culturecapital [2020-]

by Milton Lim and Patrick Blenkarn

culturecapital is a live art project that takes the form of a card game and a living archive. The project is constructed from two sets of data: (1) interviews with artists about their experiences making performance and (2) multiple years worth of municipal, provincial, and federal public funding data on performing arts companies. Using this information, the game strives to create a context in which players can question, understand, and celebrate how value is determined, shifted, and produced within theatre, dance, and live arts.

Adopting the role of stewards, players summon companies, roll a die for government grants in order to realize projects of differing values, and then use these projects to compete for community points. Strategic planning cards are played to change the tide of the competition and whoever has the most communities at the end, wins.

Like any card game, culturecapital works as a low tech, lights-on social game. But the project as a whole consists of informal game nights, sanctioned festival tournaments for the general public and arts communities alike, digital media spectacle finale showdowns, and a robust website with research links and leaderboards. Everyone is invited to play; no prior knowledge of art or games is required and all decks/games are always sold at printing cost.

Through these performances, culturecapital fulfills itself both as a collectable card game (residually promoting basic knowledge about local art companies) and as an alternative context to reflect upon performing arts economies: by participating in the game, arts workers and the general public alike are thrust into a conversation that challenges both the standard critical discourse on artistic values and the non-standard whispers of critique that define our ‘polite’ public discourse.

We hope that the generative nature of the connections between the game’s elements will enable participants to discover new perspectives and conversations that we might not otherwise be able to script ahead of time, offering a genuine window into the complexities of the relationship that artists have with public funding, being socially relevant, and navigating a rapidly changing landscape of ethics, politics, and economics within the arts.

Since 2018, we have created Canadian versions of the game for Vancouver (BC), Edmonton & Calgary (AB), Regina and Saskatoon (Saskatchewan) with local arts group Curtain Razors, Toronto (ON), and Montreal (Quebec); as well as an international version in Catalan for Barcelona (Spain) with local artists Marc Villanueva Mir and Natalia Carminati. Tournaments/presentations and workshops were conducted at festivals and venues in each region. We see games as an under-considered performance context in which many of the codes and rules of traditional performance, including duration, silence, linearity, participation, and variability can be questioned.

Development + Presentations:

We are very thankful to the many wonderful human beings who have contributed their resources, their knowledge, their opinions, and their hopes to this ongoing project.

culturecapital has received development and residency support from Boca del Lupo (Vancouver), Impulse Theatre (Victoria), Azimuth Theatre (Edmonton), SummerWorks (Toronto), and Darling Foundry (Montreal); additional gear support has been generously provided by Electric Company Theatre (Vancouver). culturecapital:online was developed with the support of HowlRound Theatre Commons (Boston), The National Theatre School (Montreal), and SummerWorks (Toronto) as part of the SummerWorks Lab. The multiplayer version of culturecapital was created in collaboration with Marc Villanueva Mir and Natalia Carminati.

Our next phases of culturecapital are dedicated to engaging with and shining a spotlight on arts communities in Atlantic Canada, The Prairies, and The Territories.


For ongoing information, please visit: culturecapital.cards

We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and BC Arts Council.

 
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