A Note to Our Audience: As you watch a performance, take a workshop, or attend an exhibition, become like the “shapeshifter” you’ll find popping up across this year’s visuals. The shapeshifter is constantly negotiating its positionality, between absorbing the world around it and affecting it. Sometimes assertive, sometimes laid-back, always engaged, and not necessarily getting it quite right every time.
Working at a festival is exhausting. It’s relentless, exacting, and all-consuming. And for the past (almost) 10 years of working at Orient Productions, it’s been the thing that I wait for every year.
D-CAF (Downtown Contemporary Arts Festival), like most festivals, is a strange world to be a part of. One that always appears to magically come together, when oftentimes it feels like it’s impossible to get everything done in time. We’re always short on time, short on money, short on staff… But somehow, all the pieces fall into place in the end.
But it isn’t a mystical force of magic that makes things work. It’s the grit, determination, passion, and labor of individuals, team members, artists, partners, and funders—a constellation of people drawn into this enigmatic world, with the belief that what we do matters.
Leading up to this year’s edition, we’ve been thinking about all the labor and love that we pour into the festival and questioning how we work. How sustainable is it to always be pulling things off at the last minute? What does it mean for our roles to constantly be diverging? What does accountability look like? How beneficial is our programming to our audience? How can we care for our artists? What is our responsibility to our partners? And most importantly, what does it all ultimately mean and what can cultural work look like when we’re witnessing genocide, climate catastrophes, and billionaires engulfing the world order?
We don’t have clear answers or solutions yet, but what I keep coming back to is the sense of belonging D-CAF has cultivated for me since joining the team in 2017. The moment we receive the festival’s brochure fresh from the printer, holding the culmination of our collective work between its pages; the unmatched feeling of leaving a theatre invigorated by a brilliant performance; hearing from a young artist that taking part in D-CAF was life-changing for them.
These little intangible moments are the anchor that grounds us and keeps us going in the midst of it all.
Join Us for the 14th Edition of D-CAF
For the 14th edition of D-CAF, we invite you to explore the program with curiosity and critique, and to help us shape what belonging can look like in practice.
