>>PREVIEW
BEAVER’S LAMENT/SAILOR AND WIDOW
Created by Eric Moschopedis
Runs until July 30
Calgary Folk Festival
Prince’s Island Park
"The work I create is always about creating space – to allow the audience enough room to create a narrative for themselves."
When it came to creating something unusual for this year’s Folk Fest, they left it to the mind of Eric Moschopedis.
Moschopedis, of Bubonic Tourist fame, has used his multi-disciplinary performance company to spearhead diverse festivals such as Calgary’s Mutton Busting Visual and Performing Arts Festival, the Plink Plink Plink Festival of Two Minute Dance, and the PIPE (Performance In Peculiar Environments) Festivals in Calgary and Whitehorse.
But, while Moschopedis works tirelessly to create unique opportunities for emerging artists, he occasionally gets to have a little fun on his own. Perhaps that is what Beaver's Lament/Sailor and Widow is really about.
For the inspiration of his work, Moschopedis started with its venue, Prince’s Island Park. He examined the park as a place of both history and emotional heartache. "There’s drug use and breaking up," he notes of the park’s numerous aspects. "Prince’s Island Park is a great place with an underbelly as well."
The result of his research would be an inaugural site-specific sound installation that adds a different flavour to this year’s Folk Festival. Beaver’s Lament/Sailor and Widow is a sad tale, comprised of five different sound stations around the Folk Festival site.
"This is the story of a queer love affair between a beaver and a sailor," Moschopedis explains.
While the park itself served as his muse, there were other factors informing his story. "I like beavers a lot and I was thinking of the natural aspect of Prince’s Island Park – and that the park has a history of being a cruising area," he says. "The sailors are because of the water – it seemed right somehow to put the two together."
The widow character would bring Moschopedis to explore early films. "If there was nothing in the mid-20th century, there was heartache," he says.
"I brought all these things together into an obviously fragmented narrative," he says, adding that although politics did not inform Beaver’s Lament, the soft wood lumber debate was in the back of his mind.
The sound installation includes a mélange of clips from movies, historical documents, found text and sound. This surreal sound collage will be presented at stations marked by eight-foot tall pink pipes adorned by beaver flags.
Audiences can visit one or all five stations in any order – this gives everyone the opportunity to create their own story. The combined time to listen to this rodent’s lament is 30 minutes. |
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