Wow, feels like the last time I was writing in this space it was a year ago. Actually, wait, it was over a year ago. I was talking about the upcoming 2010 Montreal Infringement Festival. That went very well and then I went to Buffalo, that was incredible. I wrote about my experiences at this colossally amazing event on Forget The Box shortly after I got back.

Now, after yet another Montreal Infringement success (I wasn’t as heavily involved this year, but I did manage to get out to almost all the events), there’s another Buffalo fest that just got underway. By all indications, it’s going to be even bigger, while still remaining “under the radar” if you can believe it. I previewed the 2011 Buffalo Infringement Festival on FTB yesterday. Here’s an excerpt:

“These aren’t heavily-funded corporate artists, or artists creating work where potential market revenue trumps creativity and message. We’re talking musicians, actors, visual artists, hula hoop artists and more, doing what they love to do and doing it together for eleven days. It seems that once an artist catches the Buffalo Infringement bug, it’s hard to stay away. This year’s lineup features performers who have been part of the event from the very beginning…”

I think I’ve finally found a way to balance everything and find some time to this my personal blog on a much more regular basis, even with the huge growth over at FTB (number 3 on the Mirror’s Best of Montreal, several thousand visits every month, etc) that has been keeping me real busy.

We’ll see if it works, till then, do yourself a favour and check out the Buffalo Infringement if you can.

The new poster’s done, here it is:

2010 Montreal infringement poster (concept and artwork by Marcelo César, Alexandra Cuellar and Donovan King)

The schedule should be online at infringementfestival.com/montreal by Thursday.

It’s also almost that time of year when I disappear from all things infringement as I’ll be busy organizing, attending shows and even performing.  This year I’m going to try and do some reporting, at least on Forget The Box and maybe here too.  If I don’t get the chance, at least I’ve added the festival’s Twitter feed to the sidebar.

I did manage to write a post about the festival both here and internationally for Art Threat.  You can read it here.  You really should check out the rest of their site (Art Threat, that is) as there’s quite a few interesting articles about art and politics and it updates rather regularly.

Right now, I’m preparing for the infringement press conference scheduled for this Thursday.  Fun times ahead!

]]> http://www.jasoncmclean.com/lets-infringe-again/feed/ 0 http://www.jasoncmclean.com/its-that-time-of-year-again/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=its-that-time-of-year-again http://www.jasoncmclean.com/its-that-time-of-year-again/#comments Tue, 09 Mar 2010 23:39:39 +0000 Jason http://www.jasoncmclean.com/?p=163 I’ve been involved with the Montreal infringement Festival since it’s creation in 2004 and now, for the seventh year in a row, the fest is returning and looking for artists and volunteer organizers.

Fist in the air, it's time to celebrate: infringement Festival returns!

If you’re not familiar with the fest, well, put simply, it’s a celebration of critical arts. We welcome music, theatre, film, spoken-word, visual arts, street performance, culture-jamming and to quote the fest’s tagline “anyone who wants to artistically infringe on the monoculture that surrounds us every day.”

Basically, in Montreal, the infringement is eleven days of fun that doesn’t cost anything to be a part of. This celebration has proven infectious over the years as the fest has spread to other communities.

Buffalo is by far the largest even, last year boasting over 400 acts, while the Brooklyn iF, going into its second year, is a small but very enjoyable four day event. New this year, Hamilton, Ontario will host its first-ever infringement. Apparently, the city has a growing arts scene that is ready for a festival just like this.

In Montreal, we’ve discovered that underground is the way to go for an event such as this, so this year, instead of a massive postering campaign, we’re going to rely mainy on word-of-mouth and the web to spread the word. Both methods have proven effective in the past.

If you want to be part of the celebration which happens from June 17th through the 27th or would just like some more information, please visit the festival’s site.

We arrived on Friday night and started off at The Albion Hotel, a pub/music venue that, I guess, used to be a hotel. The Albion was also the last place in Guelph we visited.

In fact, it was one of only three places I spent a significant amount of time in, the other two being the place I was billeted (with a sign over the door that read “living in style”) and the University of Guelph campus where our show was to take place.

Guelph is a small town, but it felt more like a few sections of a larger city glued together. For those of you familiar with Montreal, imagine part of NDG glued to Outremont glued to Wellington Street in Verdun glued to a sprawling and beautiful university campus, with a couple of streets reminiscent of Mile-End and the West Island thrown into the mix – and that’s it.

For such a small town, it had a very progressive vibe. We were invited by professor Alan Filewod, who’s also a character in our show (as a piece of verbatim theatre, Sinking Neptune uses actual public statements and writings from real people as play text). Filewod’s Political Intervention Theatre Project hosted the show.

The people we met from this group, from the university and in Guelph in general, were supportive and seemed to have a very progressive outlook that accepted challenges to the status quo.

Our show went over very well and during the talkback session, the audience posed some very thought provoking questions and even offered us some ideas (like getting some culture-jams related to the project going in Vancouver, which will soon host the 2010 Olympics, on Aboriginal land). There’s even talk of getting an infringement Festival going in Guelph, where I think it will go over well.

On the deck of the SS Imperialist, part of the Sinking Neptune set at the University of Guelph (photo by Matthias Elsdörfer)

The George Luscombe Theatre, where we performed, is a great, high-tech black box theatre space. For an actor like me, who’s used to performing in alleyways (Car Stories), stores that don’t want us there (various culture-jams) and bars (many other projects, including an earlier run of Sinking Neptune), it’s a nice change of pace and one worth noting.

The last time I performed in an equally high-tech venue was at King’s Theatre in Annapolis Royal, Nova Scotia, again with Sinking Neptune. That time, though, the crowd was anything but progressive and the talkback became a heated attack on our play, prompted by a perceived attack on their tourism industry, which was largely centered on Lescarbot’s play.

Where politically-charged theatre with something to say frequently has to find it’s own space in a city like Montreal (at least on the Anglo side), Guelph seems ready to showcase it front and centre, which is great for a community this size, or any community for that matter.

I wonder what type of reaction we can expect when we eventually perform the show in Quebec City, another beautiful town that seems really progressive, where once again the city’s tourism industry will be centered around celebrating another Eurocentric milestone.

This year, we’re focusing on the 400th anniversary of Quebec City, another celebration that glosses over some of the real and bloody history of the event being celebrated.

If you happen to live in the Guelph area, the show is Saturday, February 9th, at 9pm at the George Luscome Theatre at the University of Guelph and it’s pay-what-you-can.

I’ll try to write a few posts while down there, but for now, here’s a video trailer of the show:

Now entering it’s third year, the Buffalo festival is, without a doubt, the largest in the International infringement circuit (so far). While the Montreal infringement improved audiences and developed the local infringement community this year by pulling itself back and focusing on less shows centered around the Plateau neighborhood, Buffalo’s event keeps getting bigger and better.

With over 140 acts this year (up from last year and almost quadruple the number of acts in the original 2005 Buffalo event), the growth in the festival’s size is matched by it’s growth in intimate community feeling and original, spontaneous ideas.

That’s not to say that the festival doesn’t have it’s critics, or should I say critic. Among all the praise and in-depth coverage found in Buffalo’s media, there was one editorial (um, “survival guide”) in the Artvoice urging the festival to drop it’s claim to support and represent underground artists with something to say by giving them a place to say it.

I’m not sure if anyone took that advice to heart, but it sure didn’t look like it on the streets of Allentown (the festival’s epicenter) during the festival’s opening weekend and the subsequent few days we were in town.

As people were busy completing their “self-infringement” assignments, pulled out of a box at Rust Belt Books, four separate public performances turned Allen Street into a spontaneous artistic celebration. On Monday night alone, three of them co-existed simultaneously.

The surreal experience started when Subversive Theatre’s fantastic street-theatre version of Berthold Brecht’s The Exception and the Rule (which I had the chance to catch a day earlier) made it’s way down Allen parade-style past MC Vendetta’s Open-Lot (a musical open-mike in a parking lot) to Day’s Park.

We started preparing for Car Stories, while taking in some of what was happening around us. Just before our first showtime of the evening (with a new show every 30 minutes, Car Stories has several), The Exception and the Rule made it’s way back to Allen Street and took over the parking lot next to Nietzsche’s, briefly trapping one of our actors behind the scene. It moved on to the parking lot where Open-Lot was taking place, just as they went on break.

In the middle of their scene, Car Stories started half a block down outside of Mulligan’s Brick Bar. Our actor, who was watching the show, made it to Mulligan’s in time for her cue and brought the audience back, past the now-resumed Open-Lot and into our car parked in the now theatrically vacated lot next to Nietzsche’s as The Exception and The Rule continued up College Street.

Three street theatre productions all happening at the same time in the same two-block stretch of the same street, with no problems. Truly a great example of what infringing is all about.

What I really found refreshing was that the festival didn’t have to compete with corporate reality ads running up and down the street as we do in Montreal.

This probably isn’t the case all the time in Allentown (I was told that there were some other, more commercial festivals), and quite possibly not the case in other Buffalo districts, but for the few days we were there, it was really nice (and possibly hints at why the festival doesn’t have a Ministry of Culture Jamming).

For the past three visits, our troupe has been housed by the good people at the Nickel City Co-Op. They had taken over a four-story turn-of-the-century mansion (with gargoyles!) and turned it into their home.

This reclaiming of the city is evident all over Buffalo. It’s a community breathing new life into the relics of an older, much more financially prosperous time (Buffalo was once a city of millionaires, not so anymore) and celebrating while doing it. It’s one of the most unique, vibrant artistic communities I’ve encountered and it’s the perfect match for both the infringement and Car Stories.

Since Car Stories takes place in streets, alleys, parks and parking lots that already exist, a big part of the show is finding new use for what’s already there which is why, I feel, we had no problem putting together a show with mostly Buffalo actors in hardly any time.

We came up with the theme and worked out characters and scenes that fit it the day of our first performance. We don’t always do things this spur-of-the-moment, but this time we did, and it worked very well.

We even played on the Artvoice article, telling the audience that we had to make more money, so we were going to do musical theatre and were sending them to an audition with Andrew Lloyd Webber.

Back in Montreal, I can only hope that what’s happening in Buffalo will rub off on the rest of the circuit, because when it comes to infringing, they get it.