Kid Koala hosts Family Day interactive drawing session

Kid Koala wants to spend Family Day with a few hundred Calgarians who need to get some work done.

Koala, a scratch DJ, music producer, composer, graphic comic artist andfilmmaker, is playing two sets of Music to Draw to Monday at the National Music Centre.

Finding creative energy in a crowd

And what exactly, does he mean by 'music to draw to?'

Exactly that.

The notion for Music to Draw to started in 2009, when Koala, then working on a comic called Space Cadet, realized he was about to embark upon six lonely months of drawing and colouring panels alone, during a Montreal winter.

That's when he got the idea that maybe there was a creative buzz to be found by gathering together all his friends, and a few people who weren't friends, and work together while he played ambient music at moderate sound levels.

"People were invited to come anddraw, or sculpt, finish a screenplay, whatever they wanted to do," he said, in an interview with The Homestretch,"as long as it was something quiet."

While the common mythology of creativity generally features a tortured artist alone in a room with their imagination, Koala discovered that creativity sometimes manifests itself in quite the opposite fashion.

"The really amazing thing was there was this palpable energy [it was] very productive," he said.

"We did Monday nights in Montreal in the winter and by the end, we had 600 people trying to come to not talk to anybody."

For Monday's sets at 11 a.m.and 1 p.m. at the National Music Centre, Koala will host an interactive drawing session.

Visitors are welcome to bring any creative project they are currently working on.

After hosting Music to Draw To in Montreal, there's nothing that can really surprise Koala.

"In Montreal there were sculptors," he says. "People were making clothes. Some people brought laptops,coding, video games anything they needed to get in the zone for."

With files from The Homestretch

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