PDX Bridge Festival – Art, Music, and Activities for Families

by Dot Rust on July 23, 2010

http://www.vimeo.com/11571939

The PDX Bridge Festival kicks off this weekend. 16 days, 60+ events, more than two dozen bands, DJs and performers, over 150 artists, 24 films, one historic picnic and a few unavoidably large art installations.

Using the centennial anniversary of the building of the Hawthorne Bridge as its centerpiece, the festival spans the city (get it? spans? heh-heh) with events for everyone. Family events are plenty and include the MORSound Concert on the river at SE Water Avenue at Taylor Street on Saturday July 31. There’s bands, DJs, art, dance and even a circus.

Starting at 4pm, families can enjoy a sampling of Portland’s diverse communities, MC’d by Tres Shannon of Voodoo Doughnuts. This afternoon open-air concert includes: Music by Sneakin’ Out, MarchFourth Marching Band, Venerable Showers of Beauty Gamelan, Tapwater, and more. A Kids’ Pavillion with Sound Roots School of Music, the Right Brain Initiative, Portland Paper City, and Battle of the Band Camp will give kids plenty to see, hear and do. Sustainability and Ambiance by Friends of Trees, Bamboo Temples and Todji Kurtzman. Food by some of Portland’s great vendors. Beer & Wine Garden by Lagunitas Brewing Company and Barefoot Wine & Bubbly.

Admission is free, and I have to say, if you do nothing else, make sure to catch Sneakin’ Out – a Portland trio whose concerts are always entertaining and pretty amazing, considering they don’t have a drum set or a guitar among them. Amazing and clever mashups of classic rock and classical pieces played on mandolin, bass and percussion (including a typewriter) with infinite skill, blazing speed and not a little humor.

Later on, running for 2 hours starting at 9pm is one of two events that are the centerpiece of the entire festival, Lift 100: Hawthorne Bridge. For almost two hours, in conjunction with the free MORSound Concert, the trusses of the Hawthorne Bridge will become a platform for and interactive light and projection media shows. Screens stretched across the trussing along the bridge spans provide a framework for a visual tour of Portland – who we are, where we’ve come from, and where we’re going – using gathered media from the last 00 years, text-based interactions from our audience, captured images from the event, and digital artists. This will be one for the history books, and barring a wind event, a pretty cool way to end the evening.

Check out this cool teaser for an idea of what to expect:

Admission is free to the MORSound Concert.

The next day, August 1st from 12 to 2:30pm, is a kid-friendly afternoon at the St. John’s Carnival at McMenamins St. Johns Pub and Theater, 8203 N. Ivanhoe Stree. Standard family fare includes face-painting, balloon animals, popcorn and bridge-related edu-tainment, followed by a free screening of the family film Bridge to Terabithia. Parents can relax nearby with a pint.

I’m not sure what to make of the admission charge “Free with $2 suggested donation” but there you have it. All ages welcome.

Another event that is worth taking your kids to (because you just don’t get to hang out on a bridge and have a picnic) is the Brunch on the Bridge event on August 7 from 10am-1pm. They’re going to lay down 25,000 square feet of lawn to transform the center lanes of the Hawthorne Bridge into a temporary grassy park. This will be a historic event and centers around an open-air food experience – there will be 10 of Portland’s best food carts – in a nontraditional location.

There are tons of other events all centering around strengthening the bonds between our urban and rural communities. Not all music-related, but definitely worth getting the kids out to see: art installations, including the Drawbridge Project. This program sent teaching artists into classrooms to work with schoolchildren as part of teh Portland Public School District third grade curriculum on bridges. For this year’s pilot project, 120 students have been tasked with creating works of art representing the role of the Willamette River Bridges in our lives. Selected drawings on full-color pennant banners, and installed for the duration of the festival on the lamp posts along the thoroughfare of the Burnside Bridge, bringing children’s art to the hear of the city.

Dot Rust

Dot Rust has enjoyed a career in music spanning a few decades. An accomplished classical and jazz musician, Dot has performed and recorded throughout the US on horn as well as bass. It was her gigs in the recording studios, though, that caught her imagination so she set off for LA to supplement her degrees in music with more training in recording engineering. After a few years in a recording studio and production facility engineering, mastering and doing administrative work, she landed a job with a leading independent media distributor where she ultimately wound up as a product manager for a division that specialized in family music. This gave her instant access to artists and labels all over the US, on major labels and indies, and it was this interaction with the artists that opened her eyes to the burgeoning segment that is so often just an afterthought for most people. Family music is currently the only genre enjoying real growth in the music industry, and Dot hopes to bring even more awareness to Oregon and the northwest.