The Pittsburgh Foundation, in collaboration with The Opportunity Fund, is seeking submissions from local artists striving for social justice solutions in recently available funding for the grant initiative “Exposure: An Artists Program.”
As is sadly still the reality for gatherings and performances currently, the ongoing pandemic is still seeing massive, last-minute shutdowns to planned events. It is not altogether surprising but is still disheartening to see the way the virus can affect a return to form for artists. While countless Fringe festivals the world over just celebrated being back after a postponed year, some branches—such as the Sydney Fringe Festival—have unfortunately had to close their stages down for yet another year.
CEO of Sydney Fringe Festival Kerri Glasscock announced this past week that the festival has had to the Australian government’s extended lockdown with a full cancellation of the Fringe. “In 2020 when the world stopped our sector was forced to face a reckoning unlike anything we were prepared for,” she states in her address. “The unity, strength, passion, dedication and the stubborn resilience of our independent artists is truly inspiring. In spite of the hardships we are still here, and despite the futility of our environment artist[s] are still making work, exceptional work. Sydney Fringe had hoped to share that work with you in September.”
The Sydney Fringe is one of the largest Fringe festivals in the world, and with 370 productions having been planned for this year, it is a massive blow to the theatre communities of Australia and abroad. Last year saw the massively popular festival streaming shows for audiences at home, but with the current measures of the widespread delta-variant keeping most of the artists involved from both rehearsal spaces and in-person gatherings, there doesn’t seem to be feasible avenues for this.
Time and location are so volatile and shifting in our current context for what is able to be produced. It was a little more than a month ago on the opposite coast of Australia that the Adelaide Fringe Festival was closing a massively successful endeavour. At the very least it highlights the necessity of nations to maintain rigour in dealing with the still very much real pandemic.
Although it is certainly a great loss that the Sydney Fringe Festival must hold off for yet another year, there is still clearly a hope and strength in this pillar of independent theatre. They currently are running an image series stating “WE’LL FRINGE AGAIN” and are reaching out to the city for donations to help ensure the support and survival of this paragon of Fringe. With a little luck, the organization will see itself in the spotlight once again under better circumstances.
International Deadline: August 22, 2021 – House of Shadows Creative Gallery & Market is looking for work representing a wide variety of photographic art whether it be traditional darkroom, digital, experimental…
The “Fix Team” at Grist, an independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future, brought together Anjali Nath Upadhyay, a philosopher and political scientist at Liberation Spring, and facilitator Gibrán Rivera in what Rivera described as an experiment called “Where Shift Happens: A Narrative and Cultural Power Mini-School.”
U.S. Multi-State Deadline: September 23, 2021 – Cambridge Art Association fall exhibit, open to artists from the New England states, will be centered around a color ‘BLUE’. Multiple venues and cash awards…
National Assembly of State Arts Agencies released a new report that “provides a forecast of state government funding for the arts in fiscal year 2022.”
Due to the COVID19 pandemic, according to the report, “several states are changing their budget processes, whether that be passing a single-year instead of a biennial budget or making substantial adjustments in the second year of a biennial budget.”
“Discover Somatic Practices to Embody Racial Justice in Your Work,” a free workshop with Dara Silverman & Brooke Stepp offered by Strozzi Institute, seeks to tackle “how to transform patterns that reinforce unhealthy power structures — in your life, in your practice, and in the world” and to “explore new practices for embodying your chosen values of liberation, justice, and healing.”
Virginia G. Piper Charitable Trust awarded recently more than $2 million to 26 performing arts organizations to “help strengthen performing arts organizations’ re-emergence following severe disruption caused by the pandemic and provide vitally important access,” according to the press release.
International Deadline: Ongoing – Bitch: Feminist Response to Pop Culture’ provides smart, witty, and thought-provoking commentary. We’re always looking pitches and illustrations that speak to feminist responses…
Radio is becoming a more and more archaic means of consumption every passing year. With the vast majority of music listeners not even having private collections, opting instead for streaming services, most people shuffle a playlist and call it a day. But even if the majority of people only hear the radio when walking around a store, its historical and ongoing significance should not be understated or forgotten. And Toronto artist Bahia Watson has paid homage to the power of radio shows and its connection to storytelling through her recent project Program Sound FM.
Program Sound FM, described as a radio station show, went live July 25th and ran for twelve hours straight. Lead and hosted by Bahia Watson—who some may recognize from her work on Star Trek: Discovery—the full day of programming featured dozens of artists across a vast spectrum of backgrounds. Originally devised by Watson at the start of the pandemic as a means to give theatre creators an avenue for creation, she teamed up with Outside The March Theatre to secure funding and a team and the project was developed over the course of this past year.
Combining music, sound design, talk pieces, and performances, eclecticism radiated from the collected works. Jennah Foster-Catlack’s ‘Covid Tings’ gave snapshots of real and variant lives lived over this past year’s struggle; Colin Doyle and Liza Paul’s ‘Friendshit’ shared candid wisdom of connection with a college-talk-radio style; Roula Said’s ‘About 40 Days’ was an intimate, engrossing piece of storytelling. Much of the music was Canadian and BIPOC focussed-one of the many ways the station was championing progressive values-including Toronto’s Kokophonix and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson’s cover of Willie Dunn’s iconic ‘I Pity The Country’. It was a quilted tapestry, to say the very least.
With such stark variation of microphone quality and sonic textures from project to project—and even within individual segments—what could come off as unpleasantly disjointed in some contexts feels like a charming and suitable patchwork of sounds and identities from across the country. Program Sound floats somewhere in the space between a pirate radio station and Fringe show, and it is nothing if not endearing.
The bumpers and overall design of Program Sound FM’s own audio are some of the gems of the structure. Designed by TiKA, a Toronto-based multi-disciplinary artist and founder of non-profit organization StereoVisual, it is immediately catchy and captivating and truly elevated the twelve-hour run by giving a particular sonic fingerprint to the shape of the channel.
But without a doubt, the identity of Program Sound FM and its very heartbeat go to creator Bahia Watson. Watson is an outstandingly charismatic host for the forum she has created, bounding between high-energy moments to a relaxing candour. Her passionate delivery hits so many comforting notes as a host and the care that has gone from her into this inventive project is exceedingly clear. Not only is Program Sound FM looking to exist as an avenue for storytellers to share, but it is clear that the connectivity of our national community is a prime goal as well. In referencing the tragic treatment of the homeless encampments in Toronto over the past month, Watson made a stark and truthful comment on the state of the city’s priorities:
“We can fund police attacking poor people. Or we can fund the arts, and be like this.”
Shows like Program Sound FM are as beautiful as they are fleeting. Perhaps even more so than theatre or a live concert, a unique broadcast experience is so individual and so ephemeral. Bahia Watson found a way to capture those glorious aspects of storytelling and weave them together with the contexts of radio in a way that harkens back to a time long past, while still feeling so of the moment. Here’s hoping there are plans to pop up in the static again soon.