Festival of Art and Creativity 2020

Rob Murray: I’m speaking with Mia Riley from artsPlace. It’s time for your annual celebration, the Festival of Art and Creativity. It’s going to look a little different this year, isn’t it?

Mia Riley: Yeah. It’s been a problem solving challenge for our team to imagine a festival where we normally have 2000 community members coming into our building all in one weekend. How can we keep our customers safe while still offering really engaging free arts programming? I think our team has done a really good job in still offering a lot of those same programs that the community members love, but spreading them out. We’re offering small group workshops and we’re offering them over and over again. Instead of having a hundred people all come through for one workshop on a day, we’re now offering, like with our Air Plant workshop, there’s a couple of different sessions that people can preregister for.

RM: What are some of the other workshops subjects that you’re offering?

MR: Throughout the week starting on Saturday, September 19^th, I’m really excited for our Clay Play workshops on the weekends. We’re finally getting the chance to invite our community members back into our ceramics studio to get a little messy with clay.

RM: Some live events that people can enjoy from the comfort of their home kicking things off on Friday. What’s the Bow Valley Cabaret live stream all about?

MR: Normally on the Friday festival kickoff we’d have these fun outdoor concerts, so we are shifting that type of programming to accommodate the pandemic, doing it fully live streamed. I think it’s still going to be a really great time. We’re inviting family members to tune into us from their couch or from their home. On Friday night it’s going to be curated by local singer/songwriter Ellen Braun and I think it’s going to be a really great folk music focused weekend.

RM: The following night, on Saturday night – typically the YouTube concerts you guys have done have been local artists. You’re bringing in a local favorite for this one?

MR: Oscar Lopez. We’re so excited to invite him back. People have loved coming to his concerts tat artsPlace, so bringing him in for the live stream is just going to be a way that more people in the community can check him out.

RM: This Sunday, we have the Bike Shorts Film Festival coming back?

MR: It’s going to be outdoors and it’s going to be super fun. In true Canmore Community Cruisers style they’re inviting people to bike down and bring their bike into the venue, and then kind of use their bikes as social distance barriers to create these little bubbles to watch the movies on a big screen.

RM: I noticed a lot of cultural presentations as well.

MR: We are doing online discussions and webinars. A new facilitator that we have, Travis Rider, is going to be leaning a Cultural Diversity and Learning Circle workshop for people who are interested in learning about Stoney culture. I highly recommend that one.

I’m going to be moderating a panel called The Adventuring Artist, talking about artists who are working out in the landscape doing plein air artwork.

RM: Is there anything else you’d like to highlight from this week? I know there’s quite a bit here.

MR: The thing I would just like people to know is because all of our in person workshops are modified we are inviting people to preregister for all of our festival programming, which they can do on our website.