Choose Your Own Adventure
Les Escales Improbables Offers Interactive Art
Les Escales Improbables de Montréal, an international multidisciplinary arts festival, is celebrating its eighth year this week, bringing together 70 artists to make magic in the city—wild and frenzied, grasping at these last remaining weeks of summer weather.
Les Escales Improbables awkwardly translates into ‘Improbable Stop-overs,’ though “it is very poetic in French,” promised the lanky and bright-eyed artistic co-ordinator Romain Varenne.
Unlike their contemporaries, Les Escales Improbables won’t be handing out a schedule of events. Instead, it is strategically orchestrated to encourage a curious audience to travel from one piece to the next fluidly, making unplanned and spontaneous “stop-overs.”
The festival, in this way, invites exposure to art forms that may have otherwise gone unexplored by the audience. One could begin at a collective live painting project, skip over to witness a floating dress, just to move to a giant mechanical insect sculpture, ending up leading them to a musical parade.
The festival hopes “to reach every community in Montreal, bringing all art fields to everyone,” said Varenne. “We can’t be specific about the audience we are looking to attract because we want to touch the maximum variety.”
The venues, to be found mostly around the Quays of the Old Port, are often placed in unconventional or, well, improbable locations.
“Last year, for example, we had a piece at Hangar 16 in a space which is now just a parking lot,” said Varenne.
By placing the festival in these kinds of environments,Varenne explained, Les Escales Improbables “help citizens feel they own their space” and “re-discover the city with artistic performances” as they are invited into this expansive and fantastical artscape.
With all daytime events free and reasonably inexpensive events at night, the festival is highly accessible. This year Les Escales has crept further north to the Quartier Latin, joining forces for two performances with the new and multidisciplinary OUMF festival.
One piece in the fest by the Ktha Compagnie, hailing from France, is mysteriously described as involving a container, two actors, 30 spectators, a video projector and 100 dolls.
Present in the city year after year, the festival continues to change and evolve naturally.
“We don’t have a quota,” said Varenne. “We don’t decide beforehand that we will have this many theatre pieces or this many musical pieces; it depends on the propositions of the artists, and it is through their propositions that the festival designs itself.”
Les Escales Improbables encourages collaboration between artists as well. This year, about half of artists in the program are local, the others welcomed from France, Switzerland, New Zealand and the US. Many of the artists press past disciplinary separations in their own right: dancing, mixing, strumming, and playing with the boundaries and borders of artistic form.
Something to be especially excited about is no doubt “Lies My Gramma Told Me: World Beat Mash Up,” held the night of Sept. 7. This is a collaborative performance of local “hip-hop klezmer” music-and-magic-maker Socalled and the much-worshipped clarinetist David Krakauer from New York.
Enthusiastically explaining the significance of this show, Varenne noted “the creativity of Socalled and the virtuosity of Krakauer,” and the thrill of this unique opportunity to have the two together.
Many will also be intrigued by the rhythms of the “Sieste Musicale” at the Old Port, where musicians will change sets every half hour for an all-afternoon kick-back.
This is something “people come back for”—to stretch out on the grass or cushions and have the chance to “really take time to enjoy and discover musicians.”
The Daytime Escales run Sept. 9, 10 and 11 in the Quays of the Old Port of Montreal (at Jardin Eau Canada in front of the Montreal Science Centre) from 2 to 6:30 p.m. Events are free.
Night Escales are Sept. 7 and Sept. 8 at the Fonderie Darling (745 Ottawa St.). Tickets are $16 presale or $20at the door. Doors open at 7:30 p.m
This article originally appeared in Volume 32, Issue 02, published September 6, 2011.
