Brian Kidd
SHOW INFORMATION
Williams Brew Stage | ArtsQuest Center, 101 Founders Way, Bethlehem, PA 18015
- Show: 6:30 p.m.*
- Palette & Pour Menu
- Venue/Event Rules
*times subject to change
Brian has loved string instruments since he was a small child. When he was about seven years old, he pulled large rubber bands over an open shoe box to make his first guitar. A few years later, he began learning cello at the age of nine. Brian later played in youth orchestras, and then taught himself guitar in ninth grade. When his parents grounded him, due to chronic after-school detention, he was left without his newfound, beloved guitar. With optimistic defiance, he taught himself how to play the electric guitar parts on his cello. Currently, Brian makes his own arrangements to cover by popular artists, including Billy Joel, Frank Sinatra, System of a Down, Blink-182, Linkin Park and many more. Brian also enjoys home music multi-track recording, and his latest single is called “Inside.” He is working on several other original songs, including the bluesy “Love You Better,” which has an impressive cello solo, a pop song called “Pretty Girl” and a ballad called “Twilight Sea.”
Performance with Marissa Baez
Marissa Baez’s work is influenced by suppressed Mexican American history, death, ancestry, material, and decolonization. Conversations with Latinx and Indigenous academics and artists led Baez to expand their perspective on navigating a state of in-between. They address intergenerational trauma and the resilience of marginalized bodies through a combination of photography, performance, sculpture, and material-based installations. Baez weaves in family experiences and looks to their grandmother’s use of Curanderismo to explore healing and indigeneity. Their work exists in different life cycles and focuses on the process of transit. Art pieces can exist momentarily through performance and photo documentation. Projects do not follow a linear path. A new sculpture (photo or performance) connects to past work by reinforcing the conversation between the objects. Baez applies third-space and rhizomatic thinking to their cosmology. Ash is a prominent material that is found constantly in their practice. They view this material as a connection to mediumship, existing within space as vortex-like pathways. I often look at the resistance of Muir trees, and despite environmental catastrophes, they still grow.
I acknowledge the shared traumatic experience underrepresented communities face. Incorporating music and sculpture opens a path for participating members to expose themselves to a performance that focuses on healing. Each ash performance allows the audience to participate in the artwork. The first ash and music performance people participated in was Cahuitl. The handprints and wax hands represent the past coming forward. During the first performance, Rudy Sheppard and Sam Escourt joined me and played alongside the music I wrote. The Cahuitl mural is recreated with new prints expanding beyond the work’s original 5-foot round size. In each ash performance, the audience heals alongside me.
In this next iteration at ArtsQuest, a cellist, Brian Kidd, will play some music written by Marissa Baez. Brian will then abstract Marissa’s music and include some of his own responses to the performance to create a new composition. The duration of the performance will be 1 hour. Brian will then end by playing Corrido De Pennsylvania, a Mexican song created about traveling north from Fort Worth and Dallas, Texas, to Pennsylvania to work as a steelworker. The intentions set out for this performance include healing and coming together as a community.