This is WESA Arts, a weekly newsletter by Bill O'Driscoll providing in-depth reporting about the Pittsburgh area art scene. Sign up here to get it every Wednesday afternoon.
Rainy though it was early on, this past Saturday felt like the start of Pittsburgh’s festival season.
The drizzle — all right, some showers too — didn’t dissuade a couple hundred folks from turning out at 10 a.m. to hear nationally known poet Ross Gay’s delightful reading at the Greater Pittsburgh Festival of Books.
Housed in an array of buildings and lawn tents, and on one outdoor stage, the second annual festival sprawled across the campus of East Liberty’s Pittsburgh Theological Seminary.
Gay, reading in the auditorium of the seminary chapel, was as generous as you’d hope for a poet whose 2015 National Book Critics Circle Award-winning collection was titled “Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude.” He began by naming renowned Pittsburgh-based poet Toi Derricotte (who was sitting front row center) as “one of the main guides in my life,” and also the person who secured his first paid reading.
Gay’s reading ranged from an excerpt from “Be Holding,” his book-length tribute to an iconic 1980 NBA-finals play by Julius Erving, to his appreciation of a temporary community that formed around a sidewalk fig tree in Philadelphia.
During the question-and-answer session that followed, the author of essay collections titled “The Book of Delights” and “Inciting Joy” said people sometimes ask him, “How can you write about gratitude at a time like this?”
Gay said he responds, “What’s not a time like this?”
It’s a time when current events radiate suspicion, hate and violence. Gay said his work is about finding connection.
“Disconnection foments brutality,” Gay said, while “connection … is the antidote to brutality.”
Connection is all around us, he added, but “[w]e have to practice witnessing it.”
Saturday’s rain had shoved off by the time I made it to the Vietnam Veterans Pavilion in Schenley Park for the 10th annual Pittonkatonk May Day BBQ — like the book fest, a free event.
Pittonkatonk, a one-day grassroots festival for brass bands, drumming ensembles, hip hop and more, is truly a signature Pittsburgh event. I saw short sets by Timbeleza, the Eagleburger Band (complete with neon wigs and flaming tuba), and Balafon West African Dance Ensemble.
Pittonkatonk, organized by Pete Spynda, has changed a bit since it began in a Highland Park garage. It’s bigger, now with a raised stage and a PA for some acts. (It was formerly all acoustic.) The potluck is supplemented by a line of food trucks.
But though Pittonkatonk draws thousands over the course of its 10 hours, the vibe remains much the same: hip, family-friendly, LGBTQ-friendly, and equal parts neo-hippie and post-punk, with a sense of social-justice activism alongside the picnic blankets and lawn chairs. By design, Pittonkatonk is one of Pittsburgh’s bigger events to eschew corporate sponsors.
It seemed, in other words, the very embodiment of the sort of connection — and, indeed, joy — that I’d heard Ross Gay talk about a few hours earlier.
It’s something to keep in mind as Pittsburgh’s season of outdoor festivals and concerts kicks into high gear.
This weekend, there’s the Millvale Music Festival and the Children’s Theater Festival. The first week of June, the county’s free concert series at Hartwood Acres and South Park commence, along with the oldest and still largest local festival, the 10-day Three Rivers Arts Festival.
From there, it’s really festivals of one kind or another all the way down and all summer long, including Juneteenth, Picklesburgh, Barrel & Flow, and many others — all opportunities to practice making connections.
