Home Stretch: Redefining Community And Art In Madison

MADISON, WI—In the backyard of her Madison home, artist Bird Ross passed out peanut butter and jelly sandwiches before reading four short stories aloud.

Guests settled into plastic lawn chairs and acquainted (or reacquainted) themselves while Ross introduced some of the pieces she would read, including a quirky Grace Paley excerpt and a Jamaica Kincaid story about womanhood.

With endearing expression, Ross captivated the five adults gathered around her, most notably, with a Ross Gay short story about the simple joys sparked by a young tomato plant—something that felt especially appropriate while sitting in a yard on a sunny afternoon.

This story-time for grown-ups, as Ross calls it, is just one of over 15 performances that's part of a local art series called Home Stretch. The distributed festival features artists hosting small, intimate artistic acts running from June 21 until September 22.

The couple behind the series, Laurie Beth Clark and Michael Peterson, told Patch that Home Stretch is an examination of how home, community and socialization have changed because of the COVID-19 pandemic. As for the name, Home Stretch doesn’t relate to a race but rather how our homes and communities have extended and been redefined.

Nowadays, and especially with the increase in COVID-19 cases over the past few weeks, gatherings hardly involve a traditional indoor living room space. In Home Stretch, artists are playing with these non-traditional home spaces—inviting participants to a park or sitting spaced out on a front porch. For example, in the case of Quanda Johnson’s performance, attendees were taken on a canoe ride on Lake Monona and serenaded with Negro spirituals.

Ross’s home, set in her backyard, included the warm breeze drifting off Lake Monona, the shuffle of cars driving nearby and the bugs circling the covered sandwiches.

The festival, which is funded by grants from the University of Wisconsin Division of the Arts and the Madison Arts Commission, with additional support from the Wisconsin Arts Board, has several performances every week until late September. Those interested can register online.

Clark and Peterson, professors of art at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and founders of the art collective Spatula&Barcode, said they felt a distributed festival would give artists the autonomy and flexibility to work amid the pandemic.

“We didn't know whether theater would come back, or art museums or anything,” Peterson said. “So we started talking about doing something that would be about this period, about this sense of how do we even be together? How do we be in the same space with other people? And we just decided we should do something that was about that kind of process.”

Clark and Peterson were also inspired by another type of distributed festival, Café Allongé, which they held in Montreal and Madison in 2011 and 2013, respectively. In Madison, Clark and Peterson worked with 15 participating coffee shops, each hosting an artist and small, multi-media performances.

“We thought about Café Allongé and decided that some kind of distributed festival would be relatively easy to put together—not resource intensive and where artists would really chart their own path, and then kind of manage their own audiences,” Peterson said.

This type of festival allowed artists to have autonomy over their projects, not just in terms of content, but also over the COVID-19 precautions. In fact, Clark and Peterson said that they believe the initial contact between the participant and artist to discuss safety precautions is when the performance starts.

“In the signup process, you're agreeing together to work out the terms,” Clark said. “We kind of feel like the performance starts in this moment when you, as an audience member, are saying, ‘okay, what are my terms?’”

Some of the other performances include an upcoming audio recording called “Let’s Take A Walk” by playwright Amber Palmer, which takes participants on a guided walk of real-world locations. However, participants can listen to it anywhere—playing with ideas of physical space and being in two places at once, Peterson explained.

Like many of the performances, “Chai Stories” by Praveen Maripelly centers conversation and community. Moving from India to Madison during the pandemic, Maripelly uses “Stories” as a ritual to create community by inviting participants to drink chai and meet one another, Clark said.

The scale of these projects is very intimate, Peterson and Clark said. It is not so much about how wide-reaching the performances are, but rather the effects and memories they hope it will have on participants.

For me, story-time for grown-ups was the first time I was able to see my former art professor, Ross’s husband, since our class ended abruptly because of the COVID-19 pandemic in March 2020. These face-to-face reunions were a reminder of the creative and resilient ways communities have stuck together over the past 18 months.

“I think all of them [artists] are really thinking of them as a gift to their community,” Peterson said. “We've heard a lot of folks say, thank you for doing this, I had a new experience, or thank you for doing this because it's the first time I've met a stranger outside of my house—that kind of thing.”