>>PREVIEW
MUTTON BUSTING PERFORMANCE AND VISUAL ART FESTIVAL
Bubonic Tourist
Runs January 3 to 14
Epcor Centre and University of Calgary
Open-minded, busty and with plenty of experience, Calgary’s sexiest festival is back this January, promising among other things a Prairie gothic tale, a barn dance and piracy.
Yes, I’m talking about the Mutton Busting Performance and Visual Art Festival.
While One Yellow Rabbit’s High Performance Rodeo is old enough to vote in the next election, Bubonic Tourist’s Mutton Busting, its little cousin, is just turning five. The sheep’s been sheared and, underneath the layers, a prominent festival exposes itself as a showcase of emerging and established local and international artists.
KEEPING THE KIDS IN CALGARY
"Its origins were about creating community and about providing emerging artists an opportunity to showcase their talents, essentially to Calgary," says Bubonic Tourist member and festival curator Eric Moschopedis, who founded Mutton Busting in 2002. While it continues to focus on emerging talent, this year mid-career and established artists are also part of the mix, he notes. "The reason we started to include mid-career artists in particular, and then some established artists, was so that the innovative artists that are in the festival can learn from the older generation."
Moschopedis says the goal of the Bubonic Tourist company is to be part of a community-building initiative within the arts. And he says events like Mutton Busting give talented artists a reason to stay and be involved in the Calgary art scene.
"My plan with Mutton Busting has always been that, if we can create an epicentre here for emerging artists, wherein other people are coming to see the work nationally, then those artists would go and present their work in other cities, but come back to Calgary. So they wouldn’t feel the need to abandon Calgary, but the opportunities for them to travel and perform, and seek and engage with artists from around the country, would be far more prominent. "
CHECK INTO THE MOTEL
Mutton Busting is one of the events included under the umbrella of the Rodeo and began, literally, on that festival’s fringe, presenting shows in a meeting room outside One Yellow Rabbit’s Big Secret Theatre. This year, however, it has moved some of its performances into the Big Secret, while others will take place in a new venue across from the theatre called Motel. Originally a space used as the Lorne Greene Room bar during the Rodeo, it has been expanded and renovated – slightly – for performances.
"Motel is a shared venue – a joint partnership between Bubonic Tourist and One Yellow Rabbit," says Moschopedis. "We joke that it has some amenities, but there’s no continental breakfast." He compares it to Birds and Stone, Bubonic Tourist’s other found venue in the community, which is also a bare-bones space.
"The reason that it was so important to us to keep (Motel) that way – it could have been developed into a far more fancy venue – (is that) Bubonic Tourist is very, very conscious of the fact that the venue defines the performance. So if we could offer a venue that has literally nothing in it except a room, then it doesn’t control the art."
In addition to Motel and the Big Secret, Mutton Busting is also using the Epcor Centre’s Plus-15 walkway and presenting one show, Calvin Johnson, in the old MacEwan Hall Ballroom at the University of Calgary.
THINGS TO SEE AND HEAR
Singer-impresario Johnson, the founder and head of indie label K Records, is one of the many acts featured on this year’s Mutton Busting roster. Others include: Red2Blue Physical Theatre Company with Faire (1+1) Tu; poet Samuel Garrigó Meza; Toronto-based video and performance artist Gale Allen with Girls Just Want to Have Fun; Pirates at Sea! – whereupon Bubonic Tourist hijacks the Plus-15 intercom system with cutting-edge sound and noise artists; a Bubonic Barn Dance; and Plink Plink Plink Two, featuring dance artists from Calgary and Whitehorse.
Like this year’s Rodeo, there’s a strong music component to the multidisciplinary festival, including local bands The Summerlad (with a live score for the classic silent film The Passion of Joan of Arc), Woodpigeon, The Whistleburn Ensemble, and musician Mike Angus and songwriter Ethan Cole, launching Angus’s first solo album, The Yellowhead Diaries.
PAINT IT PINK
Moschopedis has brought together a group of queer and conceptually queer artists called Department of Soft Architecture. The intent is to transform gender and sexual identity through art, and subsequently race and class. The timing couldn’t be more appropriate given the upcoming federal election and Conservative Leader Stephen Harper’s attempts to revive the same-sex marriage debate.
Soft Architecture includes: zo.na pel.lu.ci.da by Montreal’s 2Boys.tv; The Three Sisters, a dark, Prairie twist on Chekhov by Edmonton’s Cowgirl Opera; Lotus Blossom Special by David Bateman (godsavethedragqueen productions); visual artists Edie Fake and Kit Malo (from Brooklyn and Montreal, respectively); Queer Projections’ Video Mixdown and When the Music Stops, including a video and performance by Benny Nemerofsky Ramsay; and ORGASM: Annie Sprinkle Film Fest, which showcases the best films of prostitute-porn star turned performance artist-sexologist Annie Sprinkle.
AND SO…
"What we’re doing, to sum it up, (is) presenting innovative, emerging and mid-career artists on a national and international perspective," says Moschopedis. "And creating a discourse based on what happens at Mutton Busting."
For festival tickets and information, call 294-7484 or go to www.bubonictourist.ca. |
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