This local community garden will host a Philadelphia Fringe Festival performance

Local artists Heather Bowlan and Melinda Rice will team up again for a site-specific show with poetry and music

The Philadelphia Fringe Festival, the annual multidisciplinary festival featuring artists from Philadelphia and worldwide, is coming to Germantown right in the middle of a community garden.

Local poet and mixed media artist Heather Bowlan and local musician Melinda Rice have teamed up again to present re:claim, another site-specific performance. But, this time, it will be in the neighborhood they both love and are connected to. They will do another combined musical and poetic performance in Hansberry Garden and Nature Center (HGNC) at 5150 Wayne Avenue. 

HGNC began in 2001. As their website states, neighbors started a committee to develop a vision of a community garden on the corner of Wayne Avenue and Hansberry Street from a lot created by a razed house at 5148 Wayne Avenue in the ‘90s. Neighbors organized, fundraised, and made an official nonprofit in 2004. In 2008, 5148 Wayne Avenue was purchased by HGNC, and the city recently turned over the deed to 5148.

HGNC’s current president, Claudia Ginanni, says she and the board are reevaluating their mission as a garden this year, including awareness and appreciation of the natural world and plants and animals and fostering responsible stewardship of an urban environment.

Ginanni says HGNC was offering cultural and educational programming over the past few years, but the labor involved for the garden volunteers was growing beyond capacity. She was glad that the re:claim performance was an entire package and aligned well with the garden’s values. 

Last year, Bowlan and Rice created an ambient soundscape alongside poetry about the life of Edward Bok in the Laurel Hill Cemetery. This year’s performance will reflect their personal connection to the neighborhood.

Bowlan grew up in the Northwest section of Philadelphia and has lived throughout the area. Rice lives right around the corner from Hansberry Garden and walks her dog there weekly.

“This community is very special to me in terms of how we’re always growing and changing together, how we’re always noticing those changes and finding ways to grow together or grow apart. But I feel like the evolution of this neighborhood over time always feels grounded in the people,” said Bowlan. 

Both artists have been talking to multiple neighbors and community members about Hansberry, including some of the founders and original members, like David and Pat Schogel, and many others. They’ve heard repeatedly how Hansberry Garden wasn’t just a garden but a history of growth as a neighborhood. 

Their poetry and violin music will combine with looped effects pedals, improvisation, and interaction, guided by the garden, natural and social history, archival documents, and the lived experiences of neighbors and members of the collectively owned garden.

They will also explore the possibilities of community to create resistance and a holistic approach to growth throughout seasons and transitions. Rice and Bowlan’s shared composition asks what a community garden, specifically this garden in a gentrifying neighborhood, can teach us about the ecosystem of a neighborhood over time. Audience members will be invited to participate at various moments during the performance and contribute to the shared experience.

Both artists are deeply collaborative in their process– Rice tailors her music to the needs of the people at the moment, and it’s how Bowlan creates most of her multimedia art. 

“Collaboration is the glue for most of my art at this point and most of the art I’m interested in making in the future. Anything that sort of rejects the idea of this hyper-individualism that just pervades everything. So art that’s pointing to that…  not necessarily in a literal way, but that’s pointing to the pathways and connections that we make together, which is why it’s special to collaborate with Melinda,” said Bowlan.

As they rehearse and start the artistic process of producing the piece, Rice has been compiling the favorite music of some of the founders and members of the garden, trying to capture the joy they express as they look back at their time in the garden. They also play with the cyclical structure of the musical composition and use the word cabbage to form some of the musical compositions. 

For Bowlan’s part, she is really interrogating herself on what it means to be a neighbor and the progression and cycles of the land that Rice is trying to capture in music.

“I’ve definitely been thinking about that progression in terms of the uses of the land and also just the shifts in the community and also the big shift we’re experiencing in this community right now,” said Bowlan.

She continued, “What growth or thriving has meant in the past and how outsiders are measuring growth or investment in the community now, what that looks like now, how that impacts the literal ecosystem but also the ecosystem of our community.” Bowlan loves how Rice’s work weaves those themes in and out. 

re:claim will be on September 8 at 5:00 p.m. (rain date September 22 at 5:00 p.m.). For more information about the show and to get tickets, visit the Fringe Festival website.