Deborah Raddall and Jean Robinson are part of the team organizing this year’s Liverpool International Theatre Festival. (Rick Conrad)

It happens every two years, it’s less than two months away and the organizers of the Liverpool International Theatre Festival want you to be part of it.

The festival is looking for local residents to open their homes and help welcome the almost 90 people coming to Liverpool from 10 different countries for the four-day event.

The volunteer-driven festival is celebrating its 16th edition from Oct. 17 to 20 at the Astor Theatre.

This year, amateur theatre troupes from Morocco, Egypt, the country of Georgia, Mexico, Italy, Switzerland, Wales and the U.S. will be putting on one-act plays in an event that celebrates theatre and international friendship. Winds of Change from Liverpool will also be putting on a play at the festival.

“For those that haven’t been to the festival in the past,” says festival chairwoman Jean Robinson, “they are one-act plays and they have to be between 25 minutes long and 50 or 55 minutes long. And so, it’s a great introduction to theatre and different types of theatre.”

Deborah Raddall is in charge of LITF’s marketing and promotions. 

“LITF is a celebration of culture and theatre and community. And it’s a chance for us, meaning Liverpool, to experience the world.”

The festival relies on 40 to 60 volunteers from the community to make it happen.

Members of the theatre troupes are billeted at homes around Queens County. This year, organizers are putting an urgent call out for people to open their homes to the actors and crews coming to Liverpool.

LITF asks hosts to provide a bed and some breakfast for festival participants. The festival looks after everything else, including other meals and transportation. Hosts also get two free tickets to the play involving their guests.

Raddall and her husband Blair have hosted troupes in their home for many previous festivals.

“It’s a wonderful experience, my experience has been really great with that. We’ve been hosting almost every year and we’ve made wonderful friendships and connections. It’s quite unique for a theatre festival.”

“All you need to do is have a bed. It’s a bed and breakfast situation. What we ask of our hosts at a minimum is to provide a bed, provide a breakfast for them in the mornings and to pick them up when they arrive, if it’s a reasonable time. … At a minimum interaction, make them welcome in your home, give them something to eat in the mornings and our festival is designed to pick up all the rest of the stuff. … We’re really looking for a welcoming space and a little bit of breakfast.”

Robinson said hosts and guests have made lasting connections.

“Hosts can be as engaged in the festival as they want to be. We know that these have become lifelong friendships and also new experiences. People have gotten to go skating for the first time with their host, even being taken to the ocean to see a beach for the first time, going out on a lobster boat or things like that that have really cemented those relationships.”

Raddall says they’re still looking for space for about 40 troupe members. Troupes and potential hosts fill out questionnaires so that organizers can help make sure the experience is as positive as possible for everybody.

“It’s a process that’s not just we’re just going to chuck somebody on your doorstep without having a conversation about what works best for you and what works best for them.”

If you’re interested in becoming a host for the Liverpool International Theatre Festival, you can contact info@litf.ca , check out their website at litf.ca or message them at their Facebook page.

Email: rickconradqccr@gmail.com

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Velta Vikmanis’s art exhibit, Chaos to Calm, is on now at the Astor Theatre in Liverpool. (Rick Conrad)

As many others did during the pandemic, Velta Vikmanis and her husband were looking to move from the crush of the city to the calm of the country.

“With the pandemic I think everybody kind of did an inventory and reprioritizing of life,” the Liverpool resident says. “And so we were very fortunate that we came to Nova Scotia. Neither one of us had ever been here or visited. We drove around for two and a half months and came across the South Shore and fell in love with it.”

That examination of where you’ve been and where you end up is a central theme of Vikmanis’s art exhibit, now on at the Astor Theatre in Liverpool. 

Chaos to Calm has its official opening with a reception on Friday at 6:30 p.m. It runs for the month of May. 

“Coming from Ontario, from a large metropolitan city of 4.2 million people and constant traffic and people on top of each other to this slower, calmer pace. … The show itself is an opportunity for me to do a kind of retrospective.”

Vikmanis and her husband Peter arrived in Liverpool in November 2021, part of the influx of people who moved to Queens County in the midst and the aftermath of the pandemic.

Before that, they lived in Toronto for 16 years, where Vikmanis worked full time. She pursued her bachelor of fine arts degree in sculpture and installation at OCAD University as a part-time student.

“The show is really a reflection of things I did in the past, things that I did in school and an opportunity for me to get back into a daily practice and reflection of my art,” she says.

“I’ve never been what I consider an artist who makes work for a living. I’ve always done it for myself and if it happens to inspire or spark joy in someone else and they appreciate it and want to purchase it, great. That just buys me more art supplies.”

While Liverpool has served as a respite from the bustle of a bigger city, it also allowed her to rediscover her passion for art. After going to school, working full time and living through a pandemic, Vikmanis says she was burnt out after years of what she calls “forced creativity”.

“It was signing up to do this show that actually forced me to do an assessment, an inventory, catalogue, and actually create new works. Because prior to that, I went through a period of no creativity and just putting it on the shelf.”

When artist Velta Vikmanis moved to Liverpool, she was inspired by Queens County’s beaches. (Rick Conrad)

Vikmanis’s show features an eclectic mix of styles, media and topics. From photography in the Azores or on the beaches of Queens County to painting to sculpture, she says it represents 20 years of work.

The centrepiece of the show is Vestige Echo, her thesis project at OCAD. It is a paper-based sculpture that consists of literal pieces and mementoes of Vikmanis’s life, quilted together and hung in the window. A metronome ticks on the windowsill behind it. 

Her parents had been packing up her childhood home in Minneapolis. They started to send her boxes of her old report cards and other keepsakes they collected over the years.

At the beginning of the pandemic, her father died. And that spurred Vikmanis to go through all of the memorabilia from her parents and from her own collection. 

“It was this whole very strange experience of having to mourn and grieve from afar. So that’s when I started gathering and looking through all the things I had collected.”

She tore everything into smaller pieces, ordered them into boxes by the weight of the paper and stitched them together according to how she picked them up out of each box.

It took her 24 weeks to complete the original eight-by-10-foot installation piece. What’s on exhibit at the Astor is a much smaller, but no less compelling, version.

“It was liberating. Certain things, you put them away and you don’t really ever really pull them back out, do you? So the fact that I was deliberate in looking at every single item, reminiscing about it, but the fact that I could have that moment and that time with that person, with that event, with that lived experience but then pass it along. For the Vestige Echo, hopefully (people) find something in it that triggers something in them.”

“It’s fun to experience it with somebody who has no idea who I am and who these people are and someone who’s present to have that shared memory. It triggers something really fun.”

Vikmanis says she loves finding beauty in the mundane. 

“At the end of the day, I’m still drawn to the ordinary. I”m not somebody who’s very gifted in realism. I can’t paint in a realistic manner. I’ve never been interested in that.”

Vikmanis jokes that since she moved to Liverpool, she’s worked almost everywhere. She now works at Main and Mersey on Main Street, and she volunteers with QCCR on its board of directors. She is also the host of two shows on the station. 

She says she’s looking forward to the opening reception on Friday, to hearing what people think of her work and to meeting other artists from Queens County.

“This is my last stop. I’m not going anywhere. Liverpool is my home now. I love all the people here and getting to know everybody. It’s a great opportunity to meet people and engage with the artist community and to meet folks that I haven’t come across yet. For me, it was that, OK I’ve transitioned, I’ve moved, I’m settled in, I’m truly calm now, so now I need to get back into that practice, and this was that kickstart to get back into that practice of thinking about,, OK what am I going to create next?”

Email: rickconradqccr@gmail.com

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