>>PREVIEW
HIGH PERFORMANCE RODEO
Runs January 3 to 20
One Yellow Rabbit
Check listings for venues and dates
One Yellow Rabbit has always revelled in causing a stir, even if their first High Performance Rodeo was a clandestine affair in a found space, by invitation only. This year, they’ll be staking their claim with a smouldering SUV, a gay wedding rerun and a headless sideshow freak.
As in previous years, the Rabbits’ renowned festival of alternative work – not experimental, mind, which curator Michael Green calls "the realm of the amateur, or the professional working in the lab" – will have its homebase in the centre court of the Epcor Centre. Previous years have seen live musical performances by inverted chins and the surreal soundscape of Ledgefest. The three most obvious signs that the Rodeo has returned to town will be an installation by Montreal’s Action Terroriste Socialement Acceptable (ATSA), preparations for the third public wedding between sexologist Annie Sprinkle and her partner Elizabeth Stephens and a freakshow display called The Headless Terror! The latter comes in advance of Calgary’s puppetry festival, the International Festival of Animated Objects.
The first, an installation titled Attack #13, deals with the Iraq war and North America’s continued dependence on oil by displaying a ruined SUV that looks, as Green observes, "like it’s been blown up on the streets of Baghdad." Designed to provoke discussion, the installation is also the first step in culling volunteers from the observers to stage "interventions," public confrontations that will then be filmed and projected in the Epcor Centre’s foyer.
"(It’s) what happens in a theatre all the time," says Green of ATSA’s audience-engaging pieces, "but there they’re expected to sit passively and take it all in."
Itself largely a confluence of Green’s curatorial travels to other festivals like Regina’s Performance Perimeters Symposium (Istvan Kantor, Theatre Replacement) and The Edinburgh Festival Fringe (News From Nowhere), the High Performance Rodeo serves as more than an exhibition of alternative work. By providing a nexus for artists, the Rodeo has already assisted in preparing North American tours for acts like this year’s Pan Pan Theatre and choreographer Karine Ponties. Even this year’s centrepiece, a collaboration with the Rheostatics’s Dave Bidini, comes on the heels of last year’s Rheostatics residency, the first such artistic residency in the Rodeo’s history.
With venues in the Martha Cohen Theatre, The Big Secret Theatre, Vertigo Playhouse, Vertigo Studio, Engineered Air Theatre and Art Gallery of Calgary, this year’s Rodeo is daunting in its size alone, even while it shrinks from four weeks to three. Though Green refuses to determine an optimal running time for the festival, he notes that no aspect is sacrosanct, and no year’s changes are necessarily permanent.
"Every year brings its own delights and challenges," he says. "I’ll never say never. What might not work one year might work another year."
What remains certain is that the challenging content of the Rodeo will be maintained. While last year’s lineup included a smattering of family shows, this year’s includes abrasive performance art, the vitriolic stylings of the Rude Pundit and, of course, the aforementioned smouldering SUV, gay wedding, and sideshow display. Even in the festival’s 21st year, Green insists that settling in is not on the agenda.
"It’ll never be a festival of mainstream work, that’s just not going to happen. Calgary doesn’t want that kind of thing, that’s not what the Rodeo is about," he says.
"People who’ve watched the Edmonton Fringe will remember a day when that festival grew to attempt to include everyone," he explains. "They had a petting zoo and an antique steam engine chugging through the centre blowing its whistle, an invasion of beer gardens. And at that point the festival becomes about something other than art, and that will never happen to the High Performance Rodeo."
If there is one thing notably absent this year, it is the near and uncharacteristically complete absence of nudity from the Rodeo’s program. A quick glance at the program’s enclosed cover retrospective confirms that the Rabbits are no strangers to exposed skin, but this year’s program contains only a few tantalizing shots, perhaps, with nothing approaching full frontal. That, according to Green, (a man who once responded to accusations that performance art was nothing but naked men screaming by doing exactly that) would simply be too simple.
"That would be predictable," he says coyly. "But I guarantee you’ll find nudity in the shows." |
Copyright ©2006 FFWD. All rights reserved.