Huge growth for festival
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When representatives from the Juvenis Festival visited schools this year, they would always ask students if she or he had heard of the youth-focused event.
More students’ arms were raised this year than last.
“We’re three years in now,” managing director Jane Karges said, “and people recognize the name. The difference in that alone has been huge.”
“I think they’re seeing the value of it more and more,” Karges added, saying that teachers have been key to getting students involved. “And the kids are starting to tell each other about it, too.”
Not only have more young people heard of the festival, which starts today and runs until Sunday, May 6, they are more adventurous in their proposals, too.
“This year, the youths finally caught on that they can take bigger risks, that there aren’t any guidelines to what they should do or what discipline,” Karges suggested.
Festival director Reid Cunningham also noticed a difference not just in the number of proposals, but also the nature of them.
“This is so different this year not because of what Jane and I were planning,” he said. “That’s the nice thing about this festival: it’s about young people bringing their voices to the table and us trying to make that happen for them.”
The organizers also saw younger people making submissions, with the youngest project leader still in high school. And this year the festival’s expanding into Napanee with a photo gallery.
There are a few schedule staples that will return again this year, including the popular Battle of the Bands, the “Juvy’s Movies” competition, a musical featuring only high school students (The Addams Family), poetry show, and the Movement Market Series (dance).
And there will be new additions, too, such as Saturday’s Constellate Showcase, and a series of arts-centred workshops.
Here, we take a look at four of the newcomers to this year’s festival.
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February 15th, 2015, is a day Francisco Corbett will never forget.
That was the day he saw an exhibition of New York artist Jean-Michel Basquait’s work at the Art Gallery of Ontario, and it was a life-changing experience for him.
“That jump-started everything, and gave me a real purpose in life,” the 20-year-old artist explained. “I had been going through some hard addictions and everything like that, and then I saw that show and it really brought out this artistic side in me.”
Corbett has been busy producing all types of art ever since.
And for the Juvenis Festival, he is bringing “We are all alive,” the second instalment of a five-part series.
“I’m combining paintings, sculptures, and fashion into one big, big room,” explained Corbett, who has exhibited his artwork a few times before.
On Tuesday, he will take over the Princess Street space that used to house American Apparel and cleave it into three areas. One will represent the beauty of nature, another an “industrial type” of beauty, and everyday beauty.
The show follows up his first instalment, “Yes, we’re alive,” that he staged in February.
The first part of that evening was a runway show.
“What I’ll do is buy thrift pieces or something like that, and I’ll find stuff on sale, and I’ll paint all over jackets and rip them up, or have things stitched on them,” Corbett explained. “So it’s like fashion reimagined.”
He ended the evening with what he calls a “living art exhibit” complete with his narration and curated soundtrack.
Corbett uses his art as a way of letting people get to know him. Many of today’s youth, he feels, are reluctant to be themselves in fear of being deemed unpopular.
“If you can be yourself, then nothing can really stop you,” he said.
Corbett, on the other hand, uses his art as a way of connecting with others.
“With the whole story I’m trying to build out over these five shows,” Corbett said, “I want to show people who I was, who I am, and who I want to be.”
(Tuesday, May 1, from 5 to 10 p.m. 274 Princess St. Entry is by donation.)
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While she has been knitting since she was 9 or 10 years old, it’s only in the past couple of years that Emma Halchuk took up embroidery.
And she’s not the only one, she said, as embroidery has experienced a resurgence in popularity.
“If you go on Instagram, there are tons of different embroidery accounts, how-to things. I don’t know exactly why this is. Even mainstream clothing stores have embroidered jeans and things.”
It’s so current that she’s curating a “textile art gallery” titled “Threads.”
“I just wanted to see a display of more of my contemporaries’ art pieces that they’re doing,” Halchuk explained. “So I thought if I’m not seeing it anywhere, I might as well see what I can do myself.”
The space will feature works of yarn, string, and fabric, and will include traditional embroidery hoops, clothing embroidery, and original clothing pieces on clothing. There will also be a knitted portrait as well as a piece that combines sculpture and fabric.
The exhibition opens Friday in the Tett Centre’s Community Gallery, right after the Kingston Fibre Artists’ current show, also titled “Threads,” wraps up.
“I hope I don’t get too many confused people,” she laughed, adding that she didn’t realize until a month ago that they shared a name.
While she can’t explain embroidery’s popularity, she does understand its appeal.
“It’s no longer just for a certain age group or group of people,” the 23-year-old said. “Anybody can do it. All you need is a needle and thread, or a sewing machine, or needles and wool.”
(Friday, May 4, to Wednesday, May 9, with the opening reception on Friday from 5 to 6 p.m. Community Gallery, Tett Centre, 370 King St. W. Entry is free.)
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Amanda Lin knows how to properly wield a sword.
She wouldn’t have learned the onstage skill, though, had the production of Macbeth in which she had a role was cast according to gender.
“It’s not something that a woman would get to do in Shakespeare normally, so that was a really cool experience,” said Lin.
And now she’s trying to create an experience for other women as one of the people behind “The Hallway Plays.”
During her time at Queen’s University, Lin noticed that, while there were more women enrolled in the school’s drama department, there were fewer dramatic roles for them.
“Not only that, but the roles that are available to women aren’t always as complex,” particularly in the classics, explained Lin.
That’s one of her reasons — to create more acting opportunities for females — that she and Blair MacMillan, one of the founders of the Theatre Count troupe, took on a pair of plays to present at the Juvenis Festival.
Lin is in charge of Hannah Moscovitch’s In This World, which sees two very different teens sitting outside of the principal’s office awaiting punishment. The play, Lin explained, brings up issues that aren’t often discussed, such as sexual assault, and in a messy, realistic way.
MacMillan, meanwhile, is overseeing Jordan Tannahill’s Get Yourself Home, Skyler James, a true story about a private who leaves the U.S. army and heads to Canada after being outed as a lesbian.
The plays — both of which take place, unsurprisingly, in a hallway at Princess Street United Church — examine what it means to be a woman in Canada.
“We thought that was a really cool opportunity to do something a little bit more non-traditional in a very intimate setting,” she said, adding that there’s room for 20 people at each show.
There will also be a craft station at which people can “create things and kind of react to what they just saw and hopefully engage in the pieces in a deeper way.”
“I think one of the really important things about theatre is being able to kind of not run away from life, but look at a situation that could be real, engage with it, and have it reflect back on what’s happening in the world.”
(Saturday, April 28, and Sunday, April 29, at 2:30 and 7:30 p.m. Princess Street United Church, 484 Albert St. 90 minutes long, and not suitable for those under 13. Cost is $15, $10 for youths.)
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Dimitri Georgaras and Maddy Roach are electrical engineers. Geograras is also a musician, and Roach a visual artist.
“We both love engineering, but it’s hard to take our love for building things and put it in an artistic way for us to take our engineering knowledge, our acoustic knowledge, and put it together,” Geogaras said. “What we’ve tried to do is take some of the concepts we learned in electrical engineering and apply them here.”
The “here” to which he refers is “Pipe Dreams,” an art installation he and Roach have created. Measuring 10 by 20 feet, it is a series of connected corrugated pipe through which sounds will pass and be changed through the equivalent of a junction box, he said.
“It’s supposed to be something you interact with,” Georgaras said. “It’s sonically unique events that change as it goes on.”
The installation will split time between the Storefront Gallery and the Tett Centre’s Community Gallery during the festival, and it will likely be configured differently at both places, which will, again, affect the sound.
Georgaras came up with the idea after taking an electroacoustic musical composition class at Queen’s University.
“I was intrigued and wanted to try it out,” he recalled, “and when I heard about the Juvenis Festival, I had this idea, and I reached out to Maddy.”
He chose to use pipes in the installation because “the delay and feedback has been a topic of conversation in my electroacoustic classes,” he said.
He said he was also inspired by some of the first recording studios, which used tubes.
“We’re doing our trial runs of it,” he said this week, “and I think it’s shaping up to be definitely interesting. I find with these sort of things you have to keep on experimenting with it and it will take itself somewhere. You just have to guide it and try to make the best of it.”
(From today until May 4 at the Storefront Gallery, 274 Princess St., and then at the Community Gallery, Tett Centre, 370 King St. W. Entry is free.)
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For a complete schedule of events or for more information, go to www.juvenisfestival.ca.
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