Now more than ever, we need good quality from all levels of art. Painters, singers, writers, filmmakers, dancers… artists all need to band together to provide their audiences with quality art that will inspire this generation to not give up hope and push on. When done right, that’s the power of good art.
This year, despite the obvious obstacles, Intrepid Theatre is presenting its audience with their art with the 23rd annual UNO Fest. However, because of the COVID-19 pandemic, it’s presenting the fest online.
“We really wanted to give an offering of love, really, of reaching out to our audience and hopefully feeding them some artistic creativity, some enjoyment in their homes, and whenever they need to,” says Intrepid Theatre artistic and executive director Heather Lindsay. “We really wanted to connect and still support the artists that were going to be in UNO Fest originally, and creatively adapt and still offer some artistic enjoyment to bring us together in this world of isolation.”
Lindsay says that changing the UNO Fest to be entirely online due to COVID-19 was a challenge, but says that everyone still wanted to make sure they had fun.
“We really deeply thought about it and let it just percolate, and collectively we came together with this artistic vision,” she says. “It’s definitely not, you know, the normal size of the festival, going to an online platform. We were aware that that’s not the medium that we work in, so we wanted to challenge ourselves and have fun, but we didn’t want to stress ourselves out so much, because we also know that everyone is working in isolation, and so it’s a challenge as well for us to work together, to try to collaborate from afar.”
Lindsay says that this year’s event includes live meet and greets on Facebook to give people a chance to really “get deeper into their work.”
“We have a sampling, hopefully that everyone can access, from free online Facebook events; so it will be Facebook Live events of happy half-hours with the artists,” she says. “It’s a meet and greet with the artist, an artist interview, really, to get deeper into their work.“
Lindsay says that the paid content portion of the festival features a pre-recorded play that users can access through social media.
“We have full shows of comedy and dance and puppetry that will make you laugh,” she says. “It’s a full play, right in your home… Local artist J. McLaughlin will be doing [her] performance live, so we do have an original full-length piece, live.”
One of the performances this year is Kunji Mark Ikeada’s Sansei: The Storyteller. Ikeada says that the performance started as an experiment.
“I was really trying to see if I could mesh contemporary dance with spoken-word poetry,” says Ikeada, “and so that combination is where the gears started to turn.”
Although the performance explores serious topics, it often uses humour in the process of exploration.
“I was really fascinated by the idea of silver linings,” says Ikeada. “That was kind of the inspiration point; it didn’t take me long to look back at my own history and know that my whole life is a bit of a silver lining, because if it wasn’t for this really dark time of the Japanese internment, my dad wouldn’t have been born, and then neither would I have.”
The show exploded between the spoken word, the dance, and telling the story, says Ikeada.
“These strands of ideas kind of came together to contextualize the Japanese internment,” he says, “to tell that story in a really personal way of how I’ve come to understand it.”
UNO Fest
Tuesday, April 28 to Saturday, May 9
intrepidtheatre.com/festivals/uno-fest