It is 8:30am on Governors Island and silence hangs in the air. Across the sun-dappled harbor, the skyline of Manhattan's financial district looms sharp and sleek. To the southwest, the Statue of Liberty smiles benevolently upon a passing Staten Island ferry, while Ellis Island's Main Building sits confidently on the western horizon.
Suddenly, a garbled voice on the radio crackles through the air. I turn to see a fleet of blue bicycles rounding the corner. They pull up beside me and I am greeted with wide smiles and robust complexions framing sparkling blue eyes and large mustaches. The Dutch have arrived.
372 years after the Governor of New Netherlands purchased "Nutten Island," the Dutch appellation for what would later become Governors Island, the Dutch are back in full force, with some eclectic international influence to boot.
Throughout this month, Governors Island plays host to the Dutch government-sponsored New Island Festival, a two-week art extravaganza featuring provocative theater, installation, and music events. It exists as the largest installment of the city-wide NY400 celebration, which commemorates the 400th anniversary of Henry Hudson's landing in the New York harbor.
It is also what brings our motley international crew to the island on this particular day. Consisting of regulation-oriented American technicians and whimsically-minded Dutch producers, the festival team strikes a delicate balance between pragmatism and ebullience.
And both are essential here. The Governors Island Preservation and Education Commission, known as GIPEC, imposes stringent regulations on island-based activities in the spirit of protecting the landmarked historic site and ensuring the safety of workers and public whose activities surround its many condemned structures. Producing any event on the island, public or private, requires a true feat of navigation through the system of American governmental bureaucracy, and the technical team has managed to steer the festival through these regulations intact. The Dutch, for their part, contribute a sense of boundless vision required to push plans forward and avoid getting mired in detail.
After checking in with the production team, I head over to Colonel's Row to see how our group's installations are progressing. Originally built to house military families, these houses have been left derelict for some years and exist in a state of controlled dilapidation. Paint curls off the ceilings, baseboards twist with water damage, and sections of weathered wall peel back to expose the layers of their construction. The overall effect stirs the romantic imagination and invites exploration into themes of history, displacement, and decay.
Yet here, they serve a renewed purpose. In the spirit of cross-cultural friendship embodied in the NY400 celebration, the festival's artistic producer, Joop Mulder, has called upon The Watermill Center, an international laboratory for performance based on the east end of Long Island, to curate a series of installations in four of these houses. Each of four artist groups were given an empty house in which to further develop the work conceptualized during their last-season's residencies at Watermill. As the coordinator for these installations, I have had the unique pleasure of seeing the projects evolve within the spaces.
The result is a diverse range of interpretation and perspective. The instinct of some groups is to fill the house completely. Implied Violence, the ambitious young group from Seattle, swathes the floors in rich red carpet to stage an epic durational work involving live leeches and a dress made entirely of speakers and wires. Others let the spaces speak for themselves. C. Ryder Cooley, a performance artist from Troy, draws upon the history of the island as a military prison to explore metaphors of confinement and flight.
The houses also become vehicles through which the artists can control their interactions with the outside world. Colombia-born Maria Jose Arjona uses the space as a peaceful haven within the chaos of the festival to explore questions of displacement and transference, while the Berlin-based HERD group energizes the public to engage in whimsical pop horror scenes.
Nick Paumgarten's recent article in The New Yorker details the quandary of what to do with Governors Island. Perhaps the kind of artistic play that the New Island Festival brings can encourage further dialogue about how we develop such open space among urban environments. To what extent can the development of public space leave room for the flexibility required for such play, and how can we further encourage this kind of participation?
Festivals like these also gather communities together. The Watermill Center's involvement in the New Island Festival brings international perspective and celebrates local history, while giving emerging artists a platform to show their work. The cross-cultural dialogue embodied in the spirit of the festival lives on at Watermill, and here engages the city in celebrating true creative community. In these bleak times, what could be fresher for New York?