About Fountain

Artbat Fest, Almaty, Kazakhstan (2013)

The ArtBat Fest in September 2013, with CEC Artslink Global Art Lab and Third Rail Projects presented a collaborative workshop series that culminated in performances of a new public site-specific work for the elaborate terraced Soviet-era fountain on Arbat Street. The resulting work, Fountain, was a collaboration between Third Rail Projects Co-Artistic Director Tom Pearson and Associate Artistic Director Marissa Nielsen-Pincus with Yegor Vassilyev and local dance artists in Kazakhstan for the 2013 ArtBat Festival, an international festival of visual art and performance.

Fountain explored notions of permission and play in a setting that married Soviet-era architecture with the shifting and blurring boundaries of contemporary culture, fast food, and public versus private space. The performers observed the decidedly different ways that people passing through the space engaged with it, from the buoyant exploratory athletics of children, to the utilitarian thoroughfare adults have made it. Watching the fountains throughout the seasons of the day, the work embraced the way water flowed, or sometimes stopped, when the space became an obstacle or a passageway, and when it became a destination.  And finally, through a slow navigation of its many spans and reaches, from solid marble surfaces and grassy areas, to its wading pool and cascading fountains, the performers attached themselves to its topography, ultimately immersing themselves fully in its waters, unleashing a splash of full-bodied release and eventual rest.