Audio for Collaboratory’s ‘Ribbon Routine’ now live

A new audio has been added to Otocast, the free mobile app that shares stories about the City’s public artworks.

One of the artworks included on Otocast is the Cor-Ten steel sculpture known as Ribbon Routine (Ena En La Plaza) that sits outside the main entrance into the Collaboratory. Located at 2031 Jackson Street adjacent to the Fort Myers Fire Department’s main station and across from the Trailways But Terminal, the Collaboratory is one of a dozen art hubs that the City’s Public Art Committee has established throughout the City’s six wards. [Go here to learn why the Public Art Committee chose the Collaboratory as an art hub partner.]

The audio not only talks about the gymnast depicted in this Edgardo Carmona sculpture, but how she is emblematic of the important work being performed by the Collaboratory, which is committed to solving all of this area’s major social problems within 18 years – a deadline that has been described as “the greatest community problem-solving initiative in American history.”

When you listen to the audio, you’ll hear the new voice of Fort Myers public art, Bill Taylor. A long-standing member of the City of Fort Myers Public Art Committee, Bill Taylor is best known in Southwest Florida as a producer, director, actor and founder of Theatre Conspiracy at the Alliance for the Arts.

Since founding the latter company in 1984, Bill has produced more than 120 shows, directed 40 productions and performed in over 50 others including three one-man shows, Sex, Drugs & Rock and Roll, Barrymore and Tru. His favorite shows include A Tuna Christmas, The Katy and Mo Show and whatever play he is working on currently, namely Clown Bar, Adam Szymkowic’s cunningly sharp clown noir dramedy (with music and additional lyrics by Adam Overett) that performs in the Foulds Theatre at the Alliance for the Arts August 18-28.

Among the many initiatives Taylor has launched at Theatre Conspiracy are its perennial New Play Contest, an emphasis on productions written by female playwrights and providing strong female characters, and programming that provides opportunities for area actors of color and discourse on Black experience in America (in shows like George C. Wolff’s A Colored Museum, Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun, August Wilson’s King Hedley II, Joe Wilson’s Come and Gone, Seven Guitars and Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, Lydia Diamond’s The Bluest Eye and Ntozake Shange’s For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow is Enuf).

If you haven’t yet used Otocast yet, pull out your smartphone and go to your app store right now. When you land there, type in Otocast in the search bar and then hit download. It’s free!

The app works with geo-mapping, which means that when you tap on the green Otocast icon, the app will automatically call up the Fort Myers guide.

Tap on the guide and you’ll see an aerial map of Fort Myers that displays a number of green pins. Those pins signify the location of most of the public artworks that are interspersed throughout Fort Myers.

Notice the banner that runs along the bottom of your screen. It contains thumbnail photographs of the particular artworks identified by those green pins. Tap on any one of them and it will take you to written information about the artwork; historic, installation and other photos; and an audio like the one that Bill Taylor just recorded for Ribbon Routine.

At present, 29 of the City’s 41 outdoor public artworks are included in the Fort Myers Guide. Work is under way to not only add the other twelve, but more than 30 historic points of interest located throughout the City.

So be sure to use and share Otocast with everyone you know.

July 31, 2022.