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Meet Bridget Hartman of Orpheus Arts Collective

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Today we’d like to introduce you to Bridget Hartman.

Bridget, can you briefly walk us through your story – how you started and how you got to where you are today.
Music has been one of the strongest constants in my life. I picked up my Dad’s saxophone at a young age and my parents eventually put me in lessons so I’d stop squeaking around the house. The saxophone allowed jazz to become apart of my growth throughout middle and high school. I loved the feel, the melodies, the craft of improvising with a collective group of people, and the community it drew in. The community is the main reason I decided to move to Denver and study jazz. The idea of always being able to relate to a group of people, no matter what city or country I’m in brought me comfort. I never had the end goal of being a professional musician going into school. I just knew I wanted to be surrounded by people that are passionate.

Within the first weeks of being out here, I met some of my closest friends to this date. They had already been living in Denver for a few years or grew up here and knew what was up. They invited me to concerts, jam sessions, listening sessions, and we’re always down to share ideas and just hang. I fell in love with Denver and the people around me. I went back home as little as possible. I would come back from the holidays early and crash on my friend Camilla’s couch just because I wanted to be here rather than home.

Over the years, I got more involved with my own projects, such as writing and playing in my first band, composing for different ensembles and collaborating with different artists for shows we had coming up. The project I had the most fun being apart of was Deals Deals Deals, a free jazz trio. It started because my bandmates and I wanted to learn more about pedals and technology we got through a grant, and we ended up jamming together twice a week. Our music and attitude towards creating was absurd and we thought it should stay in the basement until we started picking up gigs at dive bars. People that were there seemed like they genuinely wanted to listen to us improvise a set for an hour. That made way for my mindset -you can gather people around anything; they just want to be in one place experiencing the same thing.

That thought leads to the idea for my next project: a small concert series somewhere in the mountains. I honestly don’t really know why I thought ‘the mountains’ other than I was still intrigued by being in the Rockies instead of along the coast. One of my emails to a potential venue was forwarded to Sunlight Mountain Resort and we worked together to bring back the festival scene to their town. We provide the art and music. They provide the land. That email started Orpheus. My immediate friends that seemed excited about the idea helped me host events to raise money, reach out to bands and local businesses. We had no clue what we were doing, but the idea started snowballing.

Great, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
The first struggle Orpheus faced was just getting past the first step. How does the idea of a small concert series take its form as a Colorado music festival? It was the chicken and the egg complex. You need media, a following, and money to start a festival, but you need to have your first festival to have said media, money, and a following. As a group of college students, our following was our peers, and our money and media would have to come from events we throw leading up to the festival. So our first event we threw was a 24-hour Stream-a-thon. We turned the living room of my house into a little venue for musicians, comedians, and podcasts, and scheduled a line-up that lasted for 24 hours. People from the university could come and go as they pleased, and by the end of the night, we generated a nice crowd for our music acts.

Along with the stream, we launched a Go Fund Me to raise money for musicians and supplies we’d have to pay for. Everything went smoothly until Zuckerberg thought we were pulling some underhanded scheme and kept shutting us down. We turned off the stream from 2 am-7 am and then finished it off from 7-12 the next day. After the stream-a-thon, we gained some media from 303 and Westword and eventually, we were able to get some articles in publications out near Glenwood where the festival would be held. The best thing this coverage did for us was introduce us to more musicians and businesses that took an interest in a grassroots event.

The most recent roadblock has been COVID-19. At first, I felt thrown off by everything. How do we bring people together right now? The only way seemed like live streaming, but in all honesty, virtual festivals didn’t motivate me as they started happening. I have enjoyed watching the community come together in this way, and am amazed by the time we live in. To be able to have the resources to keep people connected is really incredible, but I wanted to find another way to focus my energy. So right now, I’m illustrating a short story my sister is writing. All the ideas for the story have come from our events as well as my colleagues and I am rambling late at night about the kind of world our festival/collective could transform into.

But to be completely honest, our festival and collective will be on a public pause for a while. With the protests and leadership of Black Lives Matter coming to the frontline, it’s our time to listen. I have a lot to learn and my priority right now is to keep reading, calling, emailing, and studying from people whose voices have been silenced by our systems. Everything I’ve learned and benefited from has come from black culture, and when the virus starts to subside and events start coming back, it’s important this collective applies what we’re learning to create an inclusive community. And the only way to learn right now is to take a huge step backward, and just listen. That’s the only way our actions down the line can be informed.

Please tell us about Orpheus Arts Collective.
I’ve been running Orpheus Arts Collective for about two years. It started as a grassroots music festival and took its form as a collective this past year. Year one was achieved by the stream-a-thon event and scavenging the streets for resources such as shipping pallets and boards to make posters, the stage, etc. For year two, Big Mountain Events partnered with us. The owner, Brian, is an amazing person who wanted to try and bring the arts to Glenwood for his children and hopped on our grassroots community to take the foundation we’ve created a step further. He took care of the site production and I took care of the programming. We needed to raise more money to fulfill our vision for year two, so we started a series of satellite events called “Happenings.” This is where our festival sets us apart from others. These bi-monthly events allowed us to cultivate a dedicated following of people who came to every event. And it gave myself and the others working closely with me a chance to meet people we wouldn’t have if we just hosted the festival.

The first events were held in basements. We had live music, live art, tattoo artists, jam sessions, food, drinks. A year later, we brought these events to venues such as Fort Greene, ReCreative Denver, Broadway Roxy, Skylark, a truck – my favorite event. We drove around a neighborhood playing on a truck bed with a parade of people following us to a small concert series at a house. Anyways, the happenings gave the festival a chance to transform into a community-driven, year-round production. It challenged myself and my friends to think outside the box. ‘How can we add to the experience at each event?’ The path we took was interactive art installations such as a stand-up piano we converted into a midi controller and acrylic stand up bass that triggered different sounds when touching the sensors on the neck. My specific tasks for these projects were the sound design and construction.

Working on these installations has been my favorite part of this entire collective process. Sound design, spacial design, design in general, can create more of an impact on a community than I ever realized. After taking an interest in this field and digging into different design titans, I fell in love with Es Devlin’s work. Her work is simple and grand, elegant and controversial, and inspires the imagination to create entire worlds out of familiar concepts. If you don’t know her, she is the woman behind all the stage design for Kanye, Beyonce, Wagner Opera and famous pavilions around the world. My current goal is to take her concepts and apply them to a festival we create in what seems to be the far future due to our world’s circumstance at the moment. But in the meantime, we’ll be learning and building in hopes of bringing a truly unique event to Colorado.

Do you look back particularly fondly on any memories from childhood?
This sounds a little weird and off-brand from everything I’ve been talking about. But a memory that always comes back to me is my grandma teaching me how to do a cartwheel. I don’t know why I remember it so clearly. I had just gone swimming with my siblings one summer and we were all hanging out. My grandma was sitting by the lawn and I guess I was trying to do cartwheels. She told me I sucked and started describing the movements I should be making to get my feet over my head. Before I knew it, I was gaining momentum and my feet were going over my head. None of that half horizontal shifting your legs a few feet stuff. I think I keep coming back to this memory because how did my grandma teach me how to do a cartwheel? Walking was a struggle for her. She must have been really concise in the way she instructed me. She knew when and where my hands should go and was able to get results without having to over-explain anything to me.

If I were to relate this memory to art and production, I would say this memory makes me strive to be as concise as my grandma was in that moment. My counterpart in Orpheus, Kevin, says you need to have a clear vision before you start creating, or certain parts of the composition will fall flat, and he’s right. It’s important to take time and really know what you’re trying to put out into this world for it to speak loudly. And that’s definitely something I have to work on.

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Image Credit:
Photo 2 (black and white) by Athena Wilkinson

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