To nobody’s surprise, the best things about Smoke Farm’s third
annual summer performance festival—called Interstitial
Heroes—weren’t the performances.
(Briefly: Smoke Farm is 360 acres of woods and fields and
riverbanks, an hour’s drive north of Seattle, owned free and
clear—after a decade of wrangling and fundraising—by a
nonprofit. Its figurehead is Stuart Smithers, a serene professor of
philosophy at the University of Puget Sound who can be found sitting by
bonfires at Smoke Farm events, drinking Scotch and smoking cigars and
discussing the best places to fish in Latin America. Smoke Farm
hosts all kinds of happenings, from outdoor theater festivals like
Interstitial Heroes to philosophy retreats to Burning Beast, where
excellent chefs cook whole animals on open fires in the middle of a
scenic field.)
Because it’s owned outright, Smoke Farm has a lack of ambition that
works both for and against it. For it: Smoke Farm doesn’t have to grub,
elbow-rub, and manically hype itself for grants. It can relax.
Once you’ve driven that hour north—past cows, barns, and
diners—and through its little aluminum gate, it’s difficult to
feel tense about anything at all. Against it: Smoke Farm doesn’t have
to grub, elbow-rub, and manically hype itself for anything, including
its summer performance festival. Which is why this year’s festival
began with six poets standing in a circle reciting to each
other, which most people didn’t listen to. And why the dinner
(salad, farro, beef ribs) was accompanied by an oration (from a vintage
snake-oil salesman played by Charles Leggett, organized by Matthew
Richter) that most people didn’t listen to.
People did, however, enjoy a secular confessional booth by
performance artists PDL (in the middle of a hot field on the way down
to the river), Seven Andy Warhols Playing Shuffleboard (an
installation in which audience members could don white wigs and play
shuffleboard), and a late-afternoon performance by a skeleton
crew from Circus Contraption (aerialists, acrobatics, and
songs on steel guitar and ukulele by Drew Keriakedes, Contraption’s
grinning, nihilistic genius). People would’ve danced to the psychedelic
surf-rock of Sage—they’ve reunited—except they played
toward a broiling hot field, so everybody sat in the barn behind them
to listen. A dance company called the Asterisk Project performed a
desultory dance in the river. (All women, all in white T-shirts: a
study in breasts.) Bret Fetzer told a bedtime story with shadow puppets
but, by that time, most people were taking walks and gently mauling
each other beneath the midnight moon. Art and nature compete for
people’s attention at Smoke Farm. Nature usually wins. 
