Category: Performance

10 artists. 10 score writers. A score is an old term for ‘twenty’ of something = A Score of Scores.

ARTISTS & SCORE WRITERS
Abedar Kamgari & Naseh Kamgari
Holly Timpener & Enok Ripley
James Knott & Francisco-Fernando Granados
Keith Cole & David Roche
Laura Paolini & Tomasz Szrama
Mikiki & Jan Peacock
Paul Couillard & Elvira Santamaría-Torres
Rita Camacho Lomeli & Alejandro Tamayo
SA Smythe & Autumn Knight
Tanya Mars & Myriam Laplante

Put together by Shannon Cochrane and Francesco Gagliardi

May 12: Performances by James Knott, Tanya Mars
May 13: Performances by Keith Cole, Laura Paolini
May 18: Performances by Paul Couillard, Holly Timpener
May 19: Performances by Mikiki, SA Smythe
May 20: Performances by Rita Camacho Lomeli, Abedar Kamgari

FADO’s spring performance art series invites 10 artists to perform the interpretation of a performance score, written for them by an artist of their own choosing. Artists from across a spectrum of practices grounded in live performance (including cabaret, music, experimental composition, intermedia, video and more) interpret a score designed for them by an array of Canadian and international artists. The duos have chosen to strategize their collaboration in myriad ways—from conspiring together to revealing the final score only moments before the live presentation.

Emerging in the early 1960s in the context of the FLUXUS movement and in conversation with the expanded compositional practices of John Cage and LaMonte Young, “event scores” relied on elements of collaboration, improvisation, and chance to challenge traditional understandings of originality and artistic creation. Often very short, event scores typically consisted of lists of prompts and instructions ranging from the mundane to the elusively abstract and were circulated among fellow artists with an open invitation to interpret and perform them however they wanted. 

A Score of Scores is an experimental back-to-basics platform for artists to create new small-scale work in a spirit of experimentation, collaboration, and agility.

Details & Info

• 2 performances each evening. Free. All welcome.
• Doors open at 7:00pm. Performances will start 15 minutes later (more or less).
• Mask-wearing is encouraged in the performance space. Exemptions respected.
• Building is accessible: ramps at entrances, elevator and accessible/all-gender washrooms.
• Non-alcoholic drinks will be served. Maybe snacks. Please eat your dinner before arriving.

The FADO website, created by the unique minds at I Know You Know, is guided by colour and scent.

The navigation menu contains the various categories by which FADO presents our work. The menu on the left side of your browser, where you see “about,” “performance,” “series,” “engagements,” and so on, highlights these areas. Each of the categories is color-coded and contains a description of a unique fragrance. The scent illuminates the qualities of the various ways FADO works. You can read the description of the categories/colours/scents in the footer of each web page. The notes of each scent (top, middle, and base) conjure the elements, memories, and characteristics of our performances, artists, engagements, writing, bulletin, and the archive. 

The fragrances are conceptual and actual. Some remain on the website as a description, in the form of a digital scratch n’ sniff that you can read and imagine for yourself. Some are formulated and are for smelling. Really smelling. 

FADO and I Know You Know are producing small editions of scented postcards and collectible objects for selected scents in the FADO scent collection. The second scent in the series is titled ENGAGEMENT PINK. Here we consider how artists and audiences connect, communicate, and engage. The engagements include artist talks, studio visits, workshops, round tables, Q&As, and more. Audiences ask, and artists answer.

Subscribe to the FADO mailing list and include your mailing address. If you are already on our mailing list, update your profile with your mailing address. DO THAT HERE, and your PERFORMANCE YELLOW-scented postcard will be on its way.

Presented in the context of -I (2022)
Curated and organized by Christof Migone

The third in a series of twelve annual 12-hour events taking place on December 12 from noon to midnight EST (9-21 PST, 11-23 CDT,  17-05 GMT, 18-06 CET,  1-13 CST, 2-14 KST). Each year the event moves through each word of the 12-word phrase “you and I are water earth fire air of life and death“ and activates the word of the year in a myriad of ways. This year the word is ‘I’, consequently the focus is on selfless selves, linked Is, and not-Is. The first year it started with ‘you’, last year ‘and’ came to connect you to anything and everything, this year that point of connection is ‘I’. The porous one. The sole collective.

FADO Performance Art Centre (Tkarón:to/Toronto) presents -I HOUR 12
Things I’ve Forgotten by Cindy Baker (Edmonton)

A work that incorporates audio and performance to explore the relationship between trauma, memory and the body. The project is based on a very specific, mostly-forgotten childhood memory; I’m fascinated by the ability of our brains to block out traumatic events from our conscious memory, but their inability to prevent those events from making their mark in ways that impact us into adulthood. I often wonder how much this childhood trauma had a role in the formation of my personality, my physicality, or my disabilities. Through this work and the revisiting of dreams long forgotten, I am attempting to set in motion a process by which I can trigger the emergence of memories long-buried by past trauma while also engaging in an ongoing project of resisting the imperative to demonstrate the output of labour in performance; sometimes rest is part of the work. This experiment in personal betterment and catharsis through the creative process has a long art historical tradition. In my own practice, this type of experiment walks a tightrope between earnestness and cynicism; setting up (usually hilariously futile) challenges to my personal limitations, and attempts to make myself into something that I am not serve to highlight the futility of the search for perfection and the altogether human desire for knowledge.

Over several months in 2021, I created performances for people I know, using their yards and/or the spaces outside their windows as my stage and source of inspiration, creating small intimate experimental performances with no preconceived themes or ideas. 

For this residency supported by FADO, I resolved to begin to claw back the things I’ve lost over the past year, in small and incremental gestures.

I resolved:
to perform for live audiences rather than virtual ones.
to see other artists and close friends (if only through a window).
to spend more time outside to work with the weather rather than against it or in spite of it.
to have intimate encounters.
to go to friends’ homes.
to make new performances, to experiment, to learn, to move, to think, to feel.

My practice has tended to focus on issues of identity and corporeality as they relate to gender, queerness, fatness, and disability. The work has always come from personal experience but focuses on universal themes. As my work has evolved, my practice has focused more and more on the deeply personal. It’s less concrete, literal, and intellectual than it once was and has shifted gradually to work which is more poetic. The process is still relatively new territory to me, but I’m navigating it through experimentation, into a place that includes concepts and ideas that are more ephemeral, and less visible or less concerned with public access/interpretation of the “meaning” than before.

As an artist that has generally been most comfortable with a working method that privileges research, planning, writing, making, and gathering, performance is usually the culmination of months or years of labour. Recently I’ve started to shift to a more intuitive style of performance as a way of creating new knowledge; as a way to exercise and increase my flexibility and responsivity. For this residency, I forefronted intuition, putting planning not just on the back burner, but leaving it out of the recipe altogether (as much as that’s possible.) 

This project demonstrates a commitment to a deeper exploration of process than I’ve engaged in the past, using myself as subject, object, and, in many ways, the primary audience. Elaborating on a larger exploration of memory, bodies, and trauma via intensely intimate experiences, I’m pursuing the goal of deep affective experience. I want to be changed by my work, and to examine that change so I can better understand myself and become a better artist.

A performance series for the start of times

Put together by Shannon Cochrane and Francesco Gagliardi

ARTISTS
Cara Spooner (Toronto)
Claudia Edwards (Toronto)
Jehan Roberson (USA)
Joe Culpepper (USA)
Mani Mazinani (Toronto)
Marcin Kedzior (Toronto)
Mathieu Lacroix (Montréal)
Nadège Grebmeier Forget (Montréal)
Sue Murad (USA)
Vanessa Dion Fletcher (Toronto)

PLUS limited-edition placemats designed by Lisa Kiss, with drawings by Hazel Meyer.

On the Table Off the Table is a series of commissioned performance works engaging with the table as context, stage, and trope. Aspiring to aesthetic neutrality or demanding attention as a chosen object, the table reappears throughout the history of performance, at times taking center stage, at other times hiding in plain sight.

For this series, artists working at the confluence of performance art and a range of diverse practices—from writing to dance, from sound to magic—will create live work in conversation with performance traditions about, around, and on tables.

FADO Performance Art Centre’s first post(?)-pandemic live series, On the Table Off the Table also intends to provide artists and audiences with an opportunity to re-learn together how to inhabit the space of public presentation, rediscovering the solitary workstation as a place of gathering and play.

DETAILS & INFO

• There will be 1–2 performances each evening.
• Doors will open at listed times. Performances will start 30 minutes later.
• Mask-wearing for audience is mandatory in the performance space. Exemptions respected.
• Performers will not necessarily be masked while performing.
• Accessible washrooms are located on the 4th floor.
• Non-alcoholic drinks will be served, please eat your dinner before arriving.

Free. All welcome. Tell us you will be attending. Register on Eventbrite.

SCHEDULE
September 23 @ 7:00pm: Cara Spooner, Vanessa Dion Fletcher
September 24 @ 7:00pm: Joe Culpepper & Marcin Kedzior, Claudia Edwards
September 29 @ 7:00pm: Sue Murad, Mathieu Lacroix
September 30 @ 7:00pm: Mani Mazinani, Nadège Grebmeier Forget
October 1 @ 5:00pm: Jehan Roberson

Jehan Roberson’s performance is co-presented by Hemispheric Encounters, a partnership project supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council.

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

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

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.

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:
Aleesa Cohene
Ame Henderson
Andrea Nanni
Francesco Gagliardi
Jon McCurley
Margaret Dragu
Martin Bélanger
Mikiki
Robert Abubo
Shannon Cochrane
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

Above: Trio A rehearsal with Yvonne Rainer. 2015. Photo by Henry Chan.
Below: Trio A dinner with Yvonne Rainer. 2015. Photo by Henry Chan.

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.

Silent Dinner, FADO Performance Art Centre, 2015. Photo by Henry Chan.

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

“Well, our age is one of those fires whose unbearable burning will undoubtedly reduce many works to ashes! But for those that remain, their metal will be intact […] One can no doubt wish, and I wish it too, for a softer flame, a respite, a stopover conducive to daydreaming.”
~The Artist and His Time (lecture), Albert Camus, 1957.

With the participation of fire-keepers: Alexis Bellavance, Laurence Beaudoin-Morin, Catherine Bodmer, Caroline Boileau, janick burn, Sylvie Cotton, Anne Florentiny, Pierre Gauvin, Léo Gaudreault, Stéphane Gilot, stvn Girard, Katherine-Josée Gervais, k.g. Guttman, Michelle Lacombe, Frédérique Laliberté, arkadi lavoie lachapelle, Julie-Isabelle Laurin, Helena Martin Franco, Diyar Mayil, Rhonda Meier, François Morelli, Florencia Sosa Rey, François Rioux, Jacqueline Van De Geer, Stephanie Nuckle.

OPEN FIRE | FEU OUVERT is a furtive, political, symbolic and poetic work conceptualized by Marie-Claude Gendron. Involving the artist and many members of the Montréal action art community, the group will feed a fire—daily, stealthily and anonymously—keeping the fire burning continuously over the course of the last two weeks of January.

Up to 40 members of the community of fire keepers will be culled on invitation by the artist. Those who choose to participate in the project will receive a detailed map of the route to find the exact location of the fire. 

OPEN FIRE | FEU OUVERT is an attempt to revive the invisible link that unites us through the practice of action art. Confined, for the most part, to the home, Marie-Claude Gendron’s wish is to propose an outside simple manoeuvre that involves the participation of artists in whatever way is possible given their respective means and motivation. The resolution is to foster being together, even in an abstract and active way in the imagination.

The closing event for OPEN FIRE | FEU OUVERT is a co-presentation with VIVA! Art Action.

-AND- (2021) is a 12-hour online event organized by Christof Migone. It’s the second in a series of twelve annual events taking place on December 12, from noon to midnight EST with the collaboration of multiple artists, venues and partners in Canada, China, Germany, Korea, UK, USA. Each year the event moves through each word of the 12 word phrase, “you and I are water earth fire air of life and death and activates the word of the year in myriad ways.”

In 2021, the word is ‘and’, consequently the focus is on repetitions, conjunctions, and duos. Last year it started with ‘you’, this year we connect you to anything and everything, you are together-with. Or, we get stuck in the very act that ‘and’ opens up, into the enormity that the so-what-next that ‘and’ implies. ‘And’ is all possibilities in a nutshell. A secular litany that follows pi into infinity.

For more information about this 12 year project: https://youandiarewaterearthfireairoflifeanddeath.com/

In partnership with and in the context of -AND- (2021), FADO is pleased to present the work of Erika DeFreitas and Adrian Piper in the first hour of the event.

Hour 1
12:00pm–1:00pm EST

Seriation #2a: _and (with thoughts of Adrian Piper) (2021)
In this newly commissioned work, DeFreitas creates a score based on Piper’s essay Passing for White, Passing for Black by isolating the word ‘and’ on the pages they appear. DeFreitas then performs this score, reciting the word ‘and’ evenly spaced within the timeframe of 1 minute per page.

Seriation #2: Now (1968)
Soundwork by Adrian Piper; Performed by Erika DeFreitas
DeFreitas was given permission by Piper to perform Seriation #2: Now. The original soundwork consists in 18 minutes of Piper uttering the word “now,” in a measured tone, at shorter and shorter intervals, from one minute to every second. Accompanying the audio are visuals created by DeFreitas to question our presence in the ‘now’.

RE-SOLUTIONS is a collection of 6 performances for video by W. A. Davison, created in the context of FADO Performance Art Centre’s Performance Resolution(s) at-home residency in 2021.

These six informal performance experiments re-interpret the theme “resolutions” as “re-solutions,” meaning, new solutions to problems that have already been solved.

Over the past few years, I’ve been engaged in a number of creative projects that involve exploring, and making use of, material from my archive of past work—finished pieces, documentation, sketches, ideas, etc., accumulated over several decades of artistic activity. The idea of finding new solutions to problems I’ve already solved, i.e. finding new ways to approach, develop, and execute creative problems and premises from my past, is an intriguing concept and ties in nicely with my recent archive-based work.

Working alone in my studio, I conducted a series of performance experiments which were documented on digital video. In these experiments, I examined a selection of finished works from my archive—visual art, writing, film and video, audio, past performances, etc.—determining the basic premise/problem in each one, and then, through an informal, organic, and intuitive process, found new ways in which those problems might be solved. Since the residency is focused on performance practice, these “re-solutions” took the form of performative actions/events/situations. I was particularly interested in what happens when I attempt to translate ideas from other media (drawings, collages, films, audio pieces, etc.) into performance. This was challenging at times but, almost without fail, led to interesting work. The project was process-oriented so I was not necessarily looking to create new performances for an audience. These are, literally, experiments, most geared toward helping me gain insight into my past work, as well as find new and interesting directions for future work. 

Is a work of art ever “finished” or an idea used up? “Re-Solutions” helps answer that question.

THE RE-SOLUTIONS

Dead Horse Dérive (07:10, video slideshow, 2021) is based on a multimedia drawing/painting from 2009 called Wasteland 2. I took one of the main elements of the painting, a dead horse, and traced the contours of it. I then superimposed this simplified contour drawing over a map of downtown Toronto. Finally, on the afternoon of July 10, 2021, I made a dérive (a type of psychogeographic exploration of the urban environment) on bicycle, following as closely as possible the route indicated by the drawing on the altered map. I documented the dérive by photographing streets, intersections, laneways, and whatever caught my eye during the bicycle trip. The final form of the piece is a video slideshow. 

Floating Orb (08:09, video performance, 2021) is based on an untitled collage from 2016. The collage features a spherical object floating in front of a desert landscape. For my “re-solution” I came up with a simple action involving a ball being tossed (from off camera) in front of a number of photographs that were taped to the wall of my studio.

Eye Projections (01:34, video performance, 2021) is based on an untitled sculptural assemblage from 2016. For this “re-solution” I took one of the main features of the assemblage, namely the cloth projecting from the doll’s eye sockets, and interpreted that as a performative action for the camera

Red Branches (02:01, video performance, 2021) is based on a series of sound/radio art pieces from 2020 called RE/CYCLING. In the RE/CYCLING series, I constructed a number of textured platters that were placed on a record player and amplified with a contact microphone. My “re-solution” was to make myself the revolving, textured surface, brushing against amplified tree branches.

R.P.M. Redux (01:23, video performance, 2021) is based on a super-8 film called R.P.M. that I made in 1991, in which I put a super-8 camera on a record player, and filmed while it spun around. For this “re-solution” I did exactly the same thing, this time with a video camcorder, the difference being my presence in the film/performance. I sat next to the record player and appear once every revolution.

Object Poems (11:25, video performance, 2021) is not based on a specific work. Instead, I chose to base the work on one of the techniques I use frequently in my poetic writing, namely stream-of-consciousness or surrealist automatism. The technique involves an unedited flow of words, free from rational control. In my “re-solution” I substituted found objects from around my studio for words in a poem, constructing an improvised, visual poem by juxtaposing objects next to each other or otherwise interacting with them.

SPOILER ALERT: Hasting Highland eventually got their bylaw, but you don’t want to miss a (Hybla) minute of the whole story.

Click the link below to read They Fought a Zoo by Joan Webber and then listen to The Doc Project’s audio documentary featuring Roy Mitchell, called Of Towns and Tigers, to get the full scoop on this incredible story.

READ They Fought a Zoo on CBC’s The Doc Project HERE.

In response to FADO’s Performance Resolution(s), at-home residency project call for submissions, Roy Mitchell’s tongue-in-cheek proposal was to go to Algonquin Big Cat Adventures, a roadside zoo about 15 kilometres from where he lives, and “take a tiger away. And then another.”

At the time, Mitchell was preoccupied with so-called ‘big cats’ because of this roadside zoo, that had set up business in his community and Mark Drysdale, the owner of the zoo, was exhibiting lions and tigers without a permit. Soon after learning of Drysdale’s plans to open this zoo in Hastings Highlands, Roy Mitchell started a group—Citizens for a Safe and Humane Hastings Highlands—with the express purpose of lobbying for an exotic animal bylaw in the municipality. 

So began a very long journey for Mitchell and members of his community. Much of it is documented as a part of Mitchell’s art practice—in writing, on podcasts and as content for his journalism-cum-art talk show, the Hybla Minute. The story, and Mitchell’s part in it, even made the CBC news. Is Mark Drysdale Ontario’s own Tiger King? Not if Roy Mitchell has anything to say about it.

This incredible tale covers lions, tigers, and much much more, OH MY!

The beginning, the middle and the end. In that order! Roy’s Side of the Story. There will be guests, there will be mud flung on Instagram Live. You can ask questions. It’ll be very interactive!

Instagram Live @roybruno

When: November 2 @ 5pm
Topic: The Beginning
Content: Background and how we found out about the zoo coming to town. 
Guest: Julie Woodyer, Zoocheck

When: November 3 @ 5 pm
Topic: The Middle
Content: Organizing, Drama on Council and the bylaw comes to town
Guest: Nate Smelle, local journalist

When: November 4 @ 5 pm
Topic: The End
Content: The Bylaw, the Drama, Cops and what next and can Politics be Art
Guest: Shannon Cochrane, FADO Performance Art Centre Director

BONUS MEDIA: DOWNLOAD The Lion Ate His Tiger by Grant LaFleche, Toronto Star (2022)

The pandemic postponed many activities. Earlier this year, I was limited to circulating in my local Ottawa neighbourhood, as well as my backyard, which became the sight of my auto-residence; my investigative space. This led me to (re)evaluate the notion of disorientation. Thus, my shadow became a measuring tool, an extension of self, a sensing body enabling discovery.

The danger is invisible; using my intuition I would like to give it a name. If I can identify it, then I can articulate it, open it up, present it and share it. To reach this point of understanding—to identify the object of my intuitive obsession—this was my starting point: non-defensive conscious-raising, definitely the potential of the imaginary.

Thus, I explored my neighbourhood with the help of my shadow, faithful companion heretofore ignored. To evaluate, maybe (re)establish contact, guided by its potential contours. My perception defining a renewed space. My imagination, in a sensorial quest of the site, found itself nourished by connections, memories, awareness and realities. As a result, I discovered a close connection to nature. 

On September 26, 2021, twenty-six Toronto artists (of a certain generation), on the invitation of Keith Cole, assembled at the Windsor Arms Hotel in Toronto for a High Tea. The guest of honour? Dr. Jeanne Randolph. One of Canada’s foremost cultural thinkers, Randolph is a mercurial character. She is a psychoanalyst, curator, critic, writer, musician, and a performance artist. HIGH TEA with Keith Cole and Jeanne Randolph was, what some theorists or academics might call a work of “social engagement.” For Cole, Randolph and the audience / participants assembled, the jury is out still on whether or not it was even a performance. Perhaps it would be more accurate to think of that afternoon as an event of community (rather than a ‘community event’). The people gathered in the room formed a snapshot of the Toronto arts community from a particular moment, a bit out of focus and dispersed, but collectively felt. Being in the room meant acknowledging the performance of time, of memory and of community. Pinkies up!

Image (above) © Keith Cole, High Tea, 2021. Photo Henry Chan.
Image (below) © Keith Cole, 2021. Image courtesy of the artist.

In a sense, the idea for my residency formed in the summer of 2019 in Turkey before the pandemic and before I even knew about the possibility of a residency. While I visited my home city of Istanbul after a 13-year hiatus, I unknowingly germinated the urge to move back there for a year.

Of course, the Covid-19 pandemic put a hold on my half-realized plans. My urge, fortified by powerlessness, transformed into a craving, an itch, a determination to explore the hunger I felt for Turkey.

This year, 2021, started with a concept of making a video in my childhood home in Istanbul. The apartment is uninhabited, complete with old furniture from 80s and 90s, covered with dusty white sheets, with shutdown old windows and blinds, dull musty air and perhaps old spirits. A time capsule from the last lived day of 1994 before our Canadian emigration.

What would be like to go back and record a walk-through of this space, like an audience-less performance, like a home movie of a ghost of a home? The camera as all-seeing eye, from my apartment in Toronto to our apartment in Istanbul, through a distance of 8,196.58 kms?

While I am creating this video in my mind (for now,) walking through the space in my memory, I am also creating actual videos for my day job of auditioning for commercials, film, and TV. Countless of takes for a 30-second footage of pretending to eat a salad or some chips while scolding my imaginary children, acting like a senator or a Middle Eastern engineer, suggesting organic rice to my neighbour, gardening with a surprised look on my face, reading a bowl of cereal like a crystal ball, drinking from a river, thanking the public for being vaccinated and waking up happy in bed…

So now I’m thinking about the absurdity of the correlation of these two notions in video. The manufactured actions of commercial acting and the archival footage of home, stacked together like a building.

There is a video somewhere.

Like the end of Covid, it is unhurried, throbbing, reluctant and eager.

Irene Loughlin’s home—where she spent the 2nd Covid-19 lockdown of 2020, and continues to live—is a small one bedroom apartment she shares with one other person. This 20th floor remnant of rent control is a tall building on the Hamilton escarpment, a concrete monument to the 70’s. Loughlin’s apartment contains an enclosed glass balcony that she has converted into her studio. From there, during the first part of her Performance Home residency, Loughlin is working on a series of experimental video performances using her body to reach and sustain contact with the “outside,” extending her arms through windows to establish a personal choreography with the sky and clouds, changing weather and birds; and through various actions such as ‘embracing the building’ in gratitude for shelter.

Alongside this corporeal research practice, Loughlin is mining her performance documentation archive. Observations written during her entry level job in the film industry in the midst of the pandemic are included. Her writing and drawings contain references to the first lockdown when she lived alone, and the film industry shut down. She spent most of the first three months of lockdown on CERB (as did many privileged persons living in Canada), deriving mental and spiritual sustenance from walking in the forest. By walking outside—breaching government recommendations in the first weeks and months of the pandemic—she sought to preserve her ‘sanity’ as a neuroatypical person living through the first pandemic announcements. These walks were generally devoid of human presence, and she took solace in the company of emerging deer, hawks, and other animals, as well as plants, trees and waterfalls. The first lockdown in the forest mirrored her experiences as a child confused in the company of others and seeking relief in the natural world. Sources are translated into pen and ink drawings, juxtaposed with writing that comments on her experiences as a performance and visual artist. The work comes together in a newly self-designed literary hybrid—a performance art graphic novel—that combines past objectives with the emotive and ecological crisis of our current moment specifically from Loughlin’s neuroatypical perspective.

In the spring of 2021, I was given the opportunity to make a video performance through an at-home residency from where I reside in Vancouver through FADO Performance Art Centre’s at-home residency series, Performance Resolution(s).

Queer Lines (For Agnes) is a performance for the camera that marks pandemic time through the abstraction of the Pride Flag. I use my body in various unexpected ways to paint acrylic washes on an unstretched canvas on the ground. I have developed an “embodied painting” approach that combines performance art actions with mindfulness strategies to create a work that balances form and content, emotions, and ideas. A soundscape made from this process of embodied painting compliments the video work.

This process of investigation concentrates on the subject-object binary through an embodied practice. I use my own body in my performances to experience and blur the tension between myself as both a subjective and objective body. To do this, I employ paint brushes I make from my own hair, paint, a straw I use to reenact prehistoric cave painting methodologies by blowing paint onto the canvas and toothbrushes as some of the items to work with to paint the canvas.

Primarily, Queer Lines (For Agnes) takes art historical cues from abstract painter Agnes Martin, utilizing an abstraction of the horizontal lines found in her later work. Inspired by her resistance to Patriarchal norms realized in both her painting and her writing, I find her contributions to a definition of queering conventions provocative and see this work as working from her queries, evoking new strategies and questions for the future. The work is about queer survival during a global pandemic by creating a ritual for protection for all members of the LGBTQAI2S+ communities.

Thanks to FADO, Lisa G for editing and Kage for the soundscape and all your support.

Queer Lines (For Agnes)
video, 18:30, 2021

Distributed by Vtape, Canada

LINK to preview of Queen Lines (For Agnes)

NADI + FADO + MERCER UNION

This program is an accompaniment to NADI’s exhibition, Native Art Department International: Bureau of Aesthetics, at Mercer Union from March 14–October 31, 2020. 

ARTISTS
Claudia Edwards
Deanne Hupfield
John Hupfield
Louise Liliefeldt
Abigail Lim
Lutan Lui
Nathan Roy

In the final weeks of Native Art Department International: Bureau of Aesthetics, artists Native Art Department International (NADI) and FADO Performance Art Centre are facilitating a series of performance (and other) interventions in the space of NADI’s exhibition at Mercer Union.

Created by participants working in a variety of disciplines including performance, dance, music and martial arts, these activations demonstrate NADI’s commitment to kinship and their desire to build solidarity through forms of collaboration that promote non-competition. Each performance is privately executed and the documentation of each gesture will live on the websites of [FADO Site] and [Mercer Union Site]. This approach speaks to the adaptive methodologies of artists and institutions alike to consider how the pandemic environment impacts the practice and presentation of performance art. Here, the perennially debated theories concerning liveness dissolve for a timely discussion around intimacy, kinship and support; tenets that are fully embodied within the ethos and history of performance work. 

ABOUT MERCER UNION
Mercer Union is a non-profit, artist-centred space in Toronto that was founded by twelve artists in 1979. The organization has a unique track record of presenting innovative exhibitions and programs with Canadian and international artists in formative and established stages of their careers. Mercer Union is dedicated to supporting the production of new and experimental work, assisting artists in realizing pivotal projects. Mercer Union has the will and flexibility to take on ambitious projects and fosters an intimate and supportive space for artists to develop and take risks with their work.

Image © Louise Liliefeldt & NADI, 2020. Photo Louise Liliefeldt.

Pi*llOry is an event for Queer, BIPOC and Feminist performers to show case their work, focusing on trauma. Pi*llOrists are examining how we personally and politically dismantle heteronormative hegemony and engage in healing that puts an end to the repetition of communal trauma. Pi*llOry’s performers are liberating queer bodies as a primary agency that can harness the transformative power of presence, space, politics, shame and (dis)/ability while refracting their infinite incarnations. Pi*llOry’s artists renounce the binary and traditional gender roles, they not only create new ones for themselves, but give space for others to create their own as well. Through oral, visual and visceral mediums, Pi*llOry explores the depths of fragmented gender/queer identity, pushing beyond labels and classifications. On the edge of complete uncertainty, with only the already structural, limited and bound ways of description and discrimination of queerness, Pi*llOrists arm themselves with the unknown to disrupt inherited historical trauma invoking a lasting communal cultural healing.

ARTISTS
Sadie Berlin
lo bil
Simla Civelek
Nicole Lynn Deschaine
Madeleine Lychek
Tess Martens
Sheri Osden Nault
[ field ] (Coman Poon & Brian Smith)
Randa Reda
Amber Helene Müller St. Thomas
Holly Timpener
Johannes Zits

Pi*llOry would like to thank FADO for their sponsorship and support of Pi*llOry part three and four.

Pi*llOry on Instagram
Pi*llOry on Facebook

Curated and presented by FADO Performance Art Centre in the context of Progress, international festival of performance & ideas.

In 2016, I was gifted a ton of Joyce Wieland’s marble scraps. A few pieces of it are here with us today.

What gets stored in a shoebox? Deposited into an archive? Shoved into a corner? Catalogued as important? Fever pitched towards a garbage can?

Literally and figuratively centered on a pile of marble scraps that once belonged to Joyce Wieland, Meyer’s The Marble in the Basement untangles issues of power, memory and inheritance by anthropomorphizing a forgotten object from this influential Canadian artist’s domestic archive. Surrounded by Meyer’s chosen family of objects which include a moveable staircase, an insulated football cape, a hooked rug and a hole the size of the tip of a ballpoint pen, Wieland’s marble is the anchor and next of kin, orchestrating the choreography that unfolds.

“With a mixture of tenderness, fannish enthusiasm and a keen sense for the absurdities that shape which histories are told, Meyer’s performance invites us to help bear the weight of feminist lives lived and lost.”
~Gabrielle Moser 

Hazel Meyer’s The Marble in the Basement is curated and presented by FADO Performance Art Centre as part of Progress, an international festival of performance and ideas. Progress is presented in partnership by SummerWorks and The Theatre Centre, and is collectively curated and presented by a series of Toronto-based companies, operating within a contemporary performance context. This fifth edition of the Festival is curated by Broadleaf Theatre, FADO Performance Art Centre, DLT, RT Collective, SummerWorks, The Theatre Centre, and Why Not Theatre.

CREDITS
Curated and Presented by FADO Performance Art Centre
Conceived and performed by Hazel Meyer
Performed with Moe Angelos and Stephen Jackman-Torkoff
Puppet Design by Jamie Shannon
Production Manager is Deb Lim
Lighting Design by Adrien Whan

January 30, 2020 @ 7:00pm
January 31, 2020 @ 7:00pm
February 1, 2020 @ 4:00pm (Q&A to follow)

Image © Hazel Meyer, The Marble in the Basement, FADO, 2020. Photo Polina Teif.

Curated by FADO Performance Art Centre
Co-commissioned by FADO and The Toronto Biennial of Art

single use salmon plogging addresses the labour required for enacting upon human responsibilities for taking care of the environment. The performance meditates upon the all too human compulsion to purchase and then discard that which is easily accessible, mass-produced, and presumably replaceable. 

In this performance, Toronto audiences are introduced to Ayumi Goto’s performance-alter ego, geisha gyrl, who is part salmon and part human. A performative shadow of Adrian Stimson’s Buffalo Boy, geisha gyrl and her team of scavenger-collectors intervene with the Toronto Waterfront Marathon and run the 42 kilometre route, collecting plastic and other debris along the way. single use salmon plogging culminates at the finish line of the marathon. 

This performance is dedicated to the Anishinaabe grandmother, activist and water walker, Josephine Mandamin, who circumnavigated the Great Lakes, covering over 17, 000 kilometers to raise awareness about the pollution in the river and lake systems. The performance is also dedicated to David S. Buckel, an LGBTQ rights lawyer, environmental activist, and runner, who self-immolated in Brooklyn to protest humanity’s addiction to fossil fuels.

The route run by geisha gyrl and her team of scavenger-collectors references and at points overlays the site of the Toronto Biennial’s curatorial activities, located along the original boundaries of the so-called Toronto Purchase of 1805 which stretch from Ashbridges Bay to Etobicoke Creek. 

Scavenger-collectors: Deb Lim, Peter Morin and Soleil Launiere


The performance begins at the starting line of the marathon and finishes when Ayumi and her team of scavenger-collectors cross the finish line. The performance will conclude in a final action a short distance away near Larry Sefton Park, which is located at the north/east corner of Nathan Philips Square.

Start time: 9:00am
Starting line: Queen Street West & University Avenue

End time: 2:30pm–3:30pm (approximate, time unknown)
Finish line: Queen Street West & Bay Street

MARATHON INFORMATION

Launching September 21, 2019, the Toronto Biennial of Art is a new international contemporary visual arts event as culturally connected and diverse as the city itself. For 72 days, Toronto and surrounding areas will be transformed by free exhibitions, talks, workshops and performances that reflect our local context while engaging with the most pressing issues of our time. The inaugural Biennial will present over 100 works by Canadian, Indigenous, and International artists installed at more than 15 sites on or near Toronto’s waterfront.

Image © Ayumi Goto, Rinrigaku. Photo by Yuula Benivolski.

© Marita Bullmann, 2019. Photo Henry Chan.

Marita Bullmann, Liina Kuittinen and Ignacio Pérez Pérez’s appearances in Toronto are 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.

Marita Bullmann’s (Germany) works are engagements with everyday objects: familiar materials, actions, spaces and places. In her performances, she seeks a direct encounter between body and space. Her working method can be understood as a temporally ephemeral, site- and situation-specific process. With her actions she creates her own realities and scenarios, which strengthen the awareness for object, material, body and space. Visual, temporal, haptic or acoustic elements determine the effect and perception of her performance. The way she creates abstract interpretations allows us to perceive and observe the things around us in a new way. The interpretation takes place through experience. The objects and materials she uses are by no means neutral, but connect with our sensual and emotional world of experience. Bullmann’s intention is to influence the usual mechanisms of seeing and perceiving far away from cultural imprints and to create a new ‘space’ that lets us become aware of the act of seeing. She combines the constructed experiences with a search for images and actions that make the phenomena of curiosity and peculiarity visible.

Liina Kuittinen (Finland): I am on my four. I am next to the ground. I see the surface from very close distance, the small particles and the space between them. I have to move my whole body closer to the object if I want to see it more clearly. I can not take the object in my hand and bring it closer to my eye. As an artist I am on my four and my hands are not swinging freely. I am eating ice-cream while writing this text. I am eating ice-cream for real, not just writing about it. I am eating it and it gives me great pleasure. Ice-cream goes through my digestion and my body knows how to turn the sugar into energy and to use the proteins and to get rid of the leftovers. Digestion is process that involves the body with other processes, one point in the circle of matter. Performance operates on the same plain with digestion. Performance and process of digesting are equally real. They are meeting points for material flows, actual events transforming material into other.

Ignacio Pérez Pérez (Venezuela / Finland) is a visual nomad. His work explores phenomenal reality as a journey, like the poet Mosche Benarrosch wrote: “the longest journey / is arriving / at the place / where you are.” He creates experiences of ritualistic playfulness and worldly contemplation to observe and encounter otherness and its permanent state of transformation in the realm of everyday life. His practice crosses diverse fields as performance art, walking, street photography and networking. “We are together in this. Now or never. Now or never. Now or never.”

Initiated by Patrick Lacasse and Alexis Bellavance, VIVA! Art Action was founded in 2006 by six artist-run centres from Greater Montreal to support the production of events dedicated to the presentation and advancement of action art practices and knowledge. The organization’s energies are primarily focused on VIVA! Art Action, an international biennial whose sixth edition took place in October 2017. Currently the fruit of a partnership with nine artist-centred organizations, the festival provides the public with an accessible and convivial context in which to encounter performance art in its most striking and avant-garde forms.

Save your Thursdays in September for the ultimate trio of Queer Performance Clubs performed by Moe Angelos, Hope Thompson, and David Bateman.

Performance Club 6 presents, Art Immuno Deficiency Syndrome, subtitle; Does This Giacometti Make Me Look Fat? by David Bateman. This performance looks at the iconic romance novel Love Story (1970), with an emphasis on the famous phrase from the book, “Love means never having to say you’re sorry,” and its indirect connection to the General Idea sculptures.

THE GOLDEN BOOK
Join us for Performance Club and get your own Performance Club: THE SYLLABUS, a brand new addition to FADO’s Golden Book series (as always, designed by Lisa Kiss). This time, it’s bigger (it won’t fit in your pocket, think book bag) and it contains three performance texts and an incredible intro, entitled, This is a Queer Series… written by Moynan King.

CLUB TALK BACKS
Join us after each performance for a talk back with the artist and their fellow club artists.
September 10: Moe Angelos in conversation with David Bateman
September 12: Hope Thompson in conversation with Moe Angelos
September 19: David Bateman in conversation with Hope Thompson

A Performance conversation with Jess Dobkin
Featuring the DEMPSEY AND MILLAN TALIXMXN

In 2018–2019, Jess Dobkin received a Chalmers Art Fellowship in support of her current on-going research project looking at the performance art archive—her own personal archive and the archives of notable organizations and artists in the USA, UK, Mexico, Hong Kong and Canada.

Jess Dobkin approaches the archive as both site and material to investigate the lifespan and spirit life of performance art. Building on her ongoing research in international performance archives, she interrogates the relationship between live performance and documentation to explore the dynamic ways that performance can exist before and beyond the live event.

This performance conversation, Conjuring the Archive, will invite the audience to create a DEMPSEY AND MILLAN TALIXMXN, an energetic archive of the performances and projects of Shawna Dempsey and Lorri Millan. On July 22, 2019 a fire destroyed a warehouse in Winnipeg that housed the studios of more than two dozen artists. Shawna and Lorri lost 30 years of artwork, costumes, ephemera, books, equipment and materials. This TALIXMXN is an honouring of Shawna and Lorri’s archive and an offering of archival magic.

“It’s not everyday you get to talk to the dead – and they answer.”
~Hope Thompson

Join us for Performance Club 5, and this special “conversation” between famed noir writer Cornell Woolrich (deceased) and his interviewer, Hope Thompson.

In a rare, ‘one-on-one’ Hope Thompson interviews crime writer and father of noir, Cornell Woolrich (1903–1968). Thompson brings alive her obsessive fascination with both Woolrich’s writing and his life in this ‘tell-all-from-beyond-the-grave’ interview performance. A solitary and reclusive figure in life, Woolrich is similarly reticent in death, however, Thompson’s interview techniques draw out the writer, giving the Performance Club a window into the dark secrets, vulnerabilities and surprising humour of this often overlooked giant of 20th century crime fiction.

Cornell Woolrich’s seminal short story, Three O’clock, will be provided as a sample of the author’s work. In this thriller of marital revenge, a husband known only as “Stapp” plots the murder of his wife, only to have a series of surprise events send him spiraling into nail scratching despair.

THE GOLDEN BOOK
Join us for Performance Club and get your own Performance Club: THE SYLLABUS, a brand new addition to FADO’s Golden Book series (as always, designed by Lisa Kiss). This time, it’s bigger (it won’t fit in your pocket, think book bag) and it contains three performance texts and an incredible intro, entitled, This is a Queer Series… written by Moynan King.

CLUB TALK BACKS
Join us after each performance for a talk back with the artist and their fellow club artists.
September 10: Moe Angelos in conversation with David Bateman
September 12: Hope Thompson in conversation with Moe Angelos
September 19: David Bateman in conversation with Hope Thompson

Save your Thursdays in September for the ultimate trio of Queer Performance Clubs performed by Moe Angelos, Hope Thompson, and David Bateman.

Save your Thursdays in September for the ultimate trio of Queer Performance Clubs performed by Moe Angelos, Hope Thompson, and David Bateman.

Are you a snowflake? Do you live in an information silo? Do you live to comment? Likes, dislikes, emoji bagels and a thumbs up? Are you a lurking flamer? (Or is your crazy uncle in Alberta one?) Is this making you mad? Would you like to say something? Do you feel silenced because there is no comment function? What happens when all your friends (and your “Friends”) think exactly the same as you? Can you talk to each other anymore?

Join us for Performance Club 4, Book Club: snowflakes in the echo chamber, one year after Queer/Play was published; one year after Ellie, Audrey, Jasmine, Stacy and Moe read it in their book club; and one long year on our journey ever deeper into the Offendocene, the epoch of being outraged.

THE GOLDEN BOOK
Join us for Performance Club and get your own Performance Club: THE SYLLABUS, a brand new addition to FADO’s Golden Book series (as always, designed by Lisa Kiss). This time, it’s bigger (it won’t fit in your pocket, think book bag) and it contains three performance texts and an incredible intro, entitled, This is a Queer Series… written by Moynan King.

CLUB TALK BACKS
Join us after each performance for a talk back with the artist and their fellow club artists.
September 10: Moe Angelos in conversation with David Bateman
September 12: Hope Thompson in conversation with Moe Angelos
September 19: David Bateman in conversation with Hope Thompson

DOCUMENTS centres uses dialogue, gesture and the voice of both the artist and the audience to uncover and critique structures of power. Troubling the division of labour between the performer and the audience divisions, DOCUMENTS involves a public reading of the documentation that serves to authenticate or legitimize citizenship. Central to this work is a filing cabinet that both holds the props required for the performance, while also serving as a portrait or trace of the artist. The interactive reading of the documents in the files addresses the embodied specificities of race, class, gender, sexuality to contest whether these categories accurately reflect the bodies they are meant to represent – while underlining how different audiences and relationships to power may influence this reading.

CREDITS
Curated and Presented by FADO Performance Art Centre
Conceived and Directed by Autumn Knight

This year’s Progress, international festival of performance & ideas takes place between January 30–February 15, 2019. Progress is collectively curated by FADO Performance Art Centre, F-O-R-M, Native Earth Performing Arts, SummerWorks, The Power Plant, the red light district, The Theatre Centre, Uma Nota Culture and Why Not Theatre. Produced by SummerWorks in association with The Theatre Centre.

Single Tickets: $25 | PURCHASE TICKETS
3-Show Progress Pass: $60 | PURCHASE PASS
Box Office: 416-538-0988

Image © Autumn Knight, DOCUMENTS. Image Paul Litherland.

Originally conceived for the eve of the 2015 UK general election, Cock & Bull sees three female performers (Nic Green, Laura Bradshaw, Rosana Cade) convene to perform their own, alternative, party conference.

Exploring power, voice, agency and sustainability, they use the most heard phrases from Conservative governmental rhetoric, to dismantle and redress dominant paradigms of power and Politics. Responding to the meaninglessness and repetition of empty political promise, the privilege of the governmental elite and the deep discontent of an increasingly disproportionate and divided society, this work is part protest, part catharsis, part exorcism. It becomes, in part, a demonstration of togetherness. Cock and Bull is a transforming choreography of words and a passionate speech of the body, underpinned with the real-time energy of political dissatisfaction and tory tongue-speak.

For the Toronto premiere of Cock & Bull, two iterations are performed: the original short version (60 minutes) and the long version, lasting the length of an average sitting of the House of Commons (over 7 hours). Presented as bookends in the first week of Progress, audiences are afforded the unique opportunity to investigate the performance’s structure and form as it expands (and contracts) over time.

“A quiet, luminously brilliant, meditation on politics and pain.” Exeunt Magazine
★★★★ “A blistering, beautiful act.” What’s On Stage
★★★★ “Astonishing…Unforgettable performances.” The Scotsman

Winner of the Total Theatre Award for best visual/physical theatre, Edinburgh (2016)

CREDITS
Curated and Presented by FADO Performance Art Centre
Conceived and Directed by Nic Green
Created with Laura Bradshaw and Rosana Cade
Performed by Laura Bradshaw, Rosana Cade and Nic Green (short version)
Performed by Rosana Cade and Nic Green (long version)
LX design Eleni Thomaidou
Technical support Murray Wason
Production Manager (Toronto) Deb Lim

PERFORMANCES
January 30, 2019 @ 7:30pm (60 minutes)
February 2, 2019 @ 2:00pm (7 hours & 41 minutes)

This year’s Progress, international festival of performance & ideas takes place between January 30–February 15, 2019. Progress is collectively curated by FADO Performance Art Centre, F-O-R-M, Native Earth Performing Arts, SummerWorks, The Power Plant, the red light district, The Theatre Centre, Uma Nota Culture and Why Not Theatre. Produced by SummerWorks in association with The Theatre Centre.

Single Tickets: $25 | PURCHASE TICKETS
3-Show Progress Pass: $60 | PURCHASE PASS
Box Office: 416-538-0988

Image © Nic Green, Cock & Bull. Photo Manuel Vason.

FADO Performance Art Centre is pleased to co-present Ruth Belinga (performance), Michel Bitimbhe (video) and Serge Olivier Fokua (performance) from Cameroon in the context of FAAS: À Qui? Sudbury’s 6th Fair of Alternative Art (October 24–26, 2018) and in collaboration with AXENÉ07 and RIAP. 

Every two years since 2008, the Fair of Alternative Art in Sudbury (FAAS) has occupied and transformed a public space in the nickel city’s downtown. Invited artists are challenged to complete new works over the course of the festival and according to each edition’s concept and theme. 

PRESENTING PARTNERS of FAAS: À Qui?
Aboriginal Curatorial Collective
AXENÉ07
BRAVO
Centre Bang
Dare-Dare
Debajehmujig Creation Centre
FADO Performance Art Centre
Gallery 101
Galerie Louise
Galerie du Nouvel-Ontario
Galerie Sans Nom
ImagoL’Écart lieu d’art actuel
Myths and Mirrors
Perte de signal
RIAPRuben Cohen
Voix visuelle

INVITED ARTISTS: Martin Beauregard (Montréal), Ruth Belinga (Cameroon), Michel Bitimbhe (Cameroon), Mathieu Boucher Côté (Moncton), John Court (Finland), Quill Christie-Peters (Canada), Raven Davis (Canada), John Deneuve (France), Marika Drolet-Ferguson (Moncton), Anyse Ducharme (Sturgeon Falls), Serge Olivier Fokoua (Cameroon), Patrick Harrop (Sudbury), Jérôme Havre (Toronto), Terrance Houle (Calgary), Camille Larivée (Canada), Salifou Lindou (Cameroon), Geneviève Massé (Montréal), Laurie McGauley (Sudbury), Joseph Muscat (Toronto), Yanie Porlier (Ottawa), Les Poulpes (Chicoutimi, Montréal and St-Émile-de-Suffolk), Rah (Toronto), Cora-Rae Silk (Sudbury), Cheryl Rondeau (Toronto), Laura Taler (Toronto), Camille Usher (Canada), Jean-Ambroise Vesac (Rouyn-Noranda), Clayton Windatt (Canada) and many others!

Image © Ruth Belinga, FAAS, 2018. Photo Camille Tremblay Beaulieu.

FADO Performance Art Centre is pleased to co-present a new in situ performance by John Court (UK) in the context of FAAS: À Qui?, Sudbury’s 6th Fair of Alternative Art (October 24–26, 2018).

Every two years since 2008, the Fair of Alternative Art in Sudbury (FAAS) has occupied and transformed a public space in the nickel city’s downtown. Invited artists are challenged to complete new works over the course of the festival and according to each edition’s concept and theme. This year’s festival takes place in an empty school, St-Louis-de-Gonzague Elementary School.

John Court’s performance practice is informed by the site he is performing in, often responding with continuous, repetitive actions that create a rhythm that runs parallel to that of the site. In many of his works, he refers to his own days at school, counting (or trying to), reading and drawing. In this site-specific action, Court utilized several wooden stair handrails sourced from around the school. Balancing them on his shoulder, the artist moves in repeating circles around the space, side stepping the handrails scattered around the school room floor and marking a line on the chalkboard in an effort to keep track of each revolution.

PRESENTING PARTNERS of FAAS: À Qui?
Aboriginal Curatorial Collective
AXENÉ07
BRAVO
Centre Bang
Dare-Dare
Debajehmujig Creation Centre
FADO Performance Art Centre
Gallery 101
Galerie Louise
Galerie du Nouvel-Ontario
Galerie Sans Nom
ImagoL’Écart lieu d’art actuel
Myths and Mirrors
Perte de signal
RIAPRuben Cohen
Voix visuelle

INVITED ARTISTS: Martin Beauregard (Montréal), Ruth Belinga (Cameroon), Michel Bitimbhe (Cameroon), Mathieu Boucher Côté (Moncton), John Court (Finland), Quill Christie-Peters (Canada), Raven Davis (Canada), John Deneuve (France), Marika Drolet-Ferguson (Moncton), Anyse Ducharme (Sturgeon Falls), Serge Olivier Fokoua (Cameroon), Patrick Harrop (Sudbury), Jérôme Havre (Toronto), Terrance Houle (Calgary), Camille Larivée (Canada), Salifou Lindou (Cameroon), Geneviève Massé (Montréal), Laurie McGauley (Sudbury), Joseph Muscat (Toronto), Yanie Porlier (Ottawa), Les Poulpes (Chicoutimi, Montréal and St-Émile-de-Suffolk), Rah (Toronto), Cora-Rae Silk (Sudbury), Cheryl Rondeau (Toronto), Laura Taler (Toronto), Camille Usher (Canada), Jean-Ambroise Vesac (Rouyn-Noranda), Clayton Windatt (Canada) and many others!

“Great acoustics, but shitty seating.”
“Honestly, WHY? Just WHY?”
“The faint sounds of ovarian partying.”

Curated by FADO Performance Art Centre and co-presented with SummerWorks

You are invited to sing your favourite karaoke songs in this performative installation that examines vulnerability through the site of my body. Wearing headphones that contain your voice and requested karaoke song, this mix is wired via 50-foot cable into my vaginal canal, which acts as the stage for the audience of my uterus. Other listeners are invited to eavesdrop on your performance through the flesh of my body via stethoscope.

Intimate Karaoke, Live at Uterine Concert Hall transforms the site of the theatre into a social space where an awkward karaoke party minus the amplified music shares the intimacy of the artist’s body as it is offered up as the venue where dialogue around the cultural and political expectations of bodies marked female and a critique of medical surveillance, reproductive rights and the aging Queer female body collide.

Intimate Karaoke, Live at Uterine Concert Hall is a durational performance. Audience members are asked to purchase tickets to arrive for one time slot but are welcome to stay until the end of the night.

Stay as long as you want!
Sing your favourite karaoke song for Dayna McLeod’s uterus!
Live at Uterine Concert Hall!

Credits:
Curated by FADO Performance Art Centre
Co-presented with SummerWorks
Conceived and Performed by Dayna McLeod
Technical Direction by Adrien Whan
Attendants: Rhainnon Collett, Theo Gallant, Cara Spooner, Athena Trinh

THE GOLDEN BOOK
Pick up your copy of FADO’s on-going pocket essay series, the Golden Book, at the performance. This time, the Golden Book has a blood red cover in honour of Dayna’s performance. Essay entitled, From Specular to Speculative: Intimate Encounters @ Uterine Concert Hall by Alanna Thain contained within. Alanna is the Director, Institute for Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies; Director, Moving Image Research Laboratory; and Associate Professor, Department of English at McGill University.

This performance is part of the SummerWorks Presentations programming – offering you a snapshot of contemporary performance in 2018. A vital collection of theatre, dance, music, and live art works from across the country.

SummerWorks supports work that has a clear artistic vision and explores a specific theatrical aesthetic. It encourages risk, questions, and creative exploration while insisting on accessibility, integrity, and professionalism. This year’s 11-day Festival (August 9-19, 2018) featuresover 30 unique projects as part of SummerWorks Presentations and SummerWorks Lab. New this year: we’re teaming up with an incredible group of arts organizations to bring you the SummerWorks Exchange, a new stream of the Festival that features artist workshops and professional development opportunities.

Image © Dayna McLeod, Uterine Concert Hall, Montréal, 2018. Photo Helen Simard.

Co-presented by FADO Performance Art Centre and SAVAC

Precarity renders the acquisition, care and disposal of an object into an emotionally loaded, calculative problem. The lifecycle of an object depends on its size, utility, affective potential and value. Where do you store grandma’s fine china in a tiny rented apartment? How long do you hold on to the unique piece of metal that you dumpstered for an art project ten years ago? Does your sculpture have more value sitting on a plinth in gallery, or on a shelf in storage?

Weather to Store is a durational performance in three acts, purposely presented in no particular order. In each act a collection of objects is arranged and manipulated in a different way, and in three distinct spaces: a gallery, the outdoors and a self-storage container. The sequence of time, the utility of the objects and the designated spaces that these objects and actions occupy are displaced and dis-jointed, mediating on and revealing how context influences the various object’s shifting and impermanent value. 

ACT 2: Storage
In the second act of Weather to Store, a gallery space is reframed as a typical storage locker. The artist and her exhibition take up residence in the gallery and perform ‘storing’ in situ. The artist stacks, re-orders and rearranges the art objects in the gallery-turned-storage over the course of the residency. The various configurations reveal the process through which objects are ascribed value in storage. Audience is invited to come and go during gallery hours. 

May 14–19 & 22–23 @ 12:00pm–5:00pm
Bachir/Yerex Presentation Space, 440-401 Richmond Street West, Toronto

ACT 1: Gallery
Weather to Store continues outside. The artist converts a patch of space outdoors into a gallery and mounts an exhibition, delineated by tape lines drawn on the ground.The dimension of the designated space corresponds to a typical medium sized self-storage space. The exhibition is comprised of unfinished, raw materials presented and sold as art objects along with functional objects hindered from exercising their potential utility.

May 24, 2018 @ 6:00pm–8:00pm
70 Geary Lane, Toronto

ACT 3: Outside
Weather to Store ends in a self-storage facility. The artist moves her objects for the last time into a storage locker. Opting out of preservationist logics of climate-controlled storage spaces, the artist performs the laborious process of weathering them artificially as an additive and depreciating performative gesture. Presented by SAVAC in partnership with Art Spin.

Venue: Planet Storage, 1655 Dupont Street
Date: October 11–21, 2018

SAVAC (South Asian Visual Arts Centre) is a non-profit, artist-run centre in Canada dedicated to increasing the visibility of culturally diverse artists by curating and exhibiting their work, providing mentorship, facilitating professional development and creating a community for our artists. SAVAC was founded to be an organization staffed by people of colour, committed to support the work of artists of colour.

Toronto’s hottest performance art pop-up shop is GOOD BUY! by Tanya Mars

For 3-days only! Not to be missed! Rare opportunity! Something for everyone! Be the first to own an original Mars! Everything must go!

Q: What do performance artists do when faced with rising rents, rarefied availability, aging and too much stuff?
A: Go out of business! (or)
B: Downsize. Re-purpose. Re-gift. (or)
C: Move to Hamilton.

For 3 days only, you will have the unique opportunity to see, touch, smell (and buy!) decades of treasures collected in the name of art. One-part exhibition of performance materials and one-part studio sale. Come and browse the materials, objects, costume bits and other curiosities from Tanya Mars’ personal studio/storage locker. Everything is up for grabs at Toronto’s hottest performance art POP-UP shop, GOOD BUY!

Tanya Mars is a feminist performance artist who has been involved in the Canadian art scene since 1973, and has been collecting valuable stuff all that time, lugging it from Montreal to Toronto to Shelburne, Nova Scotia and back again to Toronto. Disguised as “art materials” some of these things have been used in performances over the years, other things are performances-in-waiting. 

She’s done a lot of things. Among them: Performances (solo and collaborative) in Canada, the Arctic, Europe, South America, China, Mexico and US; director/member of Powerhouse/La Centrale; Editor of Parallelogramme/ANNPAC (if anybody remembers what those things are); some videos; collective member of 7a*11d International Festival of Performance Art; two books on Canadian Women Performance Artists with Johanna Householder; teaching performance at NSCAD and UTSC; parent, grandparent, Art Mom to many.

SHOP HOURS & EVENTS

Thursday, May 3
5:00pm–6:30pm: VIP Preview (by invitation only)
7:00pm: Doors open to the public & opening performance-lecture by Tanya Mars
7:30–9:30pm: shopping & refreshments, plus shop tours by official merchandiser, collaborator and Mars’ personal muse, Odette Oliver
ADMISSION: $5 / $2 for students and seniors

Friday, May 4
12:00pm–9:00pm: shop open
7:00pm: Performance by one of Mars’ long-time collaborators, playwright Paul Ledoux
ADMISSION: free

Saturday, May 5
12:00pm–6:00pm: shop open
ADMISSION: free

Performance by Myung-Sun Kim
Screening of the work of Julieta Maria

Co-presented by FADO Performance Art Centre, Gardiner Museum and Pleasure Dome

In support of the Gardiner Museum’s exhibition Yoko Ono: The Riverbed, Eyeblink is a three-part monthly screening and performance series that draws inspiration from Ono’s filmmaking from the 1960s and 1970s. In Yoko Ono’s early Fluxus films, Eyeblink and One (Match), the artist watches in steady, fixed-frame contemplation the simplest of gestures, managing to distill cinema to its essentials in a shot-countershot duet of light and vision. This edition of the monthly series, Eyeblink: Fires, is presented by FADO Performance Art Centre, the Gardiner Museum and Pleasure Dome. The presenting artists, Myung-Sun Kim (performance) and Julieta Maria (video) present works that will explore the intertwined lineages of trauma and survival.

Myung-Sun Kim will present a new performance work. Kim’s work explores ideas around foodways, undocumented history, war, fiction, memory, trauma, resilience, and community care. She is interested in the sharing of lived experiences and methodologies that may evoke a collective sense of empathy and a deeper understanding and care for the differences that exist within our complex intercultural communities in ways that provides sustenance.

Julieta Maria’s elegant, performance-for-camera shorts concentrates lifetimes of study and digestion into exquisite frames. The artist uses the material of her body to reflect on the violence of her native Colombia, or the exile of her Palestinian father. Pleasure Dome curates a mini-retrospective featuring a program of seven shorts, as well as two smashed reconstruction loops installed in the Gardiner’s lobby.

FADO Performance Art Centre has a long history collaborating with Buddies in Bad Times Theatre to present the work of Canadian and international performance artists at the Rhubarb! Festival including: 2Fik (2011), Sian Robinson Davies (2012), Paul Couillard and Ed Johnson a.k.a Duorama (2014) and Staceyann Chin (2017). 

For the 39th edition of the festival, we are excited to be collaborating once again to bring the work of celebrated feminist performance icon Lois Weaver to the stage at Buddies. Weaver will be developing and presenting a Toronto iteration of her part-chat show, part-concert performance, What Tammy Needs to Know About Getting Old and Having Sex.

Performed in the guise of her alter-ego Tammy WhyNot, a “65-year old trailer trash blonde who left Nashville for a career as a performance artist”, the performance is created through a collaborative workshop process with local LGBTQ elders in the week leading up to the performance. What Tammy Needs to Know About Getting Old and Having Sex looks at intimacy, relationships, desire, and sex in people over 50. No matter your age, Tammy shows us that love, desire, friendship, sexual health, and losing your keys in your handbag are universal concerns. Several iterations of this performance have been developed with a growing community of seniors in the UK and around the world. Sharing their stories and her own, Tammy invites you to quite worrying why… and start thinking, Why Not?

ABOUT TAMMY WHYNOT
Tammy Whynot has accompanied Weaver since 1978 as Weaver’s alter-ego, performance partner and research associate. The character was conceived in The Lysistrata Numbah created and performed by Spiderwoman Theatre in 1978 and born again in a caravan under the Brooklyn Bridge in a show called Upwardly Mobile Home, written and performed by the Split Britches Theatre Company in 1984. 

Tammy got her start in show business in the late eighties as a solo artist on the New York downtown performance scene appearing at WOW, PS122, The Club at La MaMa and the Limbo Lounge. Following that, she has mostly appeared in the UK and around the world. 

She made her first international appearance as mistress of ceremonies for Club Girrls at the ICA in 1994. After that she toured the UK with cLUB bENT, presented in association with It’s Queer Up North and Gay Sweatshop. Her London appearances include, Saturday nights at Duckies, Club Deviance at the Almeida Theatre, Tammy WhyNot’s X-rated Xmas Xtravaganza at the Oval House and Tammy’s Art and Beauty Salon and East End Collaborations at Queen Mary, University of London. She has also performed in Helsinki, Warsaw, Buenos Aires, Bogota, Rio de Janeiro, Montreal, Sydney, New York and Los Angeles.  

FADO Performance Art Centre is pleased to present x for staying here with us now, a new performance work by Sherri Hay. 

As a sculptor, it has never seemed outlandish to me to think about objects as having a life of their own. Nurit Bird David talks about a kind of empathetic understanding between people and the things around them that is bred by familiarity. A good friend from Japan tells how seamstresses hold funerals for their needles, burying them in a soft cool block of tofu at the temple. Which sounds quaint and funny, though of course even we are every day more familiar with how our smart devices seduce us. 

For so much of our history what has been valorized was the human who would subdue and shape the world through his reason and will, a world that was considered to be inert and insensible. In this new age of connectivity, some new ways of being and relating are coming into focus, beginning to acknowledge to a broad spectrum of otherness, and preferring self-organization to dominion.

Two evenings, two different non-human performers performing a score. The performance will move slowly, lasting perhaps 45 minutes. The exact time of the performance will be determined by the performer, in the moment. The performance will be corporeal, unmediated and analogue, not moved by electronics or motors. It will be attendant to real life forces like gravity, as well as its own material constraints. 

On the occasion of this new work by Sherri Hay, FADO is pleased to publish the fourth in The Golden Book series, containing an interview about the process of creating this performance, conducted by FADO and the performer in x for staying here with us now.

Performance 1: February 16 @ 7:30pm
Performance 2: February 24 @ 4:00pm

Curated and presented by FADO Performance Art Centre in the context of Progress

Dickie Beau presents a poetic performance of peculiar personas. LOST in TRANS takes Dickie’s sensational multimedia aesthetic to hallucinatory new heights. Continuing his shtick of using playback, in which he ‘channels’ voices he sees as being misplaced, misrepresented or misunderstood, Dickie breathes new life into found sound, ‘re-writing’ audio artefacts and playing them back through his body to become a live performing archive of the missing.

Presenting a compelling constellation of vivid characters inspired by cultural antiquity and Ovid’s Metamorphoses, LOST in TRANS is an off-road trip through the cultural archives. Cyclops, the one-eyed giant, becomes a third eye through which we view the world anew, including a radical re-visioning of Echo, the Nymph, of whom all that remained when she died of a broken heart was the sound of her voice…

“Phenomenal talent…a powerful and moving artist…breathtaking.”
Time Out (London)

“Dickie Beau is the closest this country has to a genuine medium, an auteur of the airwaves, who can put flesh onto recorded sound in a manner both gripping and disturbing.”
This is Cabaret (London)

CREDITS
Conceived and performed by: Dickie Beau
Producer: Sally Rose (UK)
Dramaturg: Julia Bardsley (UK)
Lighting Design: Marty Langthorne
Sound Design: Will Saunders (UK, Toronto)
Video filming and post-production consultant: Lukas Demgenski
Lighting operator: Nao Nagai (UK, Toronto)
Video consultant: Gillian Tan (UK)
Video operator: Aaron Pollard (Toronto)
Pegasus: Stephen Lawson (Toronto)
Production Manager: Deborah Lim (Toronto)

LOST in TRANS was originally a Southbank Centre commission supported by a Jardin d’Europe contemporary dance award and a residency at Cullberg Ballet, Stockholm and has been presented at: Southbank Centre in London, Contact in Manchester, Homotopia Festival, Liverpool, Artsadmin, London, and City of Women Festival, Ljubljana (curated as part of the Live Art Development Agency’s Just Like a Woman programme).

Progress, an international festival of performance and ideas is 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.

You’ve go to climb to the top of Mount Everest
to reach the Valley of the Dolls.
It’s a brutal climb to reach that peak
which so few have seen.
You never knew what was really up there,
but the last thing you expected to find
was the Valley of the Dolls.
You stand there, waiting for
the rush of exhilaration
you though you’d feel–but
it doesn’t come.
You’re too far away to hear the applause
and take your bows.
And there’s no place left to climb.

Fifty years ago, Jacqueline Susann wrote these opening lines in The Valley of the Dolls, what would become one of the most successful books of its time (with over 31 million copies sold, and counting) making Susann a household name (even if many still read her book under the covers in secret) and bestowing her with the honour of being the first author in history to have three consecutive books in the #1 position on the New York Times bestsellers list. Some might remember the Valley of the Dolls best as the cinematic vehicle for a pill and booze soaked cautionary tale of female ambition, fame, fortune and failure. Despite this, fifty years later the story is still relevant, telling us as much about celebrity culture today and it forewarned us then.

You’re got to climb to the top of Mount Everest to see the Valley of the Dolls, and you’re invited to take this journey with Toronto’s very own performance provocateur Keith Cole in a 5-session book club-cum-academic master class. The first 4 sessions take place in a sprawling hotel room. In Session 5, book club attendees gather with audience to watch a screening of the 1967 film directed by Mark Robson, listen to a key note speech by a secret special guest, and receive their “V of the D” diplomas.

This Performance Club 2 provides participants with a survey of a range of theories and opinions about how we engage, understand and re-evaluate, literary works of art from the past. How do we talk about, feel and learn from a work of art that is still celebrated fifty years after its first release? Our lives are increasingly dominated by visual images on screens but what about the act of reading? The act of discussion? The act of listening? The act of offering up opinions? Have we globally lost the inter-personal understanding of the importance of ideas, the circulation of information and the importance of coming together to identify, contextualize and analyze literary works of art?

The Valley of the Dolls by Jacqueline Susann refers to many performance and non-performance outlets. Namely popular entertainment and academic forms ranging from fine art, television, Hollywood, cabaret, camp, feminism, fashion, musical theatre, drug culture, power dynamics and gender politics. All of which will be analyzed in this participant lead Performance Club.

In order to reach a greater understanding of how meaning circulates through our diverse and hectic lives Performance Club participants must first come to terms with 4 items of importance:

• reading is crucial
• participation is mandatory
• attendance counts
• opinions matter

There is limited enrolment to attend all 4 sessions. The first eight participants to enrol for all sessions will receive a FREE softcover copy of the book. Each week, there will be a limited number of audited spots to attend a single session. These spots also require registration. These spots are PWYC. Auditors attend single sessions and BYOB (Bring Your Own Book).

EVENT & SCREENING
February 27, 2018
The Commons @ 401 Richmond Street West, Toronto
7:00pm: Keynote by Kristyn Dunnion & Graduation
8:00pm: Screening of The Valley of the Dolls

FADO Performance Art Centre’s newest recurring series, Performance Academy, takes on the abstract form of a school, a university, a workshop, a class or a course, in the form of our own homemade academy. Performance: Academy is not a workshop and it’s not a school either. It’s best understood as a public engagement opportunity with an artist who is invested in inverting notions of authority in practice, research, and pedagogy.

In partnership with Tangled Art + Disability, FADO welcomes Cindy Baker to Performance Academy for a one-time engagement, Good Bodies with Cindy Baker. This Performance Academy is presented in conjunction with Home: Body, a performance by Cindy Baker presented by Tangled Art + Disability.

Good Bodies with Cindy Baker

What can your body do? What CAN’T your body do? The history of performance prioritizes movement that “pushes the limits” of our bodies and capabilities, creating points of tension between ease and difficulty. As artists with disabilities, our limits often seem like failings and if we can’t push as “far” as able-bodied people, we are seen as or feel like our work is less interesting; less advanced. We are also often inclined to make work that pushes our own limits in a way that is harmful to our well-being, using our work to prove our value and ability beyond our disabilities. Conversely, as able-bodied artists, we are usually blissfully unaware of the privilege of having a mechanically proficient body. We may want to make work that is sensitive to the notion of ability and limitations, or to proactively make work that acknowledges that our bodies will eventually begin to fail and that this does not mark an end to our practices.

How do we make work that respects the limits of our bodies and exploits and highlights our abilities and strengths, without making that work be “about” disability? How do we make work that talks about other ideas that we are interested in while remaining sensitive to our own abilities?

This will be a collaborative session in which we brainstorm ideas for new work and tease out ideas for fresh approaches to our practices. Baker will pose a series of questions and lead a discussion on the ideas generated. Attendees may be asked to participate in movement exercises based on their own ideas. Bring pens and paper or your preferred recording implements and any supportive or assistive props that you personally use and feel comfortable bringing.

This academy is open to all participants of all levels of study and/or experience, including the just plain curious. Admission is free. ASL interpretation and attendant care provided.

Performance Club 1 includes the launch of Queer/Play, edited by Moynan King, and a series of performance accompaniments, such as verbatim readings of some of the interviews contained in the book and a new performance by Moe Angelos entitled (what else?) Queer/Play.

In Queer/Play (the performance) Moe Angelos interprets and takes inspiration from the material content of Queer/Play to create a new performance work of their own, playing with the idea of book club.

Verbatim interviews performed by a roster of artists, writers, and performers including:
Shannon Cochrane
Amanda Cordner
Sky Gilbert
Darren Gobert
Johanna Householder
Aisha Sasha John
Louise Liliefeldt
Pamila Matharu
Tanya Mars
Susan Wolf
Michaela Washburn

Queer/Play is a collection of never before published scripts and interviews from both emerging and established Canadian queer theatre and performance artists, Queer/Play maps a cross section of current performance works found at the intersection of queer life and art, delving into the resulting subcultures and always-changing concepts of identity and performance. In this book, queer is not just something someone is; it’s also something these artists do.

WORKS INCLUDED in Queer/Play:

Graceful Rebellions by Shaista Latif
Lapine-Moi / Rabbit-I and Cerveau Fêlé 101 / Broken Brain 101 by Nathalie Claude
Dirty Plötz by Alex Tigchelaar
Chronicles of a War Child by Jazz Kamal “Nari”
She Mami Wata and The Pussy WitchHunt by d’bi.young anitafrika
The Magic Hour by Jess Dobkin
Trapped! by Hope Thompson
Sister Mary’s a Dyke?! by Flerida Peña
Hiding Words (for you) by Gein Wong
SPIN by Evalyn Parry
Plus interviews by: Alisha Stranges, Erin Hurley, Laine Zisman Newman, Donna-Michelle St Bernard, Mel Hague, Keith Cole, Laura Levin, Tabia Lau, Kim Crosby, Margo Charlton

This is your book club. You are the audience. You decide how many sessions you attend. 

It is not a requirement that you have already read the book being clubbed to attend this Performance: Club. But you are more than welcome to! There will be a limited number of discounted books for sale at the door or you can purchase your copy in advance through the Playwrights Canada Press website.

FADO Performance Art Centre’s newest recurring performance series takes on the abstract form of a school, a university, a workshop, a class or a course, in the form of our own homemade academy. Performance: Academy is in session for the second time this October, performed by Dino Dinco.

Performance Academy 2: PERFORMING THE CRITIQUE with DINO DINCO

Performance Academy 2 is presented in multiple sessions and is offered FREE to audience-participants. There is limited enrolment for this academy, so we ask that audience-participants commit to attending as many sessions as possible. This workshop is open to all participants of all levels of study and/or experience (including the just plain curious).

DINO DINCO is a performance art curator and maker, film and theatre director, arts educator and writer. Dinco lives and works in Tijuana and Los Angeles and his research includes experimentation with performance presentation and the relationship between documentation and scholarship.

In this Academy, participants (audience) will: take a hard (and subjective) look at the current state of performance praxis and strategies of performance presentation; examine goals, ideals and expectations with making and/or attending performance; address the relationship of performance within a visual art context, including the burgeoning trend of performance being collected by museums and private collectors; consider the Performance Festival Industrial Complex; and explore how and why all of this can (and arguably should) be challenged. Participants will be expected to perform as part of this research and investigation.

FADO Performance Art Centre is pleased to offer the first iteration of our newest recurring series Performance Academy, with Bethany Ides’ INCONSOLABLE SOLVENCY, taking place at our new home in The Commons @ 401, over three consecutive Sundays in September. 

What extra-sensory signals do we exchange when we trade money for goods, services and conveniences? How out of whack would a transaction have to be in order to hardly be recognizable as such? Would it – could it – seem like something else entirely? Like love? Like devastation? Like relief?

In this workshop, we will be troubling the methods of assessment and valuation we rely on every day in order to manage and/or mitigate our senses of security, trustworthiness, likability and fairness. Participants will work collaboratively to re-interpret and re-model concepts like “efficiency,” “transparency” and “trust,” by inventing tools for dissolving those social structures that depend on them. During each meeting, individuals and smaller clusters will propose experimental contracts or modes of currency for possible use by the group as a whole. Readings will be distributed and short process/speculative writing will be assigned each week. This workshop is offered free of charge. There is no fixed monetary cost, other kinds of equitable exchange are welcomed and encouraged. 

INCONSOLABLE SOLVENCY is presented in 3 sessions. If you cannot join each of the sessions, that’s okay, but it is preferable that participants make a commitment to attend at least 2 of the sessions. This workshop is open to all participants of all levels of study and/or experience (including just plain curiosity).

Bethany Ides’ Performance Academy is presented in conjunction with, in relationship to, and in the context of the work she is developing at HATCH entitled Deathbeds. Described as an opera created in community, Deathbeds is a multi-platform work about desire as a contested resource and the ways various commodification compulsions affect romantic and economic ecologies alike. And how harrowing matters get when we try to break through all that–how funny but also jittery, how dizzyingly everything becomes blur the more emphatically we expect the expiration of the patient, Capitalism. With accelerated excitations, we imagine a body on the brink and tend to it even as we call for its demise.

Created and Performed by Terrance Houle
In collaboration with Simla Civelek

Presented at SummerWorks in partnership with FADO Performance Art Centre

Evoking our colonial and non-colonial histories that exist in the light of night as in the darkness of the day, GHOST DAYS awakens a collaboration with artists, audience, and spirit. Internationally celebrated performance artist Terrance Houle will work in residence overnight at the Theatre Centre throughout the festival, culminating in a final performance that combines video, performance, photography, and music to conjure spirits and ghosts as audience and collaborators.

Terrance Houle is in residence at SummerWorks as part of the SummerWorks Lab–a place for exploration, experimentation, and process, allowing us to support work in early stages and create connections between audiences and artists.

SummerWorks is Canada’s largest curated performance festival of theatre, dance, music, live art and interdisciplinary forms. This year’s 11-day Festival features 52 unique projects, as well our SLIP series of artist workshops, a collection of new performance experiments in the SummerWorks Lab, and nightly parties. Festival runs from August 3–13, 2017.

Image © Terrance Houle, Friend or Foe #7 (Toronto), 7a*11d International Festival of Performance Art, 2014. Photo Henry Chan.

MONOMYTHS is conceived and curated by Shannon Cochrane and Jess Dobkin.
Presented by FADO Performance Art Centre, in association with The Theatre Centre.

MONOMYTHS invites a diverse collection of artists, scholars, and activists to revise Joseph Campbell’s conception of the hero’s journey through performance art, lectures, workshops, and other offerings. This new assemblage of non-linear un-narratives proposes a cultural, political and social feminist re-visioning of the world. The MONOMYTHS perception of the universal journey dispels the notion of the lone patriarchal figure on a conquest to vanquish his demons—both inner and outer—in consideration of community, collectivity, and collaboration.

Stage 14: The Return Home
CRONE by Tanya Mars

CRONE, the latest durational performance by Tanya Mars looks at how superstition and myth intertwine. In keeping with her recent performance strategy, Mars will create an atmospheric work that combines visually rich layers of spectacular, satirical feminist imagery with light and sound. A revered matriarch of the Canadian performance art community, it is fitting that Mars offers the conclusion to the year-long epic MONOMYTHS journey, illuminating Stage 14: The Return Home.