Spheres of summer

Most people don't look to brain damage for inspiration.

  But Hannah Wiley, the director of the Summer Arts Festival, stumbled upon the idea for this year's theme several years ago while reading Descartes' Error, by Antonio Damasio. In the book, Damasio suggests that the brain cannot think creatively without the frontal lobe. That idea found its niche in Wiley's own brain and slowly evolved, until she decided this year's festival would be centered around spheres.

It doesn't make much sense, but art doesn't really have to.

The festival, which runs from July 16 through 19, features cinema, drama, dance, literary arts, music and visual arts at various sites around the UW campus. Wiley hopes that the theme of spheres will help students explore myriad arts with an overarching theme.

Wiley managed to get in touch with Damasio, and convinced him to kick off the festival tonight with a lecture, titled "Emotion, Feeling and Social Behavior: The Brain Perspective."

Perhaps the most anticipated event is Saturday's performance by the Kronos Quartet, a string quartet that once covered Jimi Hendrix's "Purple Haze." Kronos will perform "Sun Rings," a new composition commissioned for the quartet by NASA, which incorporates sounds recorded on space missions and is written by Terry Riley, a longtime collaborator of the group and one of the most influential American composer.

Kronos will dedicate its performance, which will feature the UW Chamber Singers, to the crew of the space shuttle Columbia, and a portion of the proceeds from the event is going to the Lt. Col. Michael Anderson Endowed Scholarship Fund.

Late filmmaker Stan Brakhage is being featured in this year's cinema series, which boasts films never before seen at the UW. Jennifer Bean, a UW cinema studies professor, proposed that Brakhage be the focus of the cinema series nine months ago. Unfortunately, Brakhage passed away earlier this year, and the series turned into a tribute.

"[Brakhage] was eulogized as being by far the most prestigious, avant-garde filmmaker," Wiley said. "[The timing] is a very sad but is an important coincidence with the plans we made."

The pieces to be shown span the cinematographer's career, from 1959's Window Water Baby Moving, which captures his daughter's birth, to 1999's Coda: Moilsome Toilsome, about a search for whales and the whales themselves.

The dance highlight of the festival will be the performance of the Chamber Dance Company, which was also founded by Wiley. The company focuses on performing pieces of historical significance, and this year's performance features six pieces spanning the past century.

Kevin Smythe, a senior in accounting and a dance minor, will appear in the piece "Olympiad." The piece was written in 1936 as a tribute to the Berlin Olympics of that year and features performances of several sports -- fencing, boxing, the decathlon and basketball.

The dance requires an all-male company, so Smythe was approached by Wiley and asked to participate because of his athletic nature. Smythe became interested after he learned about the dance's choreographer, Ted Shawn, who went into dance to try to improve his poor health as a child. Smythe accepted Wiley's invitation, and will portray a fencer and a basketball player in the piece.

The Chamber Dance Company performance will also feature two dances originally choreographed by Isadora Duncan -- 1921's "Mother" and 1903's "Ballspiel." Both dances were taught to the performers by a member of the "Isadorables," the troupe assembled by Duncan late in her life.

These are only a handful of the more than 60 events the festival will feature.

With musical performances from improvisational bluegrass group Psychograss and the Seattle Repertory Jazz Orchestra, lectures from Seattle Opera's Perry Lorenzo and UW philosophy professor Ron Moore; and daily performances of "Dance on the Quad" and Three Days of Rain, the challenge won't be deciding whether or not to go. Rather, the challenge will be finding time for everything.