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Friday was the Summer Solstice, and San Antonio International Airport hosted a special performance to celebrate the event underneath artist Christopher Janney's unique solar sculpture called “Passing Light.”
The installation is designed to cast an array of colored shadows into an underground parking area at the airport.
This is a yearly event, and again on Friday, at 2 p.m. Central Time, on the Summer Solstice, the multi-colored shadow grid pattern aligned perfectly with a black-line grid painted on the floor. The precise positioning lasts for less than a minute as the sun passes directly overhead.
URBAN-15 Artistic Director Catherine Cisneros performed a dance to a 56-speaker spatial sound composition during the event.
“This is a celebration of the longest day of the year when everything is in balance, and this piece that Christopher Janney made really celebrates it," said Cisneros.
Urban-15 is a community arts organization perhaps best known for its vivid drumming and dance performances.
While the visual aspect of the presentation is impressive, the audio portion is as grand. The unlikely location of the garage offers an effective acoustic space for the reverberations of the euphony of a "spatial sound" that is the backdrop for Cisneros' mesmeric dance.
In keeping with the myths and rituals of the worship of the life-giving sun observed the world over, according to Urban-15's description of the dance, the moves are "designed to bring a ceremonial awareness of our planet’s humble travels within a celestial clock, evoking the elaborate rituals performed by the ancient Egyptians, Aztecs, Celts, Mayans, Hindis, Incas and others to make visible the moment of solar zenith."
Jerry Clayton contributed to this report.
