From One Pacific Coast to Another

Well, I’m back from my adventures in Australia and Japan and have been thoroughly filled with new and enlightening experiences. Some highlights include photobooth-hunting in Sydney and San Francisco, improvising with my friend Cale in our duo “Hands are for Friends... Werewolves are for Night time,” spending hours in stationary stores in Tokyo and getting to spend quality time with my sister and her family in the lush wilderness of Northern Honshu. I had many thrilling experiences though I am, without a doubt, pooped. I’ve had a few days in Edmonton to shake off the jetlag, only to leave in another few days for Victoria, Vancouver and then Hope, British Columbia.

I’m partially going on this trip to do some research for an art project and for some tattoos I’ll be getting in October (stay tuned). Though the primary reason for the trip is to go teach at the Improv Camp! This will be the ninth camp I’ve attended (including last year’s one in Australia) and the sixth one I’ve instructed at. This year I’m working on bringing a few new features to the camp such as a library!

I’m also juggling a few other projects; a handful of illustration commissions, continuing the Anonymous Pen Pal Matchmaking Service, helping with the Art of Waiting's Photobooth Contest (which you can still submit to!), putting together applications for Toronto’s City of Craft and a Prism Comics grant and getting ready to launch my new production name & line of craft products, which should be ready in three weeks! I’m reminding myself that I can sleep when I’m dead, or more realistically, during the winter holidays.

The photo was taken underneath an art installation on the east side of the Imperial Gardens in Tokyo.

Adventures over the Pacific!

I’m stationed beside the only free electrical socket amongst the hustle and bustle at the San Francisco airport, not because I prefer the city’s airport to the city itself but for the practical reason that I’ve got a layover before I fly off to Sydney, Australia. I’ll be teaching improv at the Australian Institute of Performing Arts at their Winter Improv Intensive. I’m going with three other representatives of the Canadian Improv Games to help bring the format we teach in Canada to the Australian school systems. With just a little bit of down time after the Intensive, I’ll be flying back into the Northern hemisphere to Tokyo! I’m going mostly to visit my sister and her family but I’ll also be teaching a little bit of improv (to English speakers). I’m excited and nervous for the cultural differences and the language barrier (I plan on using my six year old niece as a translator.) I’m particularly excited for all the paper and stationary stores. I love handmade paper and thematic stationary kits. (Speaking of which, I’m still taking folks for the Anonymous Pen Pal Matchmaking Service.) After Japan, I’ll fly back to Sydney to visit with some friends and then fly to Edmonton from there. I’m really excited for the trip, I’ve got loads summer reads packed, a few illustration gigs to work on, some Beast and Creep drawings to keep up with and some final details to work out with the storyboard for Arc in the Sky. I’m also putting the final touches on a blog entry I’m writing for Art of Waiting. Their Summer Photobooth Contest is on now until September 1st , this is a super fun way to win some swell prizes. I took the photos above (collaged together for from different strips, click to enlarge) to help inspire some creativity.

Anonymous Pen Pal Matchmaking Service

UPDATE: (March 13, 2012) I'm no longer operating this project.
--------------------------------------
Who doesn’t love snail mail? Who doesn’t get enough of it? I thought up this simple, low commitment project to make the most of our postal service and to brighten our days. Here’s the project:

1. You send me your current mailing address, the number of pen pals you want and an alternative name for yourself; it can be a code name, alter ego, anagram or anything you’d like to go by. Send the info to go.eat.some.poison@gmail.com

2. I reply to your email with another person or persons’ information. (I will only match up people that I know will not use other people’s info to harm them in anyway.)

3. You and your new pen pal can send each other letters, drawings, recipes, quizzes, stickers, postcards, pictures, crafts, lists, compilation CD’s, article clippings or anything else. A good way to start is by committing to each send one piece of correspondence a month. If you’re afraid of forgetting about your pen pal, pick a day of the month that you will always write to them on, like paying your bills, but more fun!

4. The rest is up to you! You choose how many pen pals you’d like, how long you’d like to be pen pals for, and if you want to remain anonymous to each other.

I will be running the Anonymous Pen Pal Matching Service as an ongoing project, so there’s no deadline, but why put off a good thing?

Improvaganza + Beasts & Creeps

This June brought Rapid Fire Theatre’s 10th Annual Improvaganza, Canada’s largest improv festival. As per usual this year’s festival featured performers from across the globe, which included some of my favourite people. It was a super blast, needless to say. I did some visual consulting for the festival and a drawing project I originally started just for kicks. “My Friends as Beasts and Creeps” is a project I started on Facebook at the start of June. It consists of me “stealing” friends’ photos, re-interpreting them with drawing skills and giving them back to the source from which they came. Amy Shostak, the Artistic Director of Rapid Fire Theatre asked me to do a ‘ganza specific edition where I drew performers from the festival and displayed them in the theatre’s lobby. Here a few of my faves so far (click on photos to be enlarged.) If you have a Facebook account you can view the album here.

Art of Waiting: Photobooth Contest!

Earlier in June I got an intriguing email from Jeffrey Nachtigall who had heard of my photobooth expertise through my work with Photobooth.net. Jeff, who also goes by the name Dirk Lancer online, runs an fascinating website, The Art of Waiting where he uses the young medium of the internet to promote interest in old analogue technologies. Art of Waiting is mostly dedicated to photography but also to other ideas like using the postal service. (I love real mail!) We’ve collaborated on a summer contest for Art of Waiting and it’s all about photobooths! The project is really exciting and there are some really awesome prizes to be won. I highly recommend you check out the details here on the site, you’d be missing out if you didn’t.

June: the sit still mod podge month

I returned from my trip to Toronto a few days ago, I was there for PROJECTproject’s incredible COMBUSTIONfestival. The Tumbleweed Project (cross-Canada improv tour) went extremely well as well. May was a really swell month that involved a lot of moving and shaking- both in the geography and dance floor sense. Though June has brought a drastic change of pace and the way things have worked out I’m going to be in Edmonton for the whole month! This may not sound so outlandish to most but for the last 12 months I haven’t stayed in the same city for more than three consecutive weeks, with an average of one week in each city I visit. I’ve got ants in my pants and one month of sitting still is a lot for me to handle these days. Though I do have good reasons to be here, Rapid Fire Theatre’s Improvaganza is on from June 16-26 and I will be helping out the festival. I’m also collaborating with a retired UofA art professor on a series of photographs (more on this in a future post). For the most part I’ll be doing Go Eat Some Poison commissions and freelance gigs here and there; little things that will be good at occupying my time and putting moneys in my pockets. Which will come in handy because July brings travel adventures in Australia and Japan. All I have to do is ignore the ants biting at my legs for 4 weeks.

The photo is of a banner I made upon my return in order to encourage myself to get through June.

The Tumbleweed Project !!!!!

Yes, that’s right, there are five exclamation points in that title. “Why so excessive Meags?” you ask. Well, I’ll tell you. There are five exclamation points because this is one of the most exciting projects I’ve ever had the pleasure to be a part of. The Tumbleweed Project is the brainchild of Julie Dumais, Artistic Director of the Combustion Festival; an enormous and lovely improv festival in Toronto in the last week of May. The project is essentially a cross-Canada road-trip that picks up a new improviser in every city it visits, does a show, takes some workshops and finally arrives in Toronto were we’ll perform as an ensemble at the Combustion festival. Each improviser also loosely represents a region of Canada, though that region may not be the location the improviser is joining the tour, for example Justin Collette of Moncton, New Brunswick is joining the tour in Chicago. I’m going to be 3rd to join the team on May 15th in Calgary. I’m looking forward to the road-trip across the prairies, particularly to visit Winnipeg, where I haven’t been in years. I’m also going to seize this opportunity to track down some photobooths in each city for Photobooth.net.

For more information about the Combustion Festival, the Tumbleweed Project or to follow our on-the-road blog visit www.projectproject.ca. (The artwork on the poster is by Vancouver’s Ehren Salazar.)

Here are some tour details, for the specifics please visit the Facebook event here.

MAY 13: VANCOUVER- Tim Carlson @ Little Mountain Gallery
MAY 14: EDMONTON- Hannah Spear @ Rapid Fire Theatre
MAY 15: CALGARY- Meags Fitzgerald @ Loose Moose Theatre
MAY 16: REGINA- (no new member) @ The Fainting Goat
MAY 17: WINNIPEG- RobYn Slade @ Exchange Community Church
MAY 19: CHICAGO- Justin Collette @ Playground Theater
MAY 20: OTTAWA- Cari Leslie @ Elmdale House Tavern
MAY 21: MONTREAL – Kirsten Rasmussen @ Mainline Theatre
MAY 23: TORONTO - Mark Little @ Clinton's Tavern
MAY 24-29: TORONTO – @ the PROJECTproject COMBUSTIONfestival

Back from the Chicago Improv Festival!

I’ve just returned from Chicago where I was making Improv Art at the 13th Annual Chicago Improv Festival (CIF), the largest improv festival in the world. The festival was spread out over multiple venues in the city; Second City, IO, Annoyance Theatre, The Playground, Comedy Sportz... and others. There were hundreds of acts from all over the world, though unfortunately the festival was less international than originally anticipated because the European groups were unable to fly in because the Icelandic volcanic residue. The biggest highlight for me was CIF’s Award’s Night where they gave a best Ensemble of the Year award to The Improvised Shakespeare Company, Best Improviser to Susan Messing and three Lifetime Achievement awards to the late Severn Darden, Dick Schaal and to Harold Ramis. It was at Second City’s intimate ETC stage and the tone of the evening was uplifting and inspiring. It was very exciting and humbling to be around many of the field’s most talented individuals. I may be writing an article for improvisation.ca about the evening’s events and will post a link here if I do.

From an improv art perspective, the festival was a challenge for me because I had to carry my materials with me from venue to venue, usually doing three shows a night and sometimes with only minutes to set-up. (Usually at a festival I have a little studio on stage, where I sit comfortably for the whole time and have a convenient area in the lobby to display and sell my works.) The challenge ended up paying off because I got to meet tons of people that way and got to work in some great venues. After this experience I feel like I could make improv art under any conditions. In an Icelandic volcano? Probably.

I’ve been to a lot of Canadian Improv Festivals (spectating, performing, or art-making) and I’d like to think that I know a good percentage of Canadian improvisers, and that if I don’t, that it’s just a matter of time until our paths’ cross. Going to a Canadian festival is like going to my family reunion, if my entire extended family were comedians. CIF was the first American festival I’ve been to and though it still very much felt like a family reunion, it felt like someone else’s family. This may sound like a silly observation but it was crazy to meet that many improvisers at that level that I’d never met before. Once I got over my shyness I made some great friends from companies all over the states and Mexico, and I’m looking forward to my next American festival which will be that much less daunting.

The photo above is of my make shift studio at Comedy Sportz, it was taken by Jerry Schulman.