact, he conceives of College Park as “the Brooklyn of D.C.”
“I think a lot of people actually don’t realize that those two schools alone are really becoming [integral] to the large arts environment of D.C.,” he says, noting that Maryland faculty, students and alumni are represented at most of the region’s arts organizations — as well as a vast majority of NextNow participants. “There’s a lot of incredible, amazing talent brewed here.” — Doug Rule
The NextNow Fest is Thursday, Sept. 11, through Sunday, Sept. 14, at the Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center, University Boulevard and Stadium Drive in College Park. Call 301-405-ARTS or visit claricesmithcenter.umd.edu.
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