StArts Fest for all

Alberta Culture Days are coming up this weekend and in St. Albert, that means three days of art, culture and creative adventures, all courtesy of Starts Fest.

“It's definitely going to be a fun weekend. There's a little bit of something for everybody,” announced Peter Moloney, the festival's committee chair.

Perennial favourites the Story Slam and the hands-on art demonstrations and activities (put on by the St. Albert Place Visual Arts Council) will be returning to the appreciation of local crowds, Moloney hopes that new features like the St. Albert Film Fest will quickly gain traction to become future faves as well.

This year, the committee provided three microgrants to help fund some fun and wonderful new features for this year's StArts Fest.

“What I like about what we do is we try to do different things every year,” he said, adding that he really appreciates seeing and learning about new and different types of art. “I think that's the whole point of Culture Days: to expose you to what you don't know, and give you a chance to try something.”

Those include Nathan Carroll's presentation of a few excerpts from his musical The Modern Prometheus Suite, a composition with choral and text pieces based on the novel Frankenstein.

“It's something very different.”

Samantha Williams-Chapelsky will be conducting her own art piece called #SquareArt. It will include six cubes with different designs on each of the faces.

“People can come along and rearrange the cubes into landscapes. The hope is that they get to express their uniqueness in art and also take a selfie with that and post it,” he explained.

Heidi Carroll will also have two abstract colour studies, large-scale paintings on display in the lobby of St. Albert Place.

Moloney calls himself a “theatre person” so he's looking most forward to an encore staging of the People's Choice Award winner from this year's Fringe Festival.

Days of the Klondike is the Klondike Kate story with a heaping helping of St. Albert talent, including many of the cast members. It was conceptualized by Rita Martin and directed and designed by Maureen Rooney with music and lyrics (for 16 songs in the original score) by Cindy Oxley.

“What's cool about it is that everybody in St. Albert probably knows somebody associated with it. And you get to see it for free! How could you go wrong?”

The cast of 30 in this historically accurate production includes leads Maria Kolasis-Harrigan and Julien Constantin with supporting actors Kaleb Stolee, Meghan Dunlop, Halle Forsythe, Dr. Connie Poon, Julia and Dave Sorenson, and Ian, Kevin and Adam Skogstad. It's the largest show in the production company Musicalmania!'s history.

One scarf to rule them all

One unique – and extended – project that is being unveiled is an artistic garment that will help to prepare the Art Gallery of St. Albert for the coming winter.

The Scarf for St. Albert has been in the works for a month now and has received contributions from numerous members and organizations of the community, including the Creative Practices Institute, River Ridge Seniors Community, Valerie Baber and students from Paul Kane High School.

Amanda McKenzie, the gallery's community programs co-ordinator, gave a sense of the dimensions of the immense and majestic muffler.

“Right now, I've sewn together about 37 feet. We probably have enough for about 60 feet,” she said. “It's getting pretty long.”

It's going to get longer too. This weekend's celebration will see the scarf put up on the Banque d'Hochelaga building with an open invitation to people to make more fibre art pieces to extend it even further.

At the behest of a young humanitarian from the community, the gallery will also be collecting clothing for local homeless people and donations for the St. Albert Food Bank as well. The scarf will stay up as a reminder for at least the next few weeks to help solicit more donations to the two drives.

“We'll keep that up as a reminder. We're thinking, for next year, we'll continue this project and reach out to more people. Next year, I'm hoping throughout the year to approach more people, more artists and we can keep it growing. Maybe it can go further. I think it would be really great if we could get it to stretch across more of the city.”

VASA art authentic and astounding

The Visual Arts Studio Association is unveiling a new exhibit to coincide with StArts Fest and it comes out of one of its unique new programs, one that started as a collaborative effort with the Nina Haggerty Centre in Edmonton.

Peg McPherson, the instructor/guide of the sessions, explained that the class for people with developmental disabilities began out of the vision of Pat Wagensveld who saw some excellent programming space at the Hemingway Centre (that needed a bit of renovation firstly) and an audience of enthusiastic art students that previously wasn't being served in this city.

Paul Freeman, the Nina's artistic director, originally conducted the classes with McPherson soon taking over on her own.

“I give them ideas about different techniques, different subjects and we talk about different things … and then I let them go,” she said of the group of 10 students. “Sometimes they go in a totally different direction, they may have ideas about what they want or if something just comes to them, and they just do it.”

“Everything is so full of life and bright. There isn't a really dull one in the whole group. It's kind of exciting!

The class is held twice weekly, on Tuesdays from 3:30 to 5 p.m. and from 6:30 to 8 p.m.

This exhibit will run throughout October as well.