Arts Fest: Fantasy Life
For Begonia, also known as Alexa Dirks, her visual identity is just as important as her music.
The musician’s newest album Fantasy Life, to be released Oct. 24, was written in L.A. and recorded in her home city of Winnipeg.
Those lucky enough to see the Juno and Polaris Prize nominated artist at Avening Hall on Oct. 3, as part of the Creemore Festival of the Arts line-up, will get a pre-tour glimpse of Begonia’s latest release which she describes as part reality, part fantasy.
Dirks said the experience was the most ‘right’ she has ever felt in a songwriting session.
“I feel more confident in my own voice in many ways. And I feel like maybe the outward perception is that I’ve always been confident my own voice, but it takes time,” she said.
Dirks was still a teenager when she was a member of the touring band Chic Gamine.
“Everyone shares that emotional load of being in a band, being on tour. So then, when I started this project, the solo project, everything kind of took a different shape for me. Everything I thought I knew was turned on its head,” said Dirks.
The tour for her 2019 album Fear was interrupted by the pandemic. She said making her sophomore album Powder Blue, released in 2023, dragged her out of some pretty serious mental lows.
“[Every] album I’ve done, felt like I was just kind of figuring out what I was doing and getting my head to stop spinning before I could actually even focus on the art,” said Dirks.
With two albums behind her, she said she now wants to lean into the ease of making music.
“I don’t necessarily mean like it’s always so easy to write, but just the ease of emotion,” she said. “Of feeling like I can venture into the hard stuff, knowing that I will figure it out. I don’t know exactly how it’s going to be at the beginning, but I know that there will be an end. I will figure it out. And so I just felt like I trusted myself more.”
In the title track My Fantasy Life, she sings, “I live my fantasy life, I give it all every night. I don’t know if I can stop, nothing I can do to stop my fantasy life. My head is full of rage but then I get out on the stage and I live the life I always dreamed of.”
“This whole album feels like part reality, part fantasy,” said Dirks. “It lives in the kind of mundane, quiet moments, but then also lives in the hyperbolic moments that I feel my life occupies. There’s not a lot of middle ground in what I do, and I feel like this song kind of occupies that as well, where it’s like me speaking from my experience of getting to where I am today, and the imposter syndrome that comes along with that. But then also just the confusion of being an artist sometimes, and what that looks like for me, and the things I want out of it, and then sometimes how I just want to hide.”
As in the songwriting, Dirks loves to collaborate on the visual aspects of set design and costumes.
“Being a solo artist, I’m never doing things completely alone, and that’s by design. I love collaboration. It’s part of what makes me feel alive and purposeful in all of this,” she said. “We have been talking about Fantasy Life and what that means, and the songs and the colours and kind of putting together the visual language for it, in tandem with when I was making the music.”
On the album cover and in the video for So High, one of two singles that have been released, Begonia is dressed in a gold corset and a bouffant red wig. In the video for another single, Hotter Than the Sun, she is dressed as a butterfly. The themes and costumes are created in collaboration with a partner she has been working with for a decade. She said she has a wonderful crew of ‘freaky people’ in Winnipeg, including a hair stylist and make-up artist who help her come up with the whole look. Being on a budget, they pull it off by making sets and costumes, using what they have and reworking past creations.
“I’ve been working with the same director for the last couple albums,” said Dirks. “It’s just refining those languages, and I feel like this time is the most refined it’s felt, even though part of the refinement of what I do is very crafty and rough around the edges, it’s just felt the most focused in some ways to me, and that makes it the most fun.”
“It’s just felt very beautiful,” she said. “It all coming together this way for this album, and it’s felt the most thoughtful. I think the music tells one story, but then you put a visual on top of it, and it tells something completely different. And that’s what I love, thelayering of making the music and then puzzling the visuals into it. It just deepens that part for me.”
Begonia is playing Avening Hall on Friday, Oct. 3. Tickets cost $55 and are available at the door. Doors open at 7 p.m. and the show starts at 8 p.m. During the weekend’s concerts there will be a food truck on site and the bar will be open.
Calvin Lee Joseph photo
