Forget New York City: For three days, C.W. Post’s Tilles Center will be the area’s creative mecca thanks to Experience Long Island 2009. This festival runs from Sept. 25-27 and is the brainchild of The Artists Group, a five-year-old arts coalition spearheaded by Debra Kasimakis and Robert Goida, the longtime production manager of Tilles Center. Inspired by the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, this showcase features 40 artists appearing in 11 different performance spaces whose expressionism spans a multitude of disciplines including dance, music, multimedia, theater, sculpting and painting. With Goida’s five-o’clock shadow and shaggy gray head of hair, it’s easy to see the after-affects of all that’s gone into this endeavor, although his crooked grin assures that it’s all a labor of love.
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Even though there are around 200 of these Fringe Festivals held around the world annually, this is the first one to actually be staged on Long Island. Legal reasons prevent the use of the term “Fringe Festival” in connection with Experience Long Island 2009, yet Goida and Kasimakis borrowed some of its traditional methods in pulling off this creative coup. “There is no selection process. If you want to perform, you’re allowed to perform. So we tried to stick to that method. Anybody who applied to be in the Festival, we found a space for. So the performers we have all applied directly. No one was rejected,” Goida explains. “The only restriction was of a deadline nature, with our cutoff date being at the beginning of January so that we could start moving forward with all this at some point. But ultimately, this is about trying to get as many people together in as many varieties of performance as possible.”
Visitors will get to enjoy their fill of a myriad of performers. Fans of dance can partake of five different dance troupes including Mad Cap Dance. Theater buffs have their choice of a reading of the Off-Broadway show Levittown by the original cast at the Great Hall or the chance to hear comedian/poet/playwright Slash Coleman do his show, The Neon Man and Me, a production that’s already aired on PBS. In addition to appearances by the past and current poets laureate of Nassau and Suffolk County, there’ll be a glass-blower and plenty of music provided by artists ranging from Long Beach guitarist Steve Adelson, a master of the Chapman Stick, to ethereal pianist singer-songwriter Eden White, to local favorites The Suck It Easy Band. And while Coleman is a Virginia native, the majority of the participants are from Long Island, something that is a big part of what The Artist Group represents.
“Part of what The Artist Group’s mission is to have Long Island as a cultural center. The people who create and are creative are here and don’t need to feel bad because we’re not in Manhattan and that we can stand on equal ground with anything that is there,” Goida says. “The goal of this is to show the general community that you don’t have to go into Manhattan to see quality entertainment. Quality entertainment is in your backyard.”
The Artist Group’s commitment to Long Island also includes a long-range goal of eventually building a centralized, living museum not unlike Lincoln Center, where the arts can thrive: a place where patrons can go see artists’ work, whether they’re painters, dancers or musicians, that also serves as a space for these people to practice their craft. While Goida and Kasimakis have made inquiries into a number of proposed sites including the Robbins Lane property in Syosset and Charles Wang’s Lighthouse Project, rejection has been the only result. For now, the idea is that Experience Long Island ends up representing the potential behind this dream. Goida is nothing if not hopeful. “We’re hoping to generate interest and we’ve already talked to Elliott Sroka, who’s the director of Tilles Center, and we have a potential weekend booked out for next year’s season to attempt to do this. We’re hoping to generate interest, and being this is the first time anything like this has been done, we’re hoping for the best.”
Experience Long Island will be held from Friday, Sept. 25 through Sunday, Sept. 27.
For more information and scheduled performance times, please visit www.tillescenter.com or call 516-299-3100.
