Professor and festival coordinator Adriane Fang

I had to find the damn bear.

I walked up stairs. I walked through corridors. I walked down stairs. I walked through the same corridors again because I have no sense of direction. As I hurried through the dizzying labyrinth that is the Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center, I replayed the previous five minutes over and over in my head.

How could something so benign as a plush, red, heart-covered teddy bear be so elusive?

“This is pretty different from NextNOW,” I thought begrudgingly.

NextNOW Fest, a welcoming event that took place Sept. 11 through Sept. 14, was clear in its message. Well-advertised and profusely promoted, its balloon sculptures and technicolor light displays practically shouted “We’re here, we’re fun and we want you to join us.”

Not even a week removed from this artful explosion, the Festival of Subversive Artists and Minds barely whispered its intentions and had me completely baffled as well as significantly frustrated. I continued to lose hope of ever finding Mr. Bear.

I passed a group of people sitting on the floor near an orange frog. “Not a bear but maybe I’m getting close,” I thought.

What brought me to this confounding quest? Here’s how the night started: I strode into the mostly empty Clarice lobby at 6:57 p.m. with a reluctantly supportive friend to my right.

“I have no idea what we’re supposed to do now,” I said nervously, checking my phone.

I seriously didn’t. Sparsely advertised, the Festival of Subversive Artists and Minds was a mystery that I wasn’t sure I wanted to solve.

“Tuesday, September 16, Cafritz Theatre,  read the email inviting me to come to A Festival of Subversive Artists and Minds: An Opening Non-Ceremony. I was at the non-opening, and it did, indeed, seem to encapsulate the antithesis of pomp and circumstance.

Everything was quiet.

Hesitantly, we climbed the grand staircase looking for signs of life.

“Are you here for the nonfestival?” asked a woman standing at the top of the stairs, just out of view from any poor soul standing confused in The Clarice’s lobby. She handed each of us a card in exchange for our uneasy stares. Instructions covered one side; a map covered the other. Map is a loose term, as this was no traditional map. Dora the Explorer could not follow this. It was simply a picture of a smiling red bear with its head cocked to one side.

“Are we supposed to find these? Where are we allowed to look? Anywhere?” asked my friend, now clearly distressed and regretting her decision to join me.

The woman just smiled and replied, “They can already see you now.”

So began the hunt. 

***

When Leigh Wilson Smiley, director of the theater, dance and performance studies school, tasked a planning committee to come up with a “big idea” for this season, its first instinct was to make a festival of people who “blow s— up.”

Though a little more evolved, the idea of disrupting the current state of things and uprooting established orders forms the foundation for A Festival of Subversive Artists and Minds, a yearlong performance series.

Dramaturg James Ball put the concept of subversion simply: “It’s stuff that breaks the rules.”

The festival exists to discuss the disallowed, to question the unquestionable. Featuring a collection of artists and thinkers that somehow defy traditional artistic formats, it seeks to promote rebellious thinking.

“The idea of people that blow stuff up, that’s all well and good but [we’re looking] at what that actually means. Is that what we want to do in our own art form? What do we actually want to encourage in the population at large?” said Adriane Fang, coordinator for the festival and professor in the theater, dance and performance school.

Following on the heels of the widely advertised and profusely promoted NextNOW Fest, Subversive Artists and Minds might seem like an anticlimactic whimper after such an incredible bang.

This couldn’t be further from the truth.

***

After finding the bear (yes, I did finally find it), I met up with a group of students, staff and faculty from all corners of the campus. A dialogue started that captured the festival’s intentions.

“We want people to work harder, not to find the answers to the tough questions, but to figure out what’s the question that’s really not being asked,” Ball said in an interview prior to the event.

Indeed, during the nonceremony, the audience began to ask those questions. We shared tales of private anarchy — from exposing historical truth in Egypt to contesting a billion dollar project in fusion energy. 

As we delved further into what being productive in a subversive way actually meant, I realized that this bizarre event was more accurately the thunder after a lightning storm ­— rumbling and subtle, but powerful.

CORRECTION: Due to a reporting error, the article referenced the incorrect name for the person who came up with the idea for the festival.