NAPOLEON on the Radio

Posted by Tamsen Wojtanowski on November 14, 2013 · Leave a Comment 

NAPOLEON on the Radio

Citywide Shows Covered by WHYY’s Peter Crimmins

In a radio and web piece, Peter Crimmin’s interviewed a few of the participants in Citywide, starting off the piece talking to Traction Company’s Billy Dufala and then interviewing NAPOLEON’s Chrissy Day and Jordan Rockford.

“A lot of people wanted to do it, to work with others in a different way,” said artist Christina Day, a member of Napoleon who donned her administrator hat as a Citywide coordinator. “What would happen if you marry these two groups and drop them in the same room, or switch spaces — and switch brains — for a month?”

For her creative contribution to Citywide, Day and the rest of the Napoleon collective made objects in response to a poem by Gertrude Stein, “If I Told Him ” (1922). Stein wrote the poem out of repetitive sentence fragments in response to a portrait of herself painted by Pablo Picasso in 1906. The rhythmic, disjointed poem reads like a linguistic interpretation of Cubism.

To see the web-version of the article (with fabulous images of Traction Company and NAPOLEON) click here.

To hear the show, click here. (Citywide article runs at 7:10 mark)