>>PREVIEW
OPENING GALABASH
Friday, January 19
International Festival of Animated Objects
Victoria’s Ballroom
Once a year, otherworldly machines roll over water, mud and sand as the kinetic sculpture racers of the Ferndale World Championship take their creations over California terrain. By the summer, Calgary Animated Objects Society founder Xstine Cook hopes to have created a unique Calgary offering inspired by these moving pieces of artwork: a white buffalo modelled on her organization’s buffalo marionette logo. In the meantime, she is juggling a program of animated objects that are no less exotic.
Once every two years, in Calgary’s downtown, Cook marshals Canadian and international puppeteers, mask artists and nebulous "others" into the International Festival of Animated Objects. Encompassing performances, exhibitions, workshops and lectures, the festival offers a full range of presentations that fall under the broad category of "animated objects."
Now in its third year, the festival has grown far beyond its beginnings in the basement tunnels of the Epcor Centre, running alongside One Yellow Rabbit’s High Performance Rodeo, turning into what Cook calls a "lightning rod that brings in these aliens from outer space."
Kicking off this year’s festival, the opening Galabash will pack the newly renovated Victoria’s ballroom with a fundraising raffle for (among others) puppets donated by the likes of Ronnie Burkett and will include a host of cabaret-style guests. The event will be emceed by Cory Mack and Mooky Cornish, a stand-up comic and clown pair who first began performing together as part of the IFAO’s fundraising Anima-Gala. Featuring the musical talents of Chad VanGaalen and Kara Keith, the event will also nod to its animated object progenitors with VanGaalen-themed shadow puppetry and Kara Keith masks.
"So you can cut them out and be the many faces of Kara Keith looking at herself as she plays," explains Cook.
Mask work, an area near and dear to Cook’s own heart, features prominently in this year’s program. Presenting a mainstage show in the Jack Singer Concert Hall (Our Traditions) as well as an exhibition and lecture, the ’Ksan Performing Arts Group will offer a view of mask theatre through the cultural traditions of the west coast Gitxsan Native people. Taking a more contemporary spin on masks, Robert Faust will present The Mask Messenger, a one-man show running as a co-presentation between the IFAO and Vertigo’s Y-Stage series.
Cornish, a veteran clown of Cirque du Soleil fame, will also be premiering her own one-woman show, the story of a clown’s misadventures on the rocky road to success titled The Glories of Gloria Revue. Using set pieces improvised from available material, the show will be Cornish’s first production at the festival, despite having hosted the previous festival’s regular closing gala, The Dolly Wiggler Cabaret.
Other local artists presenting at the festival include Brenda Whiteman and Peter Stinson of Red Smarteez Marionettes. For the third time the pair will curate two lunchtime Puppets on Screen programs at Banker’s Hall, as well as debut their own mixture of live and filmed puppetry, Kay Stories. The festival will also include the third appearance by former Calgarian Ronnie Burkett, reading from his current work-in-progress, Billy Twinkle, Requiem for a Golden Boy.
Burkett may be Canada’s premier puppeteer, but three of the festival’s guests can lay claim to an even higher profile in the minds of college students and misanthropes. With "Team America and Beyond," The Chiodo Brothers will showcase their work on the infamous movie Team America: World Police, and present a workshop of stop-motion animation. Though they were booked after the cancellation of festival presenter Paul Zaloom’s Dante’s Inferno, the trio was not actually the latest addition to the festival.
Frank Meschkuleit, a former Muppeteer whose Left Hand of Frank offered a personal glimpse into the world of television puppetry during the previous festival, has been added at the last minute. In addition to providing puppetry for this year’s Dolly Wiggler Cabaret, he will teach one of the festival’s workshops, The Art of Puppetry for Television.
Though Zaloom’s film will not premiere at the festival, the puppeteer who Cook has proclaimed the "maestro" of the festival will still bring his unique brand of politicized puppetry with his production, Mother of All Enemies. Taking aim at the broad array of players in the inescapable media circus around the war on terror, Zaloom’s satirical shadow puppetry will aim for a technical and comic sharpness that not every act will share.
"(It’s) really bad puppetry," says Cook of Small Brown Package Theatre’s Get Off the Cross Mary, "but really fucking funny puppetry." Direct from Edmonton’s Fringe Festival, Get Off the Cross Mary delivers humour as crude as its hand puppets, staging a "queer disco version" of The Passion of the Christ.
By the summer, the Prairies may soon see CAOS’s giant white buffalo roaming the Alberta plains. But if would-be festivalgoers need a glimpse into the future of the IFAO, they need only look to last year’s Dolly Wiggler, which provided a sight nearly as surprising as any oversized animated object.
Promising its audience a glimpse of the woman whose naked form adorned all the festival’s promotional material, the curtains withdrew to reveal Mooky Cornish wearing nothing but an expression of pantomimed shock. If her then-15-year-old stepson was surprised by the sight, Cornish calmly points out that for the folks involved in this festival, the unusual is always possible.
"Poor guys," she says. "They’ll be all right. That’s their fate, being raised by a clown." |
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