2022 Kindling Arts Festival: Interview with Daniel Jones and Jessika Malone

2022 Kindling Arts Festival: Interview with Daniel Jones and Jessika Malone

By: Sai Clayton

 

It’s easy to get caught up in your little corner of the art world. That is, unless you’re Daniel Jones and Jessika Malone who have successfully managed to bring together over 150 Nashville-based dancers, musicians, designers, poets, aerialists, actors, drag queens, and more for their annual Kindling Arts Festival. 

 

Happening July 28–31, the Kindling Arts festival will be held across various West Nashville venues, spanning four thrilling days of affordable, performance-based programs. I recently sat down for a chat with Daniel and Jessika to talk about this year’s festival lineup, collaboration, and accessibility in Nashville’s ever-changing art scene. 

 

Kindling Arts Community – Photo by Tiffany Bessire

 

SC

Number: INC reports on Art of the region. For those who may be unfamiliar, what is Kindling Arts Festival?

 

DJ

Kindling Arts is Nashville’s radically unique independent arts incubator. Our mission is to support the development of innovative new works by local Nashville artists in different mediums. It means that we have a chance to work with artists in all kinds of genres and with a lot of interdisciplinary projects that merge the different genres. And our mission really is focusing on developing and cultivating the local arts community and new works in contemporary performance here in Nashville. We have this anchor festival that is the big event of the year where we get to showcase a lot of different artists working in all these different mediums. For example, in the 2022 festival that’s coming up at the end of July, we have 19 different projects, and those include dance showcases, new theater works, aerial circus performances, and things that don’t fit in a box like incredibly unique music happenings and gatherings and parties. So there really is something for everyone!

 

SC

That’s a lot! How do you go about planning such an all-encompassing series of events?

 

JM

Kindling Arts Festival is celebrating its fifth year, and within that time we’ve really worked to cultivate new aesthetics and to present diverse work in all manner of speaking: diverse artists, diverse forms, diverse venues, diverse methods of delivery. So to speak specifically to the question of, well, how do you plan for this? It’s a combination of receiving applications from artists that are interested in producing under our auspices, and then projects that we generate ourselves. We think of Kindling Arts as both an incubator and an instigator: we care for and nurture projects that someone might bring to us, and we also instigate, start up, and get excited about things that we imagine could be possible. Oftentimes that comes from learning about an artist that we’re very excited about, or we are responding to a social issue that we’re interested in and how performance could help to speak to that cause.

 

WILD MOMENTS with Kai Mote & Holden Bitner – Photo by Tiffany Bessire

 

SC

You mentioned how the art scene has changed with the city’s growth, and I think anyone who’s familiar with Nashville knows how rapidly things change around here. Can you speak a little bit more to the transitioning art scene and how it has affected Kindling and the greater performing arts community in Nashville?

 

JM

In the last 10 years we have seen all of these new folks move into town and they bring with them their unique perspectives, experiences, and an appetite for a kind of rigorous, cultural offering that had, I think, yet to exist in the landscape. We already had great things happening: an incredible music scene, incredible visual art in its own right happening, substantive theater work, and a burgeoning dance scene. We hear a lot of folks moving to town and we tell them about the festival and they’re like, “Oh my gosh, I’m so glad to know that something like this is here.” They’re coming from Chicago, New York, LA, wherever, and they’re looking for the kinds of organizations and activities that are experimental, maybe more avant garde, and of the moment. So that’s a great thing! But then there’s also the challenging side in terms of how things have changed: the rent goes up, gentrification happens, and neighborhoods change. It has meant that it’s more and more expensive for artists to make work, and their venues and opportunities are drying up. That’s where we have really tried to step into a space that helps make work possible in the face of these mounting challenges.

 

SC

Yes! I see and experience how not having a physical space and a physical home is such a barrier to so many local artists. And I love y’all’s model of hopping around to different venues and utilizing an entire community. How did you land on that kind of system, and how does that in turn shape the Kindling Arts Festival?

 

DJ

The festival model is really set up around a central tenet of “we can do more together than we can apart.” And that is one of the things that helps Kindling float and thrive in the face of these challenges that Jessika is talking about. A lot of this does come down to brass tacks, like dollars and cents, access to venues, organization and marketing, and producing and tech elements. The not-so-fun things to talk about when it comes to live performance is what we try to help make a container for. Having multiple venues in the festival is one piece of the puzzle that has meant developing a lot of really positive relationships with a lot of different kinds of physical structures, whether those be theaters, small businesses, empty warehouses or other colleague arts institutions. So we have this little pond full of lily pads of different places we jump to and it’s proven to really be successful and also interesting! The use of space in particular was something that was on our minds from the jump with the founding of Kindling. 

 

JM

It really was the genesis of the idea for the festival. We were inspired by the advantages that the shared resource model made: leading to collaboration over competition in the general arts ecosystem. When a new performer or performance entity comes to town, we try to welcome them to what’s already going on, because they’re going to be more successful if they are able to share the cost of something under our auspices. We believe that a rising tide lifts all boats. The strength is in how we come together to share venues, marketing resources, and audiences. As fantastic as Nashville is and as much as it has grown, it is still a developing arts audience where we’re having to actively recruit folks to become lifelong patrons of the arts. That audience may already know and love a particular dance group, but in the festival context, they might find out about a puppetry troupe they never knew existed, and suddenly they’re excited by them too. All the ways of coming together can help cross pollinate and help everybody do better together.

 

GUEST CURATOR: Shawn Whitsell – Photo by Tiffany Bessire

 

 

SC

Yeah, I feel like even within the past month, I’ve learned so much more about the performing arts culture here in Nashville, and I think Kindling plays such a central role in giving a lot of groups a platform and a community to call their home. So that being said, what projects are you most excited for in this year’s festival?

 

JM

We’re excited about all kinds of things! I am producing and directing a project called Bar Fight which is an underground queer fight club meets karaoke bar. And it’s crazy fun. It’s going to be at Ozari Events, a space not intended for performance, to create a really immersive, pop-up bar environment that heavily encourages audience interaction and engagement. It’s going to be really fun and we’ve got a super amazing cast. 

 

Daniel is offering an encore presentation of The Naughty Tree which is a retelling of the Eden story. I’m personally super thrilled about it because I know that a lot of folks didn’t get to catch it the first time when it was at the Blue Room. So that’s freaking amazing. 

 

We’re also gonna have all these crazy, amazing events and parties. We’re super interested in art as a reason to come together and how to break apart the traditional spectator-presenter kind of dynamic. And so we’re having our Fifth Birthday Party on Friday, July 29, which is going to have performances embedded in it which I’m super stoked about. We’re also having a social justice fashion show called Power Walk on Saturday night where folks are going to be using the art of fashion to express what’s on their hearts right now. And we’re doing a full scale installation inside The Barbershop Theater on Thursday night. 

 

BAR FIGHT with Justin Harvey, Josh Inocalla, Nikki Staggs, Blake Holliday, Diego Gomez – Photo by Kara McLeland

 

 

DJ

Obviously, I’m very excited about The Naughty Tree. I think what we experienced with the premiere in April was that a lot of people had expectations that were up-ended about what theater could look like, locally. So I’m very excited that we get a chance to revisit that piece and share it with a broader audience. 

 

Also on the lineup: I’m particularly excited about Emma Supica’s solo show called Scar Tissue. It’s short, it’s quick, but it’s really touching, smart, and very funny. She has a background in comedy, so she’s coming at it with a comedic storytelling lens. Scar Tissue also has a really beautiful community participation element at the end that I think will be meaningful for a lot of people in that audience. It’s happening at Darkhorse Theater, so it’s a very intimate venue which is sort of perfect for what she’s up to. 

 

One of the most exciting things about this festival also is that we have a curatorial partner joining us: Shawn Whitsell. Shawn is a longtime collaborator and friend of ours but also is an incredible artist, producer, and community activist here in Nashville. He runs Destiny Theater Experience, and is all over town all the time – on stage, off stage, behind the scenes, and out in the streets protesting. He’s a really incredible, dynamic human being. Jessika mentioned the two projects that he’s bringing to the table which is the Power Walk social justice fashion show, which is all about celebrating the diversity in bodies and fashions and the ways that we can promote the causes that we care about the most. And in a party setting like we are going to come together and feel a vibe and catch some beats from DJ Wu. And he’s also doing the installation at The Barbershop which is called The Soul of the People. The whole idea around it is that over the course of the opening night of the festival, members of the community can swing by the space for any amount of time that they want to between 5pm-9pm, and help create this visual art installation inside the walls of The Barbershop with their own personal perspective and narrative. And then it will live on the walls of the space for the remainder of the Festival. And there’ll be these music performances inside of it that Jessika was talking about. So that’s a really beautiful element of this year’s festival that we’ve never had before. 

 

NAUGHTY TREE with James Rudolph II as Mother Nature – Photo by Tiffany Bessire

 

SC

So I saw on Kindling’s website that the festival includes over 160 artists. How many of them are local?

 

DJ

Of those 160 artists I think literally 155 are local. We really only focus locally—that is our vibe. What’s interesting is that as we grow, there are artists that live in other places that are finding out about what we’re up to and want to come. We’re not in a place yet where we have a ton of resources to give them, so they’re operating on the same kind of resources that the local artists have. But we were saying that if you want to come, we are happy to make space for you. Those were all projects that we received through applications from artists we had never heard of or met before. So those are all new partnerships, which is very exciting, because it means that we’re broadening the network. 

 

At least a couple of those artists are going to have the chance to lead a workshop while they’re here as well. For example, Rebecca Margolick is a choreographer based out of New York who heard about our festival and applied with her solo piece that excavates this fascinating history of Jewish immigrant women in New York during the early 1900’s. She’s coming and she’s doing that piece, but New Dialect also knows about her and is going to be hosting a workshop in the community during the week of the Festival with her as the lead artist. It’s a wonderful chance for us to invest in the local community from a training perspective as well. 

 

Otherwise, it’s all local. And I would say of the local artists that we have this year it’s probably 50/50 In terms of people we’ve worked with before and new faces. So it just really shows you that there’s so many more people out there that we still don’t know about and encourages us to keep building new relationships with people.

 

SC

I think it’s definitely going to be surprising to a lot that we have such a robust performing arts scene. If you’re not part of it, you just wouldn’t know.

 

DJ

Totally, and I think we’re working on ways to try to break out of that. If anything has the power to break through the noise, the kind of work that we are interested in doing should be the kind of thing that could do it. 

 

So much of the work we do focuses on high engagement and unexpected performance formats, or narratives or stories that you haven’t seen yet. Things that are really fun, and not what you all think about like, “Oh, I’m gonna sit in the dark and watch a piece of theater.” We really are more interested in breaking out of this very traditional relationship between a spectator and a performer, like Jessika said earlier. We’re all here together in this communal experience, and hopefully that speaks to people who are interested in things like big arena shows, fashion shows, or clubs and nightlife. And, you know, we’re interested in having those people be a part of the arts community. You don’t have to be someone who’s making art to be a part of this community. 

 

Power: On with Phylicia Roybal & Spencer Grady – Photo by Tiffany Bessire

 

 

SC 

Yeah, yeah, that’s beautiful and I totally agree. So I guess looking forward to this year’s festival and future Kindling arts happenings, how can local and beyond artists and art lovers be involved and support?

 

DJ

There are a couple of ways you can get involved. I encourage people who are either artists or are just someone who loves the arts to volunteer with us. We need a lot of volunteers. We’re a people-powered organization that needs folks to jump on board in pretty much any capacity you can think of: box office, parking attendants, bringing food to artists and technicians during tech week. 

 

JM

And volunteering means free tickets! So for folks that want to participate but have $0 in the bank, volunteer for a shift and we will give you free tickets in exchange.

 

DJ

You can find the sign-up link on our website at kindlingarts.com/volunteer. Also, sign up for the newsletter and follow us on Instagram. Those are our most active outlets for getting the word out about shows. And just in general, show up and go to a bunch of arts organizations. Follow these artists that we’re working with, and be a year-round supporter of the arts. We will happily take any sort of time or energy you want to give us and we’ll happily take your advocacy out in the world for the arts and the way that the arts are a crucial role in developing a vibrant place to live. We’re always excited about any conversation that we can be having with our neighbors and with local lawmakers, state legislatures, and national legislatures about the arts and the role that they play in transforming lives. So that’s kind of micro to macro. For artists interested in appearing at the Festival, applications for 2023 will open next spring. 

 

SCAR TISSUE with Emma Supica – Photo by Tiffany Bessire

 

 

SC

Awesome. Well, I’m so so so excited to attend as many shows as I can this year! Where can I get my tickets?

 

DJ

Go to kindlingarts.com for all the ticket links and to explore the full line-up. I also want to talk about the accessibility of the Festival from a financial perspective, because I think it’s really important that people don’t think, “Oh, it’s this huge festival. There’s 19 projects, so it’s going to cost me all this money to come see it.” The reality is, a couple of the events are free, but most everything is ticketed between $10–$20 in advance or $15–$25 on the day-of.

 

Even better than buying individual tickets is getting some form of package or pass. There’s the Wildfire Weekend Pass which is our all-access pass that lets you see whatever you want in the whole festival and it’s only $75. So it’s very affordable to literally have free reign over your itinerary, choose your own adventure. There are also a variety of dance and aerial, theater, and sampler packages ranging from $40-$60. 

 

SC 

Yes, absolutely. I think so much of what’s difficult is getting people to just come out and show up. And once you find yourself there, you’re like, holy shit! I didn’t realize that this existed and it was so wonderful. And for people like me, ticket prices are definitely a barrier to entry. So I appreciate that.

 

This year’s Kindling Arts Festival will take place July 28–31 across various West Nashville venues. To view the full lineup and purchase tickets, visit kindlingarts.com