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Mountain Standard Time Performative Art Festival
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Friday, October 8 - Friday, October 22

More in: Visual Arts

You won’t see anyone emerging from an artificial womb, spewing Norwegian incantations while screaming about the patriarchy. No one is going to get hurt. Sure, personal comfort levels will be challenged, but performative art ain’t what it used to be.

Trying to sell a performance art festival is tough. Preconceived notions about the genre are a plague that Mountain Standard Time and others struggle to sluff off without diluting the process or messages inherent in any art that’s worth a damn.

“I think it’s a very difficult form to understand. Even our funding agencies, there’s no specific grant for this,” says M:ST festival director Claudina Morgado. “Oftentimes applications will get bounced around from one department to the next because it’s not even understood at that level, which is sad.”

Needless to say, that sort of misunderstanding can cause problems for the festival. As well, the fact that it’s a biennial celebration means even more headaches.

“It really affects the funding, because we don’t have a regular operational funding budget,” says Morgado. “It’s a constant attempt at trying to get enough funds to put the festival on.”

But the festival will go on, and it seeks to bring more people into the warm confines of the performative art fold — artists, students and the general population. This year’s schedule is broken down into three thematic streams: the Craft Off Series, which focuses on the process of creating craft in innovative ways; Migrant Media, which focuses on time-based creations with music and video; Mimesis: Art Imitating Life, which features performances and lectures based on real-world experiences that either affected, or happened to, the artists.

The Craft Off series, curated by the former festival director Nicole Burisch, will likely be the most surprising category to those unfamiliar or uncomfortable with performative art. The series aims to focus on the creation of craft rather than the final product.

“It’s people who are intentionally using craft as a method of performance,” says Morgado. “So not just making the object — making something that’s commercial. It’s going beyond and seeing what you can get out of it. It’s more the process than the end-product which, oftentimes with craft, it becomes about the product and not the process in itself.”

Events include artist Wednesday Lupipcyw’s Ladies’ 500-Metre Challenge, in which two teams of weavers will face off in a refereed race, complete with audience bleachers in the Glenbow Museum.

“Expect a rowdy crowd. We’re expecting people to be there making a ruckus on the second floor of the Glenbow,” says Morgado.

Another event will see David McCallum and Dory Kornfield knitting a round of Go, the Chinese strategy game.

The Migrant Media series will also challenge the perceptions of performance. Events include local experimental music sensation Bug Incision. Jay Crocker will also produce live music while Joe Kelly creates a real-time drawn-on animation to accompany the tunes.

“They all incorporate a time-based process,” says Morgado. “So either film or sound into their component of performance.”

With creations that won’t be fully defined until they are underway, it’s easy to imagine a certain amount of stress for the director, but that’s only part of the story.

“The suspense, I think, is one of the driving forces behind why I really enjoy this field,” says Morgado. “It keeps you on your toes and it shows you new things.”

The third stream of programming, Mimesis, carves closer to the stereotypical idea of performative art and suitably features many artists who have been involved in performance creation for some time. Reona Brass will incorporate barbed wire and words to indicate the damage that each can inflict. Reading sections of the Indian Act as her verbal barbs brings a strong socio-political message to the performance. This engagement is what ties all the events in Mimesis together, including a lecture on the Greek philosopher Diogenes by Scott Rogers and Dave Dyment.

“They’re all pieces that I find are either socially, politically or culturally motivated. They’re all recounting something from the past,” says Morgado.

“Whether it be something in their personal lives or something that they’ve encountered, socially, politically or culturally, and it’s affected them enough that they wanted to put something together about it.”

The hope is that audiences can approach this art form without intimidation and be exposed to new ideas. To increase the visibility of the festival, and to improve its funding odds, the organizers are considering moving to a yearly festival format. This year, it’s also hosting a fundraising cabaret at the downtown Legion — the only ticketed event of the festival.

“We don’t just want to do a festival to have shows, we want to educate, not just the art community or the students doing art but just the overall Calgarian,” says Morgado.