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In the Studio
Artist: Nadia Hagen, founder of Flam Chen
Media: Performance, Choreography, Painting
Studio Location: Odaiko Sonora S.P.A.C.E. as of this month
by Diane Daly
 adia Hagen hates me. If you’ve only had cursory contact with her that is probably what you think. And even after you get to know her, that fear could resurface. You’ll have totally relaxed around her self-deprecating humor, daring fashion choices and easy manner as a mother, and then one day you’ll run into her when you’re not prepared. Those sharp eyes, the unconcern. You’ll flush and flutter your hand like a wet moth at her, and after she burns by you’ll think, Egads! She hates me.
Not every artist should be easily approached, especially in these lands of excess sunshine and Reiki. Thank goodness Hagen chose the Old Pueblo to found Flam Chen, the troupe of fire-tossing superstars who crouch their goatlike haunches in Tucson and glower at the world. For over a decade, they’ve given us street cred.
Flam Chen’s internet presence is so pronounced that if you light a match too close to your computer their name will come up. They are featured on Zannel, the new mobile video sharing site, and they are all over the place on YouTube and MySpace. But they are also shrewd marketers, who write video and internet buzz-creation into every budget. So how famous are they? When asked this question, Hagen shrugs. “People say, ‘You’re famous.’ I break even. I’m on Zannel but I can’t get Zannel. My phone’s too ghetto.”
Megabytes are by no means the only space Flam Chen eats up; in the past few years their shows have become enormous productions, with performances involving thirty people or more navigating around open flame to Hagen’s careful choreography. Performers do aerial dance while hanging from cranes or giant balloons, ignite pool-size circles of fire on the ground, and stalk around as Kokapi, creatures on four stilts that appear to a cross between sea anemones and the Tauntauns that loped around Hoth. And when the flames are extinguished, it’s all hauled back to wherever Hagen calls home.
I visited Hagen at Flam Chen’s 23rd Street studios as she and Paul Weir, who is also her husband, were preparing to move out and into their third downtown warehouse in three years. When Flam Chen moves to the new location they will have spent less than two years in the 23rd Street digs, and it’s not hard to see why. The exterior looks like “a big chicken coop,” to use Weir’s words, with ten-foot vertical iron pipes surrounding walls of rough-cut aluminum slabs. It appears makeshift, and judging by the leaks, it was built that way. Inside, there is little room for rehearsal, for though the ceilings are high the place is literally stuffed with costumes, firefans, torches, stilts, fuel containers, and art. Twisted metal that has weathered countless explosions and the charred bandaging on the fan handles give it all the air of having emerged from an apocalypse. Partition it all with corrugated tin walls and it feels like you’re in a charred muffin pan.
The areas of the warehouse that Hagen lives in with her daughters offset the industrial with vivid color, thanks to her paintings, which she sells at Bohemia Gallery, and the cabaret-style patterns on many of her costumes and decorations. Hagen herself is a mix of these elements when she’s not glaring out at the audience as Kali. She wears large plugs in her earlobes and shaves her hair halfway up her scalp, but when she arranges a flirty ponytail on top and velour vintage ensemble below, it comes together with old-fashioned charm.
Hagen is open, too, especially when talking about theater and ritual. As a young child she lived in New York City, but in her school years she moved to the suburbs. “In the city everyone was used to pushing up against each other and the little black girls would front. You had to front, to show you mattered. So when I moved to the suburbs I would front…and I would get sent to the principal’s office. I’d say, ‘I was frontin’, and the other kid would say, ‘She tried to kill me.’” The way Hagen carries herself today, particularly in performance, it seems the choice to enact a power ritual rather than exchange niceties was a lifelong decision.
However, when asked whether she prefers performing in a group to going solo, she doesn’t hesitate to say yes. “I really like theater, the communism of it. When everyone has their own domain to command and then you put the pieces together. I grew up in the culture of the rock star. We all did, American kids. That’s the picture of the performer. The individual. The Savant. It creates a cult of envy.
“Theater engages the viewer,” she continues. “It’s more of a dialogue; it has more longevity. You can create a world rather than a freezeframe.”
Hagen says in the past with Flam Chen and other groups, performances grew entirely from collaboration. But she is forty-three years old now, and the members who were her peers have all left the group. Today several of their core performers are teenagers, and Hagen’s duties have grown beyond performance to include story creation, costume design, choreography, and even money management. “In a way it makes life really easy,” she says. “There’s an obvious hierarchy. I get to use what I know and delegate.”
But there is one ritual she is still waiting for. “I don’t mind being the ol’ lady of the group. But I’m waiting for them to pass me,” she says, a degree of agitation in her voice rattling the aluminum. “I’ll be happy when they’re doing things I don’t know how to do!”
Nadia Hagen and Flam Chen will be appearing in Inferno, a gala at Cushing Street Grill on September 22nd, and in another fundraiser for the All Souls Procession on September 29th. They hold classes in fire performance at Odaiko Sonora S.P.A.C.E., 1013 S. Tyndall Ave., on Thursdays at 7:30pm. Visit flam-chen.com or your local search engine for more information.
The Tucson Museum of Art’s Ambitious Vision
“A Great City Deserves a Great Art Museum”
--Robert E. Knight, Executive Director
Tucson Museum of Art
by Thomas Whittingslow and Maureen Shea
 he Tucson Museum of Art is one of Downtown’s hidden gems. However, if Robert E. Knight and the museum’s board of directors can secure the necessary approvals, the museum will no longer be so hidden. Knight’s vision is to extend TMA’s physical presence from its home in the “Historic Block” north of Alameda Street, to occupy the north side of the historic 1928 Pima County Courthouse at 115 N. Church Avenue — one of Tucson’s most visible and recognizable icons.
Knight envisions this new wing as a featured destination attraction of Downtown, containing of the region’s preeminent collections for Western, Native American and Latin American art. “The tiled-roof, Spanish Colonial Revival icon couldn’t be a more appropriate repository for this collection,” said Meredith Hayes, Director of Marketing and Public Relations for TMA.
Hayes points out that the adjacent El Presidio Park would also become a part of the expansion program, utilized as an outdoor sculpture court and more user-friendly by making it a venue for performance art with an amphitheatre and outdoor cafes. While she cautions that the project is still in the early stages, Hayes said that an anonymous benefactor has already discussed making the new addition a repository for his impressive collection of Western Art. “We think this expansion of the Tucson Museum of Art will be a great way of bringing tourists to the downtown: keeping them there and encouraging repeat visits. It just makes so much sense.”
The Old Pima County Courthouse, commissioned by former County Supervisor Joseph M. Ronstadt, was designed by Tucson architect Roy W. Place, and built at a cost of around $350,000. When it was first built, there was controversy about the color and the style of the brick structure, covered with pink stucco with its Moorish arches opening onto a central patio, topped with a ceramic tile dome.
“It’s not elective but a requirement that a city of a million people have a great art museum,” insists Executive Director Robert Knight, “It’s a requirement.” As the cultural repository of culture for Tucson, and by extension, Southern Arizona, the Tucson Museum of Art focuses on Latin American art, from Pre-Columbian up to Contemporary, created by Native Americans and Hispanics. Knight perceives the Tucson Museum of Art as the center of these endeavors with concentric circles expanding, first to the Southwest, North America, the Western Hemisphere… and the rest of the world. However, as a counter-point, the director likes to provide the experience of art from other parts of the world.
So much of what we see today is generated over the Internet or computer-generated by digital technology. Knight explained that the museum is the home of the real thing. “It makes such a difference when you see an original work; you get a sense of scale, texture and other attributes that cannot be conveyed on the Internet or in a reproduction or photograph. It’s an emotional experience.
Knight explained how he became hooked on art and museums in particular.
“When I was in the seventh or eighth grade, we went on a field trip. There were probably a lot of other things that I wished I had been doing, but we went to a museum. I remember standing in front of a large Morris Lewis stained-veil painting — raw canvas with veils of color. I remember saying to myself, ‘this is art?’ It opened up a whole new area of experience and it changed my life. The same thing happened when I was pushed to go to the symphony. I was into the Beatles but they were playing Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring. It blew me away. You can listen to the finest digital recordings but it is nothing like having a live symphony wash over you — the same is true of art.”
Tucson’s dynamic museum director translates his lifetime passion for the arts into his role as an important steward of regional culture. Because of his personal experiences, Knight is adamant about children’s’ programs. TMA has just ended its summer art school with more than 1,000 children participating. The museum campus also hosts the Alternative High School program called ArtWorks Academy, a partnership with Tucson Unified School District and Tucson Pima Arts Council. In a way, the Academy is the fulfillment of Knight’s early experience. Students can walk out of their classroom, located on the museum campus, then go directly to the gallery to experience the real thing. Meanwhile, these same students are being trained by the finest artists in our region. “It creates an absolutely unique experience,” says Knight. “We are changing their lives.”
Anticipating the revitalization of the downtown area and the growth of the museum, Knight has been in talks with the City and County about acquiring use of a portion of the Old Courthouse to house the extensive Western and Latino Collection. Nothing definite has been decided at this point; however, it would allow expansion of the museum to keep in step with the planning of city growth.
Future exhibits
All year round the museum is alive with programs and major exhibitions which attract tourists from all over the country and major support from local Tucsonans. Starting September 15, a new exhibition, “An Eclectic Eye: Selections from the Dan Leach Collection” will be opening. Tucson collector Dan Leach, who began collecting in the sixties, amassed a large collection on art in several different mediums, not only from emerging artists but also established artists from around the world. The Dan Leach collection has been promised to the Tucson Museum of Art upon his death, so that future generations can appreciate his lifelong passion for art. Meredith Hayes says, “It is a great way for people to learn about why people do these things when they pass away.”
In February, there will be a new exhibit entitled “Changing Hands: Art Without Reservation 2,” It will feature contemporary art from the West, Northwest and Pacific.
It is the second in a series that explores new work by 150 Native North American artists who work within the context of contemporary art and culture bringing new ideas to the forefront.
In addition the museum offers lectures, book discussions, classes to suit many levels of interest. The Tucson Museum of Art is located at 140 N. Main Ave., just north of Tucson’s City Hall. For more information, call 520-624-2333 or visit www.TucsonMuseumofArt.org.
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