FOLDA — Kingston Theatre Alliance

The cardinal rules of theatre: sit still, don’t chitchat, and make sure your phone is on silent and put away. Adrienne Wong chooses to challenge these conventions, exploring our relationships with our devices through audience participation. 

The 2024 Festival of Live Digital Art (FOLDA), produced by SpiderWebShowPerformance, took place from June 13-15. In this section (catch Part One here!), I take a deep dive into SmartSmart, an interactive performance by Adrienne Wong that was staged at the Isabel Bader Centre for the Performing Arts. In my previous review of FOLDA 2024, I mentioned that the festival promotes innovation, creativity, and reflection, and SmartSmart very much embodies these values.

Where can you catch a groovy concert, talk to a multimedia AI interface, and take in a 360-degree film in a dome, all in one weekend? FOLDA, of course!  The Festival of Live Digital Art (FOLDA), produced by SpiderWebShowPerformance, promotes live digital art with the hopes of empowering communities, creating connections, and inspiring critique. The 2024 festival took place from June 13-15, and I was fortunate to have the opportunity […]

Kingston’s annual Festival of Live Digital Arts (FOLDA) is once again on the horizon (and no, that is not a pun directed at HORIZON 360°—a film in this year’s lineup). As a hectic week is underway for the team and busy schedules abound in summer months, I conducted an eight-question email interview with Co-Curator Michael Wheeler about an intensive run alongside FOLDA in partnership with Ingenuity Labs: The StartUp. This […]

The theatre is dark. A single video game controller sits under a spotlight in front of a projector screen. With no rules, and in no established order, audience members take turns leaving their seats and approaching the stage. One at a time, these brave players take control of asses.masses. Over several hours, a story of revolution, carnage, reincarnation, and collective care unfolds.  Presented by the Festival of Live Digital Arts […]

How would you feel if someone invaded your home—a place meant for comfort and security? Home is a solo performance starring Beau Dixon, performed at the Isabel Bader Centre and was a part of the Festival of Live Digital Art (FOLDA). In Home, Beau Dixon recalls his personal experience of a home invasion and how it changed him. He describes and recreates important moments of his life, but we are […]

Imagine being in Hiroshima when the atomic bomb dropped. Now imagine having no way to hear it. Scored in Silence is an excellent solo show, starring Deaf performer, Chisato Minamimura, and was performed as part of the Festival of Live Digital Art (FOLDA) at the Isabel Bader Centre. The performance recounts World War II and the effects of the atomic bomb on Japan, but more specifically how it affected the […]

Ways of Being was an interactive performance for two different groups of audience, in two different cities simultaneously. Returning to Kingston as a part of FOLDA 2022, the work transformed me into both the performer and audience, spectator and entertainer. And as someone interested in the human condition, Ways of Being gave me the space to explore and understand, “How do we become the people we are at any given moment? […]

Told through the literal lens of digital technology such as phones and computers, the internet and social media play a critical role in communication and evidence.

The performance of You Should Have Stayed Home, directed by Michael Wheeler, was a component of the Festival of Live Digital Art (FoLDA) and as a work it explores the tensions and political possibilities inherent in virtual reality.

I was once told that a contract is meant to be a conversation, and hopefully, a dialogue. Yet it is rarely treated as such.  In reality, a contract often brings up feelings of fear. Perhaps these anxieties regarding contracts come from a worry that one may misunderstand the legal jargon, or maybe it comes from an understanding of a history of manipulation and deception. Contracts as we know it, and […]

The Maydee Box, created by Murdoc Schon and Rebecca Cuddy, was presented at this year’s Festival of Live and Digital Art in the Isabel Bader Center’s Art and Media lab. The work is an audio, visual, and tactile piece in the real world, but amplified by augmented reality. Advancing the physical world through a smart device, Schon and Cuddy have used this technology to present the actual performance of the […]

Fn (dir. Alex Bulmer and Tristan Whiston) reflects on how Ting comes to terms with her and her mother’s respective urgency to be understood on their own terms, in conversation with the lives and works of composers John Cage and Beethoven.