DETAILS

Midway: Carnival of the Macabre
EPCOR CENTRE for the Performing Arts
Thursday, January 8 - Thursday, January 8

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Kenna Burima, curator of Midway — a “mini-festival” within the larger High Performance Rodeo — describes the eclectic collection of performances as “a three-day event of controlled chaos.”

“We set up a big top and have young and emerging artists hang out and share performances and artistic visions,” says Burima, who curates the event located near the One Yellow Rabbit box office on the second floor of the Epcor Centre.

Burima says this year’s Midway has close to 10 booths, including an old-fashioned kissing booth and the titillatingly titled fetish-painting booth. There are art installations by Alberta College of Art and Design and University of Calgary students as well as recent graduates. Roving, interactive performers include fortune-telling gypsies and a burlesque artist who mixes classic burlesque with vaudeville.

Another feature of Midway is the Summerwood Warren Solo Stage, where artists and musicians offer experimental, music-centric performances. Some of the groups scheduled to appear include Synthosaurus, a group that says it offers an “aural assault of unbridled digital joy;” The Arbour Lake Sghool Performance Collective and its show of synthesized sounds combined with spoken word, props and costumes; and musician Chris Dadge with the band Ghostkeeper.

“It really is a three-day party,” says Burima. “It gives young artists an opportunity to see they’re actually part of a community. They can come out of their basements and present their work to an audience and to their friends and peers.”

Once the Midway closes at 10 p.m., the action moves to the Big Secret Theatre, where a High Performance Rodeo version of the Stampede’s Grandstand Show takes place. Local bands, including The Consonant C, Woodpigeon and Jay Crocker, will re-interpret important works of contemporary pop music, including pieces by Björk and Tom Waits. Accompanying their musical interpretations will be visual presentations based on the same music by local videographers. “The band hasn’t seen what the visual artists are doing and vice versa. The only cog in the wheel is the original music,” Burima explains.

Freakshow, another highlight of Midway, is curated by Swallow-a-Bicycle Performance Co-op. Freakshow offers people an opportunity to tour the nooks and crannies of the Epcor Centre and see “subversive performances” in unexpected places along the way. The adventure starts at a Midway booth with tours leaving every half-hour nightly. (There are two separate tours organized around different themes: “Mouth of Madness” and “Taboo and Titillation.”)

“We take people through the depths of the building, from the boiler room to the roof, to see dancers in a freight elevator,” says Swallow-a-Bicycle’s Mark Hopkins.

“We gave [the artists] free rein to create performances that are somewhat freaky,” he says. “It could be freaky in a traditional way, like the bearded lady, or it could be, ‘What does it mean to be outside the norm in Calgary?’”

Hopkins, who is performing on the roof, explains that the resulting acts are intimately tied to the spaces in which they take place. “When you’re not working in a theatre space — that doesn’t have lights and outlets — you have to embrace the space and let that inspire you. Before I selected the roof as my space, I had no idea what I was going to do,” he says.

“I sat on the roof and embraced it. I asked, ‘What does it mean to be in Calgary, in winter, looking at the landscape?’”

In another instance, an artist transforms the boiler room’s steep staircase into the stairway to success, and a hot hallway becomes a sort of hellscape for the artist performing within it.

Hopkins says there’s at least one purely practical reason Freakshow is what it is: “We couldn’t get another performance venue.” On a more artistic level, adds Hopkins, “It’s really neat to bring people into a space they see every day and redefine it for them. Suddenly, they’re going to stop in the middle of the Plus-15 and feel what it’s like to have cars drive under you.

“A lot of our audiences are regular theatre-goers. It’s neat to peel back the layers and demonstrate that every single inch of this place (the Epcor Centre) has the possibility to host performance.”

Rodeo Happenings

 I love Scott Thompson. The fact he blew me off (for an interview) doesn’t dampen my enthusiasm. Run, don’t walk, to grab tickets to see Scottastrophe, a PowerPoint presentation and comedic rant about his life (January 8 to 10).

Also showing is the launch of the City of Calgary’s “This is My City” initiative, with a performance of The Invisible Project (January 14, 21, 28). Telling the tales of Calgary’s homeless with masks made by a former street denizen, the show is directed by former Rabbit David van Belle.