Is it Art? Edinburgh Show

Is it Art? – A CFACoLab Performance

This will take place inside the building in DANCE STUDIO ONE (HFA 111).

The CFACoLab is a performance group of actors, dancers, composers, visual artists, and designers from all seven units of the College of Fine Arts at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.

The award-winning five-star group begins with a single idea or image and devises the world of a show exploring aspects of art and design.

CFACoLab will present this most recent work as seen in Scotland this past summer during the Edinburgh Fringe Festival.

Josephine Balfour-Oatts from the Scotsman newspaper gave CFACoLab’s IS IT ART? a five-star review!

She writes:

“Nine characters. One gallery. An empty pedestal.

Two questions: is it the greatest work in the history of art? Or is it nothing at all? Devised by CFACoLab – a collective of actors, dancers, composers, visual artists and designers – Is It Art? is an art-lovers paradise, a theatre-goers wonderland, and almost certainly, a traditionalists nightmare.

CFACoLab possesses a very special, and very specific, aesthetic. Theatrical elements combine the expertise and knowledge of the group, and a sense of experiment and play is embedded from the get-go.

That the show also functions as a potted history of art should be unsurprising, but surprise is this company’s forte, and this piece is so clever as to be dumbfounding.

Here, the performers are the palette, the paintbrushes, the paint. They are the picture, the frame. They coax artist movements, philosophical theories, and practices from obscurity, falsification, and yesteryear. Two musicians create the sound-world of the show (they underscore, and are instrumental to, the action), and each character – as well as having their own individual identity – embodies a specific colour.

There is dancing; there are Seagull onesies; a painting is painted and a painting is performed. The piece is alert to acts of spectatorship and arts criticism, too, and it also begins to theorise a future direction for art, as a form, as we know it. Is It Art? is deceptively simple, though, and makes for a delightful, quirky, and wholly unique experience. If you haven’t seen it, book at once – go now. If you’re lucky enough to have seen it once, double your luck – go again.”