Unexpected encounters with art
Found Festival in Old Strathcona an ambitious, unpredictable event
Found Festival Where: various locales in Old Strathcona area Running: Thursday 3 p.m. through Sunday 9 p.m. Full schedule and app: commongroundarts.ca Tickets: Gazebo Park, 83rd Avenue and 104th Street or at the door of venues
Surprise! Some time this weekend you could find yourself following a dance company into the past over a bridge. Or watching a film in a park, a play in someone’s house, or a gaggle of comic improvisers conjure “the collective memory of the room” in an organic market.
That’s what the Found Festival is for: unexpected encounters with theatre, dance, music, film, visual arts, in places you’d never expect to find a show. Like the impromptu art gallery in the alley behind the Gravity Pope Warehouse, where you’ll discover an installation of dresses made from found stuff, or an outburst of break-dancing.
Found is back this weekend in Old Strathcona to lead you on an expedition through the neighbourhood. Festival director Andrew Ritchie reports that this fourth annual edition is the most ambitious, most unpredictable yet. Site-specific submissions from 175 artists are waiting to be found, over four days and nights. You know you’ve arrived, as a festival, when you have a beer garden, import talent from Norway, and your own app with a map of the festival venues.
It wasn’t like that in 2012, when Ritchie and Elena Belyea of the Common Ground Arts Society got the idea. Ritchie’s new company Thou Art Here!, designed to set you up with Shakespeare in sitespecific situations, offered Midsummer’s Lucid Dream. “We ran up around the King Edward playground; we went down the slides with water guns; we skateboarded.”
“Every performance was one-time only; there was no map, no website …. Yup, (venues) were genuinely secret,” says Ritchie of year No. 1. “We were flying by the seat of our pants. And it was magical!”
The prospect of fun and novelty speaks for itself. “I love that people walking by, going on with their day, just come upon a performance,” says Ritchie. But there was a certain practical streak, too. Found, Ritchie says, “was all about making the arts accessible to audiences, and to emerging artists” who are up against it, cash-wise. “The main goal was not to pay for any venue,” to test the ingenuity and creativity of artists by using public or donated spaces.
Found headquarters is the Gazebo Park at the intersection of Walterdale Theatre, the Varscona and the Fringe. That’s where you’ll find the box office, the beer garden, live acts on the “festival stage,” a “Found Town” made of Popsicle sticks and Black-Out Poetry. And that’s where The Made (Today) Show will happen, an evolving art installation that comes together over eight hours on Sunday.
Inspired by Calgary’s Swallow-A-Bicycle, The Made (Today) Show has 10 artists creating a performance, on the spot, based on the people they meet. At 8 p.m., “the artists present it in some form somewhere in the park,” says Ritchie. “We have NO idea what it will be.”
The Gazebo Park is also where you’ll find Thursday’s opening festivities, complete with an “endless typewriter scroll,” film showcase, bands and more. On Saturday, there’s “an endurance art piece” in which, starting at 5 a.m., improv star Tim Mikulah, ensconced inside a robot called Munch, will do an uninterrupted reading of the released CIA report on torture, some 525 pages long. “Either he finishes it, or it finishes him.”
At a festival that restores intimacy to the way we experience art, every ticketed venue has a limited capacity. The most limited of all is Christine Lesiak’s 900 Seconds, presented in that length of time to an audience of one. It’s at the underground Black Box Music Studios (8111 99th St.). Says Ritchie: “Only 35 people in total will ever see this show.”
“Intimate theatre has a level of engagement that doesn’t let you go,” says Ritchie of the festival. “You can’t check out and check back in the way you can sitting in rows in a (conventional) theatre.”
Immersive found-space theatre is all over the place in theatre capitals like London and New York. “Edmonton’s cool,” says Ritchie. “There’s a shift in desire for this kind of excitement everywhere. Is it the future of art?”