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Pasadena’s 16-Day Turn on its AxS
For the sixth time since 1999, arts and scientific institutions converge in and near Pasadena for the AxS (ak-sis) Festival, more than a fortnight of exhibitions, performances, public art and lectures. Most of the events are free to the public.
The nonprofit Pasadena Arts Council (PAC), led by executive director Terry LeMoncheck, oversees the venture. “We talk so often about the connections between art and science in Pasadena,” says LeMoncheck. “We have such great research institutes in Caltech, JPL, the Planetary Society and Carnegie Observatories. And it’s been our observation that the more artists and scientists talk with each other, the more their vocabularies are enhanced.”
Working together, she adds, allows artists and scientists “a greater ability to tackle the problems of tomorrow that we’re creating today.”
The year’s theme is Fire and Water, kicking off with a staged reading of Carson Kreitzer’s The Love Songs of J. Robert Oppenheimer at Caltech’s Hameetman Auditorium in the Cahill Center for Astronomy and Astrophysics — the architecturally nonlinear building on California Boulevard.
“This is Bobby’s internal struggle of the atomic bomb,” explains LeMoncheck. “And the thing that makes this year’s festival particularly exciting is that we have significant money from the James Irvine Foundation, the [Ralph M.] Parsons Foundation and the NEA [National Endowment for the Arts] to commission new works just for the festival.”
One of the new commissioned works is Rain After Ash, written and directed by Corey Madden, the former associate artistic director of the Mark Taper Forum and founding artistic director of L’Atelier Arts.
“This is the result of a two-year obsession of mine,” Madden says. “I woke up in the middle of the night and turned on the computer, started surfing, and found on the early edition of the New York Times a story called Missing Poet.”
The poet was Craig Arnold who disappeared while hiking along a volcano’s rim in Japan, following in the footsteps of the 17th century Haiku poet Matsuo Basho. “It just got under my skin. I started to follow whether or not he’d been found. I discovered a Facebook page called Find Craig Arnold. So over the next two weeks there were thousands of posts from people talking about Craig and his life and his poetry.”
The posts struck Madden as an amazing phenomenon. “All these people I didn’t know who were connected through the internet. It seemed like a weird limbo to me and it took me on a journey. I read a blog of his called the Volcano Pilgrim which he wrote in the two and a half months before he disappeared. In my mind they were filled with prophesy about his fate.”
She also read a poem of his called Hymn to Persephone. “I found it connected back to my writing, a poem I’d written about the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice and the way Persephone, the little girl who’s abducted by Hades and kept by him in the underworld, plays in that story.”
Persephone takes pity on a poet and lets him have a chance to go back. “Craig had written about his own loss of love. In this poem he visits the underworld and here, two years later, he actually falls off the edge of a volcano and never comes back.”
Madden was obsessed. “I realized there was another person in the story I hadn’t recognized. I suppose in some ways it was myself, but the person who showed up was Demeter, the figure in Greek mythology who makes the world infertile and holds out on the gods until she can either have her daughter returned to her or come to terms with that...
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For the sixth time since 1999, arts and scientific institutions converge in and near Pasadena for the AxS (ak-sis) Festival, more than a fortnight of exhibitions, performances, public art and lectures. Most of the events are free to the public.
The nonprofit Pasadena Arts Council (PAC), led by executive director Terry LeMoncheck, oversees the venture. “We talk so often about the connections between art and science in Pasadena,” says LeMoncheck. “We have such great research institutes in Caltech, JPL, the Planetary Society and Carnegie Observatories. And it’s been our observation that the more artists and scientists talk with each other, the more their vocabularies are enhanced.”
Working together, she adds, allows artists and scientists “a greater ability to tackle the problems of tomorrow that we’re creating today.”
The year’s theme is Fire and Water, kicking off with a staged reading of Carson Kreitzer’s The Love Songs of J. Robert Oppenheimer at Caltech’s Hameetman Auditorium in the Cahill Center for Astronomy and Astrophysics — the architecturally nonlinear building on California Boulevard.
“This is Bobby’s internal struggle of the atomic bomb,” explains LeMoncheck. “And the thing that makes this year’s festival particularly exciting is that we have significant money from the James Irvine Foundation, the [Ralph M.] Parsons Foundation and the NEA [National Endowment for the Arts] to commission new works just for the festival.”
One of the new commissioned works is Rain After Ash, written and directed by Corey Madden, the former associate artistic director of the Mark Taper Forum and founding artistic director of L’Atelier Arts.
“This is the result of a two-year obsession of mine,” Madden says. “I woke up in the middle of the night and turned on the computer, started surfing, and found on the early edition of the New York Times a story called Missing Poet.”
The poet was Craig Arnold who disappeared while hiking along a volcano’s rim in Japan, following in the footsteps of the 17th century Haiku poet Matsuo Basho. “It just got under my skin. I started to follow whether or not he’d been found. I discovered a Facebook page called Find Craig Arnold. So over the next two weeks there were thousands of posts from people talking about Craig and his life and his poetry.”
The posts struck Madden as an amazing phenomenon. “All these people I didn’t know who were connected through the internet. It seemed like a weird limbo to me and it took me on a journey. I read a blog of his called the Volcano Pilgrim which he wrote in the two and a half months before he disappeared. In my mind they were filled with prophesy about his fate.”
She also read a poem of his called Hymn to Persephone. “I found it connected back to my writing, a poem I’d written about the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice and the way Persephone, the little girl who’s abducted by Hades and kept by him in the underworld, plays in that story.”
Persephone takes pity on a poet and lets him have a chance to go back. “Craig had written about his own loss of love. In this poem he visits the underworld and here, two years later, he actually falls off the edge of a volcano and never comes back.”
Madden was obsessed. “I realized there was another person in the story I hadn’t recognized. I suppose in some ways it was myself, but the person who showed up was Demeter, the figure in Greek mythology who makes the world infertile and holds out on the gods until she can either have her daughter returned to her or come to terms with that...