XL Cover Story

First Night

Ten years in the making, Austin's new New Year's Party is ready to astound. And you're invited.

By Jeanne Claire Van Ryzin
AMERICAN-STATESMAN ARTS WRITER
Thursday, December 29, 2005

Picture this happening on Saturday: A giant illuminated dragon floats languorously on Town Lake. A mirrored sidewalk glints in front of One American Center. The First Street Bridge morphs into a giant canvas as revelers illustrate 12-inch squares of pavement. Nearby, 4,500 illuminated vinyl tubes hang from a grid on Auditorium Shores.

There's a woman standing in the storefront windows of a Congress Avenue art space, painting and unpainting, without explanation, the glass. The oak tree-filled triangle of green space poised between City Hall and the First Street Bridge? Now it's a snow-filled oasis.

Earlier this Saturday morning, 2,006 Austinites woke to discover a round loaf of bread on their doorsteps, along with an invitation to head downtown that afternoon and join — among others — stiltwalkers, robots, jugglers, giant puppets, an ant-art car and four dancers on Segways for a grand processional down Congress Avenue.

After 10 years of preparation, here comes First Night Austin 2006: a 10-hour New Year's Eve festival that employs the sidewalks, bridges, plazas, building façades, storefront windows, indoor lobbies, balconies and, oh yes, the streets of downtown Austin as one all-encompassing stage for more than 80 performing and visual art happenings.

The madness starts at 2 p.m. Saturday and ends at midnight. The family-oriented action will extend from Ninth Street and Congress Avenue down to City Hall, then across the South First Street Bridge to Auditorium Shores.

Tying it all together, a parade will spill down Congress Avenue at 5:30 p.m. and end with fireworks fired from the roof of the CSC building at Cesar Chavez and Lavaca streets.

After dusk, the downtown happenings continue. As a countdown to midnight, drummers will form a circle on the First Street bridge before more pyrotechnics explode over Town Lake.

Then consider this: Everyone — and we mean everyone — is invited to attend.

Alcohol-free revelry

The tradition of First Night started in Boston in 1976, the brainchild of conceptual artists who thought that a night and day of free public art would make the perfect finale for the U.S. Bicentennial.

More than just street performers on corners or ice sculptures in parks, their vision called for startling, site-specific, ephemeral works — an event that lent a little civic-minded wonderment and artistry to the usual New Year's Eve drunken revelry.

Hence First Night is an alcohol-free event, and much of the programming is family-friendly. Instead of a toast when the clock strikes midnight, there will be, in Austin, the thunder of circled drummers.

First Night celebrations are now staged in more than 120 cities in the United States, Canada and New Zealand, coordinated loosely through the First Night International organization (www.firstnightintl.org).

Now this is odd: The only other city in Texas with a First Night is Wichita Falls. But let's not go there.

Ann Graham, a petite, but steel-willed cellist, started thinking about staging a First Night in Austin 11 years ago after she moved here from the Boston area when her husband, Arlen Johnson, accepted a professorship in biology at the University of Texas.

Actually, she had been thinking about First Night for a while. From 1985 to 1995, Graham, an arts administrator with a degree in biology, worked as a producer for First Night Boston. When she landed in Austin, she mounted a presentation to the Downtown Austin Alliance on the phenomenon.

In the audience was Anne Elizabeth Wynn, fairly new to Austin herself and a member of a comfortable, artistically inclined Houston family. Graham remembers that everyone, especially Wynn, was "intrigued" with the concept of First Night. But intrigue is about as far as things got.

Jump ahead a decade. Austin's sense of itself as an urbane city grew tremendously. Its philanthropic community matured. Wynn, first as Mayor Will Wynn's wife, then on her own, emerged as a major arts advocate and networker. Meanwhile, Graham added six years of service on the city's Art in Public Places committee to her résumé.

All the imaginative and leadership ingredients for a First Night Austin were in place. Early in 2005, First Night Austin was born as an independent nonprofit organization.

'Completely new'

"I'm a producer by birth," Graham laughs, looking remarkably relaxed on a recent afternoon, considering the planning swords that loom over her head. Three weeks before the celebration, artists were still joining the roster. Volunteers — more than 200 — were being drafted.

Not to mention that Austin Urban Ascent, a group of rock climbers, was practicing trick moves rappelling down the west façade of the Radisson Hotel. They're one of the more dramatic acts on the First Night schedule.

And she needs to remain sanguine right through the end of the event: First Night happens rain or shine. And no telling how many people will — or won't — show up. To accommodate the crowds, the free Starlight Dillo will shuttle folks back and forth to free parking at the State Capitol garage and surface lots. (Free parking will also be available at One Texas Center and Town Lake Center on Barton Springs Road.)

Over the past year, while Graham handled the the logistics, Wynn, as president of the First Night board, spearheaded the fundraising, donating more than $10,000 of her own money and ultimately netting about $430,000 — almost all of the $450,000 goal. The biggest contribution came from semiconductor manufacturer Samsung, which kicked in $100,000. (The American-Statesman also provided some media sponsorship.) Arguably the most important donation came from the City of Austin, which agreed to be a sponsor, giving the affair an early, official gloss — and $44,000 along with police attendance and street closures. (The South First Street bridge and parts of Guadalupe, Lavaca and Cesar Chavez streets immediately surrounding City Hall will be closed during the event.)

Graham and two other employees are the only paid First Night staffers who work out of an office in a rent-free suite in the Bank of America building (courtesy of developer T. Stacy & Associates). Most of the remaining dollars go to the artists. Fees range from $100 to $25,000, depending on the complexity of the individual artistic contribution; the average fee is between $3,000 and $5,000.

More than 360 project proposals (some artists submitted more than one) were received last summer. More than 80 were accepted after review by a panel of local artists.

"I love that we're able to give the artists the tools to do something completely new," says Graham.

Wynn found that raising money to pay artists was a relatively easy sell. "Our city's major corporate citizens understood that this event supports the arts in Austin the old-fashioned way," she says. "We pay artists in Austin to make art for Austin."

And clearly the artists like it.

"Commissions are very hard to come by," says Jaclyn Pryor, a University of Texas graduate theater student and performance artist. "I spend a lot of time just finding ways to stage my projects. (First Night) feels like a gift."

Perhaps that's why she decided to give her own.

With help from a group of friends (and bakers at Texas French Bread), Pryor will deliver round loaves of sourdough bread to the doorsteps of 2,006 houses in Austin in the pre-dawn hours Saturday. Pryor took her creative cue from her Jewish heritage, specifically the Rosh Hashanah (the Jewish New Year that typically lands in September) tradition of tashlich, or casting away, in which bread crumbs are strewn into a river as a symbolic way to shed sins and ask for forgiveness at the start of a new year.

In Pryor's interpretation, however, she wanted to add an element of magic — a playful touch that harks back to the coltishness and idealism that was the hallmark of early conceptual art in the 1960s. "Imagine waking up and finding the bread fairies left you a surprise," she says. "Wouldn't you wonder who was behind such a thing?"

And she also wants people to join her for the continuation of her project. Each loaf of bread will bear an invitation asking people to dress in white, bring their loaves of bread downtown and join the grand procession of performers and public alike who will parade down Congress Avenue to the City Hall plaza. Once there, the loaf-toters will together cast crumbs over the First Street bridge.

Pryor hopes that at least a couple of hundred people will act on her invitation.

"It's a bit of an act of faith," she says. "But let's see what happens. I think people will welcome the magic."

jvanryzin@statesman.com; 445-3699