February 24-March 2, 2005

art

True North

The north face: Matt Davis captures the urban beauty of this North Philly neighborhood in his multimedia performance piece, North of Race, at the CEC. Photo By: Michael T. Regan

The New Edge program's Matt Davis turns his attention North of Race.

by A.D. Amorosi

No one could ever accuse West Philadelphia's now 32-year-old Community Education Center of shirking its responsibilities.

If CEC isn't busy with dance classes, like modern and flamenco with Myra Bazell and Tomas Dura, it's readying its floors for auditions with Olive Dance Theater and Goodie Goodie Productions' Brotherly Love, debuting in April. Taken from playwright Paolo Pilladi's script, the multidisciplinary musical concerns itself with CEC's former neighbor, MOVE, and the circumstances involving the tragedy that ravaged Osage Avenue 20 years ago, killing 11 members of the back-to-nature militant group.

Now CEC is opening its doors to Matt Davis' North of Race, a CEC-centered New Edge series resident artist show portraying the diversity of ethnicity and aestheticism that is North Philly.

Elements of spoken word performance, "spontaneous" photography, and the rattle and hum of homemade musical instruments blend into one experimental visual and sonic boom. This is how one former farm boy sees his adopted home.

"When I first came to Philly eight years ago to study at Temple, that was the first exposure I'd had to urban life in North Philly," says Davis, 26, a composer and guitarist whose work with his jazz chamber orchestra, Aerial Photograph, has a pastoral feel at one with his rural New Jersey roots. Think Pat Metheny's As Falls Wichita, So Falls Wichita Falls or John McLaughlin's Mahavishnu-era Between Nothingness and Eternity and you'll get an idea of Davis' musical output.

Davis was in awe of everything he saw. In particular, an enormous old church on the corner of Broad Street and Susquehanna caught his eye, a dilapidated ruin so ancient its pews had decayed, its doors had fallen off and altars had crumpled. "Every day, I'd walk from the subway at Susquehanna to my dorm so I could take a good look at it. It had a magical feel." After summer vacation, Davis returned to find the church had been demolished, only to be replaced by an Eckerd Pharmacy. That contrast of new corporate culture smoothing over the rough, beautiful edges of an area in tatters never left his mind's eye.

North of Race is about that North Philadelphia. The one he lives in near Fifth and Thompson, the one filled with tight communities and charming traditions he feels are overlooked and underserved by "the bigger picture." With slides and video from North Philadelphia photographer Katherine Davis-Caldwell and the texts of regional poets Shannon Pelcher and Lisa Goldstein, Davis has created a visual opera of a people and a place undefeated by what others must see as solely an environment of detritus.

"People from outside of town and the suburbs see North Philly as a dangerous wasteland. No one would deny that a lot of Philly needs a lot of help. But I know, through my own experiences, that there's a lot more to North Philly than the casualties reported on the nightly news." Something about having gone to St. Peter's Basilica in Rome this summer — the church choirs, the elegance of eminence — provoked in Davis the feeling he first felt seeing that beaten-down church on his corner. To him it was more than just a chapel and more than just music. "It was one of the most powerful things I'd ever heard and felt," says Davis. "It just went right through me."

A bizarre spiritual soundtrack of doubly strange homemade instruments provide a rickety feel at one with the area, instruments like a "vibraphone" made out of industrial scrap metal and found-object percussion fashioned from bottles and oil drums. "There's a reclaimed piano I snagged from the sidewalk [near] Second and Brown that I took apart and put back together wrongly." When a piano key is pressed, it's as if a nerve is being struck instead of a string.

Still, Davis' main focus is on the pieces he's written for a 10-piece choir. Teamed with North Philly native and singer Byron Dailey, 14, this musical ensemble, in tandem with the hand-wringing texts and barren, beautiful photos, offers something as awestruck as his own first experiences at Broad and Susquehanna.

"Personally, I find Matt's music exciting and rich, particularly for a young musician, and I think this project is an important one," says Terri Shockley, the executive director of CEC who brought Davis into her New Edge series of residencies. "I live at 18th and Erie. I want to see how he will interpret my community. It's not often that people in North Philly get to see themselves reflected in art in a positive way."

North of Race, Fri.-Sat., Feb. 25-26, 8 p.m. and Sun., Feb. 27, 3 p.m., $8-$10, Community Education Center, 3500 Lancaster Ave., 215-387-1911.