Category: Performance

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 three 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 the USA; 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, 2018
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, 2018
12:00pm–9:00pm: shop open
7:00pm: Performance by one of Mars’ long-time collaborators, playwright Paul Ledoux
ADMISSION: free

Saturday, May 5, 2018
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.

© Myung-Sun Kim, EYEBLINK: Fires (performance), 2018. Photo Yuula Benivolski.

FADO Performance Art Centre has a long history of 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 “sixty-five-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 fifty. 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 quit 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 forty-five 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. 

SCHEDULE

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

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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.

© Sherri Hay, x for staying here with us now, 2018. Photo Henry Chan.

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 artifacts 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)

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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 enrolled 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.

Performance Academy 3: 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.

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 the Tangled Art + Disability’s exhibition Home: Body, in which Cindy Baker presented a durational performance work entitled Crash Pad.

© Cindy Baker, Crash Pad, 2017. Photo Shannon Cochrane.

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 (the book):

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 of charge 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 three 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 two 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.

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.

CREDITS
Created and performed by Terrance Houle
In collaboration with Simla Civelek

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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 eleven-day Festival features fifty-two unique projects, as well as our SLIP series of artist workshops, a collection of new performance experiments in the SummerWorks Lab, and nightly parties. The festival runs from August 3–13, 2017.

© Terrance Houle, Ghost Days with Simla Civelek, 2017. 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.

© Tanya Mars, CRONE, 2017. Photo Henry Chan.

MONOMYTHS is conceived and curated by Shannon Cochrane and Jess Dobkin.
Presented by FADO in the context of the 38th Rhubarb Festival at Buddies in Bad Times Theatre.

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 13: Freedom To Live
Performance by Staceyann Chin

This is a rare opportunity to experience the powerful and provocative work of Staceyann Chin, an out spoken-word poet and LGBT rights and political activist. In her performance for MONOMYTHS, Chin weaves excerpts from her 2015 solo performance Motherstruck! with new thoughts and words ruminating on survival and action strategies for living in the current political situation in the USA as an intersectional life-term activist. 

Staceyann Chin’s work has been published in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and the Pittsburgh Daily; and has been featured on 60 Minutes and The Oprah Winfrey Show. In 2015, she was named by Equality Forum as one of their 31 Icons of the 2015 LGBT History Month.

To watch Chin perform is to watch the very essence of poetry manifested: her performances are imperfect, volatile and beautiful. Chin’s poetry is passionate and well-written, sure; but it’s her ability to communicate that passion in performance that is unparalleled. She becomes the poetry.

Cristin O’Keefe Aptowicz, author

© Stacyann Chin, MONOMYTHS Stage 13, 2017. Photo Connie Tsang.

MONOMYTHS is conceived and curated by Shannon Cochrane and Jess Dobkin.
Presented by FADO in association with The Theatre Centre and sponsored by Images Festival.

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.

MONOMYTHS Stage 12: Mistress of Two Worlds
Silver & Gold
Nao Bustamente (performed with Zachary Murphy)

Silver & Gold combines film, live performance, and original costumes into a hyrbid work that Nao Bustamante proclaims a “filmformance.” In this filmformance, Bustamante evokes the muse of legendary filmmaker Jack Smith and his tribute to 1940s Dominican movie starlet Maria Montez in a magical and joyfully twisted exploration of race, glamour, sexuality, and the silver screen.

The performance alternates between action and live narration of a film projection. In the film, inspired by iconic underground filmmaker Jack Smith, Bustamante interprets Smith’s muse: 1940s Dominican movie starlet Maria Montez. Honing-in on Smith’s interest in Hollywood’s obsession with filmic reproduction of the exotic, Bustamante embodies Miss Montez. Using video, live voiceover, audience interaction, and the body as a source of backdrop, narrative, and emotion, she takes the spectator on a bizarre and radical journey as she discovers a new bejeweled body part, which is at once her curse and oracle. This performance is the fruit of a commission by the LIVE FILM/ Jack Smith festival, co-organized by Arsenal Institute for Film and Video Art and Hebbel-am-Ufer Theater (HAU) in Berlin. 

Watch the trailer of Silver & Gold.

© Nao Bustamante, Silver & Gold, 2017. 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.

MONOMYTHS Stage 11: Refusal of the Return
Refusal of MONOMYTHs
claude wittmann with Adam Herst

For me the question in the arts right now is not “How?” (form), “When?” (place/time),”By/for whom?” (authorship/audience), but “What for?” which is locating the projects in a political and ethical path.
~Tania Bruguera

2894 by claude wittmann asks participants to read outloud from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s report (TRC report, 2015.) Each participant reads the report to a live streaming radio station with the aid of a cell phone and streaming software provided by the artist. Readers start where the last one left and read as much as they want. Sometimes the readings take place in a specific location, but mostly, participants may read anywhere they choose–in their homes, or in public. Participants read as much or as little as they can. Listeners can similarly be anywhere, listening on any device at any time. The connection of the radio provides a special kind of intimacy between readers and listeners. This project started in April 2016. It is on-going, until the entire report (all 2894 pages) has been read or until the project transforms into something more relevant to social change. 2894 is not a Truth and Reconciliation project. It is a Truth project. It is currently co-managed by claude wittmann and Adam Herst.

ABOUT 2894

2894 starts at the point where we acknowledge that it is not possible yet for Indigenous People and Settlers to meet in equal terms.
2894 reads the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s report (TRC report).
2894 is nothing else than reading the TRC report with integrity.
2894 is a trial at triggering something.
2894 will bring stuff up in the hearts of readers and listeners. We will see what we choose to do with it. 

2894 is managed with an artistic ethics:
2894 will not exploit the suffering of people who went to residential schools;
2894 asks us to act with integrity at all times, even if this has the risk to create discomfort;
2894 should generate equality;
2894 is not owned by anybody. 

In 2894: Refusal of MONOMYTHs, claude and Adam facilitate a 3-hour reading session. Audience is invited to attend to listen to readings of the report. Audience is invited to become readers should they wish. Readers read as much or as little as they choose, to the assembled audience of witnesses.

© claude wittmann, 2894 Refusal of MONOMYTHs, 2017. 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.

MONOMYTHS Stage 10: The Road Back
Rise and Fall by Serena Lee

Rise and Fall is a performance and collective exercise on the desire for inevitability, on how the return is narrated. A mutant reading group: we will create a model by weighing things–thoughts, images, and otherwise.

The first part is called Exposition.
Here, the key idea is introduced, the character established, giving us the main melodic line, the voice to follow. We set out along the path of its making.

The second part is called Development.
Here, we find ourselves getting lost, having followed the voice, the key idea, as it veers off into unpredictable territory: shadowy undergrowth, tangled density, change to a minor key, etc. A narrative device to create tension and interest, verging on dissolution.

The third part is called Recapitulation.
Here, we have regained our orientation and found our footing in the familiar. The compounded tension yields the reward of resolution, now that we have cleared the unknown and are following the path that, we expect, will take us home.

Some things to consider:

• Because it feels good to know where you’re going or, at least, to look like you know.
• Conventional models of societal collapse include the runaway train, the house of cards, the dinosaur. 
• With circular narratives we expect to be familiar with the unexpected, we expect to come home. How does desire arrange history?
• Referring to paths, wayfaring, weaving: Lines: A Brief History (Tim Ingold, Routledge: 2007).
• Hannibal used vinegar to break through rocks, traverse the Alps and take on Rome.
• To dress a table or a body – let’s say, with a heavy polyester banquet table linen or a sheet of  silk – you must be familiar with how fabric works in relation to the forces acting upon it, how it was made, how it reacts. You must anticipate how it falls, how it feels.

We will not call it progress. How to describe the movement?

© Serena Lee, Rise and Fall, 2017. Photo Henry Chan.

Conceived and curated by Shannon Cochrane and Jess Dobkin.
Presented by FADO and sponsored by The Gladstone Hotel

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.

MONOMYTHS Stage 9: Apotheosis/Journey to the Inmost Cave
Waiting for Sunrise by Marilyn Arsem

Apotheosis (from Greek ἀποθέωσις from ἀποθεοῦν, apotheoun “to deify”; in Latin deificatio “making divine”; also called divinization and deification) is the glorification of a subject to divine level. The term has meanings in theology, where it refers to a belief, and in art, where it refers to a genre.

In theology, apotheosis refers to the idea that an individual has been raised to godlike stature. In art, the term refers to the treatment of any subject (a figure, group, locale, motif, convention or melody) in a particularly grand or exalted manner.

“In this stage of the journey, the inmost cave may represent many things in the Hero’s story such as an actual location in which lies a terrible danger or an inner conflict which up until now the Hero has not had to face. As the Hero approaches the cave he must make final preparations before taking that final leap into the great unknown. 

At the threshold to the inmost cave the Hero may once again face some of the doubts and fears that first surfaced upon his call to adventure. He may need some time to reflect upon his journey and the treacherous road ahead in order to find the courage to continue. This brief respite helps the audience understand the magnitude of the ordeal that awaits the Hero and escalates the tension in anticipation of his ultimate test.”

© Marilyn Arsem, Waiting for Sunrise, 2017. Photo Henry Chan.

Conceived and curated by Shannon Cochrane and Jess Dobkin.

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.

MONOMYTHS Stage 8: Atonement with the Father/State
Movement: Training Sessions for Freedom Fighters
Syrus Marcus Ware

In this stage of the monomyth narrative, the hero must confront and be initiated by whatever holds the ultimate power in life. All the previous stages of the journey have been moving into this place; all that follow will move out from it. This stage is frequently symbolized by an encounter with someone or thing with incredible power, often conceived as masculine, through the patriarchal heterosexist imagining of the state. 

In Movement: Training Sessions for Freedom Fighters, Syrus Marcus Ware invites you to join in the present moment (after, back then and just before, in the future), wherein the potential directions are seemingly endless, yet also hyper- focused. In this confrontation with the Father State, we move past what we have been training for, and into what we are creating anew. We will move into the prefigurative political dreams we have been working towards. All participants (heroes) will participate in collective struggle that harnesses all the activisms that have come before and that will lead us into the future together. This work will be rooted in the often invisibilized labour behind the scenes, work often done by those on the margins of the struggle. It celebrates the powerful behind the scenes hustle that facilitates–and is its own kind of–direct action. 

Participants (heroes) will create a 36-square metre banner, in four connected pieces. The 4-piece banner will be themed around 4 phrases that guide our heroes journey:

• Octavia E. Butler’s phrase, “Our future is in the stars”;
• Nat King Cole’s resistance statement to a white supremacist concert audience, “Some people are just afraid of the Dark”;
• Assata Shakur’s famous words, “I believe that we will win”;
• And finally, the relatively ambivalent expression, “What if we don’t?” 

Separately the phrases convey hope, fear, confidence and uncertainty. Together they tell a broader story about the decidedly hopeful uncertainty of our current struggle–the struggle against the supremacist state with the future of humanity and our planet in the balance. 

The banner will be gifted to the movement for use in future actions, bringing all participants into the process of supporting this life giving work. As a collective journey, as heroes we are all witness and archive to this behind the scenes labour; and as allies to the struggle for self-determination of all people through the liberation of black people, we are all implicated in the shared risks and responsibilities of this work. 

We will work together, collectively, to create these works and through the process we will meditate on the question, “what if we don’t?”, perhaps coming up with answers together as we go. For, ‘its not all we got’….and we do have each other.

This event will be ASL interpreted.

MONOMYTHS is conceived and curated by Shannon Cochrane and Jess Dobkin.

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.

MONOMYTHS Stage 7: Ordeals
PULSE by MC Coble

Curated and presented by FADO in the context of Art Spin’s in/future.

In MC Coble’s Pulse, the artist climbs the iconic Cinesphere at Ontario Place each day in order to repurpose it as a beacon of protest. A series of Morse Code messages are transmitted from the structure to receivers on the ground positioned throughout Ontario Place island who then relay the message on using their own light source. The transmitted messages are composed of statements and chants used in recent and current protests and fights for civil rights which will be selected from the artist’s archive as well as in collaboration with local community. This collaborative gesture of solidarity merges activist and nautical language to amplify a collective call for action.

Coble’s Pulse fits into the MONOMYTHS journey at Stage 7: Ordeals. During this stage of the journey the heroine has come face to face with their personal challenge. In this moment they either confront death or face their greatest fear. The hope of this stage of the journey is that by confronting their greatest fear and conquering it, they can embark on a new life. Coble’s response to illuminating this stage of the journey suggests the necessity of challenging seemingly inaccessible structures and systems (social, political personal), while insisting on the interdependency of a collective effort by employing the communication of multiple bodies, versus attempting to cross this personal bridge alone. Refraining from a heroic narrative of conquering an iconic structure, the piece lends itself to chance and even possibly, failure.

PULSE is presented in the context of in/future, a festival of art and music, presented by Art Spin in partnership with Small World Music. 100+ transformative experiences re-animating the West Island of Ontario Place during this once-in-a-lifetime festival. 60+ artists including large scale installations, films, and performances. 40+ musical performances on the Small World Music stage.

Thanks to Rui Pimenta and Layne Hinton (Art Spin), Mike Hazleton (Ontario Place), and special thanks to Matthew Languay and Basecamp Climbing for their expertise and support. Thanks to Matt Seto for facilitating the climbing team who are supporting this project. 

© MC Coble, PULSE, 2016. Photo Henry Chan (top). Photo Shannon Cochrane (bottom).

MONOMYTHS is conceived and curated by Shannon Cochrane and Jess Dobkin.
Presented in partnership with University of Toronto Centre for Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies.

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.

MONOMYTHS Stage 6: Tests, Allies, Enemies
Physics of Blackness: Understanding Beyond Linear Time
Dr. Michelle M. Wright

FADO picks up the epic MONOMYTHS series at Stage 6: Tests, Allies, Enemies with a talk given by (and a reading group led by) Dr. Michelle M. Wright entitled Physics of Blackness: Understanding Beyond Linear Time.

In this talk, Physics of Blackness: Understanding Beyond Linear Time, Michelle M. Wright shows how our current struggle to be diverse and inclusive in our worldview has more to do with Isaac Newton’s laws of motion and gravity than most would realize. Blackness, for example, can only be understood accurately by drawing on different understandings of time and space—specifically going beyond linear time and the myth of universal progress. Moving from discussions of 17th century physics to 3rd century Christian religions, to 21st century African travel narratives to Black European postwar histories to Black Caribbean settlement in 18th century Australia, Physics of Blackness goes around the globe through all spaces and times to show us the unexpected ways Blackness reveals and encounters itself.

© Michelle M. Wright, Physics of Blackness: Understanding Beyond Linear Time, 2016. Photo Henry Chan.

MONOMYTHS is conceived and curated by Shannon Cochrane and Jess Dobkin.
The series is presented by FADO in the context of Progress.

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.

MONOMYTHS Stage 5: Belly of the Whale
Thoroughbred by Jefferson Pinder
Performed with Ravyn/Jelani Ade-Lam Wngz, Danièle Dennis, Jasmyn Fyffe, Chy Ryan Spain

In Jefferson Pinder’s Thoroughbred, four performers work themselves to exhaustion running on treadmills that are remote controlled by the artist who sits at a single controller. Pinder “skillfully exhumes a corpse of black captivity and subjugation of black bodies in America that started four hundred years ago and brings it into the foreground into our present day experience.” (Fo Wilson, The Evidence of Things Not Seen)

American artist Jefferson Pinder works in video, installation, and performance. His work explores the tangle of representations and misrepresentations, visual tropes, and myths—often referencing historical events and invoking cultural symbolism. His work portrays the black body both frenetically and through drudgery in order to convey relevant cultural experiences. 

SummerWorks, in partnership with The Theatre Centre and a roster of Toronto theatre and performance organizations/presenters and companies including Aluna Theatre, Dancemakers, FADO Performance Art Centre, Summerworks, The Theatre Centre and Volcano Theatre brings the world to Toronto with Progress, an international festival of performance and ideas from January 14–February 7, 2016.

© Jefferson Pinder, Thoroughbred, 2016. Photo Henry Chan.

MONOMYTHS is conceived and curated by Shannon Cochrane and Jess Dobkin.
The series is presented by FADO in the context of Progress.

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.

MONOMYTHS Stage 4: Crossing the Threshold
Armando Minjarez

Armando Minjarez’s performance is part of his long-term international participatory art project AlieNation, which is grounded in his personal experiences as an undocumented Mexican immigrant living in the USA. AlieNation examines mass migration and the disturbing trend of dehumanizing the migrant—an alien without a home, without rights or a defined identity.

Racism and identity politics remain prevalent threads in the fabric of America, existing in a constant tension of mine vs. ours and black vs. white, a dangerous game hidden behind the veil of diversity and progress. This constant denial of a history of oppression and white supremacy has normalized a language of hate and hostility toward communities of colour throughout the USA. This performance serves as a mirror of America’s denial of self. Only through self-awareness can the process of healing begin. Armando Minjarez has traveled and conducted research on displacement and migration of people in the USA, Mexico, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria and Serbia. The project will eventually travel to Southern Mexico and Central America to follow the steps of displaced Central American minors. 

SummerWorks, in partnership with The Theatre Centre and a roster of Toronto theatre and performance organizations/presenters and companies including Aluna Theatre, Dancemakers, FADO Performance Art Centre, Summerworks, The Theatre Centre and Volcano Theatre brings the world to Toronto with Progress, an international festival of performance and ideas from January 14–February 7, 2016.

© Armando Minjarez, AlieNation, 2016. Photo Henry Chan.

MONOMYTHS is conceived and curated by Shannon Cochrane and Jess Dobkin.
The series is presented by FADO in the context of Progress.

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.

MONOMYTHS Stage 3: Meeting of the Mentor
The Exquisite Course

Performances by Dainty Smith, Tamyka Bullen, Eliza Chandler, Zanette Singh, Ariel Smith, Johnson Ngo

The Exquisite Course, presented by the Feminist Art Gallery (F.A.G.), is an evening of short lectures by feminist and/or queer artists and creative folks from a variety of disciplines, interests, and positions. A mixture of fiction and non-fiction, The Exquisite Course collages real-life stories and performance mythologies around the microphone campfire to stitch together tales of meeting real-life mentors.

The Feminist Art Gallery is a response, a process, a site, a protest, an outcry, an exhibition, a performance, an economy, a conceptual framework, a place, and an opportunity. We host we fund we advocate we support we claim. The Feminist Art Gallery (F.A.G) is our geographical footprint located in Toronto and is run by Allyson Mitchell and Deirdre Logue.

This event will be ASL interpreted.

SummerWorks, in partnership with The Theatre Centre and a roster of Toronto theatre and performance organizations/presenters and companies including Aluna Theatre, Dancemakers, FADO Performance Art Centre, Summerworks, The Theatre Centre and Volcano Theatre brings the world to Toronto with Progress, an international festival of performance and ideas from January 14–February 7, 2016. 

MONOMYTHS is conceived and curated by Shannon Cochrane and Jess Dobkin.
The series is presented by FADO in the context of Progress.

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.

MONOMYTHS Stage 2: Refusal of the Call
What is Being Refused or Your Local Sky Tonight
By Shawna Dempsey & Lorri Millan

What is Being Refused or Your Local Sky Tonight is a new performance turn by Shawna Dempsey and Lorri Millan. Part planetarium show, part rumination on Alice in Wonderland, the nature of rabbits and heroes, Dempsey and Millan deliver an off-kilter guide to the stars tonight. Collaborators since 1989, Shawna Dempsey and Lorri Millan were catapulted into the international spotlight with their performance and film We’re Talking Vulva (1986/1990). Their humorous, feminist, and provocative works work has been exhibited in diverse venues as far ranging as women’s centres in Sri Lanka to the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. To most, however, they are known simply as the Lesbian Rangers of Lesbian National Parks and Services.

This performance will be ASL interpreted by Sage Willow.

SummerWorks, in partnership with The Theatre Centre and a roster of Toronto theatre and performance organizations/presenters and companies including Aluna Theatre, Dancemakers, FADO Performance Art Centre, Summerworks, The Theatre Centre and Volcano Theatre brings the world to Toronto with Progress, an international festival of performance and ideas from January 14–February 7, 2016. 

© Shawna Dempsey & Lorri Millan, What is Being Refused or Your Local Sky Tonight, 2016. Photo Henry Chan.

MONOMYTHS is conceived and curated by Shannon Cochrane and Jess Dobkin.
The series is presented by FADO in the context of Progress.

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.

Nikamon Ochi Askiy (Ke’tapekiaq Ma’qimikew): The Land Sings
Ursula Johnson, in collaboration with Cheryl L’Hirondelle 

Post Performance / Conversation Action
Maria Hupfield

Nikamon Ochi Askiy (Ke’tapekiaq Ma’qimikew): The Land Sings is an audio-based endurance performance by Ursula Johnson created in collaboration with Cheryl L’Hirondelle, and is offered as an apology to the land for the ways in which our human impact has shifted and shaped the landscape, displacing the voices of many First Nations. 

Ursula Johnson and Maria Hupfield’s works are presented in conjunction with #callresponse, a Canada Council {Re}Conciliation initiative project. #callresponse positions the work of First Nations, Inuit and Métis women and artists as central to the strength and healing of their communities. This socially engaged project focuses on the “act of doing” through performative actions, highlighting the responsibility of voice and necessity of communal dialogue practiced by Indigenous Peoples. #callresponse is a multifaceted project which brings together five site-specific art commissions that invite collaboration with individuals, communities, lands and institutions, culminating in an exhibition in October 2016 at grunt gallery in Vancouver. The The fifth visitation of Ke’tapekiaq Ma’qimikew: The Land Sings will be a part of this exhibition.

Following The Land Sings, Maria Hupfield presents Post Performance / Conversation Action, a hybrid performance and conversation with Ursula Johnson and Cheryl L’Hirondelle on how revitalization, collaboration, and the act of refusal are used in performance art to shape current dialogue on Reconciliation.

SummerWorks, in partnership with The Theatre Centre and a roster of Toronto theatre and performance organizations/presenters and companies including Aluna Theatre, Dancemakers, FADO Performance Art Centre, Summerworks, The Theatre Centre and Volcano Theatre brings the world to Toronto with Progress, an international festival of performance and ideas from January 14–February 7, 2016.

Offered as an antidote to Toronto’s annual all-night “art thing” Nuit Blanche, LEGS, TOO is an all-day performance art relay. The form of the event is dictated by a chosen duration (in this case eight hours), which is then divided equally by the number of performance artists from the local community who are invited to participate.

We asked a staggering 116 artists to participate, and fifty-three decided to join in. For this second iteration of LEGS, TOO, audience will witness a continuous performance work made up of fifty-three eight-minute performances over the course of eight hours.

Participating artists are suggested by other participating artists, snowballing a self-organizing event that is disinterested in traditional curation. Founded on a belief in community trust, performative dialogue and artistic self-determinacy, the resulting collective event lets participating artists be responsible not only for the continuous stream of idea- and image-making, but also for the realization of the event itself. There is no staff, no coordinator, no stage manager, only artists working together. LEGS has legs. LEGS is a manifestation of the social and performing body through the collective network and expanded community.

The first iteration of LEGS was presented in our sister performance art network in Montréal on February 7, 2015, at Le Cercle Carré. The score and format of the event were initially imagined by an informal collective of artists (including Christian Bujold, Michelle Lacombe, Marie-Claude Gendron, Nadège Grebmeier Forget, Katherine-Josée Gervais and Jean-Philippe Luckurst-Cartier), and was created with the intention of activating and making-visible the often fragmented local performance art community.

(The score) LEGS,

• is made by local artists (local/provincial) participating on a voluntary basis.
• is not crafted by a singular artistic direction or selection method, and refuses all curating models (there is a lead organizer who acquires a space and starts the chain of invitations – this is the only entity-driven action).
• is intergenerational, and the invitation is extended to performance artists at all stages of their careers. It does not however pretend or attempt to be an exhaustive representation of a community.
• is a minimum of seven hours and a maximum of nine hours long; the duration for each work is decided by dividing the total chosen time by the number of participating artists in order to realize a continuous performance relay without pause. The order of the performances is arbitrary.
• is not performed for the sake of the camera, but is photo-documented and live-streamed, if possible. Images will be collected by the transmitter, made available to participating artists, and published on a collective LEGS website, where the multiplying manifestations can co-exist.
• is characterized by the fact that each participating artist is autonomous; there is no technical or material support. Artists are responsible for their own set up and clean up (which is part of their allotted time). No performance will be stopped but artists will begin at their scheduled time.
• is not financed by any public program or entity and doesn’t generate monetary profit for the organizers or the participants.
• asks, if desired, for a donation from the attending audience who are free to come and go as they please; the collected donations compensate for venue rental or documentation, if necessary, and the remainder is spent on refreshments for all.
• can only be transmitted to/in another community by an individual (or a small group) who has participated in the directly previous edition, and the physical participation of these transmitters in the next event is preferred.
• is shared through this score and set of principles across the performance art network.

LEGS in Toronto is initiated by FADO Performance Art Centre. The custodians of this iteration are Shannon Cochrane and Adriana Disman. There will be two LEGS transmitters from the authoring collective/performers from the first iteration present in Toronto.

Audience is invited to come and go throughout the day. If you cannot make it, watch the LIVE STREAM.

ARTISTS (in order of appearance)
Nadège Grebmeier Forget (transmitter from Montréal), Katherine-Josée Gervais (transmitter from Montréal), Tiffany Schofield, Adam Filek, Ed Johnson, Shaista Latif, Kate Barry, Emma-Kate Guimond, Katie Kehoe, Holly Timpener, Yan St Onge, Ellen Furey, Johannes Zits, Jonathan Simpson, Fiona Griffiths, lo bil, Anna Sarchami, Adam Herst, Lauren Scott, Eroca Nicols, Andrew James Paterson, Coman Poon, Alisha Mascarenhas, Brianna MacLellan, Alan Peng, Maggie Flynn, Dorothea Rust, Paul Couillard, Clayton Lee, Moynan King, Bojana Videkanic, Carrie Perreault, Johanna Householder, Christopher Willes, claude wittmann, Julian Pivato, Liz Khan, Simon Rabyniuk, Robert Luzar, Marcin Kedzior, Golboo Amani, Liz Peterson, Aliya Pabani, Chad Dembski, Berenicci Hershorn, Teena Lange, Francesco Gagliardi, Zeesy Powers, Jessica Cimó, Alex Beriault, Rosa Mesa, Raki Malhotra, Tanya Mars, Adriana Disman and Shannon Cochrane.

For an archive of the collected events in the LEGS series including the original event in Montréal, and subsequent events in Toronto and Zurich, visit the LEGS website.

FADO Performance Art Centre is proud to present new solo performance works by Victoria Gray (UK) and Dorothea Rust (Switzerland) in the context of the ongoing International Visiting Artists series. Dorothea Rust and Victoria Gray’s appearances in Toronto are presented in partnership with VIVA! Art Action, the next stop on the artists’ tour. Established in 2006, VIVA! Art Action is an international performance and live art festival presented once every two years in Montréal.

Ballast by Victoria Gray

Often durational, Victoria Gray’s performances utilize slowness and stillness, in conjunction with performing unsighted, bringing a cellular-attention to kinesthetic sensations. Integrating affect studies, process philosophy, political theory, and somatics, her work aims to bring dormant psychosomatic memory to consciousness. Specifically, that which subsists at the sentient level of the bones, muscles, organs, fluids, glands and nerves. This cellular-attention aims to disturb “common-sense” hierarchies of sensory organization, activating the political potential of a body that is intimately attuned to affective experience. Each work is highly contingent upon the audience’s particular presence and the specificities of each performance space. In this sense, like time, affect becomes a material in performance, it is “shaped” moment-by-moment in an immediate exchange between performer, audience and site. 

Übung / Exercise No. 6 – Gender – Render by Dorothea Rust

My (our) languages is (are) (long ago already) ramified: expanding to technological documentation and medias of expression, onto the handling with objects, including music, sound, text and movement/choreography and probably more to come. Thus constantly throwing another (new) light onto the relationship and my (our) being with others present or absent in a (different) space/place, be it audience, visitors, co-performers. 

I don’t consider performance as an ephemeral, singular event, disappearing like a soap bubble. I see it as a space and a ‘milieu’ [The term ‘milieu’ refers to Jean-Luc Nancy in: Sybille Krämer: Medium, Bote, Übertragung – Kleine Metaphysik der Medialität, 2008 , pages 54–66], me (us) moving in it, being part of a flow, of a social, cultural environment, hence performance an incident, an intervention, a disturbance, a time/moment in a process … 

Any kind of preparation and processing before and after—such as script, notation, documentation, narration, photos, video, audio—can function as a possible trace which can become again a script and material for the next performance, a new intervention, disturbance etc., like Ariadne’s thread in a labyrinth with many exits, which is picked up not only by me but by others. Thus the performance doesn’t belong to me, it’s part of a ‘milieu,’ others as much belonging to it and being part of it as me.

© Dorothea Rust, Übung / Exercise No. 6 – Gender – Render, 2015. Photo Henry Chan.

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

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 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 an exhibition of the process carried out.

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. An ongoing 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 the 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 valorizes emerging practices. Its members are interested in the context of creation and answer the need for 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.

Over the course of a five-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 four-and-a-half 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 as one of the most influential works in the canon of twentieth-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 will present 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.

CREDITS
Curated and presented by FADO Performance Art Centre
Directed by Sara Wookey, concieved by Yvonne Rainer
Performed by: Aleesa Cohene, Ame Henderson, Andrea Nann, Francesco Gagliardi, Jon McCurley, Margaret Dragu, Martin Bélanger, Mikiki, Robert Abubo, Shannon Cochrane, Simon Rabyniuk, Sara Wookey
Workshop partners: Dancemakers & Public Recordings
Performance venue partner: AGO
Gallery partner: Gallery TPW

PROGRAM & EVENTS

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

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

Open rehearsals: 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

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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.

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 eight-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 twelve performer/participants who are a combination of Deaf and hearing performers and non-performers from Toronto.

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.

CREDITS
Conceived by Shannon Cochrane & Amanda Coogan
Performed by 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

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.

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

Curated and presented by FADO Performance Art Centre at the 7a*11d International Festival of Performance Art.

Roberto de la Torre works with temporary and contingent elements, and his work is usually generated in the public sphere. Manifesting as ephemeral actions in the form of sculpture, architectural, and sensory experiences created through the use of different media, and often employing the collaboration of a large number of participants, de la Torre’s work is best understood as documentation of the transient. The focus of his work ranges from social issues that occur in the local to global context. A tension between the physical and the intellectual permeates the fabric of his work, and the notion of “social sculpture” is developed through complex negotiations of permissions and participation in each setting where the work takes place.

Ayotzinapa, muerte y renacimiento
Ayotzinapa, death and revival

PROGRAM & EVENTS

Performance: AYOTZINAPA, busqueda, muerte y renacimiento
November 2, 2014 @ 3:00pm

Performance Art Dailies Panel: Border Crossings
With Roberto de la Torre, Ali Al-Fatawi, Wathiw Al-Ameri, Serena Lee and moderator Francisco-Fernando Granados
October 29, 2019 @ 1:00pm

© Roberto de la Torre, Ayotzinapa, muerte y renacimiento, 2014. Photo Henry Chan.

Curated and presented by FADO Performance Art Centre at the 7a*11d International Festival of Performance Art. Supported by the Istituto Italiano di Cultura in Toronto.

I was there, because I’m here now. I was there, even before being an idea in my mother’s head.

—Francesca Fini

I was there is a live art project where the traditional languages of documentary and “mockumentary” are subverted and updated while blending with the surrealism of live media performance. In the performance, the artist approaches the past of Western civilization—and the one of her own family—by digitally and lively inserting herself into historical pictures and movies. Fini sabotages the past in a metaphysical scenario that integrates live media, video projections and chroma key technology, and ends up losing herself while becoming “part of the picture.” It’s an impossible encounter with the past, with culture, and with family, in which space and time collapse into the ideal dimension of performance art.

PROGRAM & EVENTS

Performance: I was there by Francesca Fini
November 1, 2014 @ 8:00 pm

Performance Art Dailies Panel: Uncomfortable Physicalities
With Francesca Fini, Eduardo Oramas, Andrée Weschler and moderator Tanya Mars
November 1, 2014 @ 1:00pm

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The Toronto Performance Art Collective (TPAC) is a not-for-profit, artist-driven collective that curates and produces the 7a11d International Festival of Performance Art—English Canada’s oldest ongoing biennial of performance art. 7a11d was established in 1997 by a group of performance artists, collectives, and organizers, eager to develop a forum for performance art in Toronto. The first 7a11d International Festival of Performance Art took place in August 1997 and presented the work of 60 local, national and international artists. The 10th edition takes place from October 29–November 2, 2014.

© Francesca Fini, I was there, 2014. Photo Henry Chan.

ARTISTS
Anthea Fitz-James (Toronto)
Arkadi Lavoie Lachapelle (Montréal)
Emma-Kate Guimond (Montréal)
Jessica Karuhanga (Toronto)
Rah Eleh (Ottawa)

FADO Performance Art Centre’s 2014 Emerging Artist series, co-presented with Xpace Cultural Centre.

Durational performance is a mode of live art where the artist works directly with the medium of time. Over the course of hours, days or longer the performer and the audience can experience a physical, mental, spiritual and/or emotional transformation. Durational performance functions to bring the performer and the audience into the moment; time is made palatable and visceral. Artists like Tehching Hsieh, Alastair MacLennan, and most famously, Marina Abramović, demonstrate how durational performance art can use mental and physical endurance to challenge the commoditization of art by offering an experience of art that is ephemeral by nature. 11:45 PM will present a collection of durational works, spread out over the course of March, throughout the gallery.

The 2014 Emerging Artists Series was curated by FADO board member Kate Barry, in consultation with Xpace and a committee of local artists (including Xpace Director Amber Landgraff, Videofag founder Jordan Tannahill, theatre artist Audrey Dewyer, and Xpace intern Humboldt Magnussen.

PROGRAM & EVENTS

Unraveling the Daughter’s Disease: Secrets, Knitting and the Body by Anthea Fitz-James
March 8 @ 12:00pm–6:00pm
March 9 @ 1:00pm–5:00pm

In Time with a Body: Duration as a Performance Practice
March 13 @ 7:00pm
Performance artist, curator and FADO co-founder Paul Couillard gives an informal lecture on duration as a performance practice. His talk will share insights from his creative work as well as performances by other artists, including a reflection on his 1999 curatorial project TIME TIME TIME, a year-long series of twelve works by various performance artists, each a minimum of twelve hours long. 

digestion/liquidation by Emma-Kate Guimond
March 16 @ 12:00pm–8:00pm

The trip, and the fall, and the lost heap of longing by Jessica Karuhanga
March 19–22 @ 1:00pm–5:00pm daily

6 hours 6 minutes 6 seconds by Arkadi Lavoie Lachapelle
March 28 @ 6:00pm–12:06:06am
For this performance, the audience is encouraged to bring with them, or to drop off at the gallery anytime during gallery hours from March 8–28, items from their homes that represent evil to them. Can be any kind of object, from a banal household item to a talisman. Object must be wrapped, so the contents are not known. All objects will be used in the performance.

Ululation by Rah Eleh
March 29 @ 12:00pm–6:00pm

What Happens After Midnight: Artists Panel
Moderated by Tanya Mars, in conversation with the artists and curator Kate Barry
March 29 @ 6:30pm

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, #120 and #121, a series of performances created by FADO’s former Performance Art Curator and founding Director Paul Couillard, together with FADO 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 seven new Duorama performances between February and September. 

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

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.
April 12, 2014 @ 2:00pm–6:00pm
hub14, 14 Markham Street

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

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

Duorama #118
June 29, 2014
An intervention into Toronto’s 2014 Pride Parade!

Duorama #119 & #120 (plus post-performance artist talk)
August 24 & 30, 2014 @ 1:00pm
Presented by Sunday Drive Art Projects in Warkworth, Ontario
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.

Duorama #121 & Golden Book Launch
September 27, 2014 @ 3:00pm–6:00pm
Centre Island Pier, Toronto Islands
For this last image in the series, the artists present a three-hour turning meditation on the Centre Island pier, a kinetic and visual action designed to connect land, water and sky. FADO is also pleased to be launching the second in our Golden Book series with a four-book ‘zine chronicling the entire Duorama series to date, from #1–120. The books are divided by years, and shows one image for each performance in the series. You can get your limited edition Duorama Golden Book at our watery publication launch on the 2:30pm ferry to Centre Island, or on the 6:45pm ferry home.

© Paul Couillard & Ed Johnson, Duorama #115, 2014. Photo Henry Chan.

ARTISTS
Danny Gaudreault
Henri Louis Chalem
Lynn Lu
Mathieu Bohet

FADO Performance Art Centre is pleased to be partnering with Art Nomade, International Meeting of Performance Art of Chicoutimi, to present four of the festival’s artists in Toronto. Founded in 2007, Art Nomade takes place once every two years in Saguenay, Québec. Art Nomade also serves as a networking platform that works with partner organizations to present invited artists in regional and provincial artist-run centres, galleries and museums.

PROGRAM & EVENTS

Performances
October 25, 2013 @ 8:00pm: Henri Louis Chalem, Danny Gaudreault
October 26, 2013 @ 8:00pm: Lynn Lu, Mathieu Bohet

Artist Talk
October 27, 2013 @ 3:00pm

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Art Nomade is an international meeting of regional, provincial, and international performance artists, showcasing the breadth and depth of contemporary performance art. Founded in 2007 by performance artist and Artistic Director, Francis O’Shaughnessy, the Meeting is produced by the artist-run center Espace Virtuel. Art Nomade takes place every two years in Saguenay, Quebec. The meeting also serves as a networking platform that allows the artists to perform in different artist-run centers, galleries and museums both on the provincial and national levels. Art Nomade is spreading its wings this year by proposing a two-week program in Chicoutimi, doubling the one-week schedule of first two editions, and a networking platform program that will run throughout the month of October. Taking place at the magnificent patrimonial site, the Pulperie de Chicoutimi, the Meeting will present no less than twenty artists from four continents, which will represent the most important international presence that Art Nomade has ever programmed. The Meeting’s new deployment will also take place into the networking platform. Therefore, the 2013 edition proposes to double the number of partners and to perform in 15 to 20 different sites throughout Quebec and Canada.

The 3rd edition of Art Nomade takes place from October 1–31, 2013.

Partners for this edition of Art Nomade include La Pulperie (Chicoutimi), Langage Plus (Alma), Musée amérindien de Mashteuiatsh (Mashteuiatsh), Caravansérail (Rimouski), VIVA! Art Action (Montreal), Praxis Art Actuel (Sainte-Thérèse), Le Lieu (Québec), L’Oeil de Poisson (Québec), Folie/Culture (Quebec), Gallery 101 (Ottawa), AXENEO7 (Gatineau), Galerie SAW Gallery (Ottawa), and FADO Performance Art Centre (Toronto).

© Henri Louis Chalem, Untitled Performance, Art Nomade + FADO, 2013. Photo Henry Chan.

FADO Performance Art Centre presents new solo performance works by Tomasz Szrama (Poland/ Finland) and Macarena Perich Rosas (Chilé):

¿QUÉ SOY? by Macarena Rosas Perich
Enter Through the Emergency Exit by Tomasz Szrama

Macarena Perich Rosas lives and works in Punta Arenas. Located at the southern tip of Patagonia in the Magallanes and Antartica Chilena Region, Punta Arenas is, literally, situated at the end of the world, and Perich Rosas just might be the only performance artist from this part of the world. Macarena’s work is engaged with themes of territory, location and place, often employing materials unique to her region of the world, including skins and fur. Her presence is raw and intense, conjuring the animal world and a deep connection to geography and the uncharted environment. Since 2009, she has been organizing Confl!cta: Contemporary Art at the End of World. Confl!cta is a call to action, based on research and experimentation, providing education for audiences and residencies for performing artists, with a goal to work with structures, difficulties and tendencies that problematize the relationship between people and their environment. Through dialogue between the artist and the audience, the impact between the body and territory is acknowledged.

Tomasz Szrama’s practice shifts between multiple disciplines, including photography and video. Regardless of the medium, a dominant common thread in all of his work is the use of his own body and methods of performance art, such as action, gesture, and the physical manipulation of everyday materials. Szrama’s work is humourous and self-reflexive, often putting his own body into impossible and even ridiculous situations such as attempting to hang himself with helium balloons, covering his entire body in a plaster cast making himself immobile and then waiting for hours in a busy tourist street, or attempting to board a plane with his own parachute. His work touches on themes of travel, trust, and the ever-present potential for personal failure.

Tomasz Szrama and Macarena Perich Rosas’ appearances in Toronto are in partnership with VIVA! Art Action. Established in 2006, VIVA! Art Action is an international performance and live art festival presented once every two years in Montréal. The festival takes place in the old Saint Michel bathhouse in Mile End, with the participation of the network of artist-run centres in the city.

Macarena Perich Rosas’ appearance in Toronto is also in partnership with LIVE International Performance Art Biennale. Founded in 1999, LIVE has located Vancouver, Canada as an important and recognized node of local, national, and international performance art activity and critical study. 

© Macarena Perich Rosas, ¿QUÉ SOY?, 2013. Photo Henry Chan.
© Tomasz Szrama, Enter Through the Emergency Exit, 2013. Photo Henry Chan.

The complicated relationship 
HuMans and the surroundings
/ natural / human / species /
must be resolved on a psychological level, 
before any real change can take place ?
do I live with identity restricted to the borders of my skin ?
or
do I live with the understanding that this is a construct of mind ?
as the water and air flows through my body
is it at all possible to identify with this vessel ?
The work I am planning for Toronto is my first attempt to
explore the possibilities to aid this change,
using the language of the body as tool.

Gustaf Broms

FADO Performance Art Centre presents a new durational performance work, Pentagram, by Gustaf Broms. From September 23-27, Broms will perform a series of street actions in public spaces throughout Toronto’s downtown core, each day from 9:00am to 5:00pm, mimicking a “typical” work day.

Gustaf Brom’s artistic practice is engaged with the exploration of the nature of consciousness, the dualistic concept of “i”, and the biological reality of the body, in an effort to understand the ‘being mind’ as a direct experience of ‘reality.’ In his practice, he started off working photography and installation, but two work in particular led him to work with the more formless processes of performance. In 1991, Broms burned all of his work, and in doing so realized that the intensity of the action and the remaining ash far outdid anything he had previously made. In 2005, he completed a series of works entitled 5 Faiths for a Brave New World in which he worked with objects that were physically too heavy for the body to move. These two experiences created a longing to explore the formless and led up to the project entitled A Walking Piece made with Trish Littler, in which the two artists spent 18 months walking across Eastern Europe. The result is considered a drawing.

Currently, Broms continues to work with a series of movements that look at concepts of inner/outer and movement/stillness, working with his own body as the tool for examining these processes. The constant question for Broms is, “why are the dancing atoms of this body not merging wit the dancing atoms surrounding it?”

Monday, September 23: Union Station pedestrian path, 65 Front Street West
Tuesday, September 24: Toronto-Dominion Centre, 66 Wellington Street West
Wednesday, September 25: Bay Street, near the old Toronto Stock Exchange
Thursday, September 26: Bay Street, south of Wellington Street
Friday, September 27: Queen’s Park Crescent, south of Bloor Street West

© Gustaf Broms, Pentagram, 2013. Photo Henry Chan.

Quatre re-traités* tiré de ‘”ils” “viennent”: Khédive et Mamelouk, en un seul, sur son patron (work-in-progress) is a psychogeo (hörspiel) performance involving radio transmission, narration and action, with a simultaneous translation from French to English and/or Italian. Psychogeo(hörspiel) is a neologism created by combining ‘psychogeography,’ meaning an approach to geography that emphasizes playfulness and drifting around urban environments; and the German word ‘hörspiel’ meaning radio-play or radio-drama.

This performance is part of a work-in-progress by Letourneau entitled, “ils” “viennent”: Khédive et Mamelouk, en un seul, sur son patron, which is a three-hour site-specific text-based science-fiction conceptual performance that can be performed for any media.

This version includes the participation of Toronto performer claude wittmann, and on recorded media by Alice Lafontaine, Alexandre St-Onge, Marie Brassard and Jac Berrocal.

The audience is encouraged to bring portable radios or walkman radios so they can leave the gallery and move around the neighbourhood during the action, picking up snippets of the narrative remotely.

© Eric Létourneau, Quatre re-traités* tiré de ‘”ils” “viennent” : Khédive et Mamelouk, en un seul, sur son patron (work-in progress), 2013. Photo Jordan Tannahill.

Presented by Feminist Art Gallery (F.A.G.) and FADO Performance Art Centre

Conducted by Calgary-based artist Wednesday Lupypciw, QUEER NOISE SOLIDARITY (QNS) is a gigantic experimental noise event. One dozen drummers, each with their own kit, will occupy the space between the baseball field and the wooded area in Christie Pits Park where they raise the racket of their percussional superjam to the outer limits of the stratosphere over 3 different, intense sessions. The drummer’s sound vibrations expand into political/intentional realms, as well as psychic/aesthetic zones, like ripples in a pond.

Inspired by the roles that feminists play in developing community solidarity across many social justice trajectories including the LGBTQI2S, feminist, anti-racist and anti-poverty movements, QUEER NOISE SOLIDARITY also blows the roof off the traditionally dude-dominated art world of rock n’ roll. QNS is a queer feminist project, proudly matronized by FADO Performance Art Centre.

CREDITS
Curated and presented by Feminist Art Gallery (F.A.G.) and FADO Performance Art Centre
Conceived and conducted by Wednesday Lupypciw
THE DRUMMERS: Alaska B, Celina Carrol, Heidi Chan, Tyla Crowhurst-Smith, Karen Frostitution, Laura Hartley, Eleanor King, Samara Liu, Rita McKeough, Conny Nowé, Shavonne Tovah Somvong, Simone TB *

[* Not all the drummers identify as female]

Thanks to Johnson Ngo and Heidi Cho for their energy gettin’ it done.

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The Feminist Art Gallery (F.A.G.) is a response, a process, a site, a protest, an outcry, an exhibition, a performance, an economy, a conceptual framework, a place and an opportunity. We host we fund we advocate we support we claim. The Feminist Art Gallery is run by Allyson Mitchell and Deirdre Logue. F.A.G. does not depend on formal funding sources nor will it ever be tied to one government or corporate controlling purse string. Instead, F.A.G. has created a web of matronage whereby people contribute to a pool of resources ensuring that artists will always be paid for exhibiting their work.

© Wednesday Lupypciw, QUEER NOISE SOLIDARITY, 2013. Photo Henry Chan.

Curated and produced by FADO Performance Art Centre, and presented in the context of the 2013 Images Festival.

Film: Rope explores the relationship between cinematic space and the space of live performance, and our ways of interpreting and recollecting the experience of movement within the film frame.

In Dangling that Rope, Andrew James Paterson writes, “In Film: Rope, Gagliardi has accentuated the simultaneous clash and fusion of different disciplines by using as source material a film that has been controversial at a number of different levels: Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope (1948). Rope is something of an anomaly within the Hitchcock canon, as it is directed to appear as if consisting almost entirely of one continuous shot. In this respect, it breaks the modernist dictum that film should not appear simply to be recorded theatre. The film eschews montage altogether.”

Rope (1948) is considered one of Alfred Hitchcock’s most experimental films. Containing only four unmasked cuts, it was shot in single ten-minute takes (the length of a camera roll), tracking in and out of black surfaces (the back of a jacket or a piece of furniture) to create the illusion of even longer continuous shots. This virtuoso technique, which required the constant shifting of stage walls, furniture, and props to make way for the camera, was partly developed by the director in order to convey the illusion of theatrical real time and continuous space.

By paradoxically attempting to re-embody and transpose the movements and positions of the characters in the film in relation to a live audience, Film: Rope perversely exposes and explores the discontinuities and incongruities between cinema and live performance.

CREDITS
Created by Francesco Gagliardi
Performed by Cara Spooner, Francesco Gagliardi, Marcin Kedzior and Michael Caldwell

PROGRAM & EVENTS

Performances
April 12–14, 2013 @ 3:00pm
April 16, 2013 @ 7:00pm & 8:30pm
The Theatre Centre Pop-Up, 1095 Queen Street West, Toronto

FADO Artist Talk, moderated by Andrew James Paterson
April 14, 2013 @ 4:30pm
The Theatre Centre Pop-Up, 1095 Queen Street West, Toronto

Images Artist Talk: Performance and Media Art: Tools with Which to Deconstruct
With Francesco Gagliardi, Tanya Lukin Linklater and Duane Linklater
April 15, 2013 @ 4:00pm
Urban Space Gallery, 401 Richmond Street West, Toronto

© Francesco Gagliardi, Film: Rope, 2013. Photo Henry Chan.

ARTISTS
Basil AlZeri
Cressida Kocienski
Golboo Amani
Maryam Taghavi

.sight.specific. proposes performance art as the staging of sight as site: observation as contour, terrain, and architecture for modes of aesthetic embodiment. The project consists of four commissioned live works in search of situated perspectives on the possibilities of performance as a contextual spatial practice. The works situate artists and audiences by trading knowledge on the streets, tracing trans-planetary sight lines, creating home and hospitality in real time through cyberspace, and staging variations on absurdity. The shapes of these relationships brings into focus questions of knowledge and memory, contact and distance, longing and belonging.

.site.specific is co-presented with Xpace Cultural Centre

PROGRAM & EVENTS

Performance: The School of Bartered Knowledge by Golboo Amani
Fridays and Saturdays in March 2013 @ 2:00pm–6:00pm

Performance: Planetaria by Cressida Kocienski
March 8, 2013 @ 8:00pm

Performance: T.M.K.L Presents: beit Suad by Basil AlZeri
March 15, 2013 @ 8:00pm
Co-presented by FUSE Magazine and Israeli Apartheid Week Toronto

Workshop: T.M.K.L Presents: beit Suad by Basil AlZeri
March 16 & 17, 2013 @ 1:00pm

Performance: Variations on Absurdity by Maryam Taghavi
March 22, 2013 @ 8:00pm

Exhibition opening: .sight.specific. residue/ephemera
March 28, 2013 @ 7:00pm

Panel Discussion: Viewing .sight.specific.
With Basil AlZeri, Golboo Amani, Cressida Kocienski, Maryam Taghavi, and moderators Johanna Householder and Francisco-Fernando Granados
March 30, 2013 @ 2:00pm

FADO Performance Art Centre is pleased to present an evening of new solo performance works from Alice de Visscher (Belgium) and Simla Civelek (Turkey/Toronto).

This event invites a local artist and an international artist to present new solo performance works created for the same space on the same evening. The artists and the audience come together to experience side by side the work of peers from different parts of the world. Each artist will present two short works in alternating sequences.

PROGRAM
Sesame Blanc by Alice de Visscher
Untitled One by Simla Civelek
Queue De Cheval II by Alice de Visscher
Untitled Two by Simla Civelek

© Alice de Visscher, Sesame Blanc, 2013. Photo Henry Chan.

FADO Performance Art Centre presents new solo performance works from Andrés Galeano (Spain) and Ieke Trinks (Netherlands):

iPerformance by Andrés Galeano
Sing, Sync, Sink by Ieke Trinks

The performance work of Andrés Galeano and Ieke Trinks share a similar methodology, and sometimes, a desired goal. Developed in situ, Galeano and Trinks create performances which combine everyday and found materials with instruction (scores), observation and live action, resulting in combinations and configurations that are both deeply philosophical and highly absurd.

Step by Step by Andrés Galeano and Ieke Trinks

While in Toronto, in addition to the solo performances listed above, the artists will also be presenting a collaborative performance in the context of the 34th Rhubarb Festival. FADO is pleased to be collaborating with The Rhubarb Festival for the third year in a row with this presentation.

Want to know how to do, well… just about anything? Ask google. In Step by Step, Andrés Galeano and Ieke Trinks spontaneously create a performance score in front of a live audience using seemingly random pieces of instructional information researched on the internet. Using the cut-and-paste function of their computers, instruction texts and how-to explanations are sorted and compiled into a dance choreography created for, and then performed by two non-dancers. The result is an unsettling and funny live performance that oscillates between conceptual demonstration and structured chaos.

SCHEDULE

iPerformance by Andrés Galeano, and Sing, Sync, Sink by Ieke Trinks
Feb 24, 2013 @ 7:00pm
Theatre Centre Pop-Up, 1095 Queen Street West, Toronto

Step by Step by Andrés Galeano and Ieke Trinks
February 27–March 13, 2015 @ 8:00pm each night
Buddies in Bad Times Theatre, 12 Alexander Street, Toronto

© Andrés Galeano, Ieke Trinks, Step by Step, Rhubarb Festival, 2013. Photo Henry Chan.

Curated and presented by FADO Performance Art Centre at the 7a*11d International Festival of Performance Art.

FADO continues with the ongoing International Visiting Artists series with new performance works from Magnüs Logi Kristinsson (born in Iceland, living in Finland) and Denis Romanovski (born in Belarus, living in Sweden). In addition, Denis Romanovski will also be presenting a guerrilla performance in the form of a tour of the Toronto subway system on October 26, 2014.

Stories in a Box by Magnús Logi Kristinsson
The artist is inside a large wooden box, and he is telling a story. A story about himself from his times in Iceland. He only shows one foot and one hand to the audience and with that hand, he give extra details to the story.

That’s OK by Denis Romanovski

To mean nothing—that’s OK.
To have money and to be hungry—that’s OK.
To do nothing under surveillance—that’s OK.
To wait for better times and to be still alive—that’s OK.
To hate museums and rebellions—that’s OK.
To sing for old people and to dance with strangers—that’s OK.
ETC.

—That’s OK Manifesto (fragment); written in collaboration with KKH students

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The Toronto Performance Art Collective (TPAC) is a not-for-profit, artist-driven collective that curates and produces the 7a*11d International Festival of Performance Art—English Canada’s oldest ongoing biennial of performance art. 7a*11d was established in 1997 by a group of performance artists, collectives, and organizers, eager to develop a forum for performance art in Toronto. The first 7a*11d International Festival of Performance Art took place in August 1997 and presented the work of sixty local, national and international artists. The 9th edition of the festival takes place from October 24–28, 2012.

© Magnús Logi Kristinsson, All the Beatles Songs, 2012. Photo Henry Chan.

FADO Performance Art Centre is pleased to present the International Visiting Artists series, with a focus on Switzerland. Claudia Bucher and Andrea Saemann will each present a new solo performance work. Join us the following afternoon for an informal gathering where each artist will talk about their individual practices.

In order to personally experience performance art history, Andrea Saemann’s work utilizes a process of the “performance copy”—repeating aspects or entire performance works by other artists. This allows the artist to enter into a work on a very visceral level with her body, and constrict her field of action, allowing for intense focus on even the smallest of gestures.

I work because I am impressed.
I recognize: authority is a performative achievement.
I see: a constricting frame opens up possibilities, to experience the world differently.
I benefit from that procedure.
In order to experience performance art history, I repeat single aspects or entire pieces. The process—to enter with my body into a performance copy—liberates unusual energies, on the battleground of autonomy versus heteronomy. The process of copying constricts my field of action and opens up new perspectives and sights on the world.

—Andrea Saemann

I perform in order to engage with my thoughts—and my questions, too. I think in images. I focus on the space surrounding me, myself as sculpture within that space, and on how an action can change the relationship between my body and my environment. As I interact intensively with a material in the here and now, a transformation occurs. I‘m interested in the moments of transition—when beauty changes into ugliness, when clean becomes dirty, when gentle turns aggressive—and the opposing associations they evoke.

—Claudia Bucher

© Claudia Bucher, Untitled Performance, 2012. Photo Henry Chan.

trace: evidence or an indication of the former presence or existence of something

—American Heritage Dictionary

Can one man stand amidst his many voices and find herself there? Can a person sing harmony with different parts of their selves? Can we trace the sound of ourselves as we change? If so, what remains of the original voice? Through an exploration of voice, trace transforms a private story into a performative experience integrating sound, video, installation and live performance. Using archival recordings taken before and during Tristan R. Whiston’s gender transition from female to male, along with recent recordings and live vocals, trace explores the idea that change is constant and we are always becoming someone new.

Throughout the installation are multiple speakers, each playing a single part or element in the immersive soundscape. Audience is invited to contribute to the performance by entering one of the installation’s beach inspired changing huts and, using old-fashioned technology, create their own vocal recording, eliciting an experience of auditory self-reflection. 

CREDITS
Video by Leslie Peters
Set elements by Trixie and Beever
Software design by Dafydd Hughes
Photography by David Hawe

Tristan R. Whiston and Moynan King are artists with distinct multi-disciplinary practices. Their shared interest in ideas of identity, gender, communication and the element of time (in both life and art) brought them together as artistic collaborators early in their careers.

Co-presented by New Adventures in Sound Art for the Sound Travels Festival of Sound Art
Sound Travels Festival of Sound Art: August 4–31, 2012
New Adventures in Sound Art: www.naisa.ca

SCHEDULE

Performance Installation:
August 24, 2012 @ 7:00pm–9:00pm
August 25, 2012 @ 11:00am–1:00pm & 7:00pm–9:00pm
August 26, 2012 @ 2:00pm–4:00pm

Artist Talk:
August 25 @ 1:00pm

Photo David Hawe.

ARTISTS
Alejandra Herrera Silva (Chilé/USA)
Alice De Visscher (Belgium)
Beth Hall & Mark Cooley(USA)
Dillon Paul & Lindsay Wolkowicz (USA)
Gina Miller (Vancouver)
Hélène Matte (Québec)
Jill Miller (USA)
Lenka Clayton (UK/USA)
Lovisa Johansson (Sweden)
Marlène Renaud-B (Québec)
Masha Godovannaya (Russia/USA)
Victoria Singh (New Zealand)

Mama-writer-in-residence Christine Pountney will be live blogging throughout the event, here.

Curatorial Statement by Natalie S. Loveless, March 2012

New Maternalisms started for me with the following questions: forty years after the intervention of feminist art around the sexual division of labour, what is the experience of the daughters of that era, now that they have become mothers? How is that expressed in their artwork and how does this artwork relate to the work that was being done in the 70s?  I am thinking, of course, of work like Mary Kelly’s infamous six-year installation piece Post-Partum Document, which she worked on from 1973 to 1979. With Kelly’s work in mind, I invited a group of artist-mothers to produce a performance or video piece speaking to their experience as mother-artists today. These artists use performance to bring attention to the embodied, biological, and material enmeshment of early maternity in ways that stand in stark formal contrast to Kelly’s work. They do this in a way, however, that is not simply at odds with the insights of post-structuralism and the linguistic turn informing Post Partum Document. Rather, while grounded in a “return to the body,” they demonstrate a commitment to non-determinist modes of signification and analysis, opening up the affective, enmeshed, experiential flows of maternal experience in ways that invite us to ask questions about maternal invisibilities and the power and challenge of the maternal to the professional body of the artist. 

DESCRIPTION OF PERFORMANCE WORKS

Maternity Leave by Lenka Clayton is a durational, Skype-mediated piece that invokes overlapping cycles of responsibility: government to citizen, institution to artist, artist to audience, parent to child, and audience to artwork. Maternity Leave was originally commissioned by the Carnegie Museum of Art for the exhibition Pittsburgh Biennial.

Challenge by Alejandra Herrera Silva is a durational piece exploring the impact and affect of maternal labour.

Milky Way and Jumping Lullaby by Lovisa Johansson. Milky Way is a durational piece inspired by the intimacy of the breastfeeding relation. Jumping Lullaby invokes the unique despair of maternal sleep deprivation.

L’Essence de la Vie by Hélène Matte is an action and text-based piece that offers a provocative, humorous, and sometimes threatening take on maternal embodiment and the cycle of life.

Jill Miller brings The Milk Truck, a mobile breastfeeding unit that combines guerrilla theatre, activism and slapstick humour, to Toronto for its Canadian debut. The Milk Truck will be running in Toronto from Friday March 23–Sunday March 25, and will be parked in front of the gallery during performances and events. In preparation for its arrival, The Milk Truck is collecting personal stories from mothers who have breastfed children in public in Toronto (at any time, past or present). We are collecting stories to create a narrative about the city.

Dis/sociation by Marlène Renaud-B is an action and endurance-based performance exploring the complex ambivalence of maternal enmeshment.

DESCRIPTION OF VIDEO WORKS

Beth Hall and Mark Cooley present Safe (60 min., loop), a performance and research-based video juxtaposing the daily rituals of child care-giving with the immensity of the information and disinformation overload that has come to characterize much contemporary maternal experience.

Masha Godovannaya presents Hunger (39 min., loop), a performance-based, split-screen video recording her experience of the conflicts of motherhood, creativity, domesticity and critical self-reflection.

Gina Miller presents Family Tissues (6 min., loop), a video documenting and contextualizing a social-practice performance in which she defrosts and discusses her childrens’ placentas with them.

Dillon Paul and Lindsey Wolkowicz present In Place (3 min., loop), a performance-based video that offers a round-the-clock time-lapsed view into the shifting puzzle pieces, rhythms, and textures of the artists’ family routine.

Victoria Singh presents SON/ART: Kurtis the 7 Chakra Boy (22 min., loop), a video that compiles documentation from the seven year LIFE/ART performance that she began on July 7, 2004, in collaboration with Linda Montano (Another 21 years of Living Art). The soundtrack was composed specifically for this piece by Kurtis’ father, Derek Champion.

Alice De Visscher presents Dream or Nightmare of Motherhood (4 min., loop), two short performance-based videos that invoke her fantasies and fears surrounding the experiences of birth and lactation.

Is art torn between the commodity and the gift, the supermarket and the church?

Lee Hassall will use the gallery as a repository and home base from which to engage with the surrounding neighbourhood, gathering impressions via exchanges with objects, paraphernalia and people, culminating in a final performance action.

For two days, audience is invited to the gallery to witness the growing installation and to donate a gift for the artist. Donated items or materials may be altered, deconstructed, disappeared or hybridized. All gifts will be considered and engaged with and will become a part of the final public performance.

SCHEDULE
March 14: performance-installation in progress @ 6:00pm–8:00pm
March 15: Artist talk in gallery @ 6:00pm
March 16: Final performance @ 8:00pm

© Lee Hassall, The Gift, 2012. Photo Henry Chan.

Curated and presented by FADO Performance Art Centre in the context of the 33rd Rhubarb Festival

Expectations started with the question; what do I hope to gain when going to see a performance? As I have spent a fair amount of time over the past couple of years doing them, seeing them and talking about them, Expectations is a way of thinking about what it is in performances that leaves me feeling dissatisfied.

When I was younger I used to copy photographs of animals from books into my sketchpad. I used to be good at making the animals look realistic, which is why I went on to study art. I don’t draw pictures of animals anymore and Im not sure if what I do now has any relation to that activity, but somehow I got from there to here under the guise of art. I studied at Goldsmiths in London and have since done performances at art festivals and comedy nights in places such as Whitstable, Hildesheim and Aberystwyth. Now I mostly write scripts and texts and perform them.

Siân Robinson Davies

Buddies In Bad Times Theatre presents the 33rd Rhubarb Festival
Raw. Radical. Performance.
February 8–19, 2012

Canada’s premiere experimental performance festival offers Toronto fresh, live encounters with contemporary theatre, performance art, dance and music. For two weeks, hundreds of local and international artists descend on Buddies to share new ideas in performance creation with adventure-loving audiences.

Through self-displacement, successive actions and minimal materials, Intra Muros I proposes a sense of contemplation, as the artist gradually tries to accumulate meanings through a constant folding and unfolding of images. Pursuing a process based on persistence, Martine Viale’s work suggests multiple stages of working, rather than presenting a completed product. Transformation through time and accumulation plays a major role in the elaboration of the work. The artist’s body becomes a “doing body” engaged in creating, layering and collecting traces of actions, which progressively transform the space and the artist herself.

PROGRAM & EVENTS

Performance Installation in Progress
February 2–3, 2012 @ 2:00pm–7:00pm

Closing Performance Action
February 3, 2012 @ 8:00pm

Artist Talk
February 4, 2012 @ 1:00pm

© Martine Viale, Intros Muros I, 2012. Photo Henry Chan.