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Curated and presented by FADO in the context of the 7a*11d International Festival of Performance Art
In partnership with L’Ecart Lieu D’Art Actuel

Do you have a special relationship with your sculptures? What if they were the ones performing? How would they do it?

This installation-performance is inspired by the Canadian investigative technique called “Mr. Big,” which allows an undercover police officer to obtain a confession from a suspect of a serious, unsolved crime. Led by shape-shifting characters, living sculptures, dual weapons and a televisual soundscape, M. Gros [Mr. Big] tackles identity issues relating to surveillance, infiltration, idea theft and copying; but moves beyond classic investigative games with a narrative that pays special attention to a contemporary art ecosystem.

M. Gros [Mr. Big] takes many forms. A performative version was presented at La Chapelle Scènes Contemporaines (Montréal), Centre Wallonie-Bruxelles (Paris), La Capella (Barcelona); and has appeared as an installation-performance at Pierre-François Ouellette art contemporain (Montréal). In addition to being presented by FADO at the 7a*11d festival in Septeber, M. Gros [Mr. Big] will also be presented at la Biennale d’art performative de Rouyn-Noranda, Galerie d’art Louise-et-Reuben- Cohen (Moncton), Festival Actoral (Montréal, Usine C) and at the Théâtre du Trillium (Ottawa).

7a*11d International Festival of Performance Art
September 6–10, 2022

b. 1985, Canada
www.nadege-grebmeier-forget.com

Nadège Grebmeier Forget’s interdisciplinary practice unfolds via durational, live, live-streamed and private performances, which sometimes result in drawing, photography or installation works. In these performances, she models and hybridizes herself to defuse expectations of beauty and explore the effects (and affects) of the concerned gaze on the unfolding identity as it is observed and analyzed by others, including oneself. Seeking to confront desires and ideals (aesthetic, commercial, sexual, etc.) through an empowered and performative manipulation of her own image, she intrinsically questions the labour of making and becoming; including the ways in which performance (of self or art) can be documented, shown, disseminated or exhibited.

Engaged within both of Montreal’s visual and live arts communities—as an artist, freelance project coordinator, creative consultant or artistic director. She has participated in numerous events, festivals, panels, residencies, and exhibitions across Canada, the US, and Europe, and is the first performance artist to receive the City of Montreal’s Prix Pierre-Ayot (2019), awarded in partnership with the Contemporary Art Galleries Association (AGAC).

Canada
https://genevieveetmatthieu.bandcamp.com/

The duo Geneviève & Matthieu, from Rouyn-Noranda in Abitibi-Témiscamingue, started working in the late 1990s, blending visual art, performance, music and everyday life. Geneviève & Matthieu play on interdisciplinarity—happening, musical composition, performance art and installation—to create group performances and productions of social tableaux that are at times festive but always human.

Beginning in 2001, their discography includes five titles. Between the baroque, abstract expressionism and arte povera, their works have been presented over forty times in Québec, across Canada, the United States, France, Belgium and Spain. Actively involved in their community, Geneviève & Mathieu have been developing the artist-run centre Écart and the Biennale d’art performatif de Rouyn-Noranda for over 20 years.

The duo takes a critical look at past and current artistic movements: DIY culture, conceptual art and performance art. Through residencies, public dissemination and the experience of a body that bounces, transforms and blends into art, their works are constantly evolving. Propelled by the human spirit, their creative approach favours a living art that challenges usual modes of presentation through the change of the place, duration, and manner of exhibiting and performing.

Image: Jehan Roberson. Photo © Jay Bendett.

USA
https://www.jehanroberson.com/

Jehan Roberson is a queer writer, scholar, artist, and memory worker using text as the basis for her interdisciplinary practice. Born and raised in Memphis, TN, Jehan’s work explores text as a site of liberation, place making, and historical intervention for Black peoples in the Americas. Her art and research have informed her previous work in archives and cultural sites such as the National Civil Rights Museum and the Center for Southern Folklore in Memphis, Kismet Productions in Chicago, and the Borges Cultural Center in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Jehan is a PhD student in English Language and Literatures at Cornell University. She holds a MA from NYU’s John W. Draper School of Humanities and Social Thought and a BA in English Literature with a double minor in Spanish and Journalism from the University of Missouri.

Canada
https://mathieulacroix.jimdofree.com/

Mathieu Lacroix is a Montreal-based artist from Drummondville, Québec. He holds a BFA from UQAM in Montreal. He has recently exhibited at Clark Center in Montréal, Maison de la culture Côte-des-Neiges in Montréal and CIRCA art actuel in Montreal. He has performed in many locations, for example at 7a*11d, the International Festival of Performance in Toronto. His works can be found in the collection of La Ville de Montréal. Mathieu Lacroix has been invited to participate at the Off Biennale of Contemporary African Art in Dakar, Senegal, and he performed in a group exhibition at Dazibao, Montreal.

Mathieu Lacroix’s multidisciplinary practice comprises drawing, sculpture, installation and performance. The notion of the “sketch” is central to his work, employing it as both a conceptual approach and a literal technique across a spectrum of media, helping to subtly unify his wide-ranging intellectual and formal interests. He creates unusual environments borrowing from both the domestic space and the commercial. Lacroix’s interventions question the complex relationship between the individual and his environment, habits, and identity. His work touches lightly but profoundly on issues from many areas such as politics, economics, personal and collective identities, and perceptual experience. 

https://joeculpepper.com/

Joe Culpepper is a magician, consultant and researcher. He is an associate researcher at Montréal’s National Circus School, is a member of London’s Magic Circle, and has adapted magic effects for Cirque du Soleil, Concordia University, and others.

Performance on Camera investigates the intersections between performance art and the camera. It is a two-intensive workshop hosted by the performance and video artist Rah Eleh. During the first day of the workshop, attendees can expect to do a series of physical exercises that will focus on character development, exploration and physicality. The second day of the workshop will be a lecture about filmmaking techniques such as framing and lighting.

Workshop attendees will be given the opportunity to create their own video that will be screened at 401 Richmond in FADO’s presentation and screening space at a later date (TBD). Attendees do not need any knowledge of performance or video production to attend, however a camera (phone or tablet cameras are acceptable) will be required for participation. Some knowledge of post-production editing is beneficial but not necessary. Attendees are welcome to explore a character they have previously developed or explore a new one. Participants will provide their own camera and any necessary materials (costumes, props, pen and paper are encouraged).

This workshop is offered for free of charge. Space is limited to 15 participants. Attendance is required on both dates. This workshop is in-person. Participants are required to mask in the co-working space and when social distancing is not possible.

Image © Rah Eleh, Oriental Drag. Courtesy of the artist.

Canada
https://www.situatedesignbuild.com/
https://scapegoatjournal.org/

Marcin Kedzior is a writer, journal editor, urban thinker, experimental dancer and educator focusing on critical theory and collaborative urban improvisations. He holds a Bachelor of Fine Art from Queen’s University and a Master of Architecture from the University of Toronto. He teaches interior design at Humber ITAL and architectural studies at the University of Toronto. He was on the winning team of the Nathan Philips Square revitalization and he has exhibited work at the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal, the Storefront for Art and Architecture in New York, the Architectural Association, London and in numerous other venues. By considering both the construction and inhabitation of spaces as social performances of people and materials, Kedzior attempts to deal with the necessarily dynamic, improvisatory and contingent aspects of bodies, materials, plans and programs.

He is aided and inspired by warehouses of literary ghosts, tactical board games, scaffolding, shoelaces, John Cage’s experimental musical notation, railings, Simone Forti’s dance constructions, goat pastures, counter monuments, and shadows.

Artist-led embodied research project by lo bil
Hosted by FADO Performance Art Centre

While this is performance-artist-based invitation, there is no imperative to perform for others. Through presence and attending to what you wish to do, you are potentially helping others attend to doing something they wish to do. Artists can use the time and space in any way they wish, however it is important to note that this project makes space for different forms of movement to occur.

COMPASS is a cross between a studio, a gym, a playground, a library and something unknown that welcomes all kinds of action and participation from both artists and visitors.

PART 1
We are seeking artists who wish to spend 2–3 hours between September 5–9 in a process of navigating shared space while engaging in their own performance practice. Each session will be very open for experimental approaches, varying levels of public interaction, and is intended as real-time embodied research. Each artist will discover for themselves the benefits and challenges of working in this way. Artists may choose to attend one or more sessions.

Date: September 6–9, 2022
Time: 11:30am–2:30pm, daily
Location: The Commons @ 401, 401 Richmond Street West

PART 2
From September 13–16, a smaller group of artists from the first week will continue to develop the discoveries they have encountered, working towards a public showing on the afternoon of September 17. Artists involved in this second week of COMPASS will be paid a small honorarium for their participation.

We welcome proposals from artists who cannot be physically present at COMPASS sessions to connect via video call or to offer provocations for public to engage in. All contributions, whether in-person or remote, will be credited. Everyone from emerging to established artists are welcome to join. Artists are also welcome to drop by during the first week or the final showing to see what’s up and/or to participate in unexpected ways.

PLUS
Join us for an open showing of COMPASS on September 17 @ 1:00pm–4:00pm.

If you would like to join COMPASS for one or more days, send an email to: lbil@rogers.com using the subject line: COMPASS / FADO and include:
your name and contact details;
which dates you would like to join us between September 6–9;
an artist statement or description of your art interests;
a short proposal of how you would use the space and time (not knowing is always a possible option).

This is not a review process. All proposals will be accepted. Asking for an brief outline of your proposal for the space and times helps us make space for everyone that wants to join in. Please note that the space will be open for anyone to join on any day.

With the participation of: Jacqui Arntfield, Ellen Bleiwas, Simon Fuh, Chris Mendoza, Dana Prieto, Matt Nish-Lapidus, Mehrnaz Rohbakhsh, St Marie φ Walker
 
ATTEND
EXTEND
REFUSE
REST
WANDER
 
Guided by five themed prompts, each dreamer-participant engaged at their own pace with short readings, various media and creative exercises that steered their performative responses. Intended to function as alternative embodied approaches to traditional research, each participant was encouraged to trust their intuition, lean into play and follow their feelings to experiment with the ephemeral and dream of alternatives to our current position. The project commenced in a collective action of rest in Toronto’s Queen’s Park, a historic site of protest and strikes. 

The findings of each participant will be collected, collated and transformed into an alternative publication in the form of a field guide as a tool for score-based self-practice. Coming in September 2022.

Performing for the archive; the archive is a performance.

For Louise Liliefeldt’s Performance Home project, over the course of fall/winter 2021, the artist is taking a deep dive through her personal archive of materials, photos and videos documenting her performance practice over the last 20 plus years.

On the surface, the goal is to create a website that illustrates Liliefeldt’s practice, providing a chronological history for those familiar with her work and for new audiences. Behind the surface however is the endless work of sifting, sorting, accessing and editing that the archive needs from us. How does the performance artists make order from what is essentially ephemeral, chaotic and non-linear?

This project was partially funded by the Ontario Arts Council. The website design is by Kathleen Smith of 7Pirouettes.

www.louiseliliefeldt.com

Read the project brochure for Kristina Guison’s Weather to Store, containing an essay entitled Notes on a Warehouse: A Mythology of Rote Rearrangements by Aaditya Aggarwal.

Image © Kristina Guison, Act 1: Weather To Store, 2018. Photo Henry Chan.

Image © FADO, 2018. Photo Henry Chan.

Good evening,

My name is Francesco Gagliardi and on behalf of FADO I am delighted to welcome you to the opening of GOOD BUY! by Tanya Mars.

Saying that the person you’re about to introduce needs no introduction is usually a cliché, but on this occasion it’s just a statement of fact. If you’re here tonight you know Tanya, and if you know her you love her – or at least you want some of her stuff.

So instead of talking about Tanya I will talk about myself, and I will tell you about the first time I sat eyes on Tanya Mars. It was about ten years ago – at the Lower Ossington Theatre: just a few doors north of her old apartment, which many of you will remember. Seiji Shimoda was performing his then already famous table piece, in which he cavorted on and around a table for about an hour wearing no clothes. The piece was originally performed using a custom-built table, but by the time I saw it, it involved the use of what Seiji referred to as “indigenous” tables: tables found on site and somehow connected to the ecosystem of specific performance communities. At the end of the evening, Shannon Cochrane – then, as tonight, the wizard behind the curtain – thanked Ms. Mars for lending the table. She waved off the acknowledgement rather brusquely, shaking her head in a way that was soon to become familiar to me: a sort of modified hair flip, the last phase of an elaborate sequence of actions starting with her glasses repeatedly traveling up and down between the bridge of her nose and the crown of her head, and invariably getting entangled in her platinum blond hair. It was 2008 and she had just been awarded the Governor General’s Award in Visual Arts. I found her rather formidable.

In retrospect, it makes perfect sense that it was Tanya who lent the table, and not just because she lived next door: she sat (at her table) at the very centre of the city’s performance ecosystem. As I came to learn, if you needed something, chances were that Tanya had it. And, if she had it, she would lend it to you no question asked. A rotary telephone or a rotating tray, a yard of pink fabric or a pair of riding spurs, faux fur, real fur, fake eyelashes, thigh-high fishing boots or tap shoes, a thurible, a button in the shape of a gondola or a gondola made of buttons, two identical cocktail hats or five boxes of plastic bobblehead dogs.

Over the years, this extraordinary collection has grown while traveling from Montreal to Toronto to Shelburne Nova Scotia, and back to Toronto – aboard moving vans and cars, up and down elevators and flights of stairs, in and out of storages rooms, attics, and unfinished basements – in labelled and unlabelled boxes and plastic bags, or rattling inside containers that were themselves part of the collection: hatboxes, slide projector cases, 1950s Bakelite handbags hand-made by nuns behind the Iron Curtain. Over the years, out of this accumulation, Ms. Mars has built her performance worlds: the costumes, the sets, the props – her tools and weapons. You might recognize a clear-plastic umbrella from The Pursuit of Happiness, a toy baby grand piano from Tyranny of Bliss, silver shoes that have glimmered in several pieces since the 1960s.

But building worlds requires discipline and discrimination. Four buttons may not be enough, but six is one too many. The shape of the vase may be right, but if the weight is not, you can’t use it. Mixed in with the performance relics, still radiating the afterglow of their brief tenure as art objects, a lot of what fills the room next door is just stuff that has never been used. Not exactly refuse, but material waiting to be called to life – a sort of counter-image of Tanya’s world: the feathers that didn’t make it onto the hat, the five gorilla dolls discarded at the last moment, the gloves that would have been perfect if only they had been a brighter yellow. This shadowy double (the dark side of Mars, if you will) is not only revealing of an artist’s discernment and taste, but full of potential waiting to be activated. It was chosen and collected with care, it almost came to life and didn’t – but it still could. It lies dormant, waiting to be awakened from the uncertain repose of objecthood.

Like in every fairy tale awakening, it is always the sleeping princess, really, who awakens the prince. So listen to the murmur of the feathers, feel the golden fabric, let those turquoise slippers entice you: they might bring you places you didn’t even know existed.

Wake up, make sure you have the exact change, and GOOD BUY!

Read the fourth in the Golden Book series: x for staying here with us now by Sherri Hay here.

Thank you, it’s such a pleasure to be here tonight to help celebrate your recent success. Special thanks to Dr. Keith Cole – I’ve been a long-time fan of your work – and to the incredible Dean of the Faculty of Performance Art, Dr. Shannon Cochrane.

Tonight’s ceremony is a way to recognize the time commitment and efforts made by the graduates. We mark this occasion because we value these things: reading books, drinking wine, meeting in person to talk about books, and drinking more wine. Also, we celebrate the lost art of listening, which is more than half of what it means to communicate, is the secret to building relationship and community, and which seems to be the biggest casualty in today’s social media wars. 

You’ve worked hard. With busy lives, it’s challenging to commit to a month of Tuesdays – to reading a very thick book, completing homework assignments, and showing up every week. It’s a very different impulse to share physical space with strangers on a king size bed in a motel room on Spadina Avenue, than it is to scroll comments online, liking stuff. Graduates, you chose to engage in meaningful dialogue in the flesh. It’s remarkable, given today’s technological advantages. In other parts of your lives, some of you teach. Some are students. But in this setting we follow a different social contract: this is knowledge exchange and we are all participating and learning. Some of you organized this project and others came strictly as guests – but we all performed roles. This is really exciting.

Specifically we honour a book written more than fifty years ago by Jacqueline Susann: a bestseller, blockbuster, and inspiration for the film we will be watching in a few moments: the Valley of the Dolls. Is it a work of art in the great literary tradition? Absolutely not. But it is more than mere commodity. You were asked: what does this book mean to us now? Is it still relevant? 

For me to answer that, I need to take a step back in time. Please indulge me!

I was born and raised in a one-stoplight town at the Southern most tip of Canada. 

We have tornados, organized crime, every Fundamentalist Christian movement imaginable, and quick sand. I barely made it out alive! Raise your hand if you’re from a small town. Shout it out! Okay suburbs, too, a different kind of soul death. 

We have this in common: aspiration, desperation, desire. We abandoned local expectation to enter into a magical place – urban, fictional, where we could become someone completely new. Or completely Gay. Just like us, the main characters come from shitty little towns to The Big City. So far, how is this different from our own stories? Even Lyon, the fictional British stud, is actually from an isolated farmhouse in the middle of nowhere, England. 

We create Self and community. We continue to create, and then comes secondary wants: money, love, fame. Sometimes, we recreate a status quo: hard rules based on competition, insecurity, internalized bigotry, capitalist greed. Because somewhere along the line we try to make art for a buck in this Vampire Economy. In the Valley of the Dolls they get rich. The rest of us just get notorious. (if we’re lucky!)

Knowing this book celebrates high camp, I thought it would be fun to read. 

The first half is the ingénue’s journey. Those female friendships reminded me of my own early years: surviving on stolen saltines, scissoring with a series of gorgeous roommates, and angling for free drinks at the bar. In the book there was a transition. The second half, that’s when things got rough. Saturn Return, People! By the end of the book, I felt a great despair.

I suspect reading this book as a woman is quite different than reading it as not a woman. Men make the rules and men benefit from them. Men also sacrifice a domestic or sustainable romantic life in order to play the game, but they don’t pay the ultimate price. What about Tony, you say? Privately perceived to be a damaged man, less of a man than others, he’s used much like a woman in this book. He’s a child man, almost equal to a woman. But his manager/sister never betrays him; he wins privacy and dignity, which is robbed from all of the females without exception.

The currency for most transactions in the book is female bodies. Oh there’s money money money. But women’s bodies, and ultimately their minds, are the collateral damage for fame and fortune. Or, for a simple escape from insufferable small town life. 

Each beautiful woman in this book is a stand in for all those other beautiful women. They’re on billboards, magazines, movie screens, television. We read Jennifer North and think Marilyn. Sharon, Whitney. Anna Nicole. Reading Neely we think Judy Garland. Frances Farmer. Britney Spears, Lindsay Lohan, Rose McGowan. Anne Welles could be Princess Di, living a lie, wealthy and famous and starved for affection. Hungry. And if this is the outcome for the most culturally valued, famous, wealthy and privileged white women, what about the rest of us? 

Professor Cole mentioned how Jennifer North’s death scene haunted him for years. For me the passages describing Neely’s incarceration in the sanatorium were terrifying. How many dissatisfied wives or reluctant girls or lesbians or latent witches or Indigenous or free thinking females were incarcerated just so, because they would not or could not play the limited roles allotted to them in their particular time? How many are still there now?

Is this book relevant? I don’t know what you decided in class, but I will say, sadly, yes. Because we can’t go one day without another famous entertainer stepping forward to talk about sexual misconduct or violence she endured during attempts to get work, maintain contracts, and grow a career.

Hell, never mind Hollywood. You might be amazed to learn as I did, that behind each little poem in practically any college literary magazine lies a blow job. A dusty, alcohol induced, sloppy, end of the night blow job. You can hardly break into the regional and non-glamorous world of Canadian literature without banging some old drunk. And for what? A royalty cheque that barely covers a month’s rent in any major city.  Never mind the cost of the prescription you’ll need to clear up the STI that poet gave you! Is there no end to the sense of entitlement held by these bearded unwashed creeps? What exactly fuels their narcissism and desperation for artistic recognition? And more important, Who Cares!?

While in the asylum and afterward, Neely speaks about her changed body with the assumption that gaining weight is a death sentence for pleasure and affection. Lyon’s hateful words about her size are fuelled with a violence and disgust that leap from the page – from a page already soaked in violence and disgust! And isn’t he the first guy on top of her, as soon as she starts popping those diet pills again? Creep.   

Even the richest woman in New York, in the world, goes to bed hungry at night, afraid of expanding her waistline.

So, what has changed in the past 50 years? 

In many respects, not much. The demise of the women in this book is all too real.

Have we at least evolved with regards to this deep body shaming, this dismissal of unconventional female beauty and power? Can we – queers, activists, artists, witches, people of size, black, indigenous, trans and disabled people – can we break this mold once and for all?

YES Mother Fucker.

My kindest advice to the graduates:

Self medicate. Like the precious white women in this book. Pop your pills and dull your pain, buffer yourself from the injustice surrounding you.

OR wake up, and dismantle it, piece by piece.

Write your own scripts, your own plays and musicals. Start your own band, make your own film. Write your damn poetry and print it or publish it yourselves. Use your cell phones, for God’s sake, and maybe, if we stop taking selfies, stop skimming and scrolling and liking things long enough, we can even use them to take down the government! 

Where will be fifty years from now? Who’s to say. But hopefully by then we can finally talk about the real main characters, the Dolls themselves. Pills for diets, pills for beauty sleep. Pills for heartache and physical pain and depression and grief, for the deep emotional wounds that will not heal. The benzos of 1960’s Hollywood may as well be the Oxys, Percs and Fentynal of the current western world. The dolls are everywhere. The Tabloid story that remains untold is the one about the wealthy, mostly-white men who make the dolls, who market and prescribe the dolls, and get even richer from the dolls. They are the ones whose reckoning shall one day come. 

My final words to you, courageous graduates: (Donna Martin Graduates!)

Every Cock Counts. (Chanting with everyone!)

If you’re going to suck it, suck it good. But never forget what else you’ve got in that mouth: teeth. A toast to one day biting down!

Norway

Agnes Nedregård is a Norwegian performance artist based in Scotland and Norway. Her working practice is primarily based in live performance, while exploring a bodily language in other mediums like video drawings and sculptural installations. She holds a Masters of Fine Art from the Glasgow School of Art (2005), and has since showed her work in festivals, galleries and screenings in Europe, USA and Asia. Frequently she engages in  collaborative practice with other artists, among these Scottish visual artist Moray Hillary and Brazilian performer Raquel Nicoletti. She teaches performance art workshops to students of art, film, theatre and architecture in Europe. Nedregård is the editor of Nordic Tantrum, a web magazine for Nordic performance art.

Canada
https://www.nemerofsky.ca/

Benny Nemerofsky Ramsay is a Montréal-born media artist. Since 2000 his video practice has brought together song, self-reflexive performance for the camera and lyrics from pop music as vehicles for examining the singing voice, multiplicity, the untranslatability of emotions into language and the ways in which emotional expression changes shape when mediated by technology and popular culture. His work has been exhibited both in film festivals and gallery contexts across Canada, Europe and East Asia. In 2004, the Plug In ICA organized Neverending Song of Love, a survey exhibition of his video works to date.

In 2014, FADO is celebrating a milestone – our 20th Anniversary. To commemorate we are looking back to our very beginnings, and are proud to present Duorama #114, #115, #116, #117, #119 and #120, a series of performances created by FADO’s former Performance Art Curator and founding Director Paul Couillard, together with founding member Ed Johnson. Partners in life and art, Paul and Ed have worked together on the performance art series Duorama since 2000.

Playful, beguiling and often minimalist, these pieces explore notions of relationship, and draw on collaborative and competitive tensions that underlie all partnerships. Responding to site and examining cultural attitudes toward male intimacy are key elements of Duorama. Recurring themes revolve around shifting interpretations of what is political and what is personal. Many of the works can be read in terms of the current social and political climate surrounding gay culture, offering askance references to issues such as gay marriage, HIV-status, and portrayals of gay culture. To date, 113 Duorama performances have been presented at galleries, festivals and various events in Canada, France, Poland, Croatia, Ukraine, Belarus, Finland, Germany, Switzerland, Spain, the USA, Singapore, Ireland and the UK.

Starting with Duorama #114 presented in the context of the Rhubarb Festival at Buddies in Bad Times Theatre (where it is rumoured Paul and Ed met for the very first time), FADO hosts a total of six new Duorama performances between February and September. 

Duorama #114
Presented at the 35th Rhubarb Festival
Buddies in Bad Times Theatre, 12 Alexander Street
February 12, 2014 @ 6:00pm–9:00pm

Duorama #115
Presented in the context of the LINK & PIN performance art series, LONG-TERM, which focuses on duos and long-term collaborations. Curated by Sandrine Schaefer and Adriana Disman.
hub14, 14 Markham Street
April 12, 2014 @ 2:00pm–6:00pm

Duorama #116
Presented by Offthemap Gallery | With the Counterpoint Community Orchestra
St. Luke’s United Church, 353 Sherbourne Street
June 7, 2014 @ 7:30pm

Duorama #117
Presented in the context of the exhibition Generations of Queer, curated by Lisa Deanne Smith
Onsite [at] OCAD University, 230 Richmond Street West
June 25, 2014 @ 8:00pm

Duorama #119 & #120 (plus post-performance artist talk)
Presented by Sunday Drive Art Projects in Warkworth, Ontario
August 24 & 30, 2014 @ 1:00pm
Sunday Drive Art Projects has brought together a roster of some of Toronto’s most active artist-run centres and collectives to present satellites in the beautiful village of Warkworth from August 23–September 6, temporarily transforming it into a hub of contemporary art.

https://francisco-fernando-granados.blogspot.com/

Francisco-Fernando Granados is a Toronto-based artist. His multidisciplinary critical practice spans drawing, performance, installation, cultural theory, digital media, public art, and community-based projects. He has presented work in galleries, museums, theatres, artist-run centres and non-traditional sites since 2005. These venues include the Art Gallery of Ontario, Mercer Union, Art Gallery of York University, Gallery TPW, Trinity Square Video, Images Festival, NuitBlanche, Bunker 2 (Toronto), Vancouver Art Gallery, MAI – Montreal, arts interculturels, Darling Foundry (Montreal), the Robert McLaughlin Gallery (Oshawa), MacLaren Art Centre (Barrie), Queens University (Kingston), Neutral Ground (Regina), Third Space (St. John) Hessel Museum of Art (NY), Berrie Center for Performing and Visual Arts at Ramapo College (NJ), Defibrillator Gallery (Chicago), Voices Breaking Boundaries (Houston) Ex Teresa Arte Actual (Mexico City), Kulturhuset (Stockholm), and Theatre Academy at the University of the Arts (Helsinki).

Istvan Kantor presents an Internationally Controversial Performance Art Gala, featuring:
NON GRATA: Storm Generation
Performance Art Network Group from Estonia / New York

PERFORMANCES
3:00pm: Empty parking lot, 163 Sterling Road
7:00pm: The Theatre Centre Pop-up, 1095 Queen Street West

WITH
Burning Iceberg Performance (Noise Band) with Wesley Rickert / Kathleen Reichelt
Solo performance by Jessica Patricia Kichoncho Karuhanga
Jubal Brown (A/VJ Mashup)

“Around the name NON GRATA there have been different hushes and shushes for a long time. Already from the point of view of death of conventionalization of art it has embodied the horrible and unwanted disembodiment of human person, from which the meaninglessness of nowadays art, is pouring out. For those, whose world of arts starts from the point, where the art world ends, NON GRATA has been a liberator, the orphic gap in the seemingly unalterable course, which however betrays us, it is a cure from incest. The main point of the group is ethical – it is the image of primitivism, impersonality and experimenting creativity. The performances of the group take place according to the logic of avoiding codes. The presentations are physical texts, whose ways of orthography and reading are kept within the limits of real actions by the group members. Aesthetical and provocative challenges are represented in places, where the Art World doesn’t work.”
~NONGRATA, Art of the Invisible, Performances 2008-2011

Sponsored by FADO Performance Art Centre. Co-presented with SMASH (store & gallery). Technical support by 253569. Special thanks to the Theatre Centre and Castlepoint.

NON GRATA is an international performance group from Estonia with a floating membership. In Non Grata there have been more than 300 members during the last 12 years from all over the world. The main characteristics is anonymity in group work, ignorance of the local art world and mass media. Group has performed in Asia, Europe, South and North America with street actions, chaotic space and context specific performances, and long lasting ghetto marathons.

FADO is pleased to be facilitating the LIVE ART EXCHANGE’s Canadian edition: CHARCO EXCHANGE. Presented in partnership with DARE-DARE, Link&Pin, and Rats9 in Montréal; and VideoFag in Toronto, CHARCO EXCHANGE happens between two cities from May 11–30, 2015.

The first phase takes place in Montréal from May 11–23, and will culminate in a public sharing in where works in progress/creation will be presented. The duos working together (who have already started the process before meeting in person through email, writing, Skype etc.) are Sofia and Ana; and Isabel and Olivier. In the last week of the project, the four artists move to Toronto where they continue their research, with a final sharing of the work produced will take place on Saturday May 30, in an event that will include live specimens, lectures and exhibition of the process carried out.

ARTISTS
Ana Matey (Spain)
Isabel León (Spain)
Serge Olivier Fokoua (Cameroon/Canada)
Soufïa Bensaïd (Tunisia/Canada)

LIVE ART EXCHANGE is a process-based research and creation project initiated by Ana Matey and Isabel Leon in 2012, and has realized projects with dozens of artists in Spain, Finland and Norway. 

LIVE ART EXCHANGE is an on-going research project on communication and interpretation of messages between individuals, using performance and action art as the basis for this research. LIVE ART EXCHANGE is interested in collective creation and believes that artistic creation is a live act, without boundaries or limits. The project manifests in a variety of proposals including meetings, residencies, workshops, talks and other outcomes including photography, video, and performance working with artists and creative people from different disciplines, backgrounds and origins. LIVE ART EXCHANGE proposes focusing on artistic process and the artists themselves, rather than the outcome or production of specific works. In this project, the research around ideas of ​​communication-interpretation and the process of creation itself goes beyond the outcome of the play itself.

DARE-DARE supports research and valorises emerging practices. Its members are interested in the context of creation and answer the need of exchange and collaboration. DARE-DARE is a flexible, open space devoted to research, experimentation, risk and critical inquiry. The artist-run centre manifests a sustained interest in exploration and in the diversity in the modes of presentation.

LINK&PIN is an international performance art series based in Montréal, Canada. It is organized and curated by Adriana Disman along with a huge amount of support from the local performance art community. It holds a constantly changing mission in an effort to stay relevant. Currently, L&P strives to support artists who are in some way marginalized and engages with thinking through anti-disciplinarity and the politics of arts funding.

RATS9 est un espace positif et inclusif où il est possible, à travers l’art, d’engager une conversation à propos des enjeux féministes, post/dé-coloniaux et queer. Notre mission est d’offrir un support à la création et à la diffusion d’artistes dont le travail aborde les problématiques liées à l’identité sexuelle, ainsi qu’aux pratiques anti-oppressive. Rats9 strives to be a positive and inclusive space where it’s possible, be through art, to engage in conversations about feminism, post-/de-coloniality, and queerness. Our mission is to offer support for the creation and diffusion of artists whose work addresses issues related to sexual identity, as well as anti-oppressive practice.

VIDEOFAG is a storefront cinema and performance lab in Toronto’s Kensington Market, dedicated to the creation and exhibition of video, film, new media, and live art. The space is run by Jordan Tannahil and William Ellis, who converted the space from an old barbershop in October 2012.

Project curated and presented by FADO Performance Art Centre

Workshop partners: Dancemakers & Public Recordings
Performance venue partner: AGO
Gallery partner: Gallery TPW

Performed by:
Robert Abubo
Martin Bélanger
Shannon Cochrane
Aleesa Cohene
Margaret Dragu
Francesco Gagliardi
Ame Henderson
Andrea Nanni
Jon McCurley
Mikiki
Simon Rabyniuk
Sara Wookey

The Project: TRANSMITTING TRIO A (1966)
Over the course of a 5-day intensive workshop led by Sara Wookey – one of the few dancers authorized by Yvonne Rainer to “transmit” (to use Rainer’s own phrase) her works – a mixed group of dance and performance artists will learn several of Rainer’s dance works, focusing primarily on Trio A (1966). 

Consisting of a 4½ minute sequence of movements that progress without repetition, phrasing, or emphasis and performed without musical accompaniment, Trio A (1966) is largely considered to be one of the originative works of the postmodern dance movement, as well one of the most influential works in the canon of 20th century dance. Rainer’s interest in task-based movement, the ephemeral, the un-spectacular, and rethinking the performer-audience relationship are characteristic concerns of both contemporary dance artists and performance artists.

The starting point for this project is the shared conversation between dance and performance artists around the distinctions between repertoire and reenactment, in particular consideration of how these modes of archiving in live art relate to the increasing interest in presenting performance art and choreography in the museum.

The results of the project are a series of presentations of Trio A (and other works in the Rainer repertoire) in a variety of contexts: a dance studio, a gallery, and a museum; as an open rehearsal, a single iteration, and a rotating relay.

FADO’s Transmitting Trio A (1966) project overlaps with Yvonne Rainer’s visit to Toronto where she will deliver an artist talk (Saturday March 21, 7:00pm) entitled Where’s the Passion? in the context of the AGO’s Radical Acts Unconference taking place on March 21. In addition, there are other activations to experience: Sara Wookey will be giving a lecture demonstration about Trio A and Gallery TPW presents a discursive series (March 20–28) curated by Jacob Korczynski and Kim Simon. Entitled, “…a container for mere possibilities that have not yet happened, a body in a state of becoming through time, or a structure for the expression of time as it moves both forwards and backwards at once.” the series responds to and thinks alongside the performances initiated by FADO, allowing the opportunity to see Rainer’s dance again within a constellation of conversations, readings and newly commissioned work.

THANK YOU. This project is possible because of the generous support of Dancemakers (Ben Kamino and Emi Forster) in making the workshop possible. Warm thanks to Public Recordings (Ame Henderson) in conceptualizing the project and helping to assemble the group. Thanks to the AGO (Kathleen McLean and Paola Poletto) for inviting this project into their activities. Thanks to the contribution of Gallery TPW as main host venue, and to curators Jacob Korczynski and Kim Simon for their keen thinking in organizing a series of discursive events in response to the project’s proposal.

SCHEDULE
Dance is Hard to See: Capturing and Transmitting Movement through Language, Media and Muscle Memory, a lecture demonstration by Sara Wookey
March 19, 7:30pm @ Dancemakers, Distillery District, 15 Case Goods Lane

Performance of Trio A (1966) by Sara Wookey
March 24, 7:00pm @ Gallery TPW

Open rehearsals of Trio A (1966)
March 22, 4:00–5:00pm @ Dancemakers
March 25, 7:00-8:00pm @ AGO, 317 Dundas Street West
March 28, 12:00-5:00pm @ Gallery TPW, 170 St. Helens Avenue

FADO Performance Art Centre presents Silent Dinner, an 8-hour performance in which a group of people arrive to the theatre space, set up a rudimentary kitchen, and then prep, cook and eat a dinner in shared silence, without communicating in their language of origin, in front of the attending audience. The performance is created with special guest artist Irish performance artist Amanda Coogan who is CoDA (Child of Deaf Adults) and 12 performer/participants who are a combination of Deaf and hearing performers and non-performers from Toronto.

PERFORMERS:
Ahmed Muslimani
Alexandrose Dayment
Amanda Coogan
Anselmo DeSousa
Catherine MacKinnon
Christopher Welsh
Keli Safia Maksud
Mary Balint
Michelle Bourgeois
Mikiki
Laura Nanni
Sage Willow
Shannon Cochrane

Conceived by Shannon Cochrane & Amanda Coogan

Silent Dinner is inspired by a choreographic exercise devised by Canadian dance artist Justine Chambers entitled Family Dinner, and American artist Lois Weaver’s well-known public discourse practice, The Long Table. In Weaver’s Long Table (inspired by Marleen Gorris’s film Antonia’s Line, in which the dinner table continually extends to accommodate the growing community of outsiders and eccentrics, until finally the table must be moved out of doors), the rules of engagement allow those sitting at the table to participate in the conversation in whatever way they wish, without limit or restriction to access or content. Using the table as a structure to orchestrate a conversation around, this long table combines community interaction with theatricality. As a form The Long Table, “acknowledges the sometimes uncomfortable side of both private exchange and public engagement, while celebrating the potential for new forms of knowledge-making and -sharing”, while the rules (or rather, the helpful hints as Weaver calls them) state that there can be silence.

In FADO’s Silent Dinner, silence is transformed from a potential born of discomfort or newness, and transformed into the landscape in which indirect communication between people who don’t share the same language is negotiated. The dinner table becomes a meeting place for the intersection of culture and language (hearing and Deaf culture, English and ASL, performance as language) via a performance score employing the everyday activity of sharing a meal. Over the course of the 8-hours of the performance the performers experience, and the audience bares witness to, the many varied and complex layers of communication, compromise, and decision-making that are being performed through construction and deconstruction, art and food, theatre and everyday ritual, the performance of the public and the private. The table functions as both motif (in theatre the table is a prop, in performance it is material) and metaphor for community and connection.

POST-PERFORMANCE Q&A
Join us at 9:00pm for coffee, dessert and a post-performance Q&A with the performers of Silent Dinner. ASL interpretation provided.

VLOG about Silent Dinner

FADO would like to offer a big THANKS to our friends and colleagues who have helped us and made this project possible, including Signs Restaurant and Rachel Shemuel, Nicka Noble, Jess Shane, Deanna Bradley-Coelho, Kerry Grandfield and Corene Kennedy and the 2nd and 3rd year students of the ASL-English interpreter program at George Brown College, and our team of trained professional ASL-English interpreters Amanda Hyde, Tara Everett, Shelly Nafshi and Silvia Wannam.

Curated and presented by FADO Performance Art Centre in association with Progress: an International Festival of Performance and Ideas.

SummerWorks, in partnership with The Theatre Centre and a roster of Toronto theatre and performance organizations/presenters and companies including FADO Performance Art Centre, Buddies in Bad Times, Dancemakers, Why Not Theatre, Video Fag, and Volcano Theatre, brings the world to Toronto with Progress: an International Festival of Performance and Ideas, February 4–15, 2015.

Performance by Wit Lopez
With special guest performance by Amai Kuda et Les Bois featuring Y Josephine on percussion 

Feminist Art Gallery (F.A.G.) and FADO Performance Art Centre are pleased to bring to you a PERFORMANCE CINQ A SEPT with FAG residency artist, Wit López. With a Special Guest performance by Amai Kuda et Les Bois featuring Y Josephine. ALSO, Wit and Amai will also be performing original music!

Wit López is a Brooklyn-raised, Philly-made, award-winning performance conjurer and pro-magicianatrix creating art out of the joy and fear of being alive. As a disabled and chronically-ill, nonbinary trans, intersex person of African American and Boricua descent, López’s visual and performance work uses absurdity to convey and challenge how they experience the world.

Amai Kuda et Les Bois have been featured in NOW magazine and on CBC’s Canada Live and Big City Small World, as well as performed at venues like the Jane Mallett Theatre, Harbourfront, The Rivoli, The Garrison, and festivals such as Luminato, Kultrun, Big on Bloor and Small World Music Festival. They have given workshops on music, decolonization, African cultural knowledge and percussion at public schools, universities, libraries and community centres throughout Southern Ontario, in the Caribbean and Europe. Their latest album titled AfroSoul Volume Volume III: Re’ was described by NOW magazine as a “tantalizing Afro-soul combo of folk, roots, desert blues and African continental music.”

Performance!
Snacks!
Open invitation and free.

All welcome.
We can’t wait to see you.

Established in 2010. The Feminist Art Gallery (F.A.G) is—a response, a process, a site, a protest, an outcry, an exhibition, a performance, an economy, a conceptual framework, a place and an opportunity. We host we fund we advocate we support we claim. The Feminist Art Gallery (FAG) is our geographical footprint located in Toronto, Canada and run by Allyson Mitchell and Deirdre Logue. Other FAG activities: We are DAG (in collaboration with Gigi Basanta): a micro funding program that has so far supported 4 feminist art projects in Canada including: Les Blues, Colour me Dragg, No More Pot Lucks, Her Jazz Noise.

Curated by Dainty Smith & Golboo Amani

PUSH.PULL is a six-month online series of interdisciplinary events examining emergent and intersectional developments in performance art and QT BIPOC cabaret. Curated by storyteller, producer and stage performer Dainty Smith and multidisciplinary artist Golboo Amani, PUSH.PULL highlights QTBIPOC cabaret performers at the intersections of live stage performance and radical political performativity.

PERFORMANCES by: Adrienne Huard, Anasimone, Babia Majora, Betsy Swoon, Cara De Melo, Cat Zaddy, Crocodile Lightning, Dolly Berlin, Gay Jesus, Imogen Quest, Ivory, James Knott, Johlene, Kimora Koi, LAL, Lucinda Mui, Lwrds, Mikiki, Ravyn Wngz, Suki Tsunami, Tanya Cheex, Tygr Willy.

SPECIAL APPEARANCES by: Perle Noire, Rania El Mugammar, Aggie Panda, Amber Dawn

PUSH.PULL presents three online Showcases featuring performers from across North America. Each showcase offers a diverse range of contemporary practices reflecting the theatrical, political and emotional range and depth of cabaret performance. 

FREE Tickets for all showcases: Buddies in Bad Times Theatre


PUSH.PULL presents BARE
April 9 @ 9:00pm (EST)
Featuring: Suki Tsunami, Lady Ore, Crocodile Lightning, Gay Jesus, Ivory, LAL  
BARE: A showcase of sensual exploration that reimagines and extorts the expectations of our own desires. Performances offering consensual and deliberate confrontations, challenging the idea of the submissive and passive nude. When skin is presented, when nudity is shown, who is vulnerable? Who is powerless? 

PUSH.PULL presents TAUNT
April 23 @ 9:00pm (EST)
Featuring: Betsy Swoon, Dolly Berlin, Johleen, Ravyn Wngz, Lucinda Miu, James Knott, Anasimone
TAUNT: A show that celebrates the power of seduction; of intentional sexuality. A thread of rage runs though burlesque. Burlesque is unapologetically rebellious, it is where the feminine, self-love, sexual agency and manipulation are performed without shame or explanation. It is a place and space where we can all misbehave together and where we are taunted by sexuality wielded like a weapon. 

PUSH.PULL presents TOPPED
May 14 @ 9:00pm (EST)
Featuring: Imogen Quest, Babia Majora, Cara De Melo, Tanya Cheex, Cat Zaddy, Mikiki, Tygr Willy, Adrienne Huard
TOPPED: Cautions, titillates and teases. The cabaret is a feminized, glamourous and glittered, a holy and sacred place. Moving and living through expressions of sexuality in its full scope of dominance and assertion, the performer toys and plays with gender, power, laughter, vulnerability, and seduction. In cabaret, we have the audacity to believe that our bodies are important, invaluable, meaningful and worth listening to. 

PUSH.PULL includes a three-part speaker series inviting performers and cultural creatives to engage in conversations at the intersections of visual culture, sex work, performance and politics by recognizing cabaret as a site of cultural production and community engagement. We’ve also included a series of workshops led by professionals in the field, aimed at engaging audience participants and community members in immersive skill-sharing experiences deepening appreciation, interest and critical engagement with cabaret.

April 14: Speaker Series: Unusual Business: The business of being a showgirl
April 28: Workshop: Body Love with Dainty Smith
For more information about PUSH.PULL workshops AND artist talks, visit Aluna Theatre

PUSH.PULL is presented in association with Buddies in Bad Times Theatre & Aluna Theatre. Sponsored by FADO Performance Art Centre. Funded by the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council.

FADO Performance Art Centre was pleased to help support Bricks & Glitter for their online and in-person (socially distanced) 2020 festival.

Bricks & Glitter is a community arts festival celebrating Two-Spirt, trans and queer talent, ingenuity, caring, anger and abundance. We are a trouble of queers who believe in creativity, collectivity and practicing the future in the now. We are intersectional be default and critical by necessity. Our 2020 festival centres Black, Indigenous and racialized artists coming together to imagine a world worth living in—for all of us. 

ARTISTS
Ms. Nookie Galore, Franny Galore, Mikiki, leZlie lee kam, Tamai Kobayashi, Rhona Spencer, Buster Cherry, David Bateman, Jord Camp, DJ Xeynamay, DJ Mirass, DJ MXMSXY, DJ Pothound, Ivory, TravoyInTheFlesh, Mango Lassi, Drag King Sebastian, Pastel Supernova, Cat Zaddy, Midnight Wolverine, Billie the Kid, Namitha Rathinappillai, Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures Collective, Mina Minou, Tygr Willy, Ola Minoul, Daddy Gambino, Kareena Pussy Couture, Sage Lovell, Thurga Kanagasekarampillai AND MANY MORE!

Bricks & Glitter 2020 was funded by the Ontario Arts Council, Toronto Arts Council, FADO Performance Art Centre and Groundswell Community Justice Trust Fund.

Bricks & Glitter website
Bricks & Glitter on Facebook
Bricks & Glitter on Instagram

Image: © Johannes Zits, Working with Wood: Beaver Remnants, Pi*llOry part four, 2020. Photo by Tina Bararian.

Canada
www.johanneszits.com

My art invites a questioning of our preconceptions of nature that continue to be imposed by dominant histories and reductive, binaristic constructs. It is more than a passive backdrop in which we live and take from. Like the rest of nature, a tree is a responsive and creative body and should not be fixed simply in the realm of the material and sublime. To achieve more immersive conditions in my encounters with trees, I take time to observe, experience, contemplate and share. These extended moments open up spaces for reflective, as well empathetic actions and interactions.

Johannes Zits works with and combines digital imaging, collage, photography and painting to focus on the body. He received his BFA from York University in 1984. He has shown both in Canada and abroad. Zits travels widely while pursuing his art research. His extended stays in various cities include Taipei, Paris, Amsterdam, Vienna, Shanghai, Manchester, Hamburg, Santiago, London and Berlin.

Image © Sheri Osden Nault, miina kawapamitin (until we meet again, in Michif), Pi*llOry part four, 2020. Photo by Tina Bararian.

www.sherinault.com

Sheri Osden Nault is an artist of Michif and mixed European descent. Situated within personal and political contexts, their art practice and research are grounded in queer, feminist, and Indigenous world-views. They strive to elicit a sense of social and ecological responsibility and intimacy on a damaged planet, recently focusing on connections between bodies, sexuality, and nature. Recent exhibitions include: Where the Shoreline Meets the Water at the ArQuives, Toronto (2020); Shapeshifters, curated by Amanda Amour-Lynx, Toronto (2019); Off-Centre at the Dunlop Art Gallery, Regina (2019); Fix Your Hearts or Die at the Art Gallery of Alberta, Edmonton (2019).

Nathan Roy is an Anishnawbe from Wikwemikong located on Manitoulin Island. Nathan was born and raised in Toronto. He has been singing for over 25 years. He is apart of a previously grammy nominated singing/drumming group called Bear Creek. Nathan enjoys traveling across North America sharing his drum teachings and his singing.

Deanne Hupfield is Anishnawbe from Temagami First Nation, Ontario, Canada. A descendant of Indian Residential School survivors, Deanne has dedicated her life to learning and preserving her culture. She learned to dance from a small age and has spent her life passing on related teachings to her community. She has taught dance for the past 15 years, including weekend classes at The Native Canadian Center of Toronto, and currently teaches virtual regalia making courses as owner of www.deannehupfield.com. As an educator she actively teaches the history of Canadian policy that affects Indigenous people. Deanne was Ironwoman, Wiki Pow Wow 2015.

John Hupfield Waaseyaabin is Anishinaabe from Wasauksing First Nation, Ontario, Canada. He is a Phd Candidate in Education at York University, living and working in Toronto where he is a recognized dancer and active community member. He attended powwows his entire life but only started grass dancing in his mid-20s. He is a regular invited and head dancer at many First Nations’ and community powwows throughout Ontario. His dancing can be seen in the music video for Indian City, 2016, by A Tribe Called Red; The One Who Keeps on Giving, 2017, double channel video by Maria Hupfield; and Miigis, 2018, a production fusing contemporary Indigenous dance with athleticism by Red Sky Performance, Toronto.

Abigail Lim is a Criminology graduate from the University of Toronto. She competed for Team Canada in the 2018 World Naginata Championships. She is currently a member of the University of Toronto Naginata Club.

Lutan Lui a PhD student at University of Toronto. She has been practicing naginata at the University of Toronto Naginata Club for seven years. In 2019 Lui (along with on Abigail Lim) competed as a pair in Engi division of World’s Naginata Championship in Wiesbaden, Germany.

b. 1950, Taiwan / USA
https://www.tehchinghsieh.net/

Renowned former performance artist, and currently self-declared non-artist, Tehching Hsieh, is most recognized for his One Year performances. He has lived in a cage, he has lived by the clock, he has lived outside, and he has lived tied by a six-foot rope to a fellow performance artist, Linda Montano. Each performance lasted for one year. His fifth and final performance, Earth, the content of which remained a secret for thirteen years, was disclosed to the public with a simple statement “I kept myself alive. I passed the December 31st, 1999.” Hsieh believes that with the completion of his thirteen year piece that there is nothing left for him to accomplish in this world.

“My idea is that time becomes the main thing, how I pass the time is my main concern. It doesn’t matter what I do, I pass time.” ~Tehching Hsieh

Kristine Stiles is an associate professor at Duke University. She is a prolific writer on contemporary art theories, a multi-disciplinary artist and an academic. Her performances have been widely celebrated with such fellow artists as Yoko Ono, Francesco Conz and Sherman Flemming. Stiles co-edited Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art: A Sourcebook of Artists’ Writings (1996). Currently, she is working on five books.

VIGILANTES –the dream of reason creates monsters–
Edited by Tania Bruguera
Design by Bill Pusztai
36 pp. (including 6 pp of b/w images)

Introductory text and performance descriptions by Tania Bruguera; as well as essays by Tagny Duff and Erin Manning.

VIGILANTES –the dream of reason creates monsters– is a small book reminiscent of a group of plane tickets in a travel folder that documents a series of liminal performances dealing with the relationship between ethics and desire. Produced in conjunction with the TIME ZONES residency curated by Tagny Duff, with internationally acclaimed Cuban artists Glenda León and Tania Bruguera.

During the residency, Bruguera commuted weekly between Chicago and Canada (first to Montréal and then to Toronto) using these trips as an opportunity to perform for the unsuspecting audience of her fellow travelers.

Bruguera describes VIGILANTES –the dream of reason creates monsters– as, “…a series of performances dealing with the relationship between ethics and desire; with the tension that can be found in a state of emotional vigilia, which is the state between being awake and asleep. Each piece will have several layers of appreciation, either from the position of the audience or of their level of boldness. These will be pieces that talk about the false strength and the hidden fragility.”

To obtain a copy of this publication, please contact us at info@performanceart.ca

b. 1945, Germany

www.blackkit.org
www.performanceartarchive.com

Boris Nieslony has worked intensively as a performance artist, curator, archivist and independent scholar, staging various installations, interventions and artist projects since the 1970s. He is the founder of Black Market International, a performance group that meets regularly in various configurations to realize group performance projects, and ASA, a foundation for a self-organizing rhizomatic network of performance artists and theorists. Today, Boris Nieslony is recognized as one of the most prolific and significant contributors to performance art, presenting his work around the world.

Japan
www.niwa-staff.org

Yoshinori Niwa is a physical performance artist who often incorporates animals, plants, and the environment into his work. Niwa’s aim is to explore how to live with others, especially those with different life experience (ethno-cultural, economic, etc). Some of his performances are site-specific, however is especially interested in how performances change from venue to venue and between audiences, so he is well attuned to responding to that which is around him. Niwa is a graduate of the Tama Art University Department of Moving Images and Performing Arts (Tokyo) and he has performed in Britain, Canada, China, Estonia, Germany, Hungary, Japan, Montenegro, Poland, Romania, Serbia, and Slovakia. He has also undertaken artistic residences through VENT Live Art (Oxford, UK), The Asahi Shimbun Foundation (Japan), and Tou Scene (Norway). In addition to his performance work, Niwa is active as a cultural producer in Japan and he has collaborated on a range of events and projects including the 2006 Tokyo-San Francisco Arts Festival. In 2007, he coordinated an international art festival titled “Artist as Activist,” which took place in Tokyo.

The sixth in the Golden Book series and essential reading for the performances presented in FADO’s Performance Club series, Performance Club: The Syllabus contains everything you need for your Performance Club 4–6 experience (including that pesky homework).

Designed by Lisa Kiss Design
72 pages

TABLE OF CONTENTS

1. This is a Queer Series
Introduction by Moynan King

2. Queer/Play
By Moe Angelos

3. Three O’Clock
By Cornell Woolrich

4. I Wanted To Be Bisexual But My Father Wouldn’t Let Me
By David Bateman

Join us for a special presentation of the Long Table with Lois Weaver herself, presented in collaboration with Progress and the Rhubarb Festival.

The Long Table is a dinner party structured by etiquette, where conversation is the only course. The project ingeniously combines theatricality and models for public engagement. It is at once a stylized appropriation and an open-ended, non-hierarchical format for participation. Both of these elements–theatrical craft and political commitment–are mutually supporting in this widely and internationally toured work. The (often-feminized) domestic realm here becomes a stage for public thought.

As an experiment in performance as a means of public engagement, the Long Table has been taken up by a vast array of of practitioners in a variety of disciplines as a way to encircle, question, and reflect in a performative, and communal way. Lois Weaver, the originator of the Long Table, hosts this special edition for Progress.

Progress is an international festival of performance and ideas presented in partnership by SummerWorks Performance Festival and The Theatre Centre. The festival is collectively curated and produced by a series of Toronto-based companies, operating within a contemporary performance context. Progress 2018 is curated by: SummerWorks Performance Festival, The Theatre Centre, Anandam Dancetheatre, FADO Performance Art Centre, Little Black Afro Theatre Company, Toronto Dance Community Love-In, and Volcano Theatre.

This event will be ASL Interpreted. All welcome. FREE.

b. 1976, Canada
www.christianmessier.ninja

Christian Messier was born in 1976, currently living and working in Québec City where he completed his Masters degree at Laval University. Messier’s work has been presented in exhibitions and events in Québec (Rencontre Internationale dʼart performance de Québec, Manif dʼart 3, DSM -V+) as well as internationally in Poland, Ireland, Argentina, Cuba and France.

FADO is pleased to welcome Marita Bullman (Germany) and Ignacio Pérez Pérez (Venezuela/Finland) to the International Visiting Artists series, along with Liina Kuittinen (Finland). This series seeks to bring exceptional artists from the global performance art scene to Toronto, to present a new work (September 20) and give an artist talk (September 21) about their own practices and the contemporary performance art ecologies of their home cities/countries.

In addition to presenting new solo performance works, both Marita Bullmann and Ignacio Pérez Pérez will engage audiences in talks about their individual practices.

Marita Bullman and Ignacio Pérez Pérez’s appearance in Toronto is in collaboration with VIVA! Art Action, one of FADO’s enduring partners. FADO and VIVA! have partnered several times (2013: Tomasz Szrama / Poland, Macarena Perich Rosas / Chile; 2015: Victoria Gray / UK, Dorothea Rust / Switzerland) over the years to share the presentation of international artists to both platforms in order to bring exceptional artists and their work to audiences in both cities; in addition to giving visiting artists the unique opportunity of engaging with performance communities in both Toronto and Montreal.

Image credit © Marita Bullman, untitled (another small matter), 2017. Photo Rebekah Dahlia.

Doors Open Toronto comes to The Commons @ 401 Richmond on May 26, for a day of film and video screenings. As a part of this program, FADO Performance Art Centre is excited to screen the world premiere of How to explain performance art to my teenage daughter (2018, video, 6:00) by Montréal-based artist, Rachel Echenberg.

How to explain performance art to my teenage daughter was originally a performance (2015) that was later remade as a video and photo series. The work references Joseph Beuys’ well-known 1965 performance, How to explain pictures to a dead hare, in which he explains his exhibition to a dead hare with his head covered in honey and gold. In Echenberg’s version, mother and daughter embrace the difficult intricacies of explaining art by simultaneously covering each other’s heads with honey and gold leaf. Absurdity and intimacy merge to reveal understanding as a sensory activity.

Echenberg’s work will be screened alongside a selection of works curated by our colleagues in The Commons @ 401, including: Alexandra Hickox’s Just Like You Do presented by Vtape; Toronto Reel Asian International Film Festival presents A Cello in the Subway by Iven Tu; Wakening by Danis Goulet is presented by imagineNATIVE Film + Media Arts Festival; and The Mountain, Les Invisibles by Amshu Chukki is presented by South Asian Visual Arts Centre.

The 19th annual Doors Open Toronto, May 25–26, 2018, presented by Great Gulf provides an opportunity to see inside more than 130 of the most architecturally, historically, culturally and socially significant buildings across the city. This year’s theme, “Film: The Great Romance” explores the city’s film and television industry. With more than 1,400 on-location film, television and digital media productions taking place in the city each year, Toronto is North America’s third largest screen-based production centre and the heart of Canada’s film and television sector. The Doors Open Toronto program features historic cinemas, film and television studios, post-production houses, digital media studios, artist-run centres and film training schools. The program also highlights buildings that have been featured in film and television, many of which are often not open to the public.

Yoshimichi Takei has developed an original performance style based on his background in Butoh dance and Japanese ‘avant-garde mime’. In his work, Takei engages in a ‘collaboration’ between his body and various electronic instruments, including light bulbs, sensors and everyday appliances.

Big Yawn offers a duet between Takei’s body and a light/sensor/sound system that he wears. As he executes a range of motion from frenzy to stillness with focused grace and precision, Takei creates not just a dance, but also a score of light and sound. At the same time, he offers a complex emotional journey shaded with humour and passion.

Hailed as being in the forefront of contemporary Japanese dance, Takei’s work is presented regularly in dance and performance festivals throughout Japan and has been seen in Europe and New York. Big Yawn marks his Canadian debut.

Co-sponsored by A Space

AGYU and FADO Performance Art Centre welcome you to an on-line artist engagement with Joyce LeeAnn presented as part of the solo exhibition, Jess Dobkin’s Wetrospective. During our time together, she will lead us on a journey to explore archival processing as performance art.

Joyce LeeAnn is a certified archivist, an interdisciplinary artist, and the founder of Archival Alchemy®. As an archivist, she has worked for a community archive, a corporate archive, a large public library, and a prestigious museum. However, her archival praxis began as a young girl, and as an act of decolonization she centers her innate methods. Through her artistic projects, she is creating an archive of everything that she has conquered and is overcoming. This is the essence of Archival Alchemy®. Created in 2017 and cultivated directly from Joyce LeeAnn’s practice, Archival Alchemy® is a small business that supports institutions and artists to activate and enrich archives.

This artist engagement is presented in community with the AGYU as part of a constellation of talks, perfromances and public engagements for Jess Dobkin’s Wetrospective. The AGYU would like to thank: 16 TONNES, ampd*, FADO Performance Art Centre, franklin furnace, Hemispheric encounters (SSHRC), polyjohn, QUEST AV and Sensorium.

WATCH the archived talk on the AGYU website HERE.

Jess Dobkin’s Wetrospective
September 2–26, 2021

“Driven by an interest in how one might performatively engage the energetic liveness of archives from polysemous perspectives Jess Dobkin’s Wetrospective takes up and takes apart the linear, patriarchal, and authoritative conventions of archive-making impulses. Channeling them instead toward more rhizomatic readings and feminist relationalities, she upcycles her own archive of past performances in ways that constitute her concept of “bendy-time.” The “archive” performs in this exhibition at the same time as it makes sense of (as in making sensate and sensual) an artist’s 25-plus-years of performance art work—including all its material and immaterial remains, reminders, and affective labour. This exhibition demands of archives what we expect from performance: the live encounter of experience in a ritual of transformation. Taking past performances as cues and as clues, this exhibition is a polytemporal, feminist, and queer experience of an archive of possible futurities, open to forever accommodating the always-shifting communities of belonging that Dobkin’s performance practice entails and magically conjures.” ~Emelie Chhangur, curator

ABOUT AGYU
Art Gallery of York University (AGYU) is a socially minded public non-profit contemporary art gallery that is a space for the creation and appreciation of art and culture. It is an affiliated and supported unit of York University, with key funders including the Canada Council for the Arts, the Province of Ontario through the Ontario Arts Council, the City of Toronto through the Toronto Arts Council, foundations, embassies, other cultural institutions, and through our membership. Throughout its 32-year history, AGYU has always operated at the forefront of contemporary artistic, curatorial, and art institutional practices.

Prologue

This is about a domestic love-affair between myself and advanced interior decorating technique. This is about the in-between of my placement, of my desire. Me, in-between: wallpaper valances, contrasting trim, kitchen islands, ferns.

This is about me, trying to make the look work; me, wanting it to all hang together; me, giving it that je ne sais pas; and me, getting the details right, the little things, the finishing touches.

Oh, oh and that feels so…hard.
Oh, oh, oh, and I’m so very…pointed.
Oh and yes and oh…I think I’ll… clean up a bit.

Introduction

I am so clean! I am so white! I’m so up, pro, up, pro, up on life!
‘Cause I’ve got a contract, a done deal, signed (clap), sealed delivered
And I’m his.
I’ve been chosen for the whitest, brightest smile.
I’ve been saved, because sin won’t stick to me.
I’ve been taken and it’s about time, too.
I’ve got this contract,
This marriage contract, signed (clap) to him in the big white robe,
Signed (clap) over to his slightly crucified but still attractive son,
And signed (clap) again on earth with ink on paper making me third-hand goods,
A-signed (clap) to a man in the flesh who mows the lawn.

There are so many things that I know, because he says so.
And he should know because he makes them happen.
The weather, that’s him.
American foreign policy, that’s him, too.
Natural disasters, prime-time programming, he does it all
His way.
A real self-starter, a self man-made
In his own image:
The weather, American foreign policy, natural disasters, prime-time programming,
And me.
Not bad, eh?
Not too shabby.
Kinda scary!
I mean, I wouldn’t want to get on his bad side, no.
Because the dark side of good is really bad.
I know, because I’m so good.
I’m so clean! I’m so white! I’m so up, pro, up, pro, up on life!

Marriage

Marriage is a lot like driving a car. Let’s say you’re going on a little trip, just the two of you. You pack your bags, jump in, and go. Now, how many of you are sitting behind the steering wheel? How many of you are actually doing the driving? That’s right, only one of you. There’s only room for one person in the driver’s seat. And what does he do? He controls the direction and speed of the vehicle. He indicates which way he’ll be turning and he toots the horn. In short he carefully maneuvers the car for the good and safety of all of the passengers. But that doesn’t mean that the co-pilot isn’t very important, too. When there’s two people in the car, she reads the map, finds the best radio station, provides pleasant conversation, and passes snacks to the driver. She has a very busy job, but she is not driving. In fact, what would happen if she reached over and grabbed the steering wheel? What would happen if she suddenly decided it was her turn? The car would go out of control, wouldn’t it? Even if she just leaned over to flick on the headlights, even that would startle the driver, and he might get into an accident. This shows us a very important point. When people don’t do what they’re supposed to do, when people don’t stick to their jobs, they end up hurting not only themselves, but others as well. Let’s take a look at Adam and Eve in the garden. When Eve took that apple, who was in the driver’s seat? And where did she end up driving them? You know where. Down a one-way freeway straight out of paradise. Eve took a wrong turn. But her big mistake was taking the wheel in the first place. Not only did it have serious repercussions for her, her family, and the entire course of human history, it also made Adam feel bad. Not only was it an extremely dangerous thing to do, it also hurt Adam’s feelings. And that’s not very nice, is it? It’s not very nice, and it’s not very smart. Because the driver can get in the car alone, and still start it up and make it run. He might get a little lost, he might not get any snacks, but he can still get up and go. Whereas the co-pilot, when she climbs into the car by herself, ends up spending a lot of time in the driveway, just reading those maps.

Bridge

The dark side of good is really bad.
I know, because I am so good, so clean, so white
That every dirty thought shows up bright-
Ly on my immaculate construction.
Every dirty thought can be read like an open book
Spelling what I want and how I want it, when.
Words you see scratched on bathroom walls.
Words you’re embarrassed to know.
Humiliating, needy words
Show up
On my complexion.

Romance Novels

My fantasies exist between the pages of paperback novels published every four days in fourteen languages for an average cost of $4.95…Canadian.
Reading Windswept Summer, Nurses’ Folly, or Indiscretion at Midnight
In Punjabi, Cantonese, or Cree
Is the only reason I can think of for bothering to learn another language.
Those foreigners, the way they speak,
It’s as if they’re always yelling.
But I’m sure that those languages wouldn’t sound so bad
Tripping from the lips of
Clark Cowell, Troubled Millionaire,
Whistled from between the teeth of
Flint Blackwell, Brilliant-But-Lonely Surgeon,
Or whispered by
Jon (that’s J-O-N) Johnson, International Explorer, Oxford-Educated, Hunk-A-Burning-Love, who has a Six-Figure Annuity and has Never Really Loved Before.
I know this is awfully liberal of me to admit
But if Jon Johnson was willing to take me
To his ancestral castle in the south of France,
Make love to me for hours every day,
And ask me what I think from time to time
I wouldn’t mind if he spoke Lebanese, or Zulu, or…French.
I really wouldn’t mind too much.
I wouldn’t mind a bit.

Fantasy #1 – Border Town Romances

Fantasy #1: Border town romances (twirl).
What makes border town romances so…special?
The meeting of culture? The mystery of difference?
The preciousness of each and every moment?
Or is it the pain of longing? The difficulty of talking?
The disapproval of one’s family and friends?
Perhaps it’s that they only exist in the present.
You probably won’t have time to discover each other’s personal habits.
Taking out a mortgage together just isn’t in the cards.
And across that border you have a better chance of being shot, than of getting pregnant.
It makes sex seem less risky.
It makes sex seem more fun.
It makes you feel that the border doesn’t really exist.
Your love is stronger than its walls.
Your love transcends all obstacles.
Your love is absolutely, positively unique.
While it lasts.
Oh, you know it can’t.
It’s impossible. It’s insane. It’s…O.K.
You have an out. An escape hatch. Fine print.
Because forever is really an awfully long time.
Forever takes too long.
And it all becomes the same after awhile:
On and on and on without end.
So, if you’re lucky, it’ll be tragic.
It’ll be epic, yet it’ll be quick.
Your love will be spectacular from start to finish.
And afterwards you can cry and cry, grieve and remember.
You’ll live with your memories
And you have more time to shop for other things.

Bridge

My fears in life are few and far between:
Saturated fat,
Communism,
And GRAVITY.

Sagging Flesh

A woman’s foundations are exceedingly important in an increasingly gravity filled world. This sneaky phenomenon—gravity—this downward pull that threatens my very concept of up and down, replacing it with lower, lower, lower; this force is actively conspiring against us for no other reason than spiteful adherence to some banal law of physics. It’s a bit of a downer, to say the least. As I find my flesh collecting in puddles at my feet, my nipples lolling in hard to find places like corners, under beds, beneath bric-a-brac shelves, constantly getting stuck in the hose of my vacuum cleaner. But the real problem is not the extra housework that these downwardly mobile body parts entail. I hesitate to admit it, but it’s true: my very real concern is that parts of my dangerously sagging self might end up in bad neighbourhoods. And what then? How could I fight? There’s no bleach strong enough to save my shimmering self. I could scrub and scrub and rub and rub, but those streets, those people will never know sparkling, lemon fresh, central vac, and snow white appliances. How could they? Their ways are uncertain and unsafe, not even aware of the dirt under their nails, the bacteria populating their surfaces, their skins dark and shadowy. They may be happy in their ways, but how could I manage among them? Surely no better than they among us.

These are the thoughts that keep me awake nights worrying, that stain my dress with rings of nervous perspiration throughout the day. For it seems not improbable that bits of my body might end up there, on the wrong side of the tracks. And therefore to continue to believe that the line between “me” and “them”, “same” and “Different” is firm and perky would be naive. Especially when the stretches and wrinkles in my skin illustrate how fluid my own borders are. So perhaps it’s alarmist, and perhaps it’s not, but I cannot sit idly by and await this prodigal fate. I must women my defenses and women them well; batten my hatches, and buckle and snap myself into underwear that binds and separates, having painfully evolved from lingerie to veritable architecture.

Bridge

My fears in life are few, it’s true,
But my fantasies can’t be counted.

Fantasy #2 – The List

Fantasy #2: achieving everything on my to-do list (twirl).
As I suck dirt into my waiting bag of empty, clean space
As I fill the interior of my open-plan, decorator-deluxe hollowness
I think of curtain stays,
Grid suspended pot racks,
Self-feeding electrical cords,
And other time-saving restraints.
I can’t get enough of this dirt.
Frankly, it’s just not dirty enough for me.
But I’m trying to make do, trying to make out
Tiny specs that have fallen between my cracks
That I can come to on my hands and knees
And rub and scrub until I slip in the grease of my own elbows.
The dust and the grime of this house are mine
Traces of my body that I massage
With brushes and sprays and an entire array
Of highly toxic germ fighting solutions
To the problem of “a woman’s work never really being done.”
It sounds like a small thing to get excited over — dirt —
But then we are expected to get excited over little things.
And this proof of my untidy, ever-exfoliating self
Tells me I am here
I am real in this world of gloss
The mess I feel is real.
I know it—it is of me—and it knows me
Well.
It knows my flesh.
It knows, and it holds me there,
Bent over sinks,
Arms deep in toilets,
Crawling across floors
Wanting the dirtiness of dirt.
Wanting to take back the dirt.
Take back me.
Take it in.
Suck it in.
Lick it in.
Be in dirt.
Be in me.
Come in me.
Dirtily.

But I want it, I want it, I want it. All. Instead of this scary get-down, show down, between none other, is there anything worse, than saturated communism, and sneaky, pinko fat?

Marriage Quiz

One: Question. What makes marriage so attractive?
Two: Bigger student loans? A good excuse to move out of your parents home? Wedding presents?
One: No. I mean, why did you marry? What led up to your decision to join together in holy union?
Two: It seemed like a good idea at the time.
One: But haven’t there been benefits to being a married woman?
Two: Could you repeat the question?
One: Let’s try another one. When I say, “To have and to hold…,” you think of….
Two: Strangulation? Suffocation? The correlation between ownership and theft?
One: When I say, “‘Till death do us part…,” you feel….
Two: Homicidal? Suicidal? Resistant to the concept of reincarnation?
One: You’re not trying very hard. We’ll try again. Question. What does marriage mean to you?
Two: Infinite compromise. Sacrifice. Selflessness. Losing oneself entirely.
One: That’s better! And who is the most important person to remember in a marriage?
Two: Me! Him? (pause) God? (bells and whistles)

Fantasy #3 – Lesbian Nation

Fantasy #3: lesbian nation (twirl).
Being a domestic goddess isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.
Have you ever noticed that you can wash the floor in the morning, by nightfall it looks just the same as before you started? That you can do all of the dishes, and in a matter of hours someone has gone and dirtied them again? That children are little grime magnets, picking up all manner of stubborn stains and bringing them home again?

Well, I’ve been thinking. If I could get rid of my family, it would effectively cut my work load by 60%. And then I would finally have time to devote myself more fully to being a homemaker. Then I could start to get ahead in the domestic world. Make something of myself. Achieve those far off goals. Perhaps move up to a ranch style. Without PTA or connubial duties getting in the way.

And you know, I bet I’m not the only one. I bet there are hundreds, maybe thousands, maybe even millions of women who would also benefit from the absence of men and children in their lives. As it is now, think of all the wasted human potential. Think of how clean it could be, if we were all freed from the inconvenience of those to whom we are joined by blood and marriage. I, for one, would have more time to devote to the common good. I’d gladly spend a half-hour vacuuming the boulevard, and afternoon dusting a jungle-jim. I, and others like me, would getup our gumption and get out of the home to make the entire world a spic-er, span-er place. There’s no end to what we could acheive together. We could tidy up toxic waste sites! Redecorate urban decay! Sew some shoulder pads into the economy! Why it would be paradise! It would be sparkling! It would be the first lesbian, separatist nation!

Bridge

I’m so clean, I’m so white
I’m so crisp and hard and still and right
That every twitch and tremor I make turns out left or wrong
Proof positive of a strong predisposition toward voluntary hysteria.
I slice my palms on the creases of my dress.
Everything is so well pressed.
It’s a problem area.
I am a problem area.
This is the problem:

Conclusion

I am a domestic alter
Location of discipline, receiver of guilt
My lipstick (kisses palms) glows bloody
The wound in my side a testament
To the persistent pain of splinters
Chaffing me each time I try to move
In this bungalow that never fit
Right?
In the first place
There was Eve
Experiencing for the first time the downward pull
The long fall from grace to graceful A-lines
In no-stick, hi-gloss, easy-to-maintain finishes
To a place where everyone has the same blood-type: clean
And whiteness and Godliness
And might and right
And home and family
All tidily equal up
In a divine floor plan
Three bedrooms, sunken living room, patio off the breakfast nook,
Repeated over and over and over again
Tomorrow is another day
-Ly bread, our kingdom comes
Unlike me
In this straight jacket against desire
Where passion plays on TV
And we only communicate in clichés
Based on stories that only end badly
For me.