FFWD Weekly
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Round up the usual suspects
This year's Rodeo features new work from some familiar faces
By Lori MontgomeryHigh Performance Rodeo
One Yellow Rabbit
January 5-25
The Arts CentreTraditionally, the eclectic slate of artists who make up One Yellow Rabbit's High Performance Rodeo have absolutely nothing in common. This year, though, they're drawn together by one thing - they are almost all familiar faces to fans of OYR's annual festival of new work.
"This Rodeo is really a case of me trusting artists who, for the most part, I'm very familiar with," says festival curator Michael Green, who has only seen one of the shows that will be presented during the three-week event. "In the case of artists I have known for some time, I'll trust them to bring anything."
Green can afford to operate on faith this year, as the participants in the '98 Rodeo range from New York performance artist Karen Finley and Tony award-winner Brent Carver to the lesser known (in Calgary) but equally impressive Guillermo Verdecchia, the Governor General's Award-winning playwright and director with Vancouver's Rumble Theatre.
This happy situation is not entirely new to Green, who has watched the festival grow up over the course of its 12-year history, but he still remembers when he didn't have quite the same variety of options.
"Before the interest from further afield, my decisions were more about working in the community," Green recalls. "Like, who do I think is actually going to be able to put together a show and not call me up a week before the festival and say, 'Sorry, we don't have a show....' Now, it's different - now my decisions are, 'Well, should I fly to Montreal this weekend? I hear there's a show and no one's heard of these people, and they sound interesting.' If they are interesting, I can invite them to my festival and then other people will have heard of them, and in some small way, I will be able to help launch the career of a new performing ensemble."
Despite the big names crowding this year's performance schedule, Green says that he is committed to finding companies on the way up and giving them a boost.
"(The Rodeo) is never going to be a festival at which you can always expect to see new work from a small stable of artists," he says. "The decisions, for me, are finding new, young artists, and fresher, more interesting ideas... and continuing to expand the definition of what you and I look forward to when we think of theatre."
Local performers like Doug Curtis' Ghost River Theatre or The Green Fools are regulars at the festival, Green says, because they are pushing the envelope and challenging audience expectations, thereby fulfilling his requirements in a Rodeo performance.
"We're looking for artists who are forging a new form of expression in order to communicate their art to an audience," he explains. "You'll find that at our festival, theatre can include music performance, dance performance, storytelling, lots of different shapes and dynamic forms.... I bring theatre (to the Rodeo), but sometimes the best theatre is coming from a dance troupe or a music ensemble. That's not surprising to me."
Green stresses the difference between the Rodeo and a festival of plays like ATP's playRites.
"This is a festival of artists who create work for themselves," he says firmly. "It's their own artistic expression that I'm interested in bringing here.... You might find plays at the festival, but you won't find traditional ways of working represented here."
Green says that in the future, he would like to see more professional development activities included in the Rodeo schedule, and more of what he calls "bridges into the community," like the co-presentation of Toronto's Urge Collective with New Works Calgary and Springboard Dance. But his focus, he insists, will continue to be finding new and exciting artists around the country.
"We'll always have the Governor General's Award-winners here and we'll always have the Chalmers award-winners, but when those artists first started coming to the Rodeo, they didn't have those accolades," he points out. "I would be remiss to start just inviting the sure hits. That's not what this festival is about."
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