Organized and led by Jed Hancock-Brainerd
Jed was born in Newport Navy Hospital in 1982 and has been living in Newport ever since (plus or minus a few off-Island years). A co-organizer of Center Aquidneck and the Jane’s Walk Festival Aquidneck, Jed truly values walking as a way to re-set human pace and does an annual walk from Providence to Newport each October. Jed got his BFA in Acting from URI and an MFA in Devised Theater from the London International School of Performing Arts. Today, he is a theater-maker, performance educator and support staff member at Bike Newport. He teaches voice and movement at Salve Regina and offers private lessons in the Alexander Technique.
Jane’s Lunch at Spring Park
Saturday May 3, 11:30am-12:30pm
For millennia, what is now Spring Park has been a gathering place on Aquidneck Island. Whether a source of water or a place to gas up your car, people have been drawn to this site. Ironically, now that it’s a park it seems there’s even less clarity on what exactly we do there. What a great time to gently build public memory around what we do with this reclaimed public space. Bring-your-own-lunch, a game, a puzzle, a song, a proposal, a question or an answer, and we’ll figure out new ways to make use of this ancient and brand new gathering place. Jed will bring the coffee.
Walk Reflections
Jed kicked off the “walk” by giving a small history of this spot — now a park, but not long ago a gas station and way before that the spring. He also read a piece of Jane Jacobs writing about parks that asserts that parks are only useful when people use them. He encouraged us to figure out how to make use of this newly-opened (and underused) park. Jed brought coffee to share, many of us had lunches, one person brought chalk and another brought the sound of water since no water actually runs.
The biggest surprise! We discovered that there is a water fountain in the park that had recently been turned on. We filled up a water bottle, played the water sound and made good use of the spring’s trough.
