The cast of Ashleigh Hicks’s Brick Shithouse, Found Festival 2024. Photo by Brianne Jang
By Liz Nicholls,
“What’s going on here?”
There’s a question that tickles the perpetrators of the Found Festival, devoted to art (and encounters with artists) in unexpected places.
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For a dozen Julys, no alley or park, no warehouse, or ravine, or sidewalk, is safe from the inspirations of the Found experimenters whose bright ideas for shaking up the usual relationship between art and audiences are the festival’s raison d’être. “What are you doing?” is another good Found question, laughs festival director Whittyn Jason.
At the 13th annual edition of Found, with its biggest mainstage lineup yet, you could find yourself sitting around a campfire somewhere in the Mill Creek Revine, for example, hearing ghost stories from 10 writers who are diverse, in every way. Curated and directed by one of them, Philip Hackborn, Madness and Other Ghost Stories is a collection of personal first-hand accounts of being haunted by mental aberrations and dysfunctions.
Banana Musik, Found Festival 2024. Photo supplied.
You might find yourself at a three-generation gathering of an immigrant family. Banana Musik, by the Regina-based FilipinX artist Kris Alvarez, is, as billed, a memory play, spun from “her immigrant experience and her care for aging parents,” as Jason describes.
At the John Walter Museum Alvarez takes us on a tour of her childhood home, and we actually get to meet Alvarez’s mom and dad. Though they’re not performers, they’re in the show, live. Her father’s original songs from the ‘60s and ‘70s, Banana Musik as he calls them, are in the show. Afterward, we’ve got an invitation to stick around for hot bread and conversation.
Kait Ramsden’s afterbirth, perhaps Found’s most mysteriously indescribable show, as Brock laughs, occupies Found’s most conventional space, Mile Zero Dance headquarters (9931 78 Ave.). Brock calls afterbirth “beautiful, joyful, weird … a hyper neo-spiritual experience,” if that helps. He watched a 30-second snippet of the piece, “then I spent the evening watching the rest. It’s so mesmerizing.” Jason calls it “a guided meditation.” And hold this thought: “There’s cake and projections.”
Found 2024 even offers an outdoor experience you can’t watch. In Queen Elizabeth Park, The Nature of Us, created by Kevin Jesuino, Cass Bessette, and Jean Louis Bleau, is an unusual way to feel a rapport with the land. It’s “a devised sound installation” as billed, a 30-minute experience of nature with a recorded soundscape that includes a choir and monologues. “You can have the experience ; you can’t see it,” as Jason says.
The usual frontiers between disciplines are erased at Found, as you will glean. And they’re in performance spaces you didn’t anticipate. You can find Found mostly in assorted locations, unexpected nooks and crannies in Old Strathcona. But this year, the festival has ventured forth to farther-flung locales. The largest show in Found history, with an extended run past the festival (through July 14), Brick Shithouse, happens in the Tesserae Factory, a giant warehouse in the west end near the Telus World of Science (11210 143 St.) where opera and Freewill Shakespeare sets get built.
In Ashleigh Hicks’ play, directed by Sarah J Culkin, seven “best friends/ worst enemies” are anonymously live-streaming their fight club, behind a pay wall. They’re struggling to survive, and they need the money. Are there limits to what they will do to appeal to the invisible audience out there in the digital cosmos? Brock calls Hicks “an incredible, challenging playwright,” and Brick Shithouse (developed in Found’s Fresh Air Artist-in -Residence program of 2023) “fast and furious, gritty and funny.” Stay tuned for a post about Hicks and their play, coming soon.
Geoffrey Simon Brown, Finding Four Leaf Clovers. Photo supplied.
In Finding Four Leaf Clovers, a title that sounds metaphorical but isn’t, you could hang out with the actor/ playwright/ director Geoffrey Simon Brown in a field in Strathcona as he exercises his unusual knack for finding four-leaf clovers. “It’s a magical capacity,” says Jason, bemused. “A little freaky really…. It’s funny, it’s quirky, it’s uniquely Geoff. And uniquely Found.” At each performance Brown will be paired with musical guests, Ghost Cars on Saturday in End of Steel Park, and Bigfin Squid on Sunday in Light Horse Park. You don’t even need a ticket.
At “a secret location in Old Strathcona,” a very Found venue as described that way, actor/playwright Louise Casemore, this year’s Fresh Air Artist-in-Residence, is presenting a workshop of Lucky Charm (it’ll get a full production at Found 2025). And you’ll be attending a séance, which is to say attempting to cross the portal between the here and now and the Great Beyond. Bess, the widow of the late great magician Houdini, presides, in hopes of making contact. Apparently after he died, till she shuffled off this mortal coil herself, Bess conducted séances every Sunday in her house. And this is one of them, your chance to catch a first-hand glimpse of life after death.
Aren’t you curious? Lucky Charm sold out instantly when Found was announced; it’ll take one to get you a ticket. The dramaturgy is by playwright Beth Graham. Casemore’s collaborator is Jake Tkaczyk.
Islands of Utopia, Found Festival 2024. Photo by Dani Torres
The venue for Islands of Utopia: Veden äärellä, performed by Deviani Andrea and Janita Frantsi, is Queen Elizabeth Park Road, and the muse is dance. And it tells the story of two childhood friends in a physically, playful way. You’re invited to play along.
You’ll find a music series at Found, too. And a big Hoedown afterparty. And poetry. For the complete schedule, more show information, and tickets, see commongroundarts.ca.
PREVIEW
Found Festival 2024
Presented by: Common Ground Arts Society
Where: assorted locations in Old Strathcona and beyond
Running: July 4 to 7
Tickets: tickets.fringetheatre.ca
