Indianapolis is home to many festivals, but none is as unique and inclusive as the Spirit and Place Festival.
The Spirit and Place Festival looks at all the ways people define place, which could mean a neighborhood, or the whole city, and what it takes to create the spirit of that place. Through the arts, religion, and humanities, each program, film, lecture or activity serves as a vehicle to promote civic involvement.
“It’s all about mobilizing ideas and creating new connections between people and organizations,” said the festival’s director, Pam Blevins Hinkle.
What makes the festival, now in its 17th year, something to look forward to is its changing themes. This year’s theme is Play.
Blevins Hinkle said “Play” denotes many meanings, but the festival is designed to allow the community to decide what themes are all about. From the completely silly and fun to thought provoking and serious – with 40 events and signature events happening all around the city in 10 days, the Spirit and Place Festival has something for everyone.
Some events include “The Great Pumpkin Fling Thing.” Families can head to Garfield Park where kids can build miniature catapults and trebuchets and decorate their own pumpkins to fling. Ivy Tech students will also be on hand to fling and carve pumpkins.
During “Telling a Story through Dance,” mothers and daughters can explore ways to communicate with each other through dance, drama, and storytelling.
The Harrison Center for the Arts has various events happening under its roof such as a marketplace and a solar show by artist Kyle Ragsdale.
“Everyone has an inner child. Play is fun and competitive and there’s different ways to interpret play,” said Joanna Taft, executive director for the Harrison Center for the Arts. “The name of our show is ‘Playing in the Streets’ because we have community activist doing wonderful community building. We’re playing off of the word ‘play’ with people working at the grass roots level to rebuild our community. We’re exploring that word from every angle and it’s a more complicated word than we thought.”
A more stimulating program titled “A Paycheck Away” happening at the Farm Bureau Insurance Building involves an original board game that allows players to explore the dimensions of homelessness.
A highly anticipated program at Roberts Park United Methodist Church, “Dare to Have Fun in Church,” examines the question “Is playing in church blasphemous?”
“Faith is a part of the festival that we’re very proud of. Part of that comes from our history. We were born out of a project at the Polis Center that studied the relationship between urban culture and religion,” said Blevins Hinkle. “That has continued and we feel religion should be a part of the public square too.”
Not only does the Spirit and Place Festival take various organizations looking through a variety of lenses to interpret a singular issue, but the majority of these programs are free.
Blevins Hinkle believes the Spirit and Place Festival promotes respect for diversity and inspires public imagination. She also believes it serves as a great platform to knit the community together, learn about unfamiliar topics and allows people to interact and become engaged in the wide variety of topics they choose to partake in.
“Our purpose is to be a catalyst for civic engagement so we want people to think differently and act differently on behalf of their community. Some of the events will be plain fun. We’re really looking to give the community a never seen before experience that opens their minds to a new idea or place or meet new people and share ideas. At the end of the festival, we hope to have created a lot of new connections and directions,” said Blevins Hinkle.
For more information, call (317) 278-3623, or visit Spiritandplace.org.
