Cluster Festival • May 31 - June 9, 2024

Environment Machine Shop is an exhibition of interactive artworks that invites guests to play, learn and interact with water samples collected from several sites along the Red River in Winnipeg. Through a series of water pumps, LEDs, lenses, audio samples and sounds, Environment Machine Shop encourages visitors to reimagine their relationship with the Red River—an important ecosystem that’s often mistreated. Visitors are encouraged to turn knobs, press buttons and interact with all of the sculptures which are Victorian-era inspired science machines or instruments, re-interpreted in a hacker/maker style using Arduinos, copper piping, and other found and reused materials to engage with Red River water samples.

Konjo is an emerging DJ and sound artist that uses genres such as House, electronic, Techno, Dancehall, as a portal to create space for their communities. Konjo places their intentions with blending various genres as a way to create their own worlds, building and rebuilding to transform dancefloors as a site for liberation. Making the dancefloor a space for dreaming and to think beyond what a dancefloor can do, be or look like. As a Black queer femme, and wanting to be able to be in conversation with the 2SQTBIPOC audience that they are playing for. They use critical fabulation as a way to fill in the gaps where the erasure of Blackness when it comes to genres such as house, electronic and techno.

The experimental sound performance titled HYPERFEMME GALACTICA uses the medium of DJing to be more than just a dance party but a site to consider the ways that anything can be transformed into an incubator for dreaming. The performance piece offers a place to think of a utopia and how are we creating our own heaven when it isn’t accessible to us?

This event is made possible with the support of The Forks Corporation and Pride Winnipeg and is a co-presentation with Gorge Festival.

A triple-feature concert with Debashis Sinhas, Jason Tait and Compost that explores the meditative, trance-inducing power of sound. Sinhas’ quadraphonic sound performance, Rückstreuung, uses the principles of subharmonic synthesis to create an immersive sound field for the audience, responding in real time to the architecture and the interplay of frequencies. This improvised performance interacts with the moment to offer a hearing experience that is rooted in traditions of meditation and active listening. Jason Tait will be premiering a new work, a series of structured improvisations for modular and analog synthesizers, sculpting an all enveloping sound bath for listeners to lose themselves in. Compost will be premiering, Decomposed, a multi-movement through-composed work for Fender Rhodes, electric bass, drums, spoken word samples, and projected time-lapse photography. Collective improvisations will be recorded and then decomposed into harmonically simple, polyrhythmic cellular motifs, mimicking the connective roles of mycelium.

This concert is presented in partnership with the West End Cultural Centre.

Electronic artists meanspath and domo11, and dance Zorya Arrow premiere a new transdisciplinary work, Symphony of Self, a four-part structured improvisation for movement, sound and livestream, inviting audiences to explore the echo chambers of “self-identity” in relation to “other”.

Composer and saxophonist Olivia Shortt (TO) joins forces with Winnipeg-based multidisciplinary artist Jaime Black for one night only, presenting new collaborative work, taking audiences on a journey through uncharted sonic realms.

Using the beautifully resonant grand piano as a template, composers and pianists continue to push further, contending with all manners of extensions: processing live and fixed electronics, preparing the strings with any number of foreign materials, and augmenting the sound with additional keyboard instruments. Madeline Hildebrand and Everett Hopfer take audiences on an exploration of these dazzling soundscapes with a program of keyboard repertoire that defies expectation.

Cellist Natanielle Felicitas, is renowned for her cross-genre collaborative in Winnipeg’s music scene and will be presenting a rare solo performance featuring a premiere of new cello and electronics work.

Long-time collaborators and contributors to Cluster, but never at the same time, Sarah Jo Kirsch and Madeline Hildebrand bring a musical offering about feeling way too much in a world of contradictions. Oscillating between the emotional extremes that roil in this masterfully selected program of pieces, Kirsch and Hildebrand presents listeners with a salve for the ache and shines a poetically hopeful light on the absurdity of it all.

This concert is presented in partnership with the West End Cultural Centre

VOCAL QUEERIES

Sarah Jo Kirsch
May 25 & 26, 2024, 10:00am - 3:00pm
VideoPool Media Arts Centre
100 Arthur Street

MOVEMENT + SOUND: Weather Parade Dance Theatre

Saturday, June 8, 2024, 12:30pm
The Forks, Room 201
1 Forks Market Road