First Night

200 cities in the US host a New Year’s Eve event called First Night, an afternoon and evening, indoor and outdoor, alcohol-free celebration of local arts and artists.  Afternoon kid and family events include art projects and sing-a-longs, and there might be a parade. After dark, in the city’s downtown, you can go to performances in churches and concert halls and conference centers and storefronts and coffee houses and galleries.  You will hear country bands and folk singers and rap artists and Greek dancers and Taiko drummers and flamenco dancers and poets and hand bell choirs.  Some events are free outdoors, others require a $20 button that gets you into everything.  Come midnight there’s a happy loud massed crowd countdown and, if the city can afford it, fireworks. 

First Night began in Boston in the 1970’s. A small group of the city’s young artist community came up with the idea of celebrating the New Year not in the typical American way, ie lots of drinking and partying, but with performances and creativity. By the 90’s Boston’s First Night had become a huge success; a million people wandered through Boston with over a thousand artist to choose from: music, dance, talks, even ice sculptures on the Boston Commons and fireworks over Boston Harbor at midnight.

I first heard of First Night 15 years ago when I moved to Monterey.   Boston native Paulette Lynch had just a few years previously moved west and wanted something like Boston’s extravaganza in her new town, but on a smaller scale.  An artist and teacher, she also imitated Boston First Night’s gradual evolution into a year round arts advocacy organization, especially for lower income youth.  At summer and after school arts camps in Dorchester and Jamaica Plains, youth create visual art and performances they then share in Boston on New Year’s Eve. 

Within a few years Monterey County kids in the south county migrant farm worker camps and inner city Salinas kids were doing art year round thanks to First Night grants. On Dec. 31 they’d bring their rap groups and mariachi bands and Mexican-style murals to First Night Monterey. 

It has been a great place for our whole family to celebrate New Year’s safely and creatively.  One year our friend a beloved local poet was Grand Marshall of the parade and we got to ride on the funky truck bed float with him down the main street.  We weren’t on a float in the Rose Bowl parade, (another very American New Year’s tradition: Pasadena, a million spectators live, 20 million on TV) but it was fun.

So I’ll just tell one story from this year’s First Night Monterey.  Each year has a theme, and this year’s was “Sea Change,” focusing on protecting ocean health, promoting marine stewardship, reducing plastics.  Check out this cool fish sculpture fifth graders from rural Greenfield made from plastic bottles, while they learned about not throwing trash into the Salinas River and thence into the Monterey Bay.

At the Conference Center my First Night button with a little seahorse on it got me into a performance by the local Spector Dance Company.  After a cute dance with young kids in Santa hats, a woman came out on stage and said,

“Welcome.  I’m a ballet mom and a marine scientist.”

Turns out she works at MBARI, the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute.  She said, "

"We do research on the effects of climate change and acidification on the ocean, pollution and plastics on marine organisms.  We wanted to share our research with the public in other ways than just research papers and colloquia.  We are thrilled when the folks at Spector Dance proposed collaborating on an artistic and educational project called ‘Ocean.’  Here are some of our adult and youth dancers doing an excerpt of it.  They’ve performed it at the Smithsonian in Washington DC and at the Aquarium of the Pacific, and in classrooms.”

Behind the dancers was a video screen with underwater photography and interviews with ocean scientists. It’s hard to describe dance, but believe me that I got a new appreciation of interdependence, decalcification and wave action from those delightful dancers.

Here’s a YouTube exerpt.

When I left the auditorium I saw a table with an art project where you could make jelly fish mobiles out of recycled plastic bottle bottoms and curly ribbon. Standing alongside many little kids, with the dancers still in my head, I fashioned my little jelly fish. 

It was a better souvenir of my New Year’s celebration than a party hat or a hangover. 

Here’s a toast to the arts, and science; may we have a sea change in 2014.

Copyright © 2014 Deborah Streeter