Essential & Fluid for 2019 

There is something beautiful about a sunset in the midst of a forest fire. The orange glow is beautiful… but you know the conditions are not good. You hope to hell the fire will subside as you take in the glimmers of the glowing setting sun.

With this thought in mind, we thank you for joining us at the 14th annual Fluid Festival in Calgary, Canada. This year was unique with art and politics simultaneously at the forefront. We started the festival with the Canadian national election, where the turbulence of our times were held front and centre, and we completed the festival with the announcement of a provincial budget under a new conservative government. Art and politics have always been bedfellows, and we look forward to inspiring folks to be aware of the current conditions and support the value of art and performance for our community in these times.

The Fluid Festival burned bright with buoyant and boisterous performances, artist talks, and gatherings—a vibrant creative community in connection, joyously held up in the midst of the heat of shifting economic and ideological conditions. Thank you to the outstanding artists featured, and those holding space for these dynamic creative voices.  

We can attest that these are turbulent times, and assert the importance of art and live performance in the cultural fabric of our community. We are committed to continuing to hold space at the eye of this storm. We are grateful for your support, holding dear a creative and liminal place, that energizes diverse performance, actions, perspectives and opinions. We thank you for joining us in this vision. 

This is dance and live performance. It troubles. It stirs. It confirms. 
It makes the real more real. 
And dreams in possibilities.
It connects us all. 

For 2019 we experienced 50 Calgarians come together in a performance protest awash in colour and potential; we sang sad Madonna songs while thinking about appropriation and the power of transformation; we watched what happens as space and resources are diminished, the compression of the raw and refined, and the impact on the human condition. We dove into a rave-party of shiny experiences; we thought about the extended body, and watched a heroic balancing act made possible through gentle communication; we made space for talking truths; we embraced the simple and the dramatic, and our state of constant becoming. We were suspended in crip time and invited to embrace our genius; we took a joyous road trip into the unknown; through the eyes of a child we were reminded of how the spirit is held and captured; we melted into a magical oblivion; we created cabaret platforms for distinct emerging voices; we experienced a stripped down rawness of female pain in sculpted space and time. We unearthed personal story and intimacy in public space, moved in meditated patterns, deconstructed performance forms and expectations, and we experienced life on a treadmill within a constantly-revealing world of embraced opportunity, wrapped up in the desire to keep up and maintain, contend with exhaustion, and embrace ever moving forward. For 2019 we also included two creative exchange labs during the festival, designed to promote artistic exchange, instigate peer to peer dialogue, and foster the development of new works with a focus on serving artists working at the intersection of different forms. Cycling with Animals brought artists together from Calgary and the UK, and This is Actively Built brought queer artists together from Montreal and Alberta.

For everyone who joined us at the Fluid Festival, the artists, audiences, production team, partners, donors, sponsors, funders:

• You are essential

• Art in community is essential.

• Live art experiences are not luxuries.

• Linking our city, our country and international ideas and connections is more important now than ever.

Springboard and the Fluid Festival champion artists working to push boundaries and serve as a space for dialogue and exchange that fosters curiosity and connection. They are an open invitation to an immersive forum of new forms and new experiences, committed to working hard to create and present work that is thought provoking, bold, hopeful and part of a global art making conversation. They are an effective way to invest in the local economy and simultaneously link local, national and international ideas. 

Top 11 reasons art is essential to the human spirit:

1. Art makes you think. I think about what the artist was trying to say. I think about how they did that. I think about why I like some things and not others. Even art I don't like makes me think about why.

2. Performance takes you places. Through performance I am offered a glimmer into life in another place and experienced through another body.

3. Art makes you feel something. I have felt so many things while experiencing performance—surprise, longing, awe, empathy, anger, disgust, desire, connection. 

4. Performance makes you look. There are always multiple layers to experiencing and understanding. There is the first splash of presence, but then you really look at the scenario and wonder... everything from "what were they thinking?" to "who are they?" and "why does this stir me?"

5. Art makes you laugh. Well, not all the time, but sometimes.

6. Performance makes you realize people are fundamentally the same around the world and throughout time. All people from all cultures and identities have a desire to capture experience—to remember, share and reflect on these experiences.

7. Art lasts longer than most things. Long after we are gone, ideas, story, image, object and experience remain, so people might remember or confront an experience and feel a connection to us, to the group, and to our times now. 

8. Performance feels so good to make and witness. 

9. You don't need language to understand it. Sure, it's good to understand context and history, but sometimes it's just good to be present and experience. 

10. Art reveals things that words just can't say. How the body is supported and spirit carried, how a person might have felt in a specific experience, what heartache looks like, what desire looks like, what love looks like, what the world looked like and what it could be.

11. The function of performance is the power to shift, transform and redeem.  It gives people the words and ideas to know their own experience. Performance is a tool for questioning and knowing who we are and what we want. Because self-knowledge is the most difficult of the arts of living, because understanding ourselves is a prerequisite for understanding anybody else, and because we can hardly fathom the reality of another without first plumbing our own depths, art is what makes us not only human but humane.

Embrace art and performance as essential.
Thanks for joining in the 2019 Fluid Festival 

Nicole