Saturday March 5th, 2011 saw a sold out crowd at the Arrata Opera Centre where Calgary's first annual Queer Arts & Culture festival kicked off in style. Featuring performances by Julie Orton, Lindsay Brandon, Jessica McMann, The Backyard Betties,Laurie MacFayden, James Tea, DJ Michelle C and Light Fires and the visual art of Brianna Strong, Emanuel Ilagan and Travis McEwen, the night proved to be a veritable of array of style and art. Organizers explain that they were using this one-night event to "pilot" the idea of a Queer Arts & Culture Festival in Calgary.

"We had no idea if it would fly," explains Programming & Producing Director Jessica Dollard, "And this one night was our test-drive to see if there was artist interest and an audience for this type of event."

Organizers couldn't be happier with the turn out when over 200 people showed up at the door and standing-room only seats were sold.  Audience response to the event has been overwhelming both at the event and thereafter -they've received nothing but glowing reviews.

"Audience members are telling us that they 'haven't felt so alive in ages' and that an event like this 'means a lot to those in the community who feel invisible most of the time'".  Dollard goes onto to say that the festival will become an annual event.

"Q the Arts will become a staple of Fairy Tales' programming alongside our film festival which will remain over 9 days long every spring.  We would like to see Q the Arts expanded to more than one night for the next incarnation of the event.  After this historical night (March 5) in our organization's history Fairytales Presentation Society will have three main programming pieces: the film festival, the arts festival and our diversity education endeavours such as OUTReels and the Youth Anti-Homophobia PSA Competition."

 "Calgary is a much more diverse place than it is noted for and events like Q the Arts will continue to improve our national and international reputation as such".

Q the Arts will be an annual event!  Check back here for the next festival's dates.

FAIRY TALES PRESENTATION SOCIETY & SWALLOW-a-Bicycle Theatre present

Calgary's inaugural Queer Arts & Culture Festival
Q the Arts

March 5, 2011 8 PM
Arrata Opera Centre (1315 - 7th Street SW, Calgary, Alberta)

TICKETS
$20 Advance Full Event
$25 at the Door (Cash Only)

$15 at the Door (Concession / Friends of CJSW / Fairy Tales Members)

For advance tickets CLICK HERE or call 403.263.0079

As Calgary's Queer Arts & Culture Festival, Q ^{the Arts} will embrace artists who are LGBTTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, two-spirit and questioning), and also those who subscribe to culturally, politically, artistically and otherwise alternative and innovative ways of contributing to society. Queer is a vista, a way of looking at the world differently, with an eye towards diversity, critical thinking and inclusion.

Don't miss this landmark event! This one-day festival is a celebration of Calgary's LGBTTQ community and of our city's diversity and inclusivity. Mark your calendars for March 5 and prepare yourselves for a decidedly queer evening of art & culture.

Fairytales Presentation Society and Swallow-a-Bicycle Theatre are proud to showcase the following artists:

Backyard Betties

You want Country? You want Folk? You want Contemporary? Put it all in a blender, sit back, relax, and enjoy a serving of the Backyard Betties! This fun group is made up of friends who love to perform as much as they love creating original music.    The Backyard Betties have all the ingredients that you need to have a good time. Enjoy! 

Chantal Vitalis

My name’s Chantal Vitalis and I write songs and play the electric guitar.  I’ve toured in Canada, Europe, USA, and Australia as a solo artist and also as a member of The Lovebullies, Kris Demeanor's Crack Band, and my former bands Same Difference and maud. I’m really proud to say that I have been credited as a songwriter, singer, composer and/or musician for many great albums, films and theatre shows.  Recent albums include “Swang Swang Swang” (on vinyl!) by The Lovebullies (songwriting) and “These United States” by Kris Demeanor & his Crack Band (guitarist).  I’ve composed for film (The Girl Who Married a Ghost, The Riders (male), Gens de Foque, The Road Project) and theatre (Bluto, When Bush Comes to Shove, Rising Out of Love) and was nominated for the fourth time by the Alberta Motion Picture Industry Association (AMPIA) for my score for The Artistic Taxidermist.  I performed in Buzz Job, a play/theatrical concert featuring the songwriting of Cal Cavendish and Kris Demeanor, icons who represent different eras in Calgary’s vibrant and often under-appreciated musical history. My solo CD, “Today’s Special,” features many songs about food, animals and people.

My Websites:  http://www.myspace.com/chantalvitalis

Electronic Press Kit: http://www.sonicbids.com/epk/epk.asp?epk_id=17924

Lovebullies MySpace: www.thelovebullies.com http://www.myspace.com/lovebullies

Kris Demeanor & His Crack Band: http://www.myspace.com/kdcrackband http://www.krisdemeanor.com/

Jessica McMann

Jesse McMann-Sparvier (aka Jessica Mcmann) has been dancing for 8 years and performing for 6 years. Her talents include flute performance, music and dance. Her career focus has been on Hoop Dance and contemporary movement. She has studied under Alex Wells, three time world champion hoop dancer, Dallas Arcand, world championship winner 2007, Brian Clyne, Raven Spirit Dance Training (Vancouver), Red Sky/Toronto Free Gallery Performance Art Residency, and currently, Promenade Dance Academy. Her dancing has taken all across Canada and the states as far as New Mexico, Inuvik ,Vancouver, and Sweden.  Currently she is working on a film, working for the Winnipeg Aboriginal Film Festival Cultural Connections for Youth program, working in many Winnipeg schools, establishing a Native Creative Arts Salon program setting tours for Sweden, Norway and Finland as well as creating new choreographies that explore our relationship with the earth, with each other and her native and queer identities. She learns from all cultures and integrates theory, knowledge, practice and ideologies into her dance yet never loses the root of traditional powwow forms and traditional practices.

Lindsay Brandon

Lindsay Brandon is a multidisciplinary artist and musician from Calgary, Alberta.  A solo performer and video artist, she plays a wide variety of acoustic instruments (guitar, keys, percussion) which she records into her loop station and uses digital synth to create multi-layered songs with live vocal mixing overtop.  Video backdrops often accompany her with images of moving light in a textured painting style.  A background in drama from her youth has been re-awakened as of late and she is currently collaborating to create sound and video for theatre.  She strives to combine her talents as a video artist, musician, dancer and actor to create a show which has many levels of artistic expression.  Inspired by current events and our relationship with what she refers to as ‘Tricknology’ Lindsay explores the duality of soulful acoustic sound and combines it with digital synth to create a sound that is both contemporary and exciting.

Emanuel Ilagan

Having a creative propensity since childhood, Emanuel Ilagan only began to see himself as an artist after getting involved in emerging queer and art scenes of Alberta's capital city. Born and raised in Edmonton, he received a BSc at the University of Alberta, majoring in Biological Sciences with a minor in Film Studies. Earning praise for his amateur film photography, he received his first show at the visual.arts@Nextfest group exhibition in 2010. The same summer marked the debut of NECKNACKS, his handmade line of neck-wear. Moving forward with this momentum, Emanuel now resides in Vancouver, British Columbia where he continues to explore and inform his identity as an artist and image-maker at the Emily Carr University of Art and Design.  Much of Ilagan’s work seeks to explore, deconstruct and/or reappropriate the visual discourse of Western patriarchy, while still being representative of his own joie de vivre: a celebration of lived experience and lived spaces. After relocating to a new city, he keeps his quiet inspirations to himself: wearing tights under his pants, remembering the bell jar in Disney's Beauty and the Beast, associating the sea with melancholy. His art can reveal these secrets.

Laurie MacFayden

Laurie MacFayden wears many hats as writer, spoken-word poet, photographer and painter. After three decades as a sports journalist, she left the news media in 2007 to focus on her own creative projects. Her debut collection of poems, White Shirt (“a bust-out-of-the-closet voice … this is Sappho crossed with the Supremes ”) was published by Frontenac House in April 2010 and long-listed for the Alberta Readers Choice Awards.

Her writing has also appeared in The New Quarterly literary magazine, the Spire Poetry Poster and The Ontario Poetry Society’s Chapbook Anthology Love: The First Course. She was a regional finalist in the 2008 CBC National Poetry Faceoff, and contributed to the inaugural online cycle of Dailyhaiku.org, and its first print offshoot, DailyHaiku I: A Daily Shot of Zen. Her work has been performed at Edmonton’s annual Loud & Queer Cabaret, Exposure (Edmonton’s Queer Arts and Culture Festival) and Acts of Pride.
She performs regularly on Edmonton’s Raving Poets open-mic stage and is a member of the League of Canadian Poets, the Writers Guild of Alberta, Edmonton Arts Council and Visual Arts Alberta. Her art lives at www.lauriemacfayden.com.

Travis McEwen

Travis McEwen is currently an Edmonton based painter with a BFA from the University of Alberta who often works from notional subjects. I am continuously exploring my own visual and emotional responses to ideas and conceptions surrounding otherness, exclusion and normalcy and how they intersect/interact with the ideas and constructs of gender and sexuality. I create and invent individual and isolated portrait subjects as a structure to exemplify and communicate the emotional psychology related to these ideas. These subjects are youths, people discovering themselves, people whose bodies are betraying them and becoming different without their consent.  And yet these isolated subjects are already marked by sociality— the ungainly, fraught relationship of the self to itself here has been fashioned by its encounter with social pathologies.  The inner experience of self-estrangement begins with the encounter with another.  The paintings’ titles seek to restage this relationship between the external remark and the internalized insecurities and self-understandings of the subjects themselves.

The Orton sisters

 “The Pride of the Calgary Ortons” as they have become known in their own minds, are two moderately talented young artists living off their parents’ good graces. The eldest, Jennie Orton, has been writing since she was 12, penning masterpieces such as “Hazzardous Times: The Dukes of Hazzard movie” and poetry about Matthew McConaughey. She earned her Broadcasting diploma from Mount Royal and shifted into journalism. She is currently resides in Vancouver with her little black dog working as senior editor for sceneinthedark.com where she reviews concerts and events in the Vancouver area. The youngest, Julie Orton, earned her theatre degree at UofC giving her official licence to indulge her already overbearing love of dramatization, much to the relief of her long-suffering family. It has served her well, she has appeared onstage at Vertigo Theatre, Alberta Theatre Projects, Ground Zero Theatre, Lunchbox Theatre, Urban Curvz, Downstage Performance Society, TheatreBOOM, and three seasons of Shakespeare in the Park. Julie recieved three Betty Mitchell Award Nominations, and one win for Best Performance by an Actress in a Supporting Role (Shakespeare's Dog - Alberta Theatre Projects). She frequently guest stars on Dirty Laundry, Calgary's only improvised soap opera. 

Jamie Tognazzini

James Tea is a local transdisciplinary artist, specializing in voice, musical theatre, eccentric performance, animation/installation, and circus arts.  Recent feature appearances include the Calgary Animated Objects Festival 2011 (La Famiglia animated installation), Midway (High Performance Rodeo) 2011, Fire & Ice NYE Celebration (emcee of the official City of Calgary countdown event),  Fluid Movement Arts Festival Physical Therapy Cabaret, Exposure Queer Arts Festival (Edmonton), Le Chic III (Hawaii) with members of Cirque du Soleil, Lhasa: Land of the Gods (Swallow-a-bicycle Performance Coop), Calgary/Edmonton Fringe festivals, & Toxic Avenger: the Musical (Broadway West Productions). In 2009, Jamie played Cheryl in Evil Dead: the Musical (Calgary and Vancouver, GZT/H&M).  

Brianna Strong

Brianna Strong is an emerging artist currently attending the Alberta College of Art & Design.  She has studied and practiced in multiple cities and is continuously hunting for parallels between her work and other disciplines. While Strong has been an observer to several areas of study and different tribes – from astronomy to athletics to magazine production - she sees art and culture as points of intersection for people. She is compelled to produce these unique states of encounter in a variety of contexts. Drawing has always been her primary way of navigating the world and remains as the preferred scheme in drawing people together over a distance. Current projects include queer photo initiative “tri” with local artist Laura Kelly, street art campaigns and collaborations with her twin sister an art historian, flamenco dancer and writer based out of Vancouver.

Headliner

Light Fires

Light Fires is the collaborative creation of Reginald Vermue (aka, Gentleman Reg) and James Bunton (of Ohbijou). The band is a colourful and cheeky brand of electro-soul, reminiscent of Hot Chip (though less kitschy than their early stuff) or Hercules and The Love Affair (but less opulent). It is sugary sweet, but anchored by the deep, icy synths of songs like “10 Feet Tall” or the gauzy, down-tempo atmospherics of “The Better”. The Light Fires’ music exudes a playfully coyness and mischievous confidence that is immediately contagious; insidiously creeping into you, and taking over your body until you are dancing ecstatically in the neon lights of some hedonistic den of bodily delights. 

AFTER-PARTY Artist Featured:

Michelle C

Meet the festival curators who helped program the festival working in conjunction with Fairy Tales & SWAB:

Kristofer Kelly is a graduate architect, an exhibit developer for the New Science Centre Project and a white elephant in a pink sailor suit. He is a tap dancing designer with an allergy to mould and suburban development. He draws to understand the world and feels that sometimes the most meaningful words are those spoken silently. A good conversation, drawn, spoken or otherwise gestured, is the goad to joy. He lives in Calgary, Alberta Canada and is currently practicing life.

 Mark Hamilton writes songs in his Calgary bedroom and gets asked to play them around the world, under the disguise name of Woodpigeon. He's particularly fond of magenta trowsers, bearded Scots, and autumnal-and-winter landscapes. He wrote this short bio on a bus, mid-way between Riga, Latvia and Tallinn, Estonia. The bus had only 15 seats, a stewardess in a navy blue suit, full catering, and even a small café with library in the back half of the vehicle. While he was a long way from Calgary as he typed, he was excited to have played a part in the curation of Fairy Tales’ first annual festival of Queer Arts in Calgary.