The streets of Charlottetown will be taken over by art this weekend — and the audience will be a big part of it.
Installations for the 11th annual edition of Art in the Open will be placed in outdoor spaces around the city’s downtown core.
Saturday’s free arts event features more than 30 projects by artists from P.E.I. and across Canada. But they’re not the only ones featured.
“For this iteration, I was really interested in performance and installation and work that socially engaged, that implicates and brings in the audience — involves them in a procession, for instance, or dance,” said Amish Morell, curator of this year’s event.
“I was looking for artists who could engage with the public, who could engage with the issues and in the lives of people in Charlottetown and P.E.I.”
Interwoven themes
Some of the installations this year include a solar-powered mobile recording studio, a mechanical dinosaur drinking fossil fuels, and a screening of a documentary about plants with audio descriptions instead of visuals.
Another body part gets added to Gerald Beaulieu’s sculpture at Victoria Park. (Shane Hennessy/CBC)
Other projects will ask the audience to dance in a silent disco, or lie in the grass and look at clouds. People can also grab a costume representing their favourite corvid and participate in the annual March of the Crows.
Morell said this year’s artwork offers many overarching themes.
“A lot of the artists are dealing with land, ecology, climate change, … treaty issues,” he said.
“We have artists working with soil, artists working with histories of apple orchards in Atlantic Canada. There’s artists dealing with trade and human-animal relations. There’s also artists who are making community: Art in the Open is a public event and … the audience is as much a part of this as the artists are.”
The audience isn’t neutral
B.C. dance artist Kemi Craig hosted a series of dance workshops ahead of her performance. Bearing Witness is a multi-sensory installation that’s meant to show that an audience is never neutral.
“The performers and the people that are there bearing witness, we have a relationship in that moment and we’re affecting each other. And I think that’s why I was drawn toward learning how to use sensory technology so that I could amplify that relationship,” she said.
“There will be some of us dancing, anywhere between three and six of us dancing…. Mostly, what you all will see will be lights, and what audience members are able to do is affect the lights in the performance that we’re going to be wearing.”
Open to interpretation
Bill Burns said his performance, The Salt, the Donkey, the Goats, the Milk, the Honey, will feature “donkeys and goats and farmers, and a beekeeper and a brass band.”
The beekeeper will show the audience how to make honey from a frame. Burns said he didn’t like to suggest people how should interpret his work, but mentions taking inspiration from his youth.
A scene from the 2017 edition of the March of Crows, which mustered at the Confederation Centre of the Arts and made its way to Victoria Park. (Art in the Open/ Facebook)
“I grew up in Saskatchewan,” Burns said. “My relationship with animals was always important. And now I see people, you know, sort of deprived of this experience.
“So I want to bring animals to urban situations, so people can understand a little bit more, because I think … if we want to continue with this world, we have to have a relationship with animals.”
And yes, the audience does gets to interact with the animals.
More details about the event, including performance schedules, can be found on the Art in the Open website.
LONDON (AP) — With a few daubs of a paintbrush, the Brontë sisters have got their dots back.
More than eight decades after it was installed, a memorial to the three 19th-century sibling novelists in London’s Westminster Abbey was amended Thursday to restore the diaereses – the two dots over the e in their surname.
The dots — which indicate that the name is pronounced “brontay” rather than “bront” — were omitted when the stone tablet commemorating Charlotte, Emily and Anne was erected in the abbey’s Poets’ Corner in October 1939, just after the outbreak of World War II.
They were restored after Brontë historian Sharon Wright, editor of the Brontë Society Gazette, raised the issue with Dean of Westminster David Hoyle. The abbey asked its stonemason to tap in the dots and its conservator to paint them.
“There’s no paper record for anyone complaining about this or mentioning this, so I just wanted to put it right, really,” Wright said. “These three Yorkshire women deserve their place here, but they also deserve to have their name spelled correctly.”
It’s believed the writers’ Irish father Patrick changed the spelling of his surname from Brunty or Prunty when he went to university in England.
Raised on the wild Yorkshire moors, all three sisters died before they were 40, leaving enduring novels including Charlotte’s “Jane Eyre,” Emily’s “Wuthering Heights” and Anne’s “The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.”
Rebecca Yorke, director of the Brontë Society, welcomed the restoration.
“As the Brontës and their work are loved and respected all over the world, it’s entirely appropriate that their name is spelled correctly on their memorial,” she said.
