Festival with ties to UB moves to Governor’s Island and beyond

As a media study graduate student in 2016, Stanzi Vaubel founded the Indeterminacy Festival to provide lifelong artists with exceptional opportunities to perform in large-scale, site-specific work. The festival began in the grain silos of downtown Buffalo and has since taken Vaubel and Melanie Aceto, associate professor of theatre and dance, all over New York, including Governor’s Island.

In mid-June, Aceto and Vaubel traveled to Governor’s Island, a 172-acre island in New York Harbor near Lower Manhattan and Brooklyn, to work on a site-spe­cif­ic per­for­mance to open this year’s fes­ti­val. The production, “Four­teen Porch­es,” was directed by Vaubel; music was co-created by Vaubel and composer Philippe Treuille and orchestrated for choir, cham­ber orches­tra, youth musi­cians, dance and New York Arts Pro­gram appren­tices for per­for­mances staged on 14 porch­es in historic Nolan Park.

The porches served as a metaphor for the festival.

“Rather than consider the arts as a matter of isolated autonomous structures or disciplines, ‘Fourteen Porches’ explores the way these structures break out of their traditional domains and connect to each other both literally and metaphorically,” Vaubel says.

Aceto, who made her fourth appearance in the Indeterminacy Festival this year, choreographed the dance performance around the porches and worked with 14 dancers — all who responded to an open call for the festival performances.

“The dancers were interested in working collaboratively in this creative process and stated they were interested in improvisation,” Aceto says. “So they didn’t just show up and learn choreography; they arrived with a ton of creative energy and came up with great stuff to make this a really collaborative opportunity.” 

Vaubel, who is currently on the faculty of the New York Arts Program, explains that in the spirit of indeterminacy, the live music and dance piece employed improvisational structures in relation to the space. Vaubel and Treuille wrote the dance piece over the course of six months; once Aceto arrived on Governor’s Island, she had five days to develop the choreography.

“I put together an ensemble of dancers based here, but then it was like, OK, here’s 500 feet of this white silk parachute material and this big space for you to create your piece in,” Vaubel recalls.

It was Aceto’s responsibility to animate the historic park, creating a visual durational spectacle with movement and the parachute silk.

“There was this five-day, intensive, creative process whereby I’m making a piece in collaboration with the participants for presentation, and then you know, the music and dance come together and it went really well,” Aceto says.

“Stanzi is always interested in me animating the space and I loved bringing the explorations and this investigation into the material.”

And since Vaubel and Aceto have worked together numerous times over the past eight years, they’ve established a professional and personal trust.

“You have to know that person really well to know that they can do that and that they aren’t signing themselves up for something they can’t actually accomplish,” Aceto says. “And then they have to trust you and that it will all come together. So you have to know each other pretty well to do that kind of thing.”

Working collaboratively is fundamental to Vaubel’s mission as an artist and began during her time in Buffalo. Even though she was a media study student, Vaubel says she felt encouraged to move between disciplines and mediums while at UB.

“There was the sense that I could be working in video and film, and then I could go down to the dance studio and I could improvise with Melanie, and then I could go over to the music department, and I worked a lot with [cellist] Jonathan Golove [UB associate professor of music], who I’m still a collaborator with,” Vaubel says.

Trained as a cellist and wanting to expand her skill in video and editing, Vaubel attended some of Aceto’s dance classes and improvised music for the dancers.

“I would play cello and I would also videotape some of the movement and the different kind of structure Melanie was creating. So then, over the course of many months, I realized that I really like these movement structures,” she explains. “We started working in this very organic way, where I had an in-depth understanding of her process and how she [Aceto] worked.”

Vaubel’s initiative as a student to be as multidisciplinary and collaborative as possible has been to her benefit, Aceto says.

“Stanzi has real expertise and a real detailed awareness of the many facets that she incorporates in the works. She really knows filmmaking, she really knows dance, she’s been in the studios, she’s really a musician, she’s an arranger and she’s really good at bringing people together and making these large-scale events happen successfully,” Aceto says.

Vaubel is hosting an incubator program until Aug. 9 to develop new work for the 2025 Indeterminacy Festival. To keep up with the details, visit the festival’s website.