2024 Application
XFest groups performers in unfamiliar configurations, challenging them to collaborate and explore their sonic and physical dynamics during 20 minute improvisations. Performers range from DIY to formally trained musicians, dancers, video, and visual artists from New England and beyond. As a weekend-long workshop, XFest provides the space and time for improvisers to interact through performance in front of an attuned audience of their peers.
XFest is a labor of community, funded by the organizers and participants. Interested in organizing your own XFest, or helping out on the next one? Contact xfest @ gmail . Want to perform? join our mailing list for application announcements and future XFest events.
“Improvisation can give us the skills to deal with many social and aesthetic issues of the twenty-first century. Although we have become adept at talking about aesthetic hybridity, cultural alerity, crossing borders (both earthly and cyber), and global fusion, few of us have really studied what physical and intellectual practice will make our bodies and minds ready for this brave new world … Improvisation can lead us out of our habitual responses by opening up alternative experiences — new physical sensations and appetites … Although this practice begins with attentiveness to corporeal experience it also develops a mental flexibility that can provide an intellectual map with which to chart new pathways for negotiating awkward and difficult crossings.”
XFest 