Column: Fulldome Film Festival underway, Macon-Mercer Symphony Orchestra opens season
Macon’s October Fulldome Film Festival is underway at the Museum of Arts and Sciences and the Macon-Mercer Symphony Orchestra opens its 2023-24 season Monday at the Grand Opera House.
For the sixth year, the Fulldome Festival is showing the best national and international immersive films created for dome-based projection environments such as the museum’s Mark Smith Planetarium. Usually set alongside the Macon Film Festival in August, fulldome showings were postponed due to a projector breakdown now repaired.
The Museum of Arts and Sciences is an international frontrunner in fulldome films, particularly in helping promote the expansion of fulldome from being strictly science, education and travelogue-based into the arena of art and narrative films.
This year, 34 short and long works from 18 countries are being shown, including ones created for children, families and adults.
A highlight is a fulldome feature celebrating the 50th anniversary of Pink Floyd’s “The Dark Side of the Moon.” The album’s 42 minutes of music in surround sound is set against views of the solar system and cosmic realms created with the band’s approval.
Don’t worry that it’s already shown once for the festival’s Thursday opening, you can see it at a second showing on Saturday at 4 p.m. when it closes the festival. Several of Thursday’s other films are being repeated, like the Art Immersive Showcase at 3 p.m. Saturday which gives an overview of the more artful, explorative side of fulldome films.
Earlier Saturday, at 11 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. show times, there are family-oriented presentations. Beginning at 11 a.m. today, a variety of fulldome films are scheduled ending with the X-Treme Art Immersive film block at 4 p.m. It features boundary-pushing artistic content.
Film schedules and information are at masmacon.org and maconfilmfestival.com.
As for ticketing, all October fulldome screenings are free for Museum of Arts and Sciences members, free for pass holders to the August 2023 Macon Film Festival, and included with regular admission to the museum.
“From vibrantly animated films for kids and cutting-edge space and science experiences to the world’s most extreme, boundary-pushing artistic content, this year’s fulldome festival has it all,” said Susan Welsh, executive director at the museum and creative force behind bringing fulldome to Macon at the planetarium.
While having the fulldome festival apart from the Macon Film Festival allows more time to see fulldome films, there’s a definite downside.
“Having them simultaneously allows traditional filmmakers here for the Macon festival the opportunity to see fulldome and become interested in creating artistic and narrative content for it,” Welsh said. “We’ve had workshops introducing them to fulldome and letting them meet some of fulldome’s current creators.”
Welsh said it works. For instance, she said Ryan Moore brought a traditional documentary to the Macon festival one year, saw what was happening with fulldome and determined to make his next work in that style. The result was “Indirect Actions,” an award-winning documentary and the first feature-length, fulldome narrative film. He brought it to Macon’s fulldome festival where it was a winner. Moore has since become involved in promoting fulldome festivals internationally.
“That’s what we want to see,” Welsh said. “Typically, fulldome festivals are paired with science festivals. We love that but want fulldome to expand.”
Does it really matter to international fulldome creators that they can send their work to a festival at a community museum in Macon, Ga.?
Artist and fulldome filmmaker Asya Dragoon of Moscow says yes, it does. Her short film, “Cycloaddition,” has its world premiere today at the festival as the first in line to show during the seven-film Art Immersive Shorts film block beginning at 2 p.m.
Dragoon’s previous, longer entry in 2021, “Beautiful Baby Tilapia,” was an award winner.
“For me, the Macon Fulldome Festival is special because it encourages filmmakers to be free and express themselves in different ways and forms,” Dragoon told me in an email. “When I’m sending my fulldome movies to the Macon fest I have a feeling I’ll be understood.”
“Cycloaddition” was created by Dragoon with musician Ivan Krylov – known as Minor Second Inc. – as a music video based on science, music and abstract art to depict the stages of cycloaddition, a chemical reaction.
“’Minor Second Inc. is a chemist by education,” Dragoon said. “That’s why he dedicated his music to the chemical reaction. Together we discussed the scenario and I created a visual interpretation of this reaction. I call it a sci-art visual experiment but at the same time, we tried to be scientifically correct when showing the molecules and reaction stages.”
From educational and entertaining kid’s films to far-reaching experimental works and the “Dark Side of the Moon” tribute, the festival offers so much that shouldn’t missed.
When curtains rise on the Macon-Mercer Symphony Monday at 7:30 p.m. at the Grand Opera House, Macon native – now internationally in demand conductor – Roderick Cox will be at the helm.
The evening’s program features Beethoven’s Symphony No. 3 “Eroica” and a unique presentation of Aaron Copland’s “Appalachian Spring” overlain with a staged documentary play written by Andrew Silver commemorating Macon’s bicentennial.
Cox began 2023 conducting the Philadelphia Orchestra, LA Philharmonic and Juilliard Symphony Orchestra and comes to the stage Monday direct from performances with the Orchestre Symphonique de Montreal. He leaves for more dates in Canada then England, France and Italy.
It’s the second time he’s conducted the Macon-Mercer Symphony, opening the second season last year and now this, the orchestra’s third season.
With a demanding schedule conducting orchestras and operas and a variety of musical works across the world, he’d no doubt echo what he told me on a previous trip here when a documentary about him, “Conducting Life,” was featured at the 2022 Macon Film Festival.
“You always have to be growing,” he told me. “All the time. When you think you know a piece, there’s always something left to learn. It’s interesting to put down a score I’ve been studying for years and then go back and find new answers to questions about how it should sound. It’s part of what makes this exciting.”
Highlighting Macon’s 200th year, a dramatic work by Silver titled “Macon Portrait” will be performed. Silver is the Page Morton Hunter Professor of English at Mercer University and to create “Macon Portrait” he interviewed and compiled the words of 10 or so Maconites who will speak their own parts on Monday.
“I was asked to create some kind of narrative to accompany ‘Appalachian Spring,’” he said. “I didn’t want it to be just my voice so I talked to people reflecting many voices in the dynamic and diverse community we live in. I created a narrative collage from those interviews that speaks of Macon’s traumas and triumphs and the legacy we share and future before us. The text works through darkness to redemption and reconciliation.”
As opposed to just throwing words in front of Copland’s music, Silver said he listened again and again to “Appalachian Spring” then fit words to the rhythm of the music.
“I was surprised by the depth of feeling the words have when spoken against the music,” Silver said. “There are particulars that make the piece very much about Macon but I think there is a universal quality as well. When we focus on the picture we’re given in the news of being so divided it’s hard to remember we’ve made a lot of progress and are capable of more.
“When we look on a community or neighborhood level, we see people can be good to each other. I see that so often in Macon now. We have work to do but when we don’t let ideological differences and polarizations keep us from talking and working together we get a very hopeful picture.”
More information on the concert and season ahead is at mcduffie.mercer.edu/symphony. Links to tickets are there and the Grand box office is at (478) 301-5470. Single concert tickets range from $25 to $35 and students are admitted free with valid ID.
Contact writer Michael W. Pannell at mwpannell@gmail.com.
