Get out and enjoy the arts and performances at the upcoming (s)hiver Winter Arts Festival. The annual event is unique to Dawson City and is slated for February 2 to 4 this year.
Organized by the (s)hiver Arts Society, it’s an arts festival with indoor and outdoor activities. “The highlights this year are the amount of outdoor interactive exhibits and the performances,” said James Boddie, one of the organizers. “Saturday is pretty much going to be a twelve-hour performance with a few interruptions,” he added. All of the artists who are participating are from the Yukon; most are from Dawson and environs. There are about 30 artists. “The number is increasing daily,” Boddie said.
The festival has been running since 2015. Hiver means winter in French, and shivering is part of the cold winter months in the Yukon.
The festival changes in shape and content with each edition and there is a lot of disparate content, so everyone will find something they enjoy, the organizer told What’s Up Yukon. “Everybody gets a bit more light in their diet, and the early twitching of spring squirreliness is suddenly noticeable in the air,” said Boddie, describing the atmosphere of the festival.
Nicole Bauberger will be one of the artists of (s)hiver Festival. She will create an installation of four 14-foot monsters around a fire, joined by four trees, with dresses hand-stitched from the food-plastic waste stream. “I am hoping to make cardboard monsters, with students and other community members,” Bauberger said. She will be at the school, where she will create monsters with students. “The school will parade out with their monsters Friday afternoon and hopefully [to] the public Saturday.”
Another artist will be Cud Eastbound. The musician, designer and digital creator will present Elements at Bay, an interactive sculpture nestled on the frozen expanse of the Yukon River, constructed from found wood. Its intricate structure, riddled with apertures, symbolizes the futility of conventional shelters in shielding us from life’s challenges. “The piece mirrors the struggle in North America where homeownership is an aspiration, yet the prevailing economic
strains make it difficult to navigate the costs of living, mental and physical health etc.
“Elements at Bay invites contemplation on the fragility of our societal expectations and the resilience required to confront the unyielding elements of life,” Eastbound explained.
Artist Nicole Schafenacker is looking forward to being part of the (s)hiver Winter Arts Festival. Her installation and performance piece is called Snowfall: Blue Shadow. The artist explained: “This project explores the liminal space between fall and winter, and the porousness of our bodies with our environments, through performance and layered videos filmed in Tàkádàdhà (Marsh Lake).”
She added, “As we transition from midnight sun to polar night and back again, witnessing the shifts around us can be a means of tending to the simultaneous changes happening in our own bodies.”
The impulse to turn inwards in these darker months can be a deeply generative one that prepares Yukoners to once again receive the light, she explained. Her installation and performance is part of a larger body of work that she has been making and performing, since 2018, called Ecologies of Intimacy.
This installation series is site-specific: each version is built for the location it’s shown in and is about being in relationship to that particular place. There are core elements that come together in each Ecologies of Intimacy installation: video, soundscapes/field recordings, choreography and written or recorded text. The installation often uses large reams of paper; or, in this upcoming performance at (s)hiver, 80 feet of linen. She has performed I’ iterations of Ecologies of Intimacy in Edmonton as part of the Good Women Dance Creative Incubator, with mentorship from interdisciplinary artist Amber Borotsik, as well as in different places in Canada. This past fall she shared the installation at the Theatre in the Bush Festival in Whitehorse.
“I’m excited to continue to build on this project at the (s)hiver Winter Arts Festival,” Schafenacker said. Her performances are scheduled for noon and 2 p.m. at KIAC, in Dawson, on Saturday February 3.
The (s)hiver Winter Arts Festival program and participating artists will be published on shiverartssociety.ca
