Until Oct. 27 Calgarians will be treated to some of the best performances in movement arts with Springboard Performance’s Fluid Fest. As with most festivals, it can be a bit overwhelming to figure out what to see, so what better than to have a concise breakdown of the shows on offer at this year’s festival?
Springboard Performance’s associate artistic producer Pam Tzeng provides those of us who may be a bit unfamiliar with Fluid Fest a bit of insight into what it is and some idea as to what we should see.
Fluid Fest invites you to embrace experience and reflect on the now with a vibrant and audacious lineup of dance and live performance from around the world and around the block. 2019 features artists that capture our contemporary times, including queer ideas and expressions, women’s voices, and creative propositions that re-imagine and reframe the body in space.
FEATURED AT FLUID FEST 2019
WEEK 1
THE OTHER HALF | THE BEAUTY OF FALLING APART
Oct. 16 a 17, 8 p.m. at cSPACE King Edward
A double bill featuring evocative and uncanny expressions of the female voice in duet form. Collaborating after 18 years apart, The Other Half’s Vanessa Goodman and Belinda McGuire revisit the shared muscle memory of their youth as a starting point to create a new duet that views their movement through the prism of an immune system. Heather Ware and Hilde Elbers perform a seductively precise exercise in how two individuals strive to find trust, and inhabit the thin edge of being “just safe enough” in The Beauty of Falling Apart.
ROAD TRIP | I AM A GENIUS
Oct. 18, 7:30 p.m. and Oct.19, 5 p.m. at cSPACE King Edward
A double bill featuring exceptional, comical and idiosyncratic female artists. Linnea Swan and Susie Burpee take audiences on an exhilarating Road Trip where two women wrestle with their mortality, and each other, on a tragicomic odyssey to the unknown. With I AM A GENIUS does anyone here know me?, Lois Brown creates a sonic choreography that invites the audience into a playful investigation of memory, patience, boredom, democratization and relationality.
HINKYPUNK
Oct. 18, 8 p.m. at DJD Dance Centre
Vancouver dance chameleon Ralph Escamillan brings club culture to the stage. With an arsenal of performance skills and training in ballroom, street dance and contemporary forms, the fierce up-and-coming artist has fashioned a performative extravaganza that both conceals and reveals an archetype, a hero.
FLUID KIKI BALL
Oct. 18, 9:30 p.m. at Dickens Pub
Celebrate Vogue/Ballroom culture at the first Fluid Kiki Vogue Ball, a collaboration between VOGUEYYC and Ralph Escamillan, co-presented by Fluid Fest, Calgary Queer Arts Society and Fake Mustache Drag King Troupe. Spectators, competitors, and judges celebrate people within their communities and compete against each other in different categories. Open to all, competitors are invited to serve their art history knowledge and werk their favourite works of art for a chance to win cash prizes and more!
TO NAME AN OTHER
Oct. 19, 3 p.m. at Atlantic Avenue Art Block Lobby | FREE EVENT
A special performance, part of Jeffrey Gibson’s exhibition Time Carriers at Esker Foundation. Fifty performers will be brought together for a moving drumming event to give name to our current political climate.
SPLIT
Oct. 19, 8 p.m. at DJD Dance Centre
Revel in Australian artistic gem Lucy Guerin’s sharp, elegant choreographic investigations. Split reflects the dilemmas of negotiating with oneself and others in a world of increased pressure and reduced resources.
WEEK 2
THE SPACE WHERE YOU DREAM & I LIVE | OBLIVION
Oct. 22, 7:30 p.m. at cSPACE King Edward
A double bill featuring two cellular investigations of wildness and flow in the body-mind world. Inspired by a provocation of her toddler son, in The Space Where You Dream & I Live, local artist Su Lin Tseng asks: “Are we humans as different as animals captured in a zoo?” Hailing from Aomori Japan, master Noguchi Taiso movement teacher and artist Mari Osanai performs a visceral new solo, oblivion.
TALKING TRUTHS: PERFORMANCE
Oct. 23, 7:30 p.m. at cSPACE King Edward
A show featuring up-and-coming female Indigenous artists: Jessica McMann (Calgary), Olivia C. Davies (Vancouver) and Ayla Modeste (Edmonton). Take in the different ways these three choreographers use traditional and contemporary dance to share meaningful stories and cultivate connection in, and for, their communities.
POUR
Daina Ashbee (Montreal)
Oct. 23 and 24, 8 p.m. at DJD Dance Centre
A dark and powerful piece about women by rising Canadian superstar Daina Ashbee. Pour explores the vulnerabilities and strengths of bodies layered with pain and littered with social oppression. Joy and celebration pierce through the tension of the performance providing a liberating and transformative experience like no other.
PHYSICAL THERAPY CABARET
Oct. 24 and 26, 9 p.m. at DJD Dance Centre
A chaotic and delightful mainstay of Fluid Fest, this year’s Physical Therapy Cabaret brings you up close and personal with bold, new creative minds in the Calgary and national community. Curated by local emerging artist Samantha Ketsa, the 2019 Cabaret breeds experimentation in motion that is not to be missed.
THAW | EXTENDED BODY | NO MORE FANTASIES
Oct. 25 and 26, 7:30 p.m. at cSPACE King Edward. (A relaxed performance environment and audio description available for the Saturday show.)
The edges of identity and body mobility are explored and unraveled in this triple bill of embodied narratives, co-presented with Inside Out Theatre. The show features new works by Vancouver’s Future Leisure and Zahra Shahab. Also in the mix is an inspiring performance by Kingston-based circus artist Erin Ball, who continues to defy gravity and share the mindblowing capacity of the body with and without mobility devices and extensions after losing both her legs from frostbite five years ago.
RUNNING PIECE
Oct. 25 and 26, 8 p.m. at DJD Dance Centre
Dancer meets treadmill. A show for the high hope joggers, overly capable multi-tasker, the compulsively late and their enduring companions. Renaissance man Jacques Poulin-Denis, hailing from Montreal, offers a performance that substantiates our proneness to constantly chase our tails and pursue the divine sublimity of busyness.
FLUID FEST AT THE LIBRARY
Oct. 26 and 27, 12-4 p.m. at Calgary Central Library | FREE EVENT
A choose-your-own-adventure event that invites you to roam the Calgary Public Library and encounter intriguing and surprising pop-up physical performances by local artists.
Featured works include: Barbara England’s L.O.V.E. deconstructed – a piece created with recordings of intimate memories submitted by Calgarians; De(Re)-Construct: Dance (Re)-Borna, new work by Anastasiia La Musa that unravels the tradition of flamenco through improvisation with live accompaniment by master Flamenco guitarist and singer Ricardo Sánchez from Mexico City; and Moving Meditation by Julie Funk featuring a group dancers that ride waves of songs and shift the space with meditative patterns.
Eric & Mia and their collaborators from the UK-based Action Hero share what transpired during their Cycling with Animals Residency. Read new bylaws spontaneously created by team who for two weeks painstakingly reassembled cut-ups of actual Calgary bylaws into strange accidental poetry.
Fluid Fest runs Oct. until 27 at various venues in the city. For the complete schedule and tickets visit fluidfest.com.
