For more than a decade, the city of Pasadena has been partnering with the Armory Center for the Arts to celebrate Mother Earth and promote the arts with the annual Pasadena Earth & Arts Festival. This Saturday, two stages, one inside the Armory and one on Raymond Avenue along Memorial Park, will be alive with dancers, rock bands, storytellers, drummers and musical instrument builders, all day long, for free. The event formerly was split into two days, a family arts festival and a celebratory Earth Day, says Armory spokesman Jon Lapointe. But the Armory and the city work so well together on other projects that they decided to combine the two: “It's been a natural fit that gets better each year,” he says. This year's festival features the work of visual artist Jeff Cain and his project with 30 college and high school students, “What Can You Build With a House?,” in which Cain and the students work collaboratively to create temporary sculptures and structures with all the 2-by-4s it takes to build an average middle-class house. Also on deck: the return of the sustainable beer garden, featuring Pasadena's Craftsman Brewing Company, and Blackwater Jukebox, a carnival band of L.A. musicians who mix their love of traditional music with a darker and more savage flair. As a pre-festival kickoff event, Jerry Garcia's widow, filmmaker Deborah Koons Garcia, will be screening her new film, Symphony of the Soil, for free on Friday, May 2, as part of the Armory's Conscientious Projector Series. The film is an exploration of the dirt we walk on, live on and grow food from, and the way this life-giving resource is used, and often misused, by the agriculture industry. What better way to celebrate Mother Earth than by looking at the actual earth beneath our feet? Armory Center for the Arts and Memorial Park, 145 N. Raymond Ave., Pasadena; Sat., May 3, 11 a.m.-5 p.m.; free. (626) 792-5101, armoryarts.org.

Sat., May 3, 2014
(Expired: 05/03/14)

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