The Ingenuity Festival kicked things off in a raucous fashion Thursday night with a street party to die for. While Mayor Jane Campbell, Cuyahoga County Commissioner Peter Lawson Jones and thousands of other engaged Clevelanders looked on, the streets of Downtown were transformed into an art-tech circus featuring a colorful Public Square performance, a high-powered concert and an unbelievable fireworks display in the heart of our city. Robin VanLear, known for organizing the annual Parade The Circle effort with the Cleveland Museum of Art and University Circle, Inc., organized over 400 artists who converged on Cleveland’s Public Square. Eight streams of artists, each wearing a different color, each led by a different Cleveland dance company, weaved through Public Square creating a “Traffic Jam,” accompanied by a soundtrack by Cleveland Arts Prize winner Greg deAlessio and Paul Cox, that was broadcast live on WCLV 104.9 FM.

Friday night, according to world renowned playwright and theatre critique Linda Eisenstein, featured "DancEvert’s collaboration with NASA engineers on “Confluence” in the BP Atrium, where dancers showed the effects of moving under higher and higher wind turbulence. Impossible not to think of the hurricane and its aftermath - a prophetic piece. First moving under gently blowing fans, the dancers’ blue capes rippling — then the 2 NASA guys came in with sinister looking leafblowers that looked like laser cannons and sounded like chainsaws. Scarves and a blue feather boa shot into the air, the feathers of the boa exploding off and falling through the space like a bird shredded before our eyes..." Eisenstein is also a Cool Cleveland correspondent, and her own work was featured during the Opera In The Alley at Ingenuity on Saturday 9/3.

Peter Chakerian (also of CC) was in awe of Hernando Cortez and the Verb Ballets’ performance Friday night at the McCrory Art/Tech Expo. Seeing, Hearing, Sleeping premiered as an "unreal, ethereal dreamscape, set to the throbbing techno beats of DJ Sasha and John Digweed. Verb’s dancers were costumed in a way that made their identities absent from intimacy — a real metaphor for how technology can make society feel sometimes — and in constant collision with momentum to use technological means for connection and resolution. It was a fantastic slice of the future that Verb should definitely repeat. On either side of Verb Ballets’ premiere, we lost ourselves in Ray Howlett’s hologram image H20 (which is almost like standing inside a miasma of water molecules) and John M. Doyle’s mixed media piece called The Builders — an homeage to the past, present and potential future of technology from a humanist’s perspective. Simply another must see. Beautiful Loser (a blend of jazz and rock), Scottyboombox (an electronic singer songwriter) and the Afrocubists (on the East 4th stage) provided solid musical enjoyment while we were there."

Saturday @ Cleveland's first Festival of Art and Technology was awash with the sights and sounds of a thriving dowtown. The colors, light, movement, and voices of everyone breathed vibrancy in an area that normally rolls up its sidewalks at 5PM on Friday afternoon - especially on Labor Day Weekend. But yesterday Euclid Avenue off of Public Square was alive - with kids! Kids doing chalk drawings on the sidewalks, kids catching bubbles blown by the bubble machine, kids petting snakes, kids learning about owls and other animals, kids watching magic, and kids doing arts and crafts. Looking for something to do with the kids today? All these activities are going on today as well.

It wasn't just kids having fun and being entertained yesterday. There was something going on for everyone. Dance performances by MorrisonDance and SAMFOD, bluegrass music inside Pickwick & Frolic, garbage crafted into art by P.R. Miller, the AllGoSigns Art/Tech Expo - complete with performance by Infinite Number of Sounds. Did we mention DJ Rob Ganem and the GLBT Dance Party?

All that, and there's still another day to go! Sunday was attended by Plain Dealer reporter Carolyn Jack, whose coverage of the festival was invaluable. "[F]estival-goers found plenty to intrigue them. Fred Wright, 58, a Cleveland Heights resident who runs an online art gallery and has experience in concert presentation, said he was impressed at what Ingenuity featured and how it was run. All the components were in place," Wright said. "I'm amazed at how arts and technology worked together here... It brought the left and right brains together."

While Carolyn Jack was talking with folks at the festival, Peter Chakerian was doing other things: Sunday morning started off with a bit of operatic rock in a group of awesome Lakewood High music students called the Lakewood Project, as well as "brunch with the venerable Cleveland Jazz Orchestra in the Hyatt Arcade. [The CJO] have over 20 years of entertaining Cleveland and they just sizzle with the ability to touch on points old and new in the Big Book of Jazz, without really steering you wrong in any way. These guys have a sound that definitely belongs on the main stage… and with a little luck, we’ll have another Ingenuity festival to talk about next year. Perhaps even as early as next summer…?"

Early next summer indeed. In a Free Times interview with Michael Gill co-director Thomas Mulready says, “We've already talked to the Cleveland Orchestra about making their July 4 concert part of Ingenuity in the Flats next year. We're bringing in a fire artist from Berlin to set the river on fire. We've met with Deep Purple about doing a 20-minute version of ‘Smoke on the Water.' Seriously.”

What is it that you'd like to see in next year's festival? More technology? More (or less) of a certain genre of music? Local foods? The sky's the limit. In the Free Times article mentioned above, Thomas Mulready also is quoted as saying "James Levin and myself are just caretakers of this idea that's been in the zeitgeist for years." If Thomas Mulready and James Levin are only the caretakers, what's our role as Clevelanders? Are we simply consumers? Producers? How can next year's Ingenuity Festival (and subsequent festivals) reflect the culture of our city? The "spirit of our times"? Send your thoughts to Letters@CoolCleveland.com.

From Cool Cleveland contributors George Nemeth, Linda Eisenstein, and Peter Chakerian
Photos by Scott Muscatello http://clevelandplanner.blogspot.com and George Nemeth (:divend:)