Preview
MOUNTAIN STANDARD TIME 2
Runs until April 17
Check listings
Art is not only meant to be hung on the walls of museums. In the case of the performance art and new media festival Mountain Standard Time 2, more than 20 artists from across Canada and the globe will break free of conventions to fill the empty spaces of Calgary’s streets and galleries with sound, motion and imagination.
"MST2 offers work that emerges from a visual arts discourse and crosses into the disciplines of theatre, sound, new media and dance," says Paul Robert, director of The New Gallery, the organization that initiated the collaborative festival. The Mountain Standard Time umbrella covers an assortment of Calgary-based arts groups with the aim of delivering unique experiences to both participating artists and the public.
"Mountain Standard Time was conceived as a way to bring a lot of top-notch performance artists from outside the local community," says Robert. "Several arts institutions were interested in doing so before, but performance is difficult to facilitate given the traditional gallery structure."
Robert adds that there will be a balance of off-site performances, often involving spontaneous interactions between artists and passers-by on city streets and in public squares, and works that occur within the frame of the gallery, with definite starting and ending times and a captive audience.
One of the aforementioned street performances will see folks making their way through Olympic Plaza becoming part of a piece by U.K. artist Otiose (a.k.a. John Dummett), who will be performing his work Lookout. For the last five years, Otiose has been exploring the idea of how places are perceived. Over a period of five days in Calgary, Otiose will try to discover the myths and truths of Olympic Plaza. Using dictation machines, maps, planning documents and notice boards, Olympic Plaza will be transformed into a huge piece of performance art, with everyone present a participant in the work.
Another project that is sure to transform Calgary’s public space is Robyn Moody’s Public Opinion. Moody, a Lethbridge-based artist, will be found conducting interviews on Stephen Avenue Walk. Attempting to provoke thought about important local issues, Moody’s performance calls into question the nature of voicing our opinions in public and how these same opinions fit into the broader context of community.
Meanwhile, Interrupt_8 takes place in a more traditional setting – Jack Singer Rehearsal Hall – but then throws out the notion that audience and performers must be separated. From the Toronto-based performance and soundscaping collective of Michelle Kasprzak, Mike Steventon and Lewis Kaye, Interrupt_8 will encourage audience members to get up and move around the space to see and hear this work, which explores ideas surrounding technology and our hopes and fears about its uses in daily life.
From the seemingly lost tourist in Olympic Plaza to the soundscape and performance art taking place in the deep recesses of the Jack Singer, MST2 promises to provoke responses about how we perceive art and our community.
Cool manipulated animation
by Carl Ayling
With the subtle skill of a puppeteer, artist Daniel Barrow will spin colourful transparencies on an overhead projector in his new performance piece The Face of Everything.
Barrow’s live illustration performance is one of the most anticipated events of the Mountain Standard Time festival. Combining hand-edited animation with live narrative and soundtrack elements, Barrow’s work is an interesting hybrid of cinema and illustration. From scene to scene, floating abstract images come together in inter-connected collages. Transitions are born out of manual animation sequences – the collision of multi-layered transparencies help to create the context of an imaginary world, and through this process the story of a young gay man is told.
Barrow’s storytelling practice parallels a lot of other performance-based media – such as puppetry, turntablism and theatre – but includes hundreds of well-crafted drawings. Watching one of his pieces, I can see an esthetic consistency – his penchant for the well-dressed man, adorned in period clothing and high collars, is suffocatingly English.
The script is cerebral and contemporary, like the work of Wes Anderson (Rushmore, The Royal Tenenbaums). Barrow explores his character’s longing and frustration through the fictitious vernacular of a very eccentric central character, a young man whose life loosely parallels that of Scott Thorson, Liberace’s boyfriend.
Sitting in the dark and facing the screen, the audience interacts with the piece as they would a film. Accompanied by a soundtrack, the performance invites people to explore a richly textured, fictitiously embellished world.
The Face of Everything takes place in the Stanford Perrott Theatre at the Alberta College of Art and Design on Friday, April 4. |
Copyright ©2003 FFWD. All rights reserved.