Junction Arts Festival runs to Sep 7. Larchaud Dance Project
performs Sep 6, 1:30pm, 2:30pm, 4:30pm, 6pm, 7:30pm and 9pm; Sep 7,
noon, 12:30pm, 2pm, 3:30pm and 5pm. Check festival website for a full
list of performers and times. Dundas W between Keele and Quebec.
www.junctionartsfest.com.
When Halifax-based dancer Véronique MacKenzie arrives in town in a few days, the first thing she’ll do is tour the Junction neighbourhood, in all its brick railway-town splendour, to map out the spots where her flash-mob troupe will converge during this weekend’s Junction Arts Festival. One minute, they are five random people, dressed in beige, heading toward the same corner. The next, they’re performing a tableau, perhaps riffing on the gestures of a panhandler, a construction worker, a piece of architecture or another artist’s work. Before you know it, they’re gone.
“It’s not something you watch,” says MacKenzie, who originally choreographed this piece, entitled Citizens, for the streets of Halifax. “It’s something you notice. If you happen to be there and you see it, you’re lucky. People inadvertently become an audience whether they want to or not.”
That sense of the unexpected makes Citizens a perfect fit for the festival, which is undergoing a period of reinvention under newly hired executive producer Michael Menegon. He wants to turn pedestrians into audiences.
“You close a street in Toronto and you get tonnes and tonnes of people even if you have nothing going on,” says Menegon, best known as the co-founder and artistic director of the defunct fringe Festival of Independent Dancer Artists (fFIDA). “Last year we piqued people’s interest with a heavier focus on a wide range of arts and we’re building on it.”
What began 16 years ago primarily as a neighbourhood gallery crawl has evolved into a five-day fest featuring 50 artists and four stages along Dundas West between Keele Street and Quebec Avenue. Popular acts like headliner David Usher share space with abundant local talent, as well as with envelope-pushing artists from across Canada. With nine performance artists on show, Menegon’s dance roots are showing.
“When I came here last year, a lot of people followed me from fFida,” says Menegon. “But I don’t think performance dominates. We were looking for people who can use movement as expression to transform the environment. And they need to be able to dance on cement.”
Jennifer Robichaud — who worked with Menegon at fFIDA and is, in fact, used to dancing on cement — brought Larchaud Dance Project’s breakdance-meets-modernism aesthetic to last year’s festival. That piece started in a bus shelter before bursting out into the street. During one performance, a die-hard transit user refused to leave the shelter. The troupe just danced around her.
“You never know when a child will walk into the piece or if a corner we are using will be occupied. We try to work around them till they notice,” says Robichaud.
Her company is back with new choreography and a punk-rock theme, prompted by this year’s festival’s focus on history: 2008 marks the 100th anniversary of the Junction’s incorporation. (Its cityhood was short-lived; it was swallowed up by Toronto a year later.) The history is remarkable. Prohibition lasted there until 1998, so the Junction developed its own ideas of fun. The Heintzman & Co. Ltd. Piano factory drew musicians, and the area’s speakeasies hosted the likes of Ella Fitzgerald and Dizzie Gillespie. The Junction’s seven theatres, which doubled as vaudeville halls, were in stiff competition.
“Any area that is rich in history has something that resonates for artists,” says Menegon. “As an artist myself, I know the importance of being supported by the artists living around you — because so much of the time you’re working against the flow.”