Director: Laurel Guy | Theme: "The Greatest Place On Earth!"
There ís a vitality here, a pool of creative energy, that I’ve found in few other places. Ithaca is the closest thing to Paradise I’ve ever experienced. —Douglas Beaver
Ithaca Festival 2001 celebrates the unique, wild beauty and spirit of this place. It is indeed the greatest place on earth. A place of wonder. A place of sublime inspiration. The essence of a place is closely tied to its landscape. We hope to inspire you in the coming months to do a little soul-searching…to uncover the ‘mythical landscape’ that you carry with you. To see with fresh eyes, our hills, forests, glacier-cut gorges, waterfalls, creeks and lakes. To renew your connection to this living earth. In a nutshell, to celebrate what happens naturally to all Ithacans each spring: We fall back in love with this place.
Circus Eccentrithaca, featuring The Second Hand and a cast of thousands! This exciting new Festival Finale is a theater-based circus that includes satire, live music, dance, acrobatics, large puppets, stiltwalkers and juggling. Circus Eccentrithaca, to be reinvented each year, will end the Festival on Sunday at Stewart Park.
The Circus Field at Stewart Park (formerly the ballfield area) began in 2001. It featured juggling, new games, stiltwalkers, a Backyard Circus for kids, and many dance, theater, and music performances.
The year 2001 was one marked with much change. The parade was moved to Thursday night to kick off the whole Festival weekend and the route was also changed to Buffalo St.
We added the Odyssey Stage on Saturday and the Haunt Stage on Sunday. These spacious performance venues featured great music. Like many other festivals, we finally expanded to include both indoor and outdoor performance stages. Finally – when the Festival ended outdoors, the music played on indoors!
Susan Bull Riley , 2001 Festival Artist
Susan’s family moved to Ithaca during the floods of January, 1996 – an appropriate introduction, perhaps, to a place so defined by water. The lake, ponds, and streams of this area figure prominently in her landscape paintings, along with the open fields and meadows which have always attracted her.
Susan’s paintings of carefully observed flowers are always done in season with the blooming plant placed in front of her. These paintings represent a race against time, with the flowers wilting far too quickly for comfort. She paints one stem at a time, which means that the completed picture is rarely something whose exact composition can be predicted; whatever the garden or meadow yields that morning is what she uses.
Light on a landscape is even more ephemeral than a blooming flower, so after starting a painting on location and visiting the site as often as weather will allow, she finishes up her work in the studio. Sometimes – very rarely – she finishes a painting within a day or two, but usually weeks or months pass before she likes what she sees. Some stubborn pictures sit in her basement for years until she can figure out how to finish them.
2001 Festival Art
The art is a beautiful watercolor of one of our most favorite views of Ithaca: driving down Route 13 and looking over at Stewart Park and Cayuga Lake, with the hills in the background. Don’t you just love that view?