Press Release: Celestial City Art and Culture Festival – The New Gaiety September 15 – 18, 2010
This year marks the first annual Celestial City Art and Culture Festival held at Gallery Connexion, Fredericton’s artist-run centre. Content of the festival, coinciding with the Harvest Jazz & Blues Festival, touches on the genres of punk, hardcore, and D.I.Y. culture.
Harvest Jazz & Blues has been around for twenty years. It has earned the right to an alternative festival. Most major music festivals in North America – The ECMAs, CMJ, Pop Montreal, NxNE, The Juno Awards, and countless others – coincide with a series of smaller events featuring lesser-known performers. “No Cases,” as they’re usually called, aren’t official festival events, but are organized independently in alternative spaces and are intended to take advantage of the atmosphere cultivated by the mainstream festival on whose coattails they ride. That atmosphere – one of getting people out of their houses to share ideas and take in some live, relevant music – is one Gallery Connexion wishes to welcome.
The title of the festival came from Mary Green and Scott Kitchen, two members of Gallery Connexion’s programming committee. They were interested in looking into Fredericton’s history to find a local artist, writer, or rabble-rouser to name the alternative festival after. Green and Kitchen did a bit of research at the Harriet Irving Library and discovered “The Celestial City,” a promotional campaign organized by a group of local business owners in 1897. It included the Chestnut family of the Chestnut Canoe Company, which used to be housed in Connexion’s new location at 440 York St. The group of businessmen produced a booklet dubbing Fredericton “The Celestial City” and distributed 10,000 copies in Upper Canada and the north-eastern U.S.
The programming committee also wanted to somehow incorporate the image and work of Frank Sherman, a local poet of the same era. He was part of the poetry movement for which Bliss Carman is most often remembered, but Sherman seems to have been largely forgotten. This is why he appears at the centre of our promotional posters.
“The New Gaiety” was the name of a movie theatre in downtown Fredericton. The programming committee thought the name was goofy, old-time-y, and oddly appropriate for this type of festival and used it as the tagline.
All events will take place at Gallery Connexion, at 440 York St. in the Chestnut Complex. See below for the schedule.
Wednesday, Sept. 15 — Film screening: No Fun City, 8 p.m., $5
Thursday, Sept. 16 — Hamburger Tapes cassette release party, featuring Adam Mowery and the Giants of Industry (Saint John), Duke Haiku (Fredericton) and the Physics for Poets (Fredericton), 8 p.m., $8
Friday, Sept. 17 — The Strawmen (Moncton), The Kamalas (Moncton), DJ Eric Neurotic (Moncton), $8
Saturday, Sept. 18 — Bad Vibrations (Halifax), Hospital Grade (Saint John), Union of the Snake (Halifax)
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Contact: Maggie Estey – events@galleryconnexion.ca
