Skeleton Park Arts Festival — Kingston Theatre Alliance

The rain never bothered us anyway! At least not at this year’s SPAF. Skeleton Park Arts Festival (SPAF), a grassroots, multidisciplinary art festival, takes place every summer over the solstice weekend in McBurney—more commonly known as Skeleton—Park. With a humble beginning over twenty years ago as a neighbourhood solstice picnic, this free, family-oriented festival has become a beloved and highly-anticipated event in the community. This year’s celebration fell over the […]

Summer solstice is just around the corner, and the sun has been bragging about it all week long. When it’s unbearably hot out, Skeleton Park (officially McBurney Park) is one of my favourite places to seek refuge—the trees offer generous shade, and there’s usually a light breeze to cut through the humidity that clings to the lakeside city air.  It’s no coincidence that, on the longest days of the year, […]

An exceptional union of community and arts is a phrase I would use to describe Skeleton Park Arts Festival (SPAF). The Festival took place in Kingston from Wednesday June 21st to Sunday June 25th with the bulk of the festival happening on Saturday, June 24 and Sunday, June 25 in Skeleton Park (shocking). I was unfortunately unable to attend the Wednesday to Friday festivities but I did attend on Saturday […]

Drawing inspiration from artists such as Jean-Michel Basquiat and situations of action painting, Corbett’s gestural method was engaging to watch and experience as an audience member. By loosening the boundaries that often exist between mediums in art, the performance invited the audience to think of the crossovers that can happen when mediums collide.

“If I hear another friggin’ theatre thing where someone tells me that we’re all family, I will just run, turn the other way and run. The interesting thing: I was not met with that kind of language with SPAF, but I was definitely met with the actual feeling of being a part of the family. The amount of people that lived around the park that actually offered me their actual bed to rest in during the festival, or their bathroom to use, or food to make like—I have never been a part of an arts event, a theatre event, that extended that kind of awareness of neighborhood.”