On Saturday, August 24, Summer of Love and Community Connection will return for its third year to host a full day of performance and movement-based art workshops. This year’s gathering will take place at Aldo Leopold Park (2906 Traceway Dr) from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.
Summer of Love (SoL) is a multidisciplinary and multilingual festival hosted by Oiñ Productions, which is a collaboration between Air Craft Madison’s Stephanie Richards and Black Power Dance’s Francis Medrano.
“We want to showcase the richness of the arts in Madison,” Richards explained. “People will be exposed to something new that maybe they haven’t tried before, and we’ll have a day to just appreciate the richness and diversity of art in Madison.”
Featuring 22 teaching artists from across the city, SoL is focused on bringing education, experience, wellness, and entertainment to Madison community members. Festival goers can learn about and try their hand at a wide range of performance arts, including circus arts, street dance, juggling, Zumba, Bollywood and belly dancing, reggaeton, the Afro-Brazilian martial art capoeira, and much more.
There will also be musical performances by Peruvian singer Emy Castro and painting classes by Leopold Elementary School art teacher Sonya Valle.
As performance artists who’ve found their lifelong passions in movement-based practices, Medrano emphasized how being connected with our bodies also brings us closer to each other.
“I think the community needs more connection and [movement] because after the pandemic, everybody has so much fear about connecting with people,” he said. “And we think that art [plays] a good role in connecting with people and community.”
“I think in a lot of ways, we’re still recovering from a global pandemic, and a lot of healing can happen in and through the arts,” Richards added. “From a public health perspective, studies have shown that recreational sports [and] recreational physical activity throughout the lifespan is super important for individual wellbeing and community wellbeing.”
Medrano and Richards were particularly intentional about hosting SoL in Madison Parks, and the festival has taken place at a different park each year.
“Public spaces like public parks are for accessibility,” Richards said. “It’s a space that’s open and free, and that’s what’s important to us—that it’s accessible and free to the community. We don’t want cost to be a barrier.”
The idea to host the festival outdoors came from Medrano’s experience of trying to teach dance during the pandemic in Peru. When the pandemic hit, he had been teaching at his own studio for more than two decades, but the country’s strict lockdown policies made it impossible to gather in indoor spaces.
“You didn’t have studios for dancing. Everything [was] closed,” he shared. “You [couldn’t] make anything inside.”
Breaking down these accessibility barriers also serves another purpose: to reach as diverse a population of Madison as possible. Medrano notes that even as the city’s Latinx community continues to grow, this increase in numbers doesn’t necessarily correlate with increased community involvement.
“These people don’t connect so much with the Madison community because [they’re working all the time],” Medrano said.
He continued: “We want to introduce the Madison community to the Latin community and share culture, folklore, and ancestral [knowledge]. Together we can learn, connect, and create [with one] another and be in better community with more openness, more understanding, and more empathy.”
As Summer of Love continues to grow and make its way around the city, Richards also hopes to tap into artists residing in host neighborhoods to create a sense of familiarity for attendees.
“If there’s artists out there who are interested in being a part of the project [in the future], reach out to us,” Richards said. “We know that there’s a richness of the arts and in every community.”
Those interested in day-of volunteering at the Summer of Love festival, you can contact Richards and Medrano at [email protected].
