The Ann Arbor Film Festival celebrates collaboration. Sure, there are some movie mavericks who do everything themselves when creating a film, but it's usually a talented group of people combining their resources to create something special.

Chien-An Yuan lives for collabs.

The Ann Arbor polymath is capable of making films, photography, art, and music all on his own—and he has many times—but he prefers to work with others to bring creations to life.

And there are so, so many creations in Yuan's world.

Yuan is a co-founder of the Asian American Pacific Islander (AAPI) performance troupe IS/LAND, whose latest work, TETRA, will be performed at the Ann Arbor Art Center (A2AC), April 15-16 and 22-23. Featuring dancers J Amber Kao, Olivia Lemmenes, S Jean Lee, and Yuan on sound design, TETRA is all about transformation: "Forming rolls of colorful Hanji mulberry paper into shapes and pathways of wisdom, knowledge, and healing, the movement of the dancers offer improvised ‘rituals’ as communal gestures of healing and transmutation, ultimately creating a restorative healing space for both the audience and performers," writes Yuan.

IS/LAND then returns to the Ann Arbor District Library on May 20 for KIZUNA TREE, an interactive installation and performance. The event combines an Ikebana tree designed by Celeste Shimoura Goedert, sound recordings from the collaborative series AAPI Stories, which was co-developed by Zosette Guir of Detroit Public Television and journalist Dorothy Hernandez as a response to the Atlanta spa shootings in 2021, and movement, visuals, and readings by IS/LAND. "KIZUNA TREE is an exploration of communal healing for AAPI peoples, across generations, communities, and ethnicities," writes Yuan.

More immediately, Yuan has a couple of projects at the Ann Arbor Art Center—both collaborative, of course.

He worked with artist Thea Augustina Eck to create a string installation in the rear staircase of A2AC, using colored yarn to create a web of lines that fan out from single sources, only interacting in separated layers when looking down or up the length of the well.

The fiber art will still be at A2AC when Yuan, using an iPad, and percussionist Jonathan Barahal Taylor improvise a score to Mattieu Hallé's May Waves Rise From Its Floor on Thursday, March 23, as part of the Ann Arbor Film Festival. Based in Ottowa, Canada, Hallé will be in Ann Arbor to screen the 16mm film of an abstract ocean landscape. He'll use a modified projector with a candle as its light source; the flame is moved and modified by Hallé's breathing and handheld pieces of broken crystal. As the shadows and light move and morph, Yuan and Taylor will react musically in real-time, making every screening of May Waves into a singular experience.

I spoke to Yuan about his current slate of artistic projects, and he gave us an update on some music he's preparing to release on his experimental record label, 1473.

Friday Five highlights music by Washtenaw County-associated artists and labels.

This week features soulful pop by Abigail Stauffer, rap by Eye O Mighty, jazzy pop by Hannah Baiardi, MEMCO Exposure Mixes by Goodmother and Naphtha, and experimental piano by Jason Adam Voss.

Three years ago, The Ark was set to be the venue for the Midwest premiere of The Fourth Messenger, a musical with a modern perspective on the life and teachings of the Buddha. Then the pandemic hit and the musical was canceled.

Now, almost three years to the day, The Fourth Messenger, with book and lyrics by Tanya Shaffer and music and additional lyrics by Vienna Teng, will finally get its Midwest premiere at The Ark on March 18. The concert-style performance will be a benefit for The Ark, Ann Arbor’s popular home for folk, jazz, and alt-country.  

In an interview with Shaffer in 2020, she described what inspired the musical while she was on a spiritual retreat. 

“The idea came to me on a nine-day silent retreat when I was supposed to be clearing my mind,” she said. “I was thinking about the story of Buddha’s enlightenment, where he was found under a tree and vowed not to get up until he found enlightenment. Then for many days and nights, all the temptations of the world are trying to get him up. And it came to me that it would be cool as a song and dance, the temptations standing under a tree and then thinking the whole story would be a musical because it has that scale of a hero’s quest, and so I got excited on the retreat and for many hours forgot about my breath and I thought about the musical.”

Shaffer didn’t pursue the idea for another five years. She said she had trouble deciding how to handle the story about the historical Buddha and his teachings.

“I started to think how would people view this story if it was a woman, and I wanted to update it and make it feel very relevant and contemporary,” Shaffer said. “So it took me five years to find my way into it and then many years to workshop.”

The Fourth Messenger premiered at the Ashby Stage in Berkeley, California, in 2013 and was presented at the New York Musical Festival in 2017. 

Friday Five highlights music by Washtenaw County-associated artists and labels.

This week features experimental sounds by Ben Miller and The Sensorium Saxophone Orchestra, ambient dub by cv313, shoegaze by Benoît Pioulard, indie-folk by Joanna Sterling, and pop-punk by Seaholm.

On the evening of April 16, when Hill Auditorium fills with the opening notes of Johann Sebastian Bach’s famous Passacaglia and Fugue in C minor, University of Michigan organ professor James Kibbie will be on the precipice of completing an incredible achievement.

This work is the final of Bach’s 281 solo organ compositions that Kibbie will perform in his 18-concert series that began in September 2022. It's a monumental musical offering that marks the end of Kibbie’s 42-year tenure as professor of organ at the University of Michigan.

The concert series also marks the culmination of Kibbie’s life-long relationship with Bach’s music.

“I’ve been working on this a long time,” Kibbie says. “Some of the first simple pieces I learned on the organ were by Bach.”

It was New Year’s Eve 2011 and we wanted a low-key way to celebrate.

My husband Brian suggested seeing The Artist, a critically acclaimed black-and-white-silent French film, at Ann Arbor’s Michigan Theater that evening.

The theater’s Screening Room featured a couple of showings, and we opted for the 9 pm show. That way, we could see the film and still get home to watch the Times Square ball drop at midnight on Dick Clark’s New Year’s Rockin’ Eve.

When we arrived at the theater, we saw a musician playing a Hammond organ about 20 minutes before The Artist started.

The organist provided pre-show entertainment and didn’t accompany The Artist during its screening, but his performance sparked our curiosity about the instrument, including the 1927 Barton pipe organ in the Michigan’s Main Auditorium.

For us, the theater organ served as a brief musical portal to the past, recalling a bygone era when it accompanied silent films at movie palaces from the 1900s to the 1920s.

Over the years, we’ve enjoyed seeing organists perform on Barton pipe organs at the Michigan Theater—the only one left in Ann Arbor—and Detroit’s Redford Theatre. Those beautiful theater organs offered warm welcomes as we took our seats to watch different films.

Nearly a decade later, I wanted to learn more about local theater organs, the theaters that housed them, and the organists who play them. 

Friday Five highlights music by Washtenaw County-associated artists and labels.

This week features New Orleans jazz by Alex Belhaj's Crescent City Quintet, post-bop jazz by Josie Ala Quartet, ambient-gospel jazz by Galen Bundy & Travis Aukerman, spiritual jazz by Mark de Clive-Lowe, Shigeto & Melanie Charles, and chamber-bluegrass jazz by Westbound Situation.

This is a very late, backdated edition of the Friday Five because you can't stream jams when you're sans electricity. Shout-out to the 2023 ice storm.

“So we’ll take process over outcome,” Jordan Mosley sings—or rather yells— on the sixth track, “settle,” from Normal Park’s this was it.

Mosley is the lead vocalist of an Ypsilanti fuzz-rock band of three high school friends who have been making music together for over a decade. Mosley is joined by drummer McKinnon Main and guitarist Anthony (Tony) Scott. Last October, the group finally finished the process and seized an outcome: its debut album, this was it.

Nestled midway through the album is one of the group’s favorite and most important tracks, “settle.” Like any great Midwest emo song, it begins on the porch. You can practically smell the American Spirits when you tune in.

“‘Cause staying in is much like going out / at least when we still had the choice / but since we don’t we can just make it easier to / settle the mind behind these red-laced bedroom eyes,” the chorus rings. 

Although it may sound like an ode to quarantine, “settle” raises questions about fate, the promise of temporary relief, and what the future holds. It starts with a dance on the porch, teetering between going out and staying in, and by the end, you’re invited inside.

“It was kind of a lynchpin where it seemed to connect all the songs around it,” Scott said. “But it also felt like a real step forward lyrically for us. To step out of our comfort zone instrumentally was also a driving factor, and we really felt like we had something at that point.”

Friday Five highlights music by Washtenaw County-associated artists and labels.

This week features art song by Electrifying Audiences, soundtrack vibes by KUZbeats, rap by Blaine Nash, solo piano by Gabriel Sadat Ferguson, and vaporwave by Unblo-Fact.

Back in October, two Michigan folk singer-songwriters formed an unexpected partnership.

Ann Arbor’s Annie Bacon and Alto’s Kyle Rasche met at the Folk Alliance Region Midwest conference outside Chicago and quickly learned they would be ideal collaborators for a new musical.

“I think we both knew of each other, and I was a fan of Annie before we [had] actually met in person because she had written this amazing folk opera a few years ago,” said Rasche, who writes, records, and performs under the moniker Chain of Lakes. 

Within only a few short hours of meeting Rasche, Bacon started writing the initial songs for a full-blown, stage-ready musical called The Keeper and shared them with him.

“I’d done my stalking and knew she’d be great to work with and immediately shared my dream with her to write a musical that had been germinating for a few years,” he said. “She came back to my room later to work on it with a bunch of it already written.”