Duality The Reliquarium Lincoln, RI April 14, 2018
Story by Christopher Gallagher Photography by Adrian Feliciano
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Duality is a state that surrounds us-we get day and night, dark and light, earth and sky, female and male, young and old from nature and then there are all those halvings provided by way of the sublime ridiculousness of humankind-the us/them, heads/tails, love/hate, rich/poor-type splits that fill our minds.
Saturday, April 14 provided us with a ready made duality, the interweaving of winter and spring within the space of a calendar day: the perfect setting to celebrate paired opposites. Sometimes, the people working on an event have a deep sense that what is being prepared, though it looks a certain way from a certain perspective, is way more than a party.
The Reliquarium are these people; an artist collective founded by Ivy Ross, Logan Cole Will, and Justin Jannone and populated by a wide array of supremely talented artists, sculptors, designers, fabricators, projectors, and other assorted creators has spent the years since their 2015 founding carrying their vision-a singularly enlightening view of the world rooted the group’s deep reverence for life and death and the natural cycles which accompany it-to every corner of the nation, beautifying events all over their home region of the Northeast, traveling to the playa of Burning Man, to the towering forests of Oregon, the subtropical sands of Miami, and beyond international borders to the jungle of Costa Rica to do what they do.
The other side of the Duality coin featured the mark of Manifest Entertainment, the production company that conceived the Duality concept to celebrate its year anniversary, teaming up with the Reliquarium folks to do exactly what its name implies-bringing ideas to reality. Manifest, run by Gregory Visci, has been working to provide the rooms of Providence, a lowkey awesome musical town with roots dating back to Wednesday Max Creek Living Room bashes in the ’80s and ’90s through the Club Therapy rave scene around the turn of the millennium and the more recent era highlighted by the offerings at The Spot in its various incarnations, with a current range of tasty musical choices and this lineup certainly delivered.
Visci brought the Infinity Tour, a national undertaking headlined by DJs Govinda, Kaminanda, and Templo to weave their sonic mastery in the space prepared for exactly that purpose. Wood and stone, metal and bone, fabric, fire, light, color, sound, shape, and, most of all, conscious intention: these are the media used by the folks who made this night happen; they used them to bring the ether of imagination to three dimensional reality.
I had made my way out to Lincoln, RI a couple weeks prior for a late night scouting session of the locale and found a crew busy at work in preparation for the approaching fortnight; interspersed with the flying sparks and the jigsaw whir was an engaging palette of activities geared to keep a bunch of creative types engaged in just enough play to keep the work moving. I gathered, through observing the skeletons of earlier events and the commitment of the members, that this was more than the average fabrication shop and awaited the big night with a strong certainty that this would be a worthwhile adventure.
See more of Adrian Feliciano’s photography HERE.
Arriving early on the evening of the 14th, I gathered, through the hustling bustle of vendors setting up, live artists preparing canvasses, tea blends and other elixirs being brewed, soundchecks being undertaken, visuals mapped, the organization of a cacao ceremony, and a pyramid full of sound healing accoutrements smack dab in the middle of the area we had been goofing off in a couple weeks prior, that my earlier impressions of the blooming event were spot on.
Fast forward: a couple hours of mingling, smiles and hugs among old friends and new, and the auditory portion of the evening began. The Mainfest/Reliquarium Duality coin would now be set on edge and spun through the night, carried on the momentum of the electronic onslaught run through the speakers by the producers and performers and the energy building on the dance floor by the evening’s guests, a group that understood Rumi’s description of dancing as “when you tear your heart out and rise out of your body to hang suspended between the worlds.” That is what happened there and it carried through until dawn; and this collaboration, which has hinted at an October rejoining of forces, established itself as a must-attend for future events.
See more of Adrian Feliciano’s photography HERE.
Check out the Live Music News and Review.com Facebook page for updates and announcements.
To submit an article an article or review, or to just say hello hit us at [email protected]
