Ice Box at home

Winter festival changes format

Bringing people together in the depth of winter has been the mandate of the Ice Box Festival for the past couple of years. It has been a way to combat the isolation many people feel as frigid February temperatures bite and the prospect of spring seems a long way off. It was a time to buoy the spirit with an event that featured colour and creativity, music and dance, a time to warm the body with hot drinks around a bonfire, and a time to nourish the soul with laughter and companionship. This year, though, the isolation is more than that imposed by the season, and the collective known as the Department of Illumination, which organizes the Ice Box Festival, has come up with a way to keep the spirit of the festival burning. “We’ve tried to capture the feeling of our festival by employing a bunch of artists to create all of these different activities that are going into a box, which people can order, and will be able to pick up at the beginning of our physically distanced athome festival,” says artistic director Krista Dalby. “I can’t tell you much, because it’s meant to be a surprise, but I can say it’s creative activities that’s appropriate for all ages.” It is hoped that the festival will begin on February 20 and run until February 28, but that depends on whether the provincially mandated lockdown has ended by that time.

Artistic director Krista Dalby and members of the Department of Illumination collective are keeping the spirit of Ice Box alive by providing an at-home activity kit in a box.

The collective had actually decided to cancel Ice Box for this year, but they were notified that they had been given a federal grant from the Department of Canadian Heritage, which they had applied for many months earlier. “I asked the funder if we would be able to do an at-home version, and they were very happy to have us do anything,” says Dalby. “I went back to all of the artists who we were meant to be working with and said ‘Hey, would you be interested in contributing to this new format?’ and everybody was very keen to have something to work on.” The collective is making up 100 boxes for distribution at a cost of $35 each. “All of the artists are busy working on their things in their studios at home, and we chose the number 100 because it’s what each artist could produce in a one-month timeframe. I wanted it to be inexpensive. Part of our mandate is to be as accessible as possible, so we priced them as low as we possibly could,” says Dalby. She adds that the actual value of the items in each box is likely well over $100. The idea behind the at-home festival is that participants will visit the Department of Illumination’s website for online programming or workshops that will make use of the content of the boxes. Because there are a limited number of boxes available, there will also be some online workshops that anyone can participate in. “One of the things I’m really excited about is that we’ll work with Arwyn Carpenter again, who is our dancer in previous years. She is going to be having daily Zoom dance parties at different times of the day so people can participate. What we’re hoping is going to happen is at the end of Ice Box, which we’re running as our normal nine-day festival, on the last day we were hoping to do some physically distant flash dance mobs outside various long-term care facilities, coordinating with the homes so they can play the music inside and we’ll be outside dancing, and [residents] can look out their windows,” adds Dalby.

One of the other events that will be part of Ice Box is an outdoor art show at Armoury Square featuring work that was created as part of the Art in Isolation project. Community members were encouraged to submit artwork during a monthlong period in the spring of 2020 under four different prompts. There were over 300 submissions. “We started the Art in Isolation project because a lot of our artists were saying, ‘We have all of this time and we’re not feeling creative and don’t know what to do,’ so we thought about providing some parameters and prompts and a deadline. And it does help having some of these exterior factors to motivate you and channel your creative energy into something specific. That was really successful in inviting people to participate. We’ve curated almost 100 artworks and those will be appearing in a catalogue, which we’re making up, and we’re going to have an outdoor exhibit. The show features 66 artists, so it’s a really beautiful show, and I’m excited,” says Dalby. The launch date is scheduled for February 20, but may be changed depending on whether the lockdown is extended. Dalby says that it was important for her and the collective to keep the Ice Box festival in some form. “We really feel like we’re in a service position to our community, and that we have a lot to offer people in these times. This is the whole reason we created Ice Box in the first place. Our whole raison d’être for this company is bringing people together. We thought that we were isolated before the pandemic during winters in the County, so obviously this year is a whole other level of isolation. I really feel we have a role to play in people’s well-being and mental health, so we’re trying to do that as much as we can.” Please visit deptofillumination.org for more information about the Ice Box festival.