The Managing Director for SXSW has been forced to address speculation that a performance contract has been put in place threatening to contact immigration officials if their artists perform outside of their official showcases.
As Flavorwire reports, Brooklyn artist Felix Walworth of Told Slant canceled his band's appearance at the annual festival after tweeting a snippet of the contract, accusing SXSW of threatening to deport artists.
After looking through this contract sent to me by sxsw I have decided to cancel Told Slant's performance at the festival pic.twitter.com/rI2Xv0duJl
— Told Slant (@Felixixix666) March 2, 2017
However, in an interview with the Austin Chronicle, SXSW Managing Director Roland Swenson said that the particular part of the contract Walworth referred to is for extreme instances.
"We've had these restrictions in the agreement for about five years and never had to enforce them," Swenson said.
"It's intended for someone who does something really egregious like disobeying our rules for pyrotechnics, starts a brawl in a club, or kills somebody. You have to really fuck up for us to do this stuff.
"What people don't understand is that we're already talking to immigration about all these bands," Swanson said of the SXSW acts.
"Most of these bands are here because we sort of sponsored them. So if somebody did something bad enough that we had to enforce this part of the contract, we would probably be obliged to notify immigration that 'Hey these guys are trouble'’ but we’ve never had to do that."
Soon after Swenson commented on the matter, also suggesting Walworth had cut and copied sections of the contract in his original tweet, the musician released a follow-up video on Twitter to show he had not altered the contract.
the managing director of sxsw accused me of pasting together two parts of the contract to make it sound worse than it is. Here's a video: pic.twitter.com/wDaCBiCDBx
— Told Slant (@Felixixix666) March 2, 2017
"It was still a misunderstanding on his part in thinking that the deportation threat was from us, not just the consequences of violating the terms of the visa," Swensen emailed the Austin Chronicle soon after the video was published.
Swensen also admitted that he will consider making changes to the SXSW artist contracts moving forward.
"The contract could use some work," he conceded.
"But no matter what a contract says, it's easy to jump to conclusions when you pull a couple of paragraphs out of context."
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