Kingston Festival Director’s Top Picks for Oct. 7-9 O+ Festival

This year’s O+ Festival schedule is bigger and more diverse than ever. To help you plan your itinerary, we’ve asked members of the O+ Festival team for a list of their must dos. Up first: Aimee Gardner, festival director of O+ Festival Kingston.

I am someone who likes art, theater, music, and technology. I know less about wellness but every year I like to try something new at O+. Here are some ideas for what I would do and see, but I probably won’t have time to, so I’ll have to live vicariously through you!
Friday Oct. 7
4pm Stop by the MO+THERSHIP to get your wristband and a t-shirt! Also pick up a sketchbook and pencil for later on
5pm Gather at the Kingston Library to be in the parade, or cheer everyone as it goes by from Keegan’s or Santa Fe! The parade will pass by all the new murals for this year
6pm Opening reception for Will Lytle at Keegan Ales and check out John Breiner’s mural
8pm SageArts at ARTBAR Gallery
8:45pm “The What Inside” funeral multimedia performance by Camilla Ha at Seven21 Media Center
10pm Goddess magic life drawing theater with Anna Laura Hafner at Broadway Arts
11pm PMS and the Mood Swings at the Anchor
Saturday Oct. 8
9am EXPO+ Check out the inside of an ambulance! Bring your stuffed animals to the Teddy Bear Clinic! They need TLC too.
10:30am Durational Installation with Rosekill Activators at Academy Green
12pm Linda Mary Montano Art/Life Counseling at Gargoyle’s
1:30pm CPR Training at the Kirkland. I have always wanted to get training in this, and now you can!
3:30pm Sucfesful Performance by Rosekill Activators on the trolley! Meet at MO+THERSHIP
5pm Errorarium at BSP Middle. This is an improvised analog signal processed live concert to entertain plants and flies!
6:30pm Universe Exploding Performance by Rosekill Activators at Frog Alley. This is a ruin. Fun!
7pm Terrestrail Absorption Performance by Rosekill Activators at Frog Alley
8pm Kaki King at BSP back room. A genre onto herself and multimedia projection on her guitar with The Neck is a Bridge to the Body.
9:30pm Sondre Lerche at the Old Dutch Church
11pm SALO+N at outdated
Sunday Oct. 9
10am Beyond Death Foraged Materials Workshop with Linda Weintraub at the Old Dutch Church basement
11:30am Check out Martina Nehrling‘s mural at Kovo
12pm Chains of Love at Academy Green
12:30pm Check out Lady Pink and Jess Chen’s murals at Express Latinos and ARTBAR Gallery
1:15pm SALO+N at ARTBAR Gallery for Jess Chen‘s poetry reading
2pm Temporary Tattoo with P Tenney at Peace Park
2:30pm Find an Empowering Clerk at MO+THERSHIP and get yourself a joy license!
3pm Check out Eugene Stetz‘s mural at People’s Place
4pm Visit the (P)Optimism Shoppe to learn more about INT-O Yellow and its relationship to our murals
5pm Poetry reading by T’ai Freedom Ford and reception at the Milne Fabrication Factory
7pm Tele Novella at BSP Front
8pm Wrap Party at BSP Front

O+ Petaluma Hosts Silent Auction Fundraiser Sept. 16

O+ Petaluma presents its first silent auction Friday, Sept. 16 from 6-9 p.m. at Griffin Map Design, 122 American Alley.

Fifty percent of each artwork sold goes toward the purchase of art supplies for O+ Petaluma, which takes place Nov. 4-5.

The lineup of Bay Area artists in the art auction are: Isis Hockenos, Dani Robison, Julia Edith Rigby, Andrea Kendall, Justin Ringlein, Jonny Hirschmugl, Rachel Endoso, James Curtis
and Maxfield Bala.

To stay up-to-date, follow the Facebook event.

Julia Edith Rigby
Julia Edith Rigby

 

Justin Ringlein
Justin Ringlein

O+ Festival Wristband Includes Unlimited Classes in Yoga, Meditation, Sound Healing, Dance

The Oct. 7-9 O+ Festival’s signature EXPLO+RE series is a relaxing wellness retreat set within 3 days of concerts and art-making. This year’s offerings of yoga, meditation, sound healing and dance are more diverse than ever thanks to the generous donation of time and talent from Kingston-area studios and their teachers.

EXPLO+RE classes are included in your all-access O+ Festival wristband. Make a donation and pre-order your wristband here.

This year’s offerings include (subject to change): Kirtan and Healing Tibetan Mantra Music with Lee Mirabai Harrington, Sequences in Time + Space with Heidi Reagan, Vinyasa Yoga with Deb Seche of The Yoga House, Empower: The Art of Fitness Pole Dancing with Sarah Jacoby of Studio Nine, Kundalini Yoga: Vibrating the Cosmos with Neslihan Lord, Kids Yoga with the teachers of Mudita Yoga, Intro to Swing Dancing with Emily Vail of Uptown Swing, Movement + Meditation with Sarah Capua, Yoga en Español with Kristen Wilson, Yin Yoga with Julie Colton, Healing Gong Bath with Valeria Gheorghiu, Neslihan Sukh Inder, Andrea Staskowska and Theresa Widmann of Anahata, Core Vinyasa with Kelli Ingersoll, Learn to Meditate with Sky Lake Retreat Center, Dance Xross Fitness – DXF with Stacey Nodelman of the Center for Creative Education, Hoop Dancing with Marissa Foti, Qigong Foundations with Corinne Wolcott of tuiHealthcare, Attain Ayurvedic Vitality: Unleash Your Creative Genius + Sound Healing with Mark Reynolds and Lauryn Bellafiore, Meditation with Shawn Harrison of Mudita and Bhakti Kriya w/ Live Music with Radharani Renee Finkelstein.

EXPLORE 1 by Projectej.com Photography (Photos by Project EJ)

Literary SALO+N Call for Readers

Every year in October, we co-host a 2-day literary event as part of the O+ Festival, which is a weekend-long event with tons of music, art, and other beautiful chaos. This happens upstate, in Kingston, NY.

We call it the Literary SALO+N. We call it that because it’s not so much a program or performance as an interactive reading, a meeting of minds and voices. If you attend the festival, you’ll get a sense of the festival vibe, which is very non-standard, community-based, volunteer-driven. We like to think the Literary SALO+N breaks a similar mold.

The readings take place at Outdated Café, a very colorful/retro place, the heart of historic uptown, socially and commercially speaking. Recently featured in Vogue for its antiques. This year, as part of a festival-wide effort to expand our presence beyond Uptown Kingston into Midtown, we’re doing one evening at Outdated, and a daytime event at ARTBAR Gallery.

Confirmed readers include Jacob Appel, Sari Botton, Jess X. Chen (a 2016 O+ artist who will be making a large-scale mural at ARTBAR that honors women migrants and refugees), Sara Eckel, Jane Liddle, Julie Novak, Eva Tenuto and Pauline Uchmanowicz.

This is an invite to you to join and read some of your work, whether fiction or nonfiction, poetry or prose, drama, epistolary, improv, found work, or otherwise. Every year we write to the festival-wide theme, and this year the theme is: “Mothers of Invention.” Whatever that means to you. Whatever it inspires.

ione reading at 2014 literary salonKeep in mind that the Literary Salon happens, especially on Saturday night, during the peak of the festival. Festival-goers are seeing and hearing bands, marching in parades, making art, doing yoga. Energy is high, and readings that are received best tend to be energetic and lively. As curators, we encourage form-bending, mash-ups, props, visual aids, and anything else that will surprise and delight.

A 5- to 10-minute piece is best. Please rehearse reading your piece aloud using a clock or timer. If you’re not accustomed to doing this, you might be surprised by how few words can be delivered at a comfortable pace in minutes. It’s surprisingly short in story terms. If you go over, we won’t yank you, but we do have a schedule to stick to, so we might grow impatient.

Please write us if you’d like to take part, at ben@benobler.com, and indicate which of the two Salons you’d like to participate at, and what approximate time:

  1. Saturday, October 8, at Outdated Café, 314 Wall Street, 8 PM to midnight.
  2. Sunday, October 9, at ARTBAR Gallery, 674 Broadway, 10 AM to 2 PM.

We will assign you an available time slot, making every effort to accommodate your wants and needs. (Once the festival schedule comes out, you may wish to be elsewhere to see certain bands/acts, and we can adjust as needed.) Questions welcome, and sometime closer to October, we’ll write to confirm your participation.

Thank you!

Ben Obler, Sam Osterhout, & Johnnie Morello