EVENT PREVIEW
“Los Trompos” (“The Spinning Tops”)
On view daily through Nov. 29. Free. Woodruff Arts Center, 1280 Peachtree St. N.E., Atlanta. www.high.org.
As part of its Friday Night Lates series (featuring half-price admission starting at 4 p.m. with extended hours until 9 p.m., with free entertainment and food and drink for sale), the High Museum will present outdoor programs of music and other performances on the first and third Friday of the month during “Los Trompos’” run.
The schedule (subject to change):
Friday: The Atlanta Opera (7-9 p.m.)
May 15: Theater Argo
June 5: Theater Argo, Dad's Garage
June 19: Dad's Garage
July 17: Ben Coleman, musician and sound designer
Aug. 7: Ben Coleman
Aug. 21: Atlanta Ballet's Wabi Sabi
Sept. 4: The Atlanta Opera; the Object Group
Sept. 18: The Object Group
Oct. 2: T. Lang Dance
Oct. 16: T. Lang Dance
Nov. 6: Atlanta Ballet's Wabi Sabi
MORE MIDTOWN ‘LOS TROMPOS’
15th and Peachtree Street
Federal Reserve Bank, 1000 Peachtree St.
999 Peachtree St.
12th Street and Peachtree Walk
Bank of America Plaza, 600 Peachtree St.
Promenade (in courtyard), 1230 Peachtree St.
Georgia Tech’s Clough Commons, 266 Fourth St.
Ignacio Cadena, co-designer of "Los Trompos," an installation of spinning tops on steroids dotting the Woodruff Arts Center's Sifly Piazza, spotted a visitor stretching out on one who looked like he was about to drift into a siesta in the noonday sun.
“Look at this guy,” the designer exclaimed with enthusiasm that suggested that security needn’t be called. “He’s using it the right way!”
At the other end of the plaza, Susan Boatwright's daughters — Annabelle, 10; Emma, 9; and Samantha, 8 — were finding their own right way to experience a jumbo trompo — playing on, inside and even atop their whirling ride. The girls were taking turns spinning each other around as fast as they could, the one doing the pushing virtually lifting off as she held its pink, fuchsia and lime woven straps for dear life.
“This is so much more fun and so much less costly than going to Disney World,” noted the Marietta mom as her home-schooled girls, alternately laughing and excitedly gasping for air, flew by.
All around them, hours before its official unveiling last Friday, children of all ages were checking out "Los Trompos" ("The Spinning Tops"), the second large-scale interactive design installation dreamed up by Mexican designers Cadena and Hector Esrawe. It's the encore to last summer and fall's "Mi Casa, Your Casa."
Like those rows of fire-red, three-dimensional, open-framed “houses” that boasted hammocks and swings, “Los Trompos” is a community-nurturing gesture commissioned by the High Museum of Art.
“Mi Casa,” the site of a series of performances and other events, was so popular that the High extended this “piazza activation program,” as the museum calls it, through 2017, with funding from the Lettie Pate Evans Foundation.
The High launches the series of biweekly outdoor "Friday Night Lates" happenings this week, with wandering singers from the Atlanta Opera serenading visitors with arias upon request Friday under moonlight.
The museum estimates more than 100,000 visitors enjoyed the extended run of “Mi Casa,” which is roughly 100,000 more people than typically had lolled about the piazza and the adjoining lawn area most years.
Italian architect Renzo Piano, who designed the High’s three-building expansion completed in 2005, intended the piazza as a gathering space that would link the varied elements of the growing Woodruff campus. And while the arts center had some successes attracting the public to Piano’s public space with occasional performing arts events, all that concrete looked lonely before the High commissioned Cadena and Esrawe.
“It was amazingly beautiful but completely dead,” recalled Cadena, who is based in Monterrey. “It was a hallway, not a center for interaction.”
When they were designing their first project for the High — two robustly hued reading rooms inside the 2013 exhibit "Frida & Diego: Passion, Politics and Painting" — the designers noticed how the plaza came to life during a Theatre for the Very Young performance by the Alliance Theatre that they happened upon.
“When we saw that, we saw many possibilities,” said Esrawe, whose studio is in Mexico City. “That led us to create a canvas that allows many people to perform.”
Those “Mi Casa” houses were symbols of community that succeeded in bringing together diverse audiences of Atlantans. It may not be as obvious, but Cadena said “Los Trompos” symbolizes the same.
“It’s just a little more playful,” he said. “Mi Casa” “was more architectonic. This one is more like a big toy.”
The biggest of the five different types of trompos the pair created — some with seating inside, some outside; and some with woven tops, others open to the sky — is 8 feet 2 inches tall with a 7-foot-9-inch diameter.
Both now in their mid-40s with young children of their own, the designers recall the simple childhood joy of playing with trompos, spun by winding string around the body and then launching the top.
“It’s a beautiful idea and a beautiful thing to play with,” Cadena said, noting that technology has made them passe even in Mexico. “We have to introduce it to the kids again. Trompos can be cool again.”
The 31 large-scale ones on the Woodruff campus — 27 on the piazza, two stationary ones on the High’s uneven front lawn and two in the Callaway Plaza turnaround at 15th Street — should provide ample evidence of the traditional toy’s viability. As will seven more scattered around Midtown (see box for locations).
“The thing that’s so nice is that it creates this incredible sense of community and play together,” High decorative arts and design curator Sarah Schleuning said. “In order to spin them, somebody else has to help you, so you start to see little kids pushing other little kids, adults pushing others. It’s creating a way to engage.”
To keep the piazza activation idea fresh, the High will commission different designers to play next year, the curator said, even while allowing that she regrets the collaboration with Cadena and Esrawe is drawing to a close.
The High staff is uniformly fond of the designers, who are appreciated for their warm personalities, creative chitchat, espresso sipping, all-black garb and (especially among the females) nice cologne.
And the feeling is mutual.
“We agree completely on that, because it needs to have fresh approaches, needs to have new creatives doing this,” Esrawe said. “And for us, also, there’s the possibility for other places …”
To which Cadena interjected with the unfettered directness of a trompo-playing kid: “Sad!”
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