CONNECT is a one night collision of avant-garde music, visual and performance arts, to celebrate the relationships of science, nature and creativity. It occurs in late August of each year. The event is a celebration of spontaneous, unregulated ingenuity, bordering on creative chaos. It’s a tremendous collision of creative thinkers and makers, an event that you have to witness and help create (by attending) to truly grasp. It promises to stretch the mind and delight the senses.
It provides a moving, unusual experience and interpretation of nature. It creates short term and long lasting dialogues and new community interactions between artists, scientists and other creative thinkers. CONNECT draws its participants and engaged audience from throughout the region, across all socio-economic and demographic lines. And finally, the avant-garde nature of CONNECT pushes everyone’s ideas forward.
Bernheim loosely coordinates the event, provides the time, location, conditions, and infrastructure services. What occurs during the four-hour event is spontaneous, inter-active, participatory, unexpected happenstances that only the participants and attendees will be equipped to truly fathom. No two Connects will likely ever be parallel. “What will be happening will evolve up to the last minute, probably even into the event itself,” Executive Director, Mark Wourms says happily.
The physical stage is a strikingly beautiful location, around the Lake Nevin at Bernheim. Attendees are encouraged to roam around the circumference of the lake. While doing so they may encounter, engage and/or frolic with artists, experimental musicians, naturalists, scientists, actors, dancers, sustainability advocates, mimes, lunatics, puppeteers, filmmakers, all engaged in some sort of endeavor, performance, installation, social interaction, and/or experiential science. What organizers anticipate is playful open-minded and full sensory engagement no matter what or whom one encounters. What happens is a creative collision; it is mind-expanding reverie.
The timing of the event is significant. For example in 2011, 6:21 p.m. to 10:21 p.m., exactly 2 hours prior to and after sun set. The rotation of the earth in and of itself provides the stage lighting and gives the event perimeters that are simultaneously primal and interplanetary.