Dominica/Canada
Aisha Sasha John is the only daughter and youngest child of the late Catherine Iris (John) Callender, the sixth of seven children born in La Plaine, Dominica to Ignatia John (Mama Babe) and Ludovic John (Papa Joe). Aisha is a dance artist and a poet. The Pool (Toronto Dance Theatre 2025) is her most recent choreographic work, and total (McClelland & Stewart 2025) is her most recent poetry collection.
I am a multi-disciplinary artist, living in Etobicoke for over 15 years. I facilitate art workshops that engage the whole community. My art is inspired by nature and the people around me. I am also a digital creator. I love going for walks and visiting landmarks in this neighbourhood. I plan to keep working here and contribute to developing a rich artistic community.
© Roxy Menzies, 2026. Photo Djenabeě.
Canada
Roxy is an artist with two decades of experience who seamlessly blends dance, writing, and healing arts in her multifaceted practice. With a deep curiosity about the human body, mind, and spirit, she advocates for optimal health and holistic well-being. She has taught online Chair Fitness for New York City employees, movement and dance through community arts for seniors, in the Canadian educational system, pre/post natal bodies and Cirque du Soleil artists.
Roxy has performed, guest-taught, or presented around the world, with her interests predominantly related to forms within the African diaspora. As a published author you can find her musings online, spot her on television dancing on furniture or in a stadium, reading poetry or just plain old creating.
India
Ranganathan Rajan (He/Him) is originally from India and is currently based in Tkaronto. He is an artist with performance art and contemporary dance, working with stress and strength in the body; Ranganathan is finding ways to work by creating a split in the images as they relate to him. Ranganathan graduated from the Professional Training Program at Dance Arts Institute Canada (2025) and has completed a Diploma in Movement Art and Mixed Media from Attakkalari Center of Movement Arts in Bangalore, India (2021). Ranganathan believes in socially engaged acts, focusing on participation and collaboration through his initiative Aspect_P.O.D.
Canada
Nyda Kwasowsky A multi-disciplinary artist/maker of mixed heritage situated in Tkaronto. She orients towards abolitionist approaches rooted in experimentation, improvisation and community. Her work centers around grief, hybridity and belonging in racialized diasporic experience. Studied in somatics and trauma informed practices, a practitioner in TCM cupping and Auricular Acupuncture and training in Harm Reduction, Restorative Justice, Polyvagal Certified, craftworks, Earthwork and studying as a Birth Doula. Her most recent explorations look at the intersections of cultural materiality and the moving dancing performing body.
Canada
H(annah) Kryworuchko (they/she/he) is an emerging textile artist/designer and facilitator completing their BDes at OCAD University in Material Art and Design. H’s practice is grounded in making with others, in their body, with land, and in water through quilting, weaving, printing, and dyeing. They develop relational and community-engaged work aligning with their values in abolition, solidarity, and care. H has over 15 years of experience in competitive artistic swimming and longer as a water lover.
Singapore/Canada
Aysia Tse (she/her) is a Singaporean-born visual artist, facilitator and arts worker based in Toronto. Her practice involves movement-based work, video, and multimedia installations that engage themes relating to madness, queerness, and her mixed diasporic identity. Her background as a professional coach and competitive artistic swimming athlete informs her interests in bodily inquiry and embodied performance.
© Hannah Palmer, Summer’s Over, 2026.
USA
Hannah S. Palmer is an American writer and artist from the Southside of Atlanta.
Through her essays, lectures, and collaborative projects, Palmer reconsiders urban rivers, neglected spaces, public swimming pools, environmental justice, and the forms of nature that persist within urban environments. Among these projects is Finding the Flint, an investigation into the headwaters of the river flowing underneath Atlanta’s mega-airport. In 2024, she published The Pool Is Closed: Segregation, Summertime, and the Search for a Place to Swim, which examines the social, racial, and political dimensions of access to water in the United States.
Her work is distinguished by its attention to the stories embedded within urban landscapes and by a nuanced reflection on the ways infrastructure, water, memory, and the living world shape our everyday experience of the city.
POOLBODY is a new multi-site performance series unfolding across Toronto from August 6–9. Pools are complex spaces—sites of leisure and competition, public gathering and private escape, play and surveillance, intimacy, memory, access, exclusion, and joy.
POOLBODY brings together performances, conversations, workshops, and site-responsive projects that move through these tensions. Featuring Aisha Sasha John, Aysia Tse & (H)annah Kryworuchko, Hannah Palmer, Mikiki, Nyda Kwasowsky, Ranganathan Rajan, and Tess Martens. PLUS, a Seniors Movement Workshop with Roxy Menzies, and a Kids Pool Art Exhibit & watercolour workshop with Richa Baghel.
This series is made possible with support from Toronto Arts Council | Toronto Arts Foundation – Arts in the Parks, FADO Performance Art Centre and Dancemakers Curators in Community Fund.
PROGRAM – all events are FREE and OPEN to all
THURSDAY, AUGUST 6
(1) FADO Performance Art Centre, The Commons, 401 Richmond St. W. (MAP)
6:00 PM: Performance Lecture & Opening Reception
Pool Maintenance by Hannah S. Palmer
FRIDAY, AUGUST 7
(2) Flagstaff Park, 42 Mercury Rd, Rexdale (ACCESS INFO & MAP)
12:30–1:30 PM: Kids’ Pool Art Exhibition & Kid’s Watercolour Workshop with Richa Baghel
1:00–2:00 PM: Seniors’ Movement Workshop led by Roxy Menzies
2:30–4:00 PM: Performances
Lifelines (a pilgrimage with, to and for the waters) by Nyda Kwasowsky
Phantasmagoria by Ranganathan Rajan
PAPER. BAG. SAG. DOLL… by Tess Martens
SATURDAY, AUGUST 8
(3) Hart House Pool, University of Toronto, 7 Hart House Circle (ACCESS INFO & MAP)
6:30–8:30 PM: Performances
pool notes and (mis)alignments by Aysia Tse & (H)annah Kryworuchko
SPLASH PAD by Mikiki
SUNDAY, AUGUST 9
(4) Private Pool (Baby Point Road)
6:00 PM: Performance
my astonishing wealth by Aisha Sasha John
ACCESS INFORMATION
(1) The Commons @ 401 has a barrier-free entrance on the northeast side of the building, with an automatic door. The Commons is on the fourth floor and can be reached by elevator. Accessible washrooms are available on the first and fourth floors.
(2) Flagstaff Park and pool deck is wheelchair accessible. Some activities will take place on grass, which may be uneven or difficult to navigate with a mobility device. The pool washroom has one step at the entrance and is not fully wheelchair accessible. ASL interpretation will be available for the seniors’ movement workshop and the pool performances.
(3) Hart House Aquatic Centre has barrier-free entrances and an elevator that serves all floors. The pool is on the lower level. A universal washroom is available on the basement level, near the Arbor Room. On weekends, visitors using the barrier-free entrance should enter from Tower Road. ASL interpretation will be available for the performance.
(4) Baby Point Road location is a private home and backyard pool. Unfortunately, the venue is not wheelchair accessible.
For access questions or to request additional accommodations, please contact Shalon at shalonwh@gmail.com
© Poster image: Manny Trinh (@mannytrinh), Acrylic on paper, 2026.
This podcast series accompanies a performance series of the same name which took place from 2024-2025, which invited artists to investigate two of the foundational gestures of the performance art vocabulary—walking, talking—through performances and discursive interventions that explore their intrinsic mutual imbrication.
In the accompanying Walk-And-Talk podcast series, hosts by Francesco Gagliardi and Julian Higurery Nunez, invited local artists, researchers, and other creative folk to go on a walk and talk about the ways that walking informs their practices.
Each episode is the length of a short walk, no edits, just walking and talking.
Organized and hosted by Francesco Gagliardi and Julian Higurery Nunez
Produced by FADO Performance Art Radio
Music and sound by Peppercorn Imagine
EPISODE 1: Colin Cudmore walks and talks with Francesco Gagliardi
EPISODE 2: Lisa Deanne Smith walks and talks with Julian Higuerey Nunez
EPISODE 3: Marcin Kedzior walks and talks with Francesco Gagliardi
EPISODE 4: Keith Cole walks and talks with Julian Higuerey Nunez
EPISODE 5: Shawn Michaloff walks and talks with Francesco Gagliardi
EPISODE 6: Lisa Kiss walks and talks with Julian Higuerey Nunez
Co-presented by Alleyway Gallery and FADO Performance Art Centre
Friday, May 22 | 6:30pm
Dermot Wilson
Fan Wu
Gwen MacGregor
Quan Steele
Marilyn Yogarajah
Saturday, May 23 | 3:00pm
Christopher Petersen
Isaak Fong
Johannes Zits
lo bil
lwrds duniam
Prism of Fire performance series, curated by Johannes Zits, features 10 artists offering distinct responses to this fractured landscape against the backdrop of the city.
Positioned in a downtown laneway, the billboard Through the Prism of a Fire pulls a distant, damaged landscape into sharp focus. This large-scale image of a wildfire’s aftermath, clear-cut terrain swept into devastation, becomes the anchor for a series of performances in the final stretch of the CONTACT Festival in May.
Through forms such as spoken word, sound, fleeting installations, and subtle gestures, the artists stage live conversations between the scorched forest and the urban space that holds it. Working with the laneway’s acoustics, interruptions, and constraints, each artist initiates their own brief bridge between altered forest and public life. Together, these actions reimagine the billboard as a site of exchange where memory, place, and embodied presence meet in the tense space between destruction and renewal.
© Johannes Zits, Through the Prism of a Fire, 2024. Billboard.
Through the Prism of a Fire reflects on the growing intensity of wildfires across Canada, capturing the aftermath of a 2024 blaze in the Cariboo region of British Columbia, on Lhtako Dene Nation territory. While fire is a natural part of the forest’s life cycle, increased and sustained human activity has disrupted this balance. Industrial logging, monocultures, and conventional forestry practices have stripped away the diversity and resilience that once allowed ecosystems to recover.
Christopher Petersen is a dancer and performance artist. Their work focuses on the physical body in space and attempts to allow an audience to stare into bones and flesh, the exertion of bodies, and the bodies of stillness. Christopher is unsure of most things but cannot stop.
© Gwen MacGregor. Photo Johannes Zits.
Gwen MacGregor is a Tkaronto based artist, geographic scholar, teacher and community organizer who identifies as an “unsettler.” They work in installation, video, photography and drawing. MacGregor has received awards such as the Toronto Friends of the Visual Arts Artist of the Year and the Canada Council International Studio in New York. Her work is in a number of collections including the Nickle Galleries in Calgary, the Art Gallery of Ontario, Oakville Galleries, Artbank, and the Royal Bank Collection. MacGregor has a PhD in Cultural Geography from The University of Toronto and an Honours BA in Art Hsitory from York University.
© Fan Wu. Photo Hamish Ballantyne.
Fan Wu is a poet, performer, and pedagogue. His current research revolves around Daoist sound and spiritual practice and its concepts of subtlety and effortlessness. His performance work has been shown at Art Metropole, Buddies in Bad Times, the plumb, and SummerWorks. He collaborates with artists of many disciplines, including Thom Gill, Evan Webber, Phil Hamilton, and Kieran Adams.
© Quan Steele. Photo Bob Steele.
Quan Steele is a multidisciplinary Vietnamese artist based in Toronto whose practice spans painting, sculpture, performance, ephemeral land art, and site-specific installations. Over the past two decades, she has presented her work in solo, group, collective, and juried exhibitions across Canada and has participated in residencies in White Bear (Temagami, 2022 and 2024); Sooke, Vancouver Island (2024); and Mountain Island Arts in Wells, BC (2025). A member of the Ontario Society of Artists, Broken Forests Collective and Etobicoke Art Group, her work explores environmentalism, the human–nature relationship, and the passage of time, using art as a catalyst for curiosity, awareness, and meaningful change. is a Toronto based dancer and performance artist. Their work focuses on the physical body in space and attempts to allow an audience to stare into bones and flesh, the exertion of bodies, and the bodies of stillness.
© Dermot Wilson. Photo Lisa Murzin.
b. Dublin, Eire
Artist and curator Dermot Wilson lives in northern Ontario. He works in various media including video, audio, time-based installation, digital imaging and performance to create works that include meditations upon his relationships with the community and the environment. Dermot has performed in galleries, bars, artist-run centres and on various outdoor sites in many communities across Canada, South America, Asia, USA and Europe. His noise/spoken word performances challenge institutional conventions and promotes dialogues about ownership and environmental abuses.
Recent installations include: Escarpment Erasure Mega-horn (Escarpment Corridor Alliance); Iterations/Emanations (KINO Gallery and Wroclaw University Gallery, Wroclaw, Poland); and Random Acts of Joy (TOTE Gallery, Campinas, Brazil). Hyperboreal is his ambient sound/spoken word performance collective. He has performed spoken word rants in urban sites across Canada since 1996 and is currently performing site-specific sound art works in clearcut or endangered forest sites.
© Marilyn Yogarajah. Photo Alex Herrera.
Marilyn Yogarajah (they/any) is an artist whose practice centers on rhythm, specifically sound and poetry. They have a background in teaching music, and an education in sociology and gender studies. Marilyn plays in multiple bands across the city, including but not limited to not a band, martian crisis unit, output 1:1:1, and teething. They also founded spectrum soundbath in 2020 which is a collaborative community based sound meditation practice. They write poetry under the moniker queertamil and can be found on bandcamp under threesixmarilyn. Land back always and death to empire.
Join us for another instalment in FADO’s Walk-And-Talk performance series.
Free, all welcome.
Clint Enns takes us on a cinematic Walk-And-Talk through the work of Karl Grune’s 1923 film, Die Strasse, narrating the film as a performative-intervention.
Enns’ Die Strasse [Back Alley Edit] re-imagines Karl Grune’s 1923 Die Strasse as a walking film. The film follows movements of a man who leaves his home and drifts through the city at night, each step carrying him deeper into the dangers of the street. Cinema as walk, narrative as restless wandering.
The artist’s reworking intervenes in this walk by adding a textual element and voice, shifting the film from “silent walkie” to “talkie.” A detour[nement] where new stories emerge in motion.
Clint Enns is a visual artist, writer, and curator living in Tiohtià:ke / Montréal. His post-cinematic practice consists of reworking existing films, disrupting their conventional narratives and forms. His interventions destabilize the cinematic image, turning familiar works into sites of critical play and reinterpretation. By appropriating and manipulating filmic material, Enns challenges the permanence of cinema as a fixed cultural object, presenting it as malleable, thinking though the ways moving images persist, mutate, and circulate in a post-cinematic landscape shaped by digital technologies and remix culture.
© Karl Grune, Die Strasse, 1923. Film still.
Join us for a joyful day of video-art BINGE WATCHING. Two different screenings sandwich a guided movement practice for artists. Wear your jammies, drink ginger ale and eat popcorn ALL DAY!!!
FADO Performance Art Centre and V tape are thrilled to present Your New Normal: An Afternoon With Margaret Dragu, part of FADO’s on-going Walk-And-Talk performance series.
2:00PM: screening, NEW NORMAL: an embodied novel
3:00PM: supportTHEsupport (movement practice) with snacks & chats & PAJAMAS!
4:00PM: screening, TICK AND TALK OF COMMON TIME
PROGRAMME
2:00PM: NEW NORMAL: an embodied novel (video, 45:00)
“An embodied novel is a 13-part multi-modal project documenting Dragu’s experiences on public transit while waiting for/recovering from two hip replacement surgeries. This series of poetic-prose stories are articulated in the body as short videos produced by Dragu alongside her collaborators, Justine A. Chambers (choreography) and E. Kage (score), as well as in text in her publication by the same name.” (Yasmine Whaley-Kalaora, C.L.A.M.)
Choreographer: Justine A. Chambers
Composer & Musician: E. Kage
Novelist: Margaret Dragu
Dancers: Rob Abubo, Justine A. Chambers, Stephanie Cyr, Alison Denham, Kate Franklin, Bynh Ho, Mikiki, Claudia Moore
3:00PM: supportTHEsupport (TORONTO VERSION)
supportTHEsupport is an art experiment that began September 2019 during the LIVE! Biennale in Vancouver. supportTHEsupport appears to be dance/fitness classes (live-in-person and live-on-ZOOM ) with members in Vancouver, Montréal, Toronto, Berlin, Hanover and Copenhagen. But it is actually a living studio of amazing and creative artists who help each other make art happen.
***Feel free to bring your own yoga mat, towel, blocks.***
4:00PM: TICK AND TALK OF COMMON TIME (video, 33 min)
“An opus of five variations and five entr’actes. Playing with the idea of TikTok dance trends, the variations feature fifteen live Vancouver-based dancers, three Toronto-based performers and many more [of whom are] dancing over Zoom, as well as several TikTok dance videos. Each variation presents a new choreography set to compositions from five different Canadian composers. The videos of the dancers are often in split screen or overlapping one another in the mainframe. The entr’actes feature improvisational dance by Dragu and Justine A. Chambers set to the sounds of live improvised vocal transcription.” (Nathaniel Marchand, Western Front)
Composers: Mark Haney, Nikita Carter, E. Kage, Sarah Sheard, Brady Marks
Dancers: Justine A. Chambers, Kate Franklin, Vanessa (VK) Kwan, Johanna Householder, Francisco-Fernando Granados, Angelo Pedari, Stephanie Bokenfohr, Margaret Dragu
SILT: FRESHWATER
In Collaboration with FADO Performance Art Centre!
Saturday, November 29, 2025
The Commons @ 401 Richmond Street West, Toronto
3:00PM start time
FREE | All welcome
ARTISTS
Jen Hum
public-universal-friends
Emily Duckett
Abbey Richens (of Spiral Eyedd & Meaningful Movement)
SILT: FRESHWATER is an evening of performance. Through a public open call, four artists are each provided with 15 minutes to present an action, event, performance. Silt was originally started for dance, movement, and performance artists; however, it is open to everyone regardless of artistic or personal identifications. The aim of SILT: FRESHWATER is to provide participants with an accessible low stakes stage for experimentation and expression.
Please RSVP at the link below.
This fragrance opens us to the question, has the show started? It's winter, the theatre is colder than the street and the room is filled with people and all their winter smells: wet faux leather, down, too much shampoo, and beer breath. The atmosphere is a trickster. Am I late, am I early?
yellow mandarin, mimosa
honey, chamomile, salt
narcissus, guaiac wood, piss, beer
![Die Strasse [Back Alley Edit] by Clint Enns](https://performanceart.ca/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/06_028_Clint-Enns_Die-Strasse-Back-Alley-Edit_November-21-2025_Photo-Henry-Chan-150x150.jpg)
![Die Strasse [Back Alley Edit] by Clint Enns](https://performanceart.ca/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/Clint-Enns_Die-Strasse_2_video-still.jpg)
