UBCO Faculty of Creative and Critical Studies to put on Living Things International Arts Festival

The UBCO Faculty of Creative and Critical Studies and Inner Fish Performance Co. are putting on Living Things International Arts Festival between January 5th to February 4th, 2018. The festival will be taking place at theatres and studios around Kelowna such as The Rotary Centre for the Arts, the Kelowna Community Theatre, on the UBCO campus, the FINA gallery, the Studio for Spaces and Things, the Centre for Culture and Technology, the University Centre, and the New Art Centre.

The Living Things International Arts Festival features boundary-pushing contemporary theatre, music, dance, animated films, visual art and multi-media performances from international artists at the height of their game.

Living Things animates venues across Kelowna’s cultural district during the winter season in collaboration with UBC Okanagan’s Faculty of Creative and Critical Studies, Ballet Kelowna, Bumbershoot Children’s Theatre, the Rotary Centre for the Arts, the Alternator Gallery and Skin and Bones Music Series. For the 2018 festival (the second edition), artists from France, Australia, Toronto, Vancouver and the Okanagan region will be performing in the Cultural District as well as on UBC’s Okanagan campus.

There is something for everyone in the Living Things Festival, from children’s puppet theatre to a challenging, live exploration of what might constitute a ‘foreign radical’ in contemporary Canada. They are also presenting a world premiere jazz trio at the Kelowna Community Theatre, experimental video and visual art at the New Art Centre, spoken word performances, and other events. Living Things is a new force in Kelowna, offering contemporary, audacious performances that resist traditional categories and demand a playful, inquisitive audience.

SHOWS/EVENTS

Living Things Art Club
Three after-party events, each featuring sound, media, and music artists from the Okanagan community.
January 5th - Kelowna performance group Aeon performing their piece Water.
January 19th - Performances from Darren Williams, Alex Poindexter, and UBC sound art collective Convulse.
February 2nd - More performance from Aeon and Alex Poindexter
New Arts Collective - Free
9:00 pm - 1:00 am

Aeon is an Audio/Visual art group from Kelowna, BC that combines generative sound and moving images to tell meaningful stories through rich mediated experiences. Performances range from abstract ambient pieces to perceptually affected electronica. Water by Aeon engages with the sensitive bodies of water in the Okanagan Valley. Through expressive electroacoustic and visual performance, Aeon brings the enchantment of the water to the foreground. The work reveals the contrast between natural and human-made sound and visual spaces.

Convulse is a group of students in the Sound Art program at UBC Okanagan campus. Performers use metals, lamps, strings, and drawing to explore the sonic qualities of objects.

Darren Williams is a Canadian saxophonist/bassoonist who pushes the limits of extended instrumental technique into regions that are lyrical, terrifying, uncanny, and “more fun than spiked punch live” (Georgia Straight). Called “a raw, vocal explorer,” (Stuart Broomer) Darren has performed with Eugene Chadbourne, Chad van Gaalen, Myk Freedman, Mats Gustafsson, Han Bennink, and many others.

Alex Poindexter is a disgraceful individual who slaps down 80's synth-pop grooves in an unrelenting pursuit of feeling over thinking. Critically massacred but loved by the fans, this is sure to be a winner at least 50% of the time.

Objects in Motion

Animated films from the National Film Board archives and independent film-makers from around the world, curated by Myron Campbell, to be followed by artist talks from participating festival performers or local arts community members.
RCA Mary Irwin Theatre - Entry $7
7:00 pm

January 9th from 7:00 pm - 8:00 pm
Theme: Tales of the City

January 16th 7:00 pm - 9:30 pm
Theme: Through the Eyes of a Child
Also features an artist talk afterwards with Jay Dodge, Sharon Thesen, Matt Rader, Denise Kenney, and Neil Cadger.

January 23rd 7:00 pm - 8:00 pm
Theme: Coexistence/Connection

Red Phone

By Boca del Lupo from Vancouver.
UBC Okanagan University Centre - by donation
January 16th - 20 10:30 am - 6:30 pm with breaks every 2 hours

We’re asking playwrights: “what is the most urgent conversation every Canadian should be having?” Then we’re asking them to write it. And asking you to have it.

Part theatre and part social intervention, Boca del Lupo’s Red Phone is an audience-to-audience performance that utilizes the intimacy of a phone call and the technology of a teleprompter. Two at a time, audience members are guided through a conversation about life, art and their surroundings.

The experience takes place between two hand-crafted, fully enclosed phone booths outfitted with an antique red phone and an integrated teleprompter. An unseen operator prompts two audience members to engage in a five-minute conversation written by a Canadian writer. The act of having the conversation with an unseen stranger provides an anonymity that adds to the intimacy of the performance, encouraging participants to be the actor in their own theatrical experience. Red Phone is a one-of-a-kind performance where anyone can engage in some of the most urgent, touching, thought to provoke conversations written by some of Canada’s most exciting writers.

For this performance and installation, we have commissioned Sharon Thesen to compose an original dialogue for Red Phone. Sharon is a renowned Canadian poet who taught at UBCO in the Creative Writing program until 2016. We are also planning writing workshops with members of Boca del Lupo that will be open to all UBCO students leading up to the festival.

Liar Liar!

By Amy Modahl and Corinne Thiessen
UBC Okanagan FINA Gallery - by donation
January 18th - 20th from 2:00 pm - 6:00 pm

In a world where 91% of people lie regularly at work and at home, it is important to detect deception, even within our closest social networks. Interpersonal Suspicion can save us time, money, and guard our personal and economic safety.

AmCor Inc.® offers a unique solution to this 21st-century problem. Highly trained Human Lie Detector Services Agents, Special Officers Çlåöd Îdíã and Åj Dähl bring you the Deception Detection Training Program. By examining your meta-communicative functions, through our interpretive analysis method of advanced contour drawing techniques, AmCor officers disclose mendacious responses by tracking such cues as darting eye movement and subjective facial movements.

Amy Modahl, originally from Wisconsin, lives and works in Salmon Arm, BC. She holds an MFA in Visual Arts from the University of British Columbia, Kelowna and an MA in Applied Linguistics from Northern Arizona University. Her research and creative practice often investigate linguistic ideas visually through various media including drawing, painting, printmaking, stop-motion animation and installation. Currently, she teaches in the Communications Department at Okanagan College, British Columbia.

Corinne Thiessen is a multidisciplinary artist born in Winnipeg, Manitoba. She holds an MFA from the University of Lethbridge. Thiessen is curious about human social activity, especially pertaining to deviance, social norms, self-regulation and social control. Through kinetic objects, drawing, video and performance, her work explores physical and ideological impediments, repression and “acting out.” Thiessen has taught in the Media department at Lethbridge College and teaches Drawing in the Faculty of Fine Arts at the University of Lethbridge.

Piece for Person and Ghetto Blaster

By Nicola Gunn from Australia
January 20th and 21st at 8:00 pm
RCA Mary Irwin Theatre - Adult $30, Student $20, and Child $10

Check out a little sneak peek here.

Piece for Person and Ghetto Blaster is a confrontational muse on peace and conflict, moral relativism and the very function of art, inspired by an incident that actually happened. A woman saw a man throwing stones at a sitting duck and she yelled at him. What follows is a dissection of the excruciating realms of human behaviour and a navigation of the moral and ethical complexities of intervention. Littered with anecdotes and digressions, critical and philosophical theory, the text is accompanied by a rhythmic electronic soundscape and a non-stop, athletic choreography that shifts from the unnecessary and incongruous to the comic and strangely affecting. These multiple layers form a work in perpetual motion, “a moral and physical workout, witty, outright funny, deeply intelligent and, as intended, morally perplexing…” RealTime.

Piece for Person and Ghetto Blaster slips across tempos, ideas and performance modes - from theatre to dance to performance art and back.

Double Bill: Multiple Organism & where this lives now (19+)

Mind of a Snail (Vancouver) & Plastic Orchid Factory (Vancouver)
Black Box Theatre - Adult $30, Student $20
January 26th - 27th at 8:00 pm

The Double Bill features dance-theatre performance where this lives now by Plastic Orchid Factory and 10 Gates Dancing, followed by Multiple Organism by Mind of a Snail.

Multiple Organism is a genre and gender-bending surrealist comedy for adults (18+). Expect bizarre and hilarious nudity using the body as a projection surface, plus colourful shadow puppetry projections, and an original musical soundtrack. This show is a multi-layered psychedelic dream about having a body - and how our body is seen by others. An artist’s life model, tired of being objectified, steals a magical paintbrush and falls down a proverbial rabbit-hole with a pair of sentient toothbrushes. She must decide whether to follow her old internalized script or release this script and love herself for who she really is. With a dramatic sub-plot featuring an affair between brushes, and one of the weirdest personal hygiene rituals you’ve ever seen!

where this lives now began in 2014 when renowned Canadian choreographer.

Tedd Robinson shared his nearly 4 decades of dance archives with 6 choreographers from across Canada. The objective was to move these archives from DVD and VHS and into the bodies and imaginations of another generation of dance artists. The end result was FACETS, which premiered at the National Arts Centre in May 2015. Angie Cheng and James Gnam explore the nature of legacy in dance, rediscovering how archives live on, distilled and imperfectly transformed through our memories and our technologies. Angie and James work with time, space and transformation to (re)frame questions, concerns and aesthetics of another generation within the context of the present.

Mind of a Snail is a shadow puppetry duo currently based out of Vancouver BC. Since 2003, Chloé Ziner and Jessica Gabriel have been developing a multilayered style of visual storytelling using overhead projectors as their main light source. Their performances play at the intersection of puppetry, visual arts, clowning & music. Their latest show “Multiple Organism” won Critic’s Choice Award, Artistic Risk Award, Cultchivating the Fringe Award and Pick of the Fringe at Vancouver Fringe in 2017. Their original shows “Curious Contagious”, “Caws & Effect” and “Against Gravity” have won dozens of awards at festivals across Canada and the USA.

MGB Jazz Trio

Black Box Theatre- Entry $20
January 25th at 8:00 pm

Canadian premiere performance of the MGB Jazz Trio (Matt Mitchell, Gordon Grdina, Jim Black). Complex, intricate, idiosyncratic, and rockin’—those are the adjectives that best describe this cross-border collaboration between Vancouver guitarist Gordon Grdina, and New York’s Matt Mitchell piano, and Jim Black drums. Juno Award winner Grdina’s compositions give the nod to 20th-century classical composition, rock, free jazz, and third stream, and this trio promises to explore those ideas at their highest levels.

Since its inception in May 2015, Skin And Bones Music Series (in conjunction with the Alternator Gallery) have had the privilege of hosting some of our planets greatest musicians and instrumentalists from nearby to far & away. For their 25th concert instalment Skin & Bones is thrilled for this special cross-pollination project in collaboration with the Living Things Festival.

Table Top Tales

By SNAFU and the Snack Music Collective (Montreal)
Jan. 29th - 31st at Black Box Theatre - Child: $10 Student: $15 Adult: $25
For ages 4 and up, check out more information here.

Table Top Tales is an adventure in storytelling, puppetry, and music. We share stories of family and friends and the adventures and challenges of growing up. Parents and children will be invited to tell a story from their family lore: funny stories, scary stories, embarrassing stories, silly stories, heart-warming stories, even sad stories. Then you sit back and watch as the professional puppeteers bring your story to life by puppeteering fruits, vegetables and kitchen tools!

A fabulous puppetry-storytelling-improv-dance-music mash up. They bring personal stories to life in a way that is both simple and simply brilliant. Their imaginative canvas seems to stretch ever larger as they make the world a better place one connection at a time. Montreal Rampage

Tons of fun. The DIY puppets and props are imaginative and the impromptu sound design inspired. Glenn Sumi, Now Magazine.

Metamorphosis Cabaret (19+)

Feb. 1st - Doors at 7:30 pm, Show at 8:30 pm (19+ with ID to enter)
Black Box Theatre- Presale $15, Door $20

Watch live transformations in this strange variety show created to help bring the dark days of winter back to life. In collaboration with Living Things International Art Festival, members of the Inspired Word Café collective present, with special guests Mountain Sound and Tait Lupo of Kinshira, a raucous show of change, growth, and other weird shit we don’t fully understand.

Featuring performances such as clown, spoken word, burlesque, LED Poi, and a giant man in a red bathrobe. Oh, and we can’t forget DIY Deb, or Rhian Jack, or whatever her name is these days. She’ll show up to intrude on someone’s set, there is no doubt. PLUS! Surprise, interactive performances before and after the cabaret!

This is a late-night, down and dirty type of event. Come play with your favourite Kelowna poets, performers, musicians, deadbeats, try-hards, wannabes, whatever you call us behind our backs.

Tempus Extraordinarius

By Theatre Fools and Feathers from France
February 3rd and 4th at 8:00 pm
RCA Mary Irwin Theatre - Adult $30, Student $20, and Child $10

Tempus Extraordinarius is a spectacularly funny and touchingly sad performance by two superb French clowns (not the red nose kind). Their comic timing is impeccable and their sensitivity is deeply moving. A poetic world reminiscent of Samuel Beckett and Charlie Chaplin.

Tempus Extraordinarius is not the continuation of Tragicomic Fate of Tubby and Nottubby. It is the echo of it, where the fortuitous encounter of two vagabonds, one night near the Seine, in Paris, allows the world to preserve a glimmer of humanity while spreading everywhere a new era of terror. Confronted with a world devoid of all freedom, condemned to survive, Tubby and Nottubby will be swept away by the tumultuous waves of History and Time, in an epic crossing of themselves. Beyond the barbarism and chaos of the world, Tempus Extraordinarius is a tribute to wonder, dream, hope and life.