One of the many things I love about the Headlands Center is how they are not afraid to experiment, and last Tuesday night a brand-new short-term on-site project called L'esprit de Corps yielded sweet results indeed. Headed by Stephanie Sherman of Greensboro's Elsewhere, L'esprit de Corps brought her together with four local artists who are also members of art collaboratives to spend ten days at the Center doing, well, whatever they organized themselves to do. The other participants were Aaron Gach of the Center for Tactical Magic, Christian Nagler of Nonsite Collective, Ian Alan Paul of the Friendly Fire Collective, and Sam White of OPEN Restaurant. Last Tuesday, just before the end of their residency, the artists hosted a spectacular dinner for the public called Swarmth in which we were all seated at one of six tables, each one of which held one course, and every time the dinner bell rang everyone got up and moved to whatever next table appealed. The menu was based on a Christmas dinner that had been served back when the Center was still an army barracks, and my own meal trajectory started with oysters and ended with soup (with vegetables, tempeh, salad, and bread somewhere in the middle). We were given nine minutes at each table and instructions to follow for each course, like no talking during the first or constant applause for the kitchen during the fourth. It injected a genuine sense of play into the meal, and I never sat with the same group twice since everyone was following their own path around the room. After dinner we "retreated" to the Officer's Club upstairs to have dessert and play games that had us laughing and running around the room like kids at summer camp. Finally we went for a walk around the Center grounds under the stars and crescent moon on one of the warmest nights of the year, ending up with reflections and conversation on a basketball court which had been strewn with candles. I felt a little sad as the evening came to a close, knowing that particular group, both of artists and visitors, would not come together in exactly the same way ever again. But that's also what made the experience so meaningful to me, a microcosm of the real-life coincidences that trigger intersections, connections, relationships.
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