Mutton Busting – Press Release

Mutton Busting, produced by Bubonic Tourist, is now in it’s fifth year! The festival runs from January 3rd to 14th, 2006, featuring performance and visual arts and is a secondary event to the wildly successful One Yellow Rabbit’s High Performance Theatre.

Mutton Busting is one of few performance and visual art festivals for professional emerging and innovative artists in Western Canada. Its impact on the Calgary community is immeasurable. The festival brings together an entire generation of artists and provides a forum where ideas, cultures, and aesthetics can be shared and communicated. Through this event, Bubonic Tourist strives to foster the creation of collaborative relationships among local, national, and international artists.

With festival highlights such as Cowgirl Opera’s prairie gothic tale, The Three Sisters, American Indie Rocker Calvin Johnson, and four visual artists from Canada and the United States, this year’s Mutton Busting festival will surely challenge the artistic boundaries of innovative art.

As part of its fifth annual Mutton Busting Performance and Visual Art Festival, Bubonic Tourist is excited to present an engaging and audacious series of queer performance, music, video, animation and visual art entitled Department of Soft Architecture (DOSA).

This group embodies work that directly confronts the socio-political climate regarding queer culture and its faint representation in Alberta. By showcasing queer artists from a multitude of disciplines to an emerging generation of appreciators, Bubonic Tourist hopes to create an opportunity for an artistic and critical discourse for the queer and queer friendly community.

DOSA is a bold and artistically innovative approach to engaging Calgary’s professional emerging artists and the emerging/established municipal community by exploring the notions of queer, gender and sexual identity. The series will include performance and visual art by artists from New York, Montreal, Toronto, Kamloops, Edmonton, and Calgary.

The performances will feature works from the darlings of the Montreal cult cabaret scene, 2Boys.tv, prostitute/porn star turned performance artist/sexologist, Annie Sprinkle, Calgary’s indie-pop artists, Woodpigeon, and PhD David Bateman’s text-based performance art titled Lotus Blossom Special. Also included in the festival are Benny Ramsay’s internationally shown Queer Projections Cabaret, Program A and Program B, as well as the international launch of the 4th Gaylord Phoenix Comic by New York artist Edie Fake.

By showcasing queer artists from a multitude of disciplines to an emerging generation of artists and appreciators, Bubonic Tourist hopes to create an opportunity for an artistic and critical discourse among the queer community, and in result, aid the development of Alberta’s culture.

The two-week festival will present performances at The Big Secret Theatre, Old Mac Hall Ballroom, and MOTEL, Bubonic Tourist’s and One Yellow Rabbit’s new EPCOR CENTRE venue. For details on individual shows, look for the Mutton Busting full festival guide or visit www.bubonictourist.ca.

Bubonic Tourist presents
“Mutton Busting”
Tickets: (403) 294-7484
www.bubonictourist.ca