Fluid Festival turns 20 this October, and its vision is clear: to create a hub for Alberta’s dance community with artists from other regions and disciplines. The festival is produced by Springboard Performance, a Calgary-based arts organization founded by Nicole Mion.
Beyond Fluid Fest, Springboard runs programs year-round from residencies and workshops to founding and hosting performances at ‘containR’, a pop-up art park in Inglewood and Crescent Heights. Fluid remains its centrepiece: three weekends of global touring work paired with Calgary’s own creatives.
As Mion explained, the festival features local, national, and international artists. “It was a way of clustering energy and being in conversation with the dance community,” she shares. That clustering shows up in how audiences experience the festival, filling venues across the city, including The Grand Theatre, Decidedly Jazz Danceworks, Contemporary Calgary, and the Big Secret Theatre. “These are all venues that people are pretty familiar with if you’re in the theatre scene, and if you’re not, it’s a nice way to test the waters and see how your curiosity can take you into the world of contemporary performance,” she said.
Fluid Fest merges classical techniques with improvised scores, blending comedy with feminist critique inside theatres. It harnesses these intersections to make waves across disciplines. It also responds to Alberta’s realities: venues are scarce, travel is long, and budgets are tight.
If the festival is the how, its guiding why is wonder. Marketing lead Deanna Witwer elaborates, “In this culture, environment, and time, it’s so important to come together and feel something. Live art can do that. And wonder is a way to frame many experiences and feelings in a positive and generative way.”
Catch the festival from October 17 to November 2. For a full schedule, visit springboardperformance.com
Ballet Edmonton Flows into Calgary
Ballet Edmonton will take the Calgary main stage for the first time with Soft Currents, a collaborative project that brings Edmonton and Calgary dancers together under award-winning choreographer Vanessa Goodman. For Kirsten Wicklund, Artistic Director of Ballet Edmonton, it’s a chance to cross-pollinate. “It’s really more of a collaborative approach, more of an improvised score that the dance groups build together,” she says. “It’s important to us to have a beautiful conversation between our dance groups.”
Within that web, choreographers and collectives like Ballet Edmonton are strengthening Alberta-to-Alberta ties. Mion celebrates their success, sharing, “I’m proud of what [Ballet Edmonton] have been able to do in so few years. They’re really putting Alberta on the map for contemporary ballet.”
View this post on Instagram
For many Calgarians, Ballet Edmonton’s appearance will be their first encounter with a company that embodies reinvention. Wicklund describes it this way: “Ballet Edmonton is a creation-based contemporary ballet company. It is an ensemble of people who dance in a variety of styles, but are classically trained. We invite choreographers into our space who are primarily invested in innovating through dance. We host them for their creative process, but ask that the dancers devote themselves to whatever working approach they want to grow.”
Wicklund believes that contemporary dance lowers barriers for newcomers because of the humanity it reflects. “What we’re presenting is an immediate response to what’s happening in the world right now. It aims to be something that draws you into a dialogue. Question what [and] why. We’re really dealing with moving bodies and the relationships between them.”
Jocelyn Mah is Bloody Brilliant
“Humanity” is exactly what choreographer Jocelyn Mah leans into with Right Hand Woman, a part of Fluid’s comedy-forward Why So Serious program. Mah has a long-standing relationship with the festival, having served as a curator of their cabaret programming and in other ensemble works. Her new piece was sparked by a specific fear while curating Fluid Fest’s Halloween cabaret last year. “I had this imagery of performing a very serious dance solo, and your tampon starts falling out or the string starts hanging out on stage while you’re dancing. What do you do?”
The result is a solo dance where she reveals her inner monologue to the audience through Tony Tamponi, a giant bloody tampon puppet she wears during the performance. Mah is clear about the politics under the punchlines. “Bodies can menstruate, and it’s deemed to be disgusting or something to be ashamed about. I want to break down those walls. It’s okay to talk about your experiences, your body, and celebrate being here.”
Fluid Fest is more than just a hub; it’s an active practice of putting people, ideas, and spaces into motion. In October, Fluid Fest invites Calgarians to test that practice for themselves. Follow your curiosity and let wonder do its connective work along the way.
