Whawp. That was the sound of Delusions, a festival of experimental music at the Zhou B. Art Center, getting shut down two weeks ago. The closure, ordered by police, was as predictable as a waltz tempo, but somehow no one at Bridgeport’s palace of the avant-garde saw it coming. Majel Connery—artistic director of Opera Cabal, the organization of composers, writers, musicians, singers, and actors producing the four-day festival—says her group didn’t have a contract with the center. “If we did, I think we’d be suing them,” she says.
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“We were depressed for a full 12 hours,” Connery says. The police arrived Friday, October 19, when the two biggest days of the fest were still to come. “We had people flying in from the east coast and the west coast for this, and we had already paid for their plane tickets. It seemed like we had to do something.” Officially canceled, the festival was quietly moved the next day to the ballroom of a Hyde Park home, where it was performed for an audience of about 50. Connery launched Opera Cabal last year with a fellowship from the University of Chicago, where she’s pursuing a PhD. Before the October gig the group had held three smaller events at the Zhou B. center, which provided the space free of charge. But she says it isn’t likely to perform there again.
Now the cops told him it was no go. Relocating the show overnight was impossible: it required a big setup, with an eight-channel sound system and a 65-foot-long canvas to be painted by the Zhou brothers while four groups of musicians from ICE, working with CCF composers, played a carefully devised “improvisational” score. On Saturday CCF canceled. “There were folks who had come in from out of town for us—most of the ICE members live in New York now—so it was a real bummer,” Preissing says. But major sponsor Boeing has been supportive, and he’s looking to reschedule in the spring, somewhere else.
What She Did for Dance
