By snoadmin
Having to do a thesis for a master’s degree sounds overwhelming and tedious, with long days of reading and writing in a cold library. That’s not the case, however, for Patricia Garza, who decided to do a collaboration project with all the different departments of CSULB’s College of the Arts, for her master’s thesis; she called it Fusion.
Fusion took place on Smooth’s Sports Grille’s rooftop in downtown Long Beach on the evening of March 22.
It’s hard to have the best of all worlds, especially in art. Exhibitions are usually only focused in one form. If you go to a theater, you’ll get a play. If you go to a concert, you’ll get live music. However, Fusion was an unusual opportunity with diverse artistic forms where viewers were able to enjoy performances and art exhibitions up-close and at the same time.
In a great open space overlooking Pine Avenue, there were all kinds of art. CSULB alumni and student-artists got to display their work in this communal event. There was photography, paintings and jewelry on display. The Society of Student Illustrators constantly had artists creating and drawing on the back of the stage. On stage, for three hours, were non-stop performances including intense spoken word, amusing pieces of plays, Spice Girls parodies, professional abstract dance routines, fun amateur dancing and live rock’n’roll.
Domino Affect, a new modern dance company composed of four CSULB alumni, performed a professional abstract dance. A fine match for the night’s atmosphere, the girls’ movements were soft, pretty and sensitive. The spatial sounding music in the background and their gentle gestures conveyed a dreamlike sensation that was broken by sudden fast and violent motion as their set evolved.
The Alive Theatre, a newly formed CSULB alumni theatre company, gave its share of laughter and emotion to the public with theatrical pieces, which included a Spice Girls parody. They also performed series of little humoristic sketches and a piece of the new play “Insanity,” a combination of singing, dance and theater. The actors were able to connect with the audience. The funny moments in their repertory were actually funny. The deep and gloomy moments transmitted a melancholy feeling, which accompanied the sensual and hurting live music well.
Shaunte Caraballo, a theater graduate student, shared her poetry. “Rolling stone” was a family-based, women-empowering poem. Her versatile voice went accordingly to her words; it was strong and intense or soft and hopeful.
The visual art was composed by collaborations of a number of artists. There was black-and-white photography, oil on canvas, digital prints, and so on. The set of collages by Nadina Flores, “Memories of a Valid Youth,” targeted most of the audience, who were in their late twenties. Images from the ’80s and ’90s made people, myself included, smile and sigh while thinking about our own recollections.
Also displayed in front was Jonathan Takahashi’s black-and-white photography of isolated and destroyed houses. The images displayed a terrible decay, yet it didn’t feel like an alienated place, but rather a familiar one.
The fun dancing emerged freely at the end of the night when the indie-rock band, Countless Thousands, hit the stage. Its happy and electric melodies made some people jump spontaneously to the dance floor while making other people make other people jump to the dance floor not so spontaneously and with no dance shoes on. Overall, the sound was ideal for the closing note; people were happy and full of energy after all the continuous art.
Garza, the organizer, expressed her contentment with the overall result of the event. She hopes to establish Fusion as a yearly artistic collaboration for the CSULB family. I could not agree more with her plan.
