Collaborative Arts
Atlas's Intersections Festival returns for more cross-cultural mixing
Outbursts from the audience can often derail a performance. However, when one audience member stood up during a concert last year featuring soloists from the Gay Men’s Chorus, her words were anything but disruptive.
“This is my first time to hear the Gay Men’s Chorus of Washington,” Mary Hall Surface recalls her saying. “In fact, it’s my first time to come to any performance by a gay organization. And I just want to tell you, I’ve had a great time.”
How do you respond to such praise? By singing of course. “The guys on the stage just rose to their feet and sang the song from the musical Ragtime, ‘Let Them Hear You,'” says Surface. “I tell you, it was intense. It was just fabulous.”
Surface is hoping for similar audience reactions in the coming weeks, when the Atlas Performing Arts Center in the H Street Corridor once again plays host to Intersections: A New America Arts Festival. She started the festival in 2010 as a way to encourage more collaboration across genres in the performing arts, as well as more interactions across the board, among performers and audiences. Each year, it attracts roughly 9,000 people and sees 700 performers throughout the Atlas complex.
“I think we have deepened our commitment to creating a unique meeting place for artists and audiences,” says Surface, who notes that audience interaction is encouraged at every performance. In addition to returning soloists from the Gay Men’s Chorus, another performance that Surface singles out is a theatrical concert paying tribute to D.C.’s role in the bossa nova music craze of the 1960s. This Saturday, Feb. 21, actors and the internationally known jazz trio Veronneau will recreate and play through the music heard on Charlie Byrd’s 1962 Jazz Samba, heralded as the only jazz album to reach No. 1 on the Billboard pop chart — and recorded at D.C.’s All Souls Unitarian Church.
“Intersections is a celebratory event,” Surface says. Everything grows out of a sense of possibility, of how the arts can be a place where we grow toward one another.”
Intersections starts Friday, Feb. 20, and runs weekends to March 7, at the Atlas Performing Arts Center, 1333 H St. NE. Ticket prices and passes vary. Call 202-399-7993 or visit atlasarts.org.
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