Marc Glassman wants to turn the city into one big salon and he’s using his Pages UnBound Festival to do it.
This year’s instalment, running May 7 to 10, continues the strategy of blurring the boundaries of genre by bringing together cultural creators from a variety of disciplines to discover what they have in common.
Filmmaker, author and installation artist Guy Maddin, and Robert Enright of Border Crossings, start the conversation in Dreams and Narratives with their take on unique narrative strategies, early cinema, surrealism and decadent literature, with clips from Guy’s newest film Forbidden Room.
On Friday, May 8, writer-directors Paul Almond, Martyn Burke, Ann Shin and NOW magazine’s Susan G. Cole continue the conversation with Storytellers: Literature and Film and their distinctive creative processes and transformative philosophies. This will be followed by visual, oral and audio presentations from a group of talented – and highly unique – female authors on the internal and external influences that have shaped the pages of their work, featuring Suzanne Alyssa Andrew, Zoe Cormier, Sarah Henstra, Heather O’Neill and host Zoe Di Novi in What Women Write.
Saturday, May 9 brings superb photographers Geoffrey James, Vincenzo Pietropaolo and Lana Šlezić on to the same stage in The Virtual Coffee Table: Photobooks in the Digital Age with visual and oral techniques showcasing their work, and the future direction of the photobook.
To finish off the evening, the audience will experience a late-night, vaudeville-esque session exploring a wide swath of art forms – performing, culinary and musical arts, dance, improvisation and the science of ecology – and discover connections between and within the “wild” and the cultured at The Cabaret of Wild Culture. Featuring Elizabeth Bettencourt, Tony Calzetta, Zoe Cormier, Alec Dempster, David Ferry, Gemma Files, Marc Glassman, Bob Nasmith, Cathy Petch, Leon Rooke, Whitney Smith and the Society for the Preservation of Wild Culture.
The Sunday, May 10 event features John Lorinc, Michael McClelland, Vincenzo Pietropaolo, Ellen Scheinberg and host Gerry Flahive together in The Ward: Slums to Skyscrapers with their insights on this fabled Toronto neighbourhood, why it ceased to be and its meaning today.
More info here. Win an all access festival pass here.
susanc@nowtoronto.com | @susangcole
