Dusk-to-dawn arts festival Northern Spark returns to St. Paul this weekend

Frederick Melo, Pioneer Press
·5 min read

What does the world need now? From a vampire club dance party to a shadow puppet drive-in where you control the puppets and music, the answer, or at least a promising start, rolls out around 9 p.m. Saturday up and down University Avenue in St. Paul, and keeps rolling until 5:30 a.m.

Northern Spark, the annual interactive arts festival, returns to its programmatic roots this weekend as a one-night, dusk-to-dawn celebration, with scheduled indoor and outdoor events throughout the Rondo, Frogtown, Little Mekong and downtown neighborhoods. The late-night happenings will be followed by a Native-themed closing water ceremony — the first closing ceremony since 2017 — that will run from 2 a.m. to 5:30 a.m. Sunday on Raspberry Island in the Mississippi River, just south of downtown St. Paul.

The night’s theme — “What the World Needs Now” — seeks to challenge audiences and creators to imagine a better world through performance, hands-on participatory art-making, sound and sculpture.

“We decided to do a format we had actually been thinking of prior to the pandemic, where most of the projects end when the audience naturally wanes, and then have a closing event for people who want to stay out and experience dawn together,” said Sarah Peters, executive director of event organizer Northern Lights, a Twin Cities nonprofit. “The rest of the venues don’t have to be open at all hours, but the closing event is going to be a slow, meditative movement with dance, music and song.”

The celebration began as a one-night festival in 2011 in Minneapolis and has since jumped locations, formats and themes. In 2019, it was held over the course of two nights in St. Paul, wrapping around 2 a.m. each morning.

It was canceled entirely in 2020 due the pandemic. Last year, events were spread throughout St. Paul over the course of two weeks, with some exhibits even handled by mail.

“What the World Needs Now” promises to be at once more traditional and as abstract as ever, with activities hosted by the Victoria Theater Arts Center, Springboard for the Arts, the Rondo Community Library and the Minnesota Museum of American Art.

“It’s real magic is that people are together in public space, and at night, witnessing places that are transformed by art experiences,” Peters said. “Northern Spark takes place in places that a lot of us go to or walk by everyday — a parking lot, a public park, at the library — but it asks you to participate with others in engaging with that space.”

Expect performances and installations by the Native Youth Arts Collective and Ain Duh Yung Center, Grupo Soap del Corazon, Frogtown Radio/WFNU, St. Paul Almanac, the St. Paul Neighborhood Network and at least a dozen more exhibitors. Major funders include the Minnesota State Arts Board, the National Endowment for the Arts, the St. Paul STAR program, Art Works, the St. Paul and Minnesota Foundation, F.R. Bigelow Foundation, the Metro Regional Arts Council, the McKnight Foundation and others.

Here’s a selection of events, not intended to be exhaustive:

9:30 p.m. and 10:30 p.m.: “Mestizaje: Intermix-Remix” at the Minnesota Museum of American Art, 350 Robert St. N. in downtown St. Paul. What does it mean to be of both European and Indigenous descent? The works of eight Latin artists from the artist collective Grupo Soap del Corazón are displayed on the exterior of the museum’s ground-level and skyway entrance. The M opens its doors for guided tours at 9:30 p.m. and 10:30 p.m. with independent curator Billy G. Franklin, who will lead visitors through the exhibit in English and Spanish. Afterwards, the museum will host screen printing on fabric using designs created by Grupo Soap artists. Leave with a small patch for your favorite jacket or t-shirt.

9 pm. to 2 a.m.: “Mangoes are Memories” at Springboard for the Arts, 262 University Ave. West. Audiences are invited to share their memories with a mango tree by writing them down or speaking them into a recorded soundscape. Also at Springboard, “Community Love & Friendship” presents first and second-generation Hmong immigrants Pang Foua Xiong, Mai Vang, Suzanne Thao and Sandy Lo as they showcase the centuries-old Hmong embroidery practice of Paaj Ntaub (“pan-dow”) — needlework incorporating symbolic images and codes evoking family, nature, love, perseverance and folklore. Ready to break out the goth/ambient/trance moves? Follow the red velvet rope to the elevator and hit the vampire club’s dance floor for “From Dusk till Dark: Waves in the Night.”

9 pm. to 2 a.m.: “Library After Dark” at Rondo Community Library, 461 Dale St. N. Families are invited to participate in a variety of kid-friendly art projects. Also at the library, “Rooted in Rondo” will showcases youth-produced documentary shorts and audio pieces exploring the histories, legacies and future of St. Paul’s historic Rondo neighborhood.

9 pm. to 2 a.m.: “Drive-in Movie Extravaganza” at Victoria Theater Arts Center, 825 University Ave. West. Cardboard art cars will help recreate the feel of a drive-in movie in front of a shadow puppet screen. Festival-goers are invited to sit in an art car or become part of the show themselves by going behind the shadow screen and picking their own genre-specific theme song and puppets. Professional puppeteers will also deliver performances throughout the night. If you’re ready to get some paint on your hands, the “Start at Home” interactive art exhibit invites participants to paint a picture of positive change with the Mino Oski Ain Dah Yung center and the Native Youth Arts Collective. A “Post Office to the Ancestors” invites audiences to write letters to those they’ve lost or feel separated from.

2 a.m. to 5:30 a.m.: A closing ceremony at Raspberry Island is themed “ingiw mekwendamowaad ziibi: the ones who remember the river.” A large-scale installation of two cloth rivers are meant to replicate the Mississippi and Minnesota rivers. Visitors can journey along the rivers and interact with teachings about water as Native artists paint stories on the cloth paths, sing songs of gratitude and embody the water’s movement.

More information is online at 2022.NorthernSpark.org.

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