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sinceileftyoublog · 4 years ago

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Pygmalion Festival Preview: 9/24-9/26

BY JORDAN MAINZER

When it became clear in May that the beloved Champaign-Urbana festival Pygmalion wasn’t going to happen regularly, founder Seth Fein refused to simply do nothing. He also refused to settle for the same nostalgic, corporate-sponsored bullshit that other festivals have decided to do, usually a combination of “archival” material discoverable through a YouTube search and low-quality acoustic performances from basements. Instead, Fein took what he could from the more unusual aspects of the planned Pygmalion lineup and did what would have been unthinkable a year ago: curate a virtual festival with no live music. A mixture of timely roundtable discussions, podcasts, table readings, a hackathon, a virtual escape room, and a Zoom version of the festival’s Human Library (“checking out” a person to tell you a story), the pay-what-you-want festival will be unlike any other not only in Pygmalion’s history but in the history of streamed entertainment so far. The action kicks off today at 4 PM CST and runs through Saturday at midnight.

I spoke with Fein over the phone earlier this month to talk about this year’s festival: how it came to be, curating a socially conscious, diverse lineup, what he’s looking forward to, and the sustainability of the virtual festival model. Highlights for the weekend NOT mentioned in our conversation below include Dan Savage discussing the documentary film Jimmy in Saigon, Headlines We Would Have Written featuring writers from the newly-formed sports blog Defector, and as-yet-announced material with the likes of Japanese Breakfast’s Michelle Zauner and Algiers’ Franklin James Fisher. Read on, catch the fest, and if you can, donate to the fest, with proceeds going to charities like UNCF and NIVA.

Since I Left You: At what point did you decide to go the route you did with Pygmalion?

Seth Fein: I’d say the middle of May is when my partner Patrick [Singer] and I had enough discussions with sponsors and enough discussions with people in our creative space where we were like, “You know what? I think we should do something.” I’m just not good at doing nothing. I don’t do well with idle time at all. Because it became apparent that our sponsors--not all, but most--were willing to continue to support what we do, we were like, “Let’s do it! Let’s use this as a laboratory to experiment to see what we can create inside of this fucked up moment.” It was pretty inspiring. It’s ironic for me personally because we’ve always resisted doing an online streaming component of Pygmalion. I’m kind of a purist, partially because of my age, partially because of my historical pedigree as a performer in a band. I never wanted to do streaming anything. Every year, we’d just reject companies that would come to us offering to set up cameras and sell tickets all over the world. They’d be like, “It’s no cost to you, you’re just gonna make money!” I’d be like, “Nah. I don’t wanna do that.” I kind of want to preserve the idea of the moment. When you’re there for a show, you want to be able to think back and say, “I was at that show! I was with people and had a human moment.”

The pandemic has forced me out of that space, and I’m glad. I think that as we get older, we become stuck in particular identities, and nobody is immune to that. Now, I have friends in L.A. and in Tokyo who are like, “I can’t wait!” They get to be a part of it. My best friend from 1st grade is super excited about the programming, and he lives in Tokyo. He’d never in a million years be able to come to Pygmalion. This year he gets to be a part of it, so that’s pretty exciting.

SILY: You’re also finding a way to stand out among the livestreams. There are zero traditional livestreamed performances in this fest. How did you come up with the components of the fest this year?

SF: A combination of recognizing that I already had stream fatigue and Zoom fatigue, even in the middle of May. In order for this to be a compelling program, we were gonna have to create new content you wouldn’t be able to Google search, where you can be like, “Okay, I wanna see this band perform these songs,” which generally you can do, by and large. Almost every band with any amount of popularity has something you can watch, whether that’s free or you can purchase it. It’s available to you. We didn’t want to replicate anything that was available.

The other thing that was different from getting baked, staying up late, wondering about my life, envisioning a new future, I really just felt like as a promoter, I’m always very conscientious about what my role is in an artist’s professional engagement. How and why am I earning my percentage of the money? In a traditional sense, there are a lot of reasons: setting up personnel to create the show, hiring the correct sound engineer to be able to run a professional show. There is value in a promoter. But in this particular moment, I’m not so sure I’m needed for a band who is struggling to do a streaming set. They can do that themselves and retain 100% of those profits, and I want them to. If we’re gonna come to artists, authors, or speakers, we’re going to want to present something curated that’s unique and interesting and an opportunity for them to do something they haven’t otherwise thought of. That’s where the programming is coming from: What can we do as promoters to create space for new and unique content that fans and the audience will be interested in?

SILY: What percentage of people taking part in this were on the original planned lineup for this year?

SF: Not a ton. When COVID struck, we weren’t that deep, although what we had was awesome. [laughs] We were in such a good position. We’ve been doing this for quite a long time--it’s one of the oldest events in the country of this kind. Since 2005. Some years are better than others. Some years you just get lucky. It’s never been bad, but some years don’t hit. This year was gonna be fucking great. The artists we had confirmed for live music, we tried to incorporate them in some sort of meaningful way. The one we retained and were able to pivot on was working with the cast of Napoleon Dynamite [for a table reading], which we thought was a fun event we could incorporate in the livestream. We love the movie, we think it’s a wonderful anti-hero tale that speaks to a lot of Middle America. We were able to pivot with them pretty quickly and get them to agree to do a virtual thing. Outside of that, we had to reconstruct the entire thing: the programming, the identity. It actually surprisingly took a lot more work than we thought it was going to. But again: idle time, no good.

SILY: You decided the direction to take in May. Later that month, there were protests surrounding the murder of George Floyd and an awakening among people who weren’t really paying attention before to structural racism. A lot of that conscientiousness seems to be reflected in the programming. To what extent were you reactive to the moment in planning the fest?

SF: We’ve been pretty thoughtful about how we’re programming for a number of years now. If you go back and look at the scope of the programming over the course of 15 years, you’ll see it start to shift around 2015, 2016 in particular, and then a better and more diverse direction in 2017. Part of the problem I personally had as the founder and programmer of Pygmalion early on is I’ve always been a really big believer in presenting what you know and love so that you’re not caught trying to be a poser. I don’t know that I’m always the best person to present hip hop, jazz, or country music. I do like that music, but I was always a British rock and indie rock kid. My favorite bands are XTC and Tears For Fears, Pink Floyd, INXS...Peter Gabriel, Phil Collins. That’s what I was into. The music my bands played reflected those, and when I became a promoter, I was interested in promoting that type of music. I was passionate about it, and I wanted to share that with people.

At some point, you have to stop thinking of yourself and start thinking about your audience. That’s a growing problem, and it’s painful to recognize you haven’t done right by what you should have been doing. You take it, and instead of pouting about it, you change your program. We’ve been doing that pretty significantly over the past 3-4 years. [Independent of] the re-inspired Black Lives Matters movement, as sad as the circumstances surrounding it are, we were always going to be booking a diverse lineup. But it’s a stark reminder. You hate for these things to be on display because somebody’s life was lost and communities were broken. It feels helpless. How is this still fucking happening? What is stopping people from affecting change? There are answers to that, individually, personally inside of our company.

Now, we feel pretty enlightened that our festival has promoters inside of a community like Champaign-Urbana, or anywhere, to create a diverse and broad array of art. That’s my and Patrick’s personal take. You become a better listener when you start pushing what people want to see instead of what you’re passionate about promoting. That’s part of the growing process, and I’m grateful for anybody who’s ever challenged me in the past to be like, “Yo. These bands are cool, but it’s too fucking white!” You listen, and you either pay attention and respond or are stuck in a cyclical act of denial, and I didn’t want to be in that place.

SILY: What’s cool about the program is that there are things that have existed in the livestream format before that people are familiar with--roundtable discussions, talks, readings--but there are a few things that jump out as unique, like the virtual escape room with Sudan Archives.

SF: It’s still being built. One of the things we wanted to do was create new content and be playful with our programming. How can we be presenters and offer our audience an opportunity to engage and interact in a way they wouldn’t normally do? We have a lot of talented people in Champaign-Urbana, despite being a small city, due to the University of Illinois being here. Two people [we know] who were videographers and also had jobs at the University of Illinois, creative people, said, “Fuck it,” quit their jobs, and became escape room designers. Their escape rooms are just phenomenal. They’re mind-bending. I suck at this stuff. Every time I go, I go with people far smarter than me because I’d lose every time. But I’m always amazed by all these intricate ways they’ve been able to build in these puzzle pieces. It’s crazy!

We approached [the escape room designers]. We receive a grant from a public arts program for the festival, and traditionally, you have to spend that money on artists and production inside downtown Urbana in order to stimulate the economy. This year with the pandemic, we’re not doing anything live because we fundamentally don’t believe we’re in the position to be doing that. In discussion with the commission, we asked, “How can we spend money on a virtual event but still honor the spirit of the agreement?” We proposed the idea that we would hire a local downtown Urbana business to work with us, and [the commission] thought it was a great idea. [The escape room designers] are able to do some live escape rooms, but it’s truncated, so they accepted our proposal.

Our idea was then: How do we incorporate a music element or an author or someone with a significant pedigree to be part of the game? I had been speaking with my friend Ali Hedrick, who is an amazing agent who has been doing it for 25 years, and she proposed Sudan Archives, who I was familiar with and really liked. The game designers incorporated her music and her instrument, the violin, into the game. While I can’t speak to the specifics yet, because I haven’t played the game, I have a lot of faith in the two of them as creators, and I expect it to be really unique and engaging. It’ll be a situation where 6 people play on Zoom on teams that are randomly put together, so you’re not friends with everyone. You kind of have to have a new experience and work together with people you may not know. There will be a human avatar that will do the escape room for you in these different locations. You’ll be instructing them what to do.

One of the things I’ve been having to come to terms with is that people who are behaving properly, which is to say that you’re not spreading the virus, you’re doing a lot of staying at home and engaging with people through your computers and your phones. The way we’re entertained is different right now, and it will forever be different. This just accelerates where we were going. Now, we have to find a new space for artistic output to enjoy our lives. This is something that people already into this type of stuff will enjoy. The fact that it’s free will make it more enjoyable. The fact that we have sponsorship to pay for the production of this game to be able to offer to it for people for no cost is very exciting, and you hope that people who are of enough means see that it’s a free thing and donate to the charities we’re hoping to raise money for.

SILY: As much as something like a virtual festival is the logical accelerated next step, it’s not a replacement or designed to replace the live festival experience. That said, The Human Library intrigued me. After a Guided By Voices livestream earlier this year, my girlfriend and I were calling out into the Zoom void to see if anybody random wanted to hang out virtually. The Human Library seems to be a nice replacement for what we were looking for, which is randomly bumping into someone you don’t know at a show or festival and hitting it off with them.

SF: The Human Library is such a unique project. We’ve done it for 5-6 years now and have of course done it live in the past. We work with the University of Illinois University Library, who is the local partner. If you’ve ever done it, you’re essentially checking out a book, but the book is a human being. The human being sits down with another human being, and they tell you a story. You can ask questions. Some are choose your own adventure, some are a little more direct, but you walk away with a story. It’s remarkably engaging. There are things that don’t lend themselves well to the virtual space at all, and there are things that do. I think that this is one of the things that does. If I was to tell you a story, we could jump on Zoom together, and provided you weren’t clicking around the internet while I’m talking, we could focus on our Zoom conversation. It’s gonna be a pretty intimate discussion. It’s just me and you with headphones on, looking at each other, through the screen. It provides a lot of opportunities for intimacy and human connection. When we first started analyzing, “What can we take from what we’ve done in the past and try to create a new space for it in the virtual realm?” that was a no-brainer. In the end, people have been telling each other a lot of stories over Zoom in the pandemic era. This is just an extension of that.

SILY: Is there something in the program you’re most excited for?

SF: Quite a bit. I’m a huge fan of Ilana Glazer. I think Broad City is the best sitcom of the last decade. I think what she’s doing with civic engagement right now is important. We were really grateful for the opportunity to book and confirm here and have her do a Generator, where she speaks with people inside of politics to inspire people to not sit this one out. This is a pretty important election. I’m pretty excited to have her present inside the work we’re doing. I’m also excited with what we’re doing with Worst Show Ever, which is gonna be two episodes, 7 guests, and a moderator, my new friend Nabil Ayers, who is a journalist and U.S. label manager at 4AD. He really liked the idea, and the two of us have been working on this for a couple months now and finally have our 7-person collection of artists, authors, and musicians to tell each other about the worst show [they’ve ever played]. We just got done this week doing a pre-filming interview with each of them, and there are some great stories. It’ll be fun to watch them interact and engage. I’m excited to see how that works out. I’m also very excited about the Minecraft Open Pit thing. I don’t play it, but my nephews do, and I know enough that it reminds me of video games from my childhood. They’re going to build an upside-down version of our arena in Champaign-Urbana, Assembly Hall, which is a remarkable piece of architecture that was designed by Max Abramovitz, who is a University of Illinois graduate but one of the more well-known architects of the 20th century. That will be fun to see the virtual space come together.

SILY: To what extent do you see this virtual festival as a sustainable model going forward, whether instead of or in conjunction with in-person festivals?

SF: I don’t totally know. I think eventually, the digital realm will supplant the live experience. I don’t know that I’m going to live to see it totally, but I definitely think there’s going to be a hybridization, and I definitely think there will be room for both. The idea that you live in a different part of a country or different part of the world and there’s something you want to see but can’t afford to get there to see it, I think that has quite a bit of potential. But I don’t see them as the same thing. I think it’s like how you eat food. You can eat this or that, it’s the same item, but it’s done in a different way and served in a different space. I think there will be room for both.

For us, personally, I’m going to always default to doing live events because I believe in the power of being together and having shared experiences. I think it’s the only way we find commonalities. Humans are social creatures. Even the most introverted person in the world generally needs people--just not a lot. I think there will always be innovation that provides opportunity for artists and presenters to try to create something out of nothing. The augmented and virtual reality will continue to develop and become more commonplace and be a piece of the market that’s not so foreign to most people. I think that will be accelerated even further. The idea of an iPod used to be so crazy. Within a few years, everybody had music on their phones. That’ll happen too with virtual reality as technology becomes more affordable and ubiquitous. I think there will be a lot of movement once that becomes more common, whereas right now, looking into a two-dimensional stream and watching a concert is one thing. Putting on virtual or augmented reality equipment and stepping inside a virtual space is probably a much more compelling and sensational opportunity for a person. My experiences with virtual reality have been mesmerizing, and we’re certainly fairly new as to where that goes. It could go in a lot of different directions. There will be room for people to capitalize in it.

I’m always hungry to get back into live rock and hip hop on stage and letting people dance, hopefully finding themselves in trouble, but not too much trouble, if you know what I mean.

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