Chaos and Kisses: A Grand Opening Parade for Calder Gardens
Saturday, September 20
Noon – 2pm
Featured artists include Philly's Sun Ra Arkestra. Photo by Sibylle Zerr
Calder Gardens will celebrate its opening with Chaos and Kisses, a free public parade on Saturday, September 20, from noon to 2pm, conceived by acclaimed artist, composer, and musician Arto Lindsay. Featured artists include Sun Ra Arkestra, Pig Iron Theatre, Almanac Dance Circus Theatre, Mad Beatz Philly, and PHonk!
Opening on Sunday, September 21, Calder Gardens is a new cultural destination that honors the legacy of Alexander Calder, a leading 20th-century artist and native Philadelphian. The space unites Calder’s art with architecture, nature, and activations that nurture different ways of thinking, feeling, and understanding.
The opening parade begins at noon at LOVE Park near City Hall, which features the famous bronze statue of William Penn by Calder’s grandfather Alexander Milne Calder. It continues along the Parkway, past the landmark Swann Memorial Fountain by Calder’s father Alexander Stirling Calder, and concludes in Maja Park near Calder Gardens with a free concert at 1pm by the legendary Sun Ra Arkestra.
The parade’s lineup features an unprecedented ensemble of Philadelphia-based performers and artists, including Pig Iron Theatre, Almanac Dance Circus Theatre, Mad Beatz Philly with youth drumlines, and Brazilian percussion ensemble PHonk!. Together, these artists will activate the city with music, movement, theater, and spectacle, guided by Arto Lindsay’s conceptual framework for the event.
The idea of a parade is deeply rooted in the history and spirit of Calder Gardens, honoring the Calder family’s ancestry in Philadelphia and the city’s vibrant arts scene. Staged on the Parkway and free to all, the parade celebrates collaboration, experimentation, and impermanence—values that were central to Calder’s own work and will guide the programming at Calder Gardens in the years ahead.
Commissioned by Calder Gardens, the event is conceived by Lindsay, an artist, musician, and producer whose work blurs boundaries between music, performance, and visual art. Chaos and Kisses takes its name from his original score for the occasion, which shapes the flow of the parade while leaving room for individual experiences and encounters. “Everyone knows what to expect from a parade,” Lindsay says, “which makes it the perfect place for the unexpected to appear.” By collaborating exclusively with local artists and communities, Lindsay and Calder Gardens emphasize the importance of collective creation and place-based cultural production.
Please note: Calder Gardens opens September 21, the day after the parade. While supplies last, parade attendees will receive vouchers for free admission (redeemable for six months during available time slots).
Event Details: Chaos and Kisses: A Grand Opening Parade for Calder Gardens by Arto Lindsay
Featured Artists: Sun Ra Arkestra, Pig Iron Theatre, Almanac Dance Circus Theatre, Mad Beatz Philly, PHonk!
Date: Saturday, September 20, 2025
Time: Noon – 2pm
Route: LOVE Park → Swann Memorial Fountain → Parkway → Maja Park (next to Calder Gardens)
Finale Concert: Sun Ra Arkestra, 1pm at Maja Park
Price: Free and open to the public
We encourage you to register to receive updates about the parade.
About the Artists
Sun Ra Arkestra
Sun Ra was one of the greatest, yet least widely known, jazz artists of the last four decades. The composer, bandleader, pianist, poet, and Afro-Futurist philosopher founded his Arkestra to take jazz into unexplored territories, drawing on black vaudeville, modern dance, Egyptian cosmology, Eastern philosophy, surrealism, kitsch, and the Bible. Today, the Arkestra is led by 101-year-young alto saxophonist and long-time Sun Ra collaborator Marshall Allen. The mischievous brass blasts and the grooves keep rolling, as the big band—fully dressed, as usual, in space capes with a hint of ancient Egypt—takes off once again in a joyous burst of tightly organized madness.
Multinatural (Blackout) Parade, performance on the occasion of the 53rd Venice Biennale. Courtesy Fondazione Claudio Buziol, Venezia. Photo by Moira Ricci
Arto Lindsay
Born in 1953 in Virginia and raised in Brazil, Lindsay became a central figure in avant-garde music and art in New York. He first gained prominence in 1977 with the band DNA, featured on Brian Eno’s seminal compilation No New York. He went on to join the Lounge Lizards, perform with The Golden Palominos, and co-founded Ambitious Lovers in 1985. Since the 1990s, his solo recordings have fused experimental noise with Brazilian traditions.
As a producer, Lindsay has collaborated with Caetano Veloso, Gal Costa, Marisa Monte, David Byrne, Waldemar Bastos, Thiago Nassif, and Ilê Aiyê, while also working across disciplines with figures including Ryuichi Sakamoto, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Matthew Barney, Laurie Anderson, Animal Collective, Heiner Müller, Cornelius, and Rirkrit Tiravanija. He has also engaged directly with Calder’s legacy through performances at the Whitney Museum’s Calder: Hypermobility.
Chaos and Kisses continues Lindsay’s exploration of the parade as a medium, bringing together music, theater, dance, and community in a shared, celebratory act of collective creation to mark the opening of Calder Gardens.
Pig Iron Theatre
Founded in 1995, Pig Iron Theatre has created over 35 original works and toured worldwide. Individual works have been inspired by history and biography (Anodyne, 2001), rock music (Swamp Is On, 2015), American kitsch culture (Welcome to Yuba City, 2009), and our relationship to our geologic time (Superterranean, 2019). The company has won two Obie Awards and many Barrymore Awards, and the founders have been awarded a Pew Fellowship and a USA Knight Fellowship, among others.
Photo by John C Hawthorne
Almanac Dance Circus Theatre
Almanac Projects is an award-winning Philly-based company dedicated to producing original works of genre-defying art. The group’s goal is simple: to help artists push the limits of theatrical performance and thrill audiences with experiences they won’t find anywhere else. Since its founding in 2013 as a circus company by graduates of the Pig Iron School and Headlong Performance Institute, Almanac has premiered 16 full-length shows, including commissions from the Philadelphia Museum of Art, FringeArts, and the New York Botanical Garden.
Mad Beatz Philly
Mad Beatz Philly was founded in 2013 by director Jesse Mell and a cohort of dedicated high school upperclassmen interested in forming a community-based network to advance their career goals of becoming professional performers and teachers. Today, the group has a network of HBCU-style school drumline programs across Philadelphia serving more than 250 students. Mad Beatz Philly is an education partner of the Mann Center for the Performing Arts.
PHonk!
PHonk!Philly builds community and empowers Philadelphians through the lively traditions of African diasporic carnival culture. Inspired by the rhythms, dances, and festive street parades of Brazil, the Caribbean, and New Orleans, they create inclusive spaces for joy, resilience, and cultural preservation. Their dynamic performances featuring drumming, dance, and colorful costumes invite people of all ages to connect, learn, and rise together.
Sponsors
Calder Gardens opening events are underwritten by Aramark, Comcast NBCUniversal, Neubauer Family Foundation, and Marsha and Jeffrey Perelman. Additional support is provided by Brown Advisory, Cozen O’Connor, Future Standard, Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation, Green Family Foundation, Independence Blue Cross, JPMorganChase, Morgan Lewis, Penn Medicine, Lindy Snider Foundation, Sotheby’s, and Temple University.