With one successful Ybor City arts festival under his belt and another new one arriving this week, you could call David Audet the historic district's "festival guy."
Since 2003, he has served as artistic director of the Ybor Festival of the Moving Image, a four-day film, video, and performance extravaganza sponsored by Hillsborough Community College and scheduled to celebrate its sixth anniversary next year. Before that, he codirected USF's Chinsegut Film and Video Festival in the early 1980s, after graduating from the school's film and photography program. And from the late '70s to the early '90s, Audet worked with a cadre of like-minded creative folks to spearhead the Artists and Writers Balls, elaborate parties with a collaborative art component held in Ybor's former social clubs.
With next to nothing in terms of financial resources, the Artists and Writers group somehow always managed to decorate a ballroom, get their hands on some beer and draw hundreds (if not thousands) of people, from artists to curious passersby, into a free-for-all of costumed revelry.
To this day, Audet remains a devout practitioner of the art-on-a-dime philosophy of the Artists and Writers group. The person who inspired their shenanigans, Audet says, was photographer Bud Lee, whom he met as a USF student. Audet quickly fell under the spell of charismatic Lee, a former Life Photographer of the Year (and Weekly Planet/Creative Loafing mainstay) who, with his wife Peggy, called a storefront on Ybor's Seventh Avenue home until their children began to arrive. (Then Davis Islands and eventually Plant City seemed like a better environment.) In 2003, Lee suffered a debilitating stroke; he now lives in a convalescent home in Plant City.
This weekend's Deep Carnivale marks Audet's latest attempt to carry on the Bud Lee creative legacy — and to provide a lure for visitors to the historic district other than the bars and nightclubs that have overtaken it in the past 15 years. (The Ybor City Development Corporation provided seed money for the event, and Hillsborough Community College agreed to sponsor it.)
The daylong fest is all about words — spoken, sung and incorporated into art projects by a diverse group of poets, writers, singer/songwriters and visual artists from all over the Bay area. Well-known authors Enid Shomer (Tourist Season) and Ferdie Pacheco will be on hand, as will acclaimed poets Sylvia Curbelo and Tampa poet laureate James Tokley.
With three stages split between the Cuban Club and HCC's Ybor campus, Audet expects to pack a full 24 hours' worth of performance into eight hours on Saturday — not counting the efforts of any impromptu orators who take to the streets. The Cuban Club's indoor stage will be reserved for performers whose subject matter may not be suitable for the festival's youngest attendees; otherwise, the event aims to be family-friendly.
An area on the HCC patio, across from the Cuban Club and a separate stage, will be designated for kid-friendly activities: storytelling, crafts involving words and reading, and music. Around the corner on Ninth Avenue, the arches of the El Pasaje arcade will serve as the site of a 20-artist collaborative work called "Exquisite Corpse," in which each artist writes (and depicts visually) a poetic stanza based on the last line of the poem written by the previous artist. Vendors of new and used books are scheduled to line 14th Street.
For help with the Exquisite Corpse project, Audet has enlisted 26-year-old Charlotte Lee, Bud and Peggy Lee's youngest child. She's the kind of person who, like her dad, "can take a pile of shit and turn it into art," Audet explains.
I visited Charlotte Lee in Aripeka, a small waterfront town in Pasco County where the recent University of Georgia grad works in a professional artist's studio. Armed with the enigmatic line of poetry bequeathed to her by another artist, Charlotte set about creating her portion of the Exquisite Corpse, while I noted that her method essentially boils down to following the guidelines below.
• Rule No. 1: Whenever possible, knock back some fried fish and beers at a local watering hole before getting started. Scope out the bikes (mainly Harleys) in the parking lot, and head home when it gets good and late.
• Rule No. 2: Whenever possible, use recycled and found materials. (In other words, take a pile of shit, and turn it into art.) Although Lee was too young to attend many of the Artists and Writers Balls — she did serve as a day-after clean-up helper — she recalls the low-budget decorations with glee. Inside a place like the Cuban Club, where the Balls were held at night, transforming a canopy of torn bed sheets into something magical with the right lighting was easy. In the daylight of Deep Carnivale, people will have the opportunity to examine her project up close, so bed sheets are out. Instead, she opts for some russet-colored silk from the collection of her mother, a public school art teacher and craft maven.
• Rule No. 3: Always let people give you stuff that might become fodder for an art project; in turn, always offer goodies from your stash to other artists in need. Charlotte remembers that dumpster-diving was among her father's champion skills. Classes of USF sculpture students would often arrive at the Lee house to raid a backyard pile of found objects. In her Aripeka studio, a gutted house with flood damage that she spent weeks cleaning, a cluster of shelves holds borrowed buckets, half-empty cans of spray paint, and tubs full of letter and number stamps donated by her mother. She also keeps handy every size screwdriver known to man.
• Rule No. 4: You won't know until you try. Conceptual planning is great, but a project in the vein of the Artists and Writers group is about action. With a combination of leftover house paint and spray paint, Charlotte has already completed some test runs of painting script on the surface of the silk. Which brings me to:
• Rule No. 5: Keep both the materials and the process quick, dirty and cheap. Though she's no stranger to using oils and acrylics in her "fine art" projects, this endeavor is about ingenuity and invention.
We decide — for the moment, at least — that a combination of white latex paint and bronze spray paint on the silk makes the letters of her poem stand out best.
Lee, who grew up in an environment saturated with visual art, finds the poetry-writing aspect of the project the hardest. Or maybe it's just indecision that drives her to keep changing the two verses in her poem that aren't already fixed. She received the line "I watched the shadows sashay by" from the artist before her; the line she handed off to the next artist was "I could feel it beating through the floor." Between those two images, she alternately proposes a paean to heartache and a meditation on lightning storms. Exhausted by now, we decide that Charlotte will decide later, probably much closer to the event.
• Rule No. 6: Finish the project approximately five minutes before show time. Working ahead kills the adrenaline rush.
By the way, I'll also be at Deep Carnivale, reading a short story I've written. Don't be a stranger — come say hi.
This article appears in Aug 29 – Sep 4, 2007.