What happens when an irresistible force meets an immovable object?

If that force is the three-day Momentum art and culture festival — and the object is a lingering pandemic — you pivot by necessity to make your event both coronavirus safe yet still interactive.

“Ensuring safety first is probably the biggest difference between this year (and the earliest festivals),” said Crystal Phelps, Momentum Festival manager for the presenting Toledo Arts Commission. “Before, it was really condensed. Now we’re allowing for more room to roam and making so it doesn’t feel crowded.”

A coronavirus-shackled 2020 Momentum meant an abundance of virtual activities that stretched over five weeks. This year’s festival returns to three days, mostly along the waterfront.

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“Historically, interactivity has been a key component,” Phelps recalled. “Pre-pandemic we were loaded up with a lot of hands-on activities. This year we still have interactive things, but it’s also more visually interesting to watch.

“From last year to this year, one thing we learned was about self-guided activity,” she continued. “People seem to really resonate with being able to discover things at their own pace. Also, [we’ll have more] virtual content, like video pieces, that people can engage with” from a distance.

This year's fifth Momentum Festival, which runs Thursday through Saturday at Promenade Park and elsewhere, promises that both safety and interactivity will be at play. There will be artists painting onsite murals, Dancin’ In The Streets videos, inflatable tubular benches called Street Seats, and plenty of music, including hourly bands from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Saturday.

As always, Momentum will celebrate community awareness: The Holding Project, a live performance where actors elicit testimonies about feelings of safety, and several civic-minded films at the KeyBank Discovery Theater, including Sons of Toledo, about a local barber’s day prior to attending the funeral for his brother.

Visual spectacle remains a prime component of the festival, with several experiences designed to dazzle the eyes and engage the spirit.

Dazzling eyes is par for the course for Colorado-based Denver Digerati, which made its first appearance at Momentum in 2019, and will be front and center for Thursday’s opening day with two one-hour programs of dazzling digital animation on the giant LED screen on the side of the ProMedica parking garage.

Created in 2013 to create digital content on screens in Denver’s downtown theater district, Denver Digerati has since created its Supernova Festival, a one-day visual festival in Denver (this year it’s Saturday) showcasing some of the best digital animation from around the world.

The organization opens a portal from February to June each year allowing digital artists to submit works up to 60 minutes long, then curates those submission into a festival.

In Toledo, Supernova Regeneration serves Daybreak during the day Thursday, and Nightfall that evening.

Ranging from the comical to surreal, the digital creations (they aren’t so much videos as abstract romps through the imagination) show just how far computer animation has come, says Ivar Zeile, founder and co-director of Denver Digerati.

“Twenty years ago it might take an artist a year to deliver something computerized that’s 20 minutes long. Now you see artists do full-length works that are phenomenal” in much shorter time, he explained.

“There’s a good mixture of national and international artists in the Toledo program. There are works that come from artists who, if you didn’t see their name, you wouldn't know they came from outside the country. Then there’s a music video that's highly digital in Spanish. What I like about the medium is that it’s a universal way of putting forward art and motion imagery. It’s a shared experience across cultures.”

Visitors can find an equally colorful if more hands-on visual experience with Crescendo, located in Festival Park near Imagination Station. There they’ll find an upright piano and an invitation to sit down and play it. Doing so after dark will cause lights on nearby trees to twinkle and pulse, fueled by the keyboard notes.

“The lights are agnostic to your ability (or inability) to play music,” said Kyle Eli Ebersole, who created the interactive work with his friend Ian Molitors. “Children can walk up and touch the keys and see their actions turned into a light show. Or if you’re a professional musician, you can give the crowd a show. We find the community does a great job of sharing the stage and cheering each other on.

“The piano is a stand-up Ebersole Patented Grand Player Piano that has since had the player piano mechanism removed,” he continued. “We were aware that you could get a piano online for cheap so I started searching around and actually came across a piano with my surname that was originally built in Cincinnati. Before this I had no idea that Ebersole pianos existed. It seemed like the opportunity to sign my work.”

Agility has proven the saving grace for the riverfront festival. In its pre-pandemic days Momentum drew thousands to a single location at Promenade Park. Last year’s attendance was harder to track, since festival events took place over a longer period of time.

“Last year we were really happy with the engagement that we had,” Phelps said, but cautioned that “measuring virtual participation versus in person is always a little tricky. We had a lot of great feedback from attendees telling us about the things they loved.”

Some of that feedback came from participating artists themselves, who not only got positive audience response, but also remuneration.

Phelps said that since Momentum’s inception in 2017, the Arts Commission has paid participating artists more than $384,000.

First Published September 16, 2021, 12:00 p.m.