Northern Spark—the all-night arts festival that had its third annual outing last Saturday-into-Sunday—turned downtown Saint Paul into a credible imitation of Manhattan-after-dark. My wife, Laurie, and I made our way very slowly into the creep-and-stop traffic jam that was Lowertown at about 10:30 PM; we had signed up to help run a project, Forecast Public Art's Labyrinth, from 10:45 till a quarter to one.

The sidewalks were alive with gaggles of art-goers, heading from one imaginative project to another. This was no art crawl, no peek into studios to look at paintings. This was a grand collage of happenings, ranging from dance performances to video projections Mexican-wrestling-mask-making to the destruction (by fire) of a full-size replica of a house by an internationally renowned architect (see the Buzz item about that in this issue).

This year's idea—to localize the festival in and around the newly remodeled Union Depot complex, and nearby places like the new Bedlam Theater site and the Minnesota Museum of American Art, rather than have it sprawl around multiple far-flung locations—was a stroke of inspiration. Talk about urban density! Our capital city felt like an international center of cool and creativity.

Labyrinthine Adventures

We eventually found the Labyrinth, in the big outdoor space under the depot's Waiting Room. Created by Forecast founder and Executive Director Jack Becker and architect Bob Lunning, it was a slightly Russian-Constructivist version of the sort of meditative labyrinth you can find, for example, at the Carondelet Center and other places of meditation and repose. You slowly walk the path that's lined out on the ground, circling in and out, thinking your own thoughts (or having no thoughts) amid the surrounding delightful cacophony. Behind us, drummers at multiple drum sets kept up heavy-duty drum solos for the full two hours of our shift—taking turns, I hope.

Laurie's and my job was to invite passersby to try the labyrinth walk, and offer them one of the two pairs of noise-canceling (or at least noise-reducing) headphones intended to help them find peace in the midst of the Spark. A steady stream of meditators took us up on the offer. Once, a group of vivid young women, a little the worse for microbrew consumption, made it to the middle of the labyrinth, then ran laughing straight out—sassy rule-breakers! A guy with a video camera filmed his feet making the trek. Some of the people waiting in line asked Laurie about the history of labyrinths—there's a famous one on the floor of Chartres Cathedral, ca. 1200 CE, and the Romans had them on their floors too, probably for decoration rather than meditation.

When our shift was over, we wandered into the beautifully restored depot building, which was packed with people, humming with music and conversation, and occasionally punctuated by unpredictable happenings, like the arrival of David Lefkowitz's adorable mini-art-museum, Peripatetic, a little building on a wheeled cart that Lefkowitz actually programs with tiny art.

I tried my hand at playing tunes on some water-filled glass vessels with a chopstick in Pritika Chowdhry's Empty Time installation (my shoulder bag, which I had neglected to remove from my shoulder, swung forward and nearly whacked a glass vessel). Hurrying on in embarrassment, Laurie and I came into a room full of the intense and spirit-lifting sound of  Sacred Harp singing, an antique southern tradition of a capella gospel music that's kept alive locally by the Minnesota State Sacred Harp Singing Convention.

We headed home in the neighborhood of 3 AM, mildly regretful that we couldn't make it all the way through to the 5:30 AM close of festivities, but energized by the sheer volume and scope of local creativity and the celebratory atmosphere of the whole thing. This was art not as high culture or heady discourse but as holiday and hullabaloo.

Paper Darts Pop Up

Northern Spark, a one-night-stand, is gone till next year—but if you are still in the mood for celebrating creativity, by all means check out the goings-on at SooLocal, the ambitious little storefront offshoot of the SooVac Gallery in south Minneapolis. Through July 20, it's hosting the Paper Darts Pop Up, a  celebration of literary, artistic, and musical ambition and experimentation in the Twin Cities, led by Paper Darts, the deeply hip and very visual Twin Cities literary magazine. It's been running since the first of June, but the Grand Opening is June 14, with an evening of readings celebrating the launch of Paper Darts' fifth print issue, plus some fierce sounds by the band Black Diet.

The rest of the Pop Up fest is a mixture of art shows, poetry readings, panel discussions, storytelling, music, a video game tournament ("Tipsy Pixels," one of the best names ever), and a great deal more. Check out the whole lineup here.