SpiderWebShow Performance proudly presents the annual Festival of Live Digital Art (FOLDA), the only Festival of its kind in Canada exploring and presenting live performances integrated with digital technologies. FOLDA 2023 will be presented both in-person and online, June 7 to 10, 2023, at the Isabel Bader Centre for the Performing Arts, Queen’s University in Kingston, ON, and is produced by SpiderWebShow Performance.

Artists from across Canada travel to Kingston to perform in FOLDA. This year, the Festival delves into the idea of synesthesia, a unique experience in which stimulation of one sensory pathway causes an automatic and involuntary response in another. Synesthetes hear colours, taste shapes, and feel sounds. In other words, their senses can get mixed up and create unique perceptions that are not typically experienced by others. In addition, programming for FOLDA shows how everyday digital technologies make opportunities for artists and audiences with disabilities to access the arts.

“Together, through their performances, the artists presented at FOLDA this year are asking the audience to consider how our senses inform who we think we are, and how we relate to those around us. As co-curators of FOLDA 2023, we hope audiences will encounter and reconsider their preconceptions of ability, security, and community, and emerge from the festival with a renewed sense that anything is possible.” - Adrienne Wong, Michael Wheeler, and Marcel Stewart, Co-Curators.

The works presented this year at FOLDA include Deaf UK dancer Chisato Minamimura, unpacking the hidden perspectives of Deaf people who survived the horrors of the atomic bomb in Japan in 1945 with her work Scored in Silence. With Through My Lens, Amy Amantea delves into the subjectivity of audio description from her experience as a person with 2% vision, and how portrait photography and conversation capture a moment in different ways. Kingston’s favourite aerialist Erin Ball creates an immersive accessibility experience about a queer love story. Beyond the physical senses, Beau Dixon wonders about his sense of security after a home invasion in Home. And Patrick Blenkarn and Milton Lim push the boundaries of an audience’s sense of itself with the participatory video game performance of asses.masses.

FOLDA 2023 LINEUP:

THROUGH MY LENS

Written and Performed by Amy Amantea

Written and Directed by James Long

June 7, 2023 at 5:30pm and *6:30pm

June 8, 2023 at 4pm, 5pm, 6pm, and 7pm

June 9, 2023 at 4pm, 5pm, 6pm, and 7pm

June 10, 2023 at 4pm, 5pm, 6pm, and 7pm

Each performance can accommodate one audience member.

*The 6:30pm performance on June 7 will be livestreamed, and an -in-person audience will gather in Kingston to watch the livestream together at the Isabel Bader Centre.

Amy Amantea (she/her) is an artist with a lived experience of blindness, specifically having a total of 2% vision in one eye. She is also a photographer with a practice that involves walking the city at twilight, looking for interesting light patterns and capturing them with her camera. THROUGH MY LENS brings these life experiences into one small photography studio where Amantea shares her work as a photographer with a single participant who then describes her images—images she has never “seen”—back to her.

SCORED IN SILENCE

By Chisato Minamimura

June 7, 2023 at 8pm

SCORED IN SILENCE is a solo sign language performance by London-based Deaf Japanese artist Chisato Minamimura (she/her). The show unpacks the hidden perspectives of Deaf people from the small number that survived the horrors of the atomic bomb atrocity in Japan in 1945.

ASSES.MASSES

By Patrick Blenkarn and Milton Lim

June 8, 2023 at 4pm

ASSES.MASSES is a 7+ hour video game designed to be played from beginning to end by a live audience. Told across 10 episodes and a wide range of game forms, the show follows the epic journey of unemployed asses as they navigate the perils of a post-Industrial society in which they’ve been made redundant.

CREATIVE ACCESS IN COMMUNITY

by Erin Ball, Maxime Beauregard, and collaborators

June 8, 2023 at 8pm EST

June 10, 2023 at 6:30pm EST

Erin Ball (ze/they/she) and Maxime Beauregard (they/them) are thrilled to collaborate with FOLDA for the 2023 festival presented in Katarokwi/Kingston. The artists will present an ALPHA stage immersive accessibility experience about a queer love story. The event will be a hybrid work-in-progress, both presented in-person and online, created in collaboration with Amy Amantea, folks from Cohort, and other access consultants.

HOME

By Beau Dixon and Linda Garneau

FOLDA 2023 Innovation Resident

in association with Soulpepper Theatre

June 9, 2023 at 8pm

In collaboration with dancer/choreographer Linda Garneau, HOME is a physical, expressionistic exploration of Dixon’s response to a home invasion. Incorporating movement, sound, and projections, this BETA stage of development of the piece moves further into the senses and emotions associated with PTSD as well as the loss of identity and the struggle to maintain a sense of ‘HOME.’

DJ SHUB PRESENTS WAR CLUB LIVE

Co-presented with the Isabel Bader Centre for the Arts

June 10, 2023 at 8pm

Considered to be the Godfather of PowWowStep, DJ Shub has undoubtedly pioneered a growing genre of electronic music. DJ Shub won the 2022 JUNO award for Contemporary Indigenous Artist of the Year, and previously won Breakthrough Group of the Year in 2014 (with A Tribe Called Red). He was also an Indigenous Music Award nominee at the 2018 Juno Awards for his PowWowStep EP, won a Much Music Video Award for Best EDM/Dance Video in 2017 and was shortlisted for the esteemed Polaris Music Prize Award in 2013.

His latest album War Club (2020) was released to critical acclaim during the pandemic, featuring collaborations with other indigenous and BIPOC artists like Snotty Nose Rez Kids, Boogát, Fawn Wood, and Phoenix Pagliacci to name a few.

The War Club performance integrates electronic music, traditional dancers, and is a celebration of Indigenous music and culture.

DETAILS:

WHEN: Wednesday, June 7 to Saturday, June 10, 2023

WHERE: Isabel Bader Centre for the Performing Arts, Queen’s University in Kingston, ON

TICKETS: Tickets: starting from $15.00, including fees - Festival Passes: $100 including fees - Start Up Registration + Pass: $200 including fees - For more details on tickets and FOLDA 2023: www.folda.ca.