Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity Announces In-Situ Leighton Residencies

Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity continues to support artists using digital and remote opportunities during the COVID-19 pandemic. To this purpose, Banff Centre is announcing a new, one-time In-Situ Leighton Residency program, allowing artists to advance projects that cannot currently take place on the Banff campus due to COVID-19 restrictions.

The In-Situ Leighton Residency program will support eight artists through five projects representing a mix of artistic disciplines. Each project will be supported with $10,000 to advance a project that was previously scheduled to occur at Banff Centre this season. A selection committee made up of Banff Centre program directors reviewed 70 suspended Leighton Residencies from April 2020 to March 2021 and worked with the eventual recipients to refine their workplans for activities to move forward in their home communities.

The five projects selected to receive an In-Situ Leighton Residency are: Leela Gilday & Jay Gilday, Yellowknife, NWT
(Music, Singer-Songwriter, Indigenous Arts)
Leela Gilday will delve deeper into exploring traditional Dene drum songs, transcribing vocal lines, and using rhythms to inspire experimentation and creation of contemporary arrangements with traditional songs and ancestral songs and sounds. She will do this work, in part, with her brother Jay Gilday to develop a show comprised of individual and collective works incorporating Dene and familial stories.

Gabriel Martinez, Philadelphia, USA
(Visual Arts)
Gabriel's work has been greatly motivated by the themes of loss, celebration, memorial, and cultural identity; the subject of AIDS and Queer history being embedded into his interdisciplinary works since the onset of his career. Gabriel will further develop a process of sanding denim over the surface of hand traced and carved linoleum panels sourcing inspirational research from LGBTQ+ history researched at the John J. Wilcox Archives and the Stonewall Museum and Archive.

Stuart Ross, Cobourg, ON
(Literary Arts)
Stuart will continue work on a collection of 100 two-page short stories called The Wrong Word. With a history of writing short stories and prose poems, Stuart will focus exclusively on short stories, exploring emerging themes and echoes, such as climate change, and the crisis which may be the impending end-of-times for the human species.

Teiya Kasahara & Sarah Pelzer, Toronto, ON/Vancouver, BC
(Opera)
Opera artists Teiya Kasahara (they/them) and Sarah Pelzer (she/her) wish to create a methodology for collaborative opera creation. They will explore tools, structures, and vocabulary to be used for a set of experiments and workshops in the greater artistic community.

Victoria Hunt & Moe Clark, Treaty 7/Montreal, QC
(Dance, Music, Indigenous Arts)
Having met at a Banff Centre program in 2019, Victoria and Moe's collaboration through Victoria's process as a Maori/mixed descent dance/performance artist, and Moe's process as a Métis/mixed descent sound/performance artist, was unearthed. Connecting deeply to the call of ancestral lineages while acknowledging our place as contemporary queer artists creating on occupied territories, we began a collaboration. Their work will include dialogue with knowledge keepers and elders from their respective territories, community, and collaborators; supporting the continuum of community exchange through virtual circles; and carry out performance research with respective artistic collaborators.

"Through the COVID pandemic, Banff Centre has been able to shift arts and leadership educational and training opportunities to an online format. It is thrilling to offer an In-Situ Leighton Residency which supports the creation of artistic work across disciplines," Janice Price, President and CEO, Banff Centre

"In offering the In-Situ Leighton Residencies to support these five projects over the next three months, Banff Centre has received enthusiastic support from artists. We are excited to see what this substitution for time and space on-campus will yield by way of creative work," Howard Jang, Vice President Arts and Leadership, Banff Centre

"The Leighton Residencies for artists are central to the ethos of Banff Centre and its commitment to supporting creative works. Through the COVID-19 pandemic, we continue to seek ways to fulfill this commitment. The In-Situ Residency program complements our online learning programs and digital events until we can again gather on campus - and possibly beyond," Nathan Medd, Managing Director, Performing Arts and Leighton Residency Program

In other related news, when Banff Centre again welcomes artists for Leighton Residencies, they will find refreshed and refined workspaces. Using some of the dedicated Leighton Residency operational budget, Banff Centre took this period of quiet on campus to refit the studios with new furniture, digital tools, storage, and lighting.

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