Category: Performance

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.

ARTISTS
Alicia Grant (Toronto)
Cassils (Montréal / USA)
Dana Michel (Montréal)
Dominic Johnson (UK)
MC Coble (USA / Sweden)
The Pole Club (Toronto)

Curated by Jess Dobkin and FADO Performance Art Centre

Commitment Issues presents the work of five artists and one collective who use their bodies as primary source material to investigate qualities and dimensions of commitment—to ideas, to performance, to audience and to the artists themselves. Through play, risk, intimacy and sexuality, these artists transcend fixed social, psychological, physical and spiritual notions of commitment.

Further confounding the interplay of fixed notions of commitment, the venue for Commitment Issues is Oasis Aqualounge, home to Toronto’s preeminent swinger’s club. Performance sites will include the outdoor heated swimming pool, steam room, hot tub and locker room. Audiences are invited to stay late and enjoy all of Oasis Aqualounge’s amenities which also include a sauna, two bars and multiple lounges. Locker and towel service provided. Bring your bathing suit or birthday suit. Admission restricted to patrons 19+ years of age.

PROGRAM & EVENTS

Performances
November 16, 2011 @ 7:00pm to 10:00pm
Oasis Aqualounge, 231 Mutual Street, Toronto

Processing: Artists Panel & Reception
November 17, 2011 @ 7:30pm
Studio Theatre, Helen Gardiner Phelan Playhouse, 4 Glen Morris Street

The panel is co-sponsored by the Graduate Centre for Study of Drama at the University of Toronto and the Mark S. Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies at the University of Toronto.

© Dominic Johnson, Transmission, 2011. Photo Henry Chan.

FADO Performance Art Centre is proud to present Imagined Spaces/Lost Objects, a programme of performance works curated by Victoria Stanton for the 2011 Edgy Women Festival presented at Studio 303 in Montréal.

Between the timeless and the transitory, between dream and reality, fact and fantasy, there emerges a potent junction. This intersection, a “no-man’s land,” straddles temporal veracity and produces a space difficult to pin down. In this imagined space, a series of self-consciously constructed identities come to embody an invested trace – of lost love, lost words, of lost or stolen objects. Lost and yet, the trace of what remains sticks in the memory, and to the body. And in this “no-man’s land” we find four women – charting four distinct paths on land in-between multiply defined world.

ARTISTS
Janine Eisenächer (Berlin)
Amalie Atkins (Saskatoon)
Julianna Barabas (Calgary)
Laura Margita (Saskatoon)

Within the context of a fictional world, Amalie Atkin’s work investigates aspects of loss, isolation, transformation, and ritual to create a mythology both awkward and spectacular. Over the past few years I have been working in film, performance, fibres and photography, using these mediums in ways that at once inform one another and contribute to the creation of these fantastical environments. Fusing these separate entities together this seires marks the first appearance of my cinematic work in the context of performance. Initially made as a 16mm film for this event, Three Minute Miracle: Tracking the Wolf will be presented as a live performance, incorporating a live audio component and additional performative elements that tie into key events and objects in the film.

Antidote by Julianna Barabas is a series of performance actions designed to break down social norms around touch, gestures of care, vulnerability and public intimacy. Using hand washing and then massage of the hands of the audience participants, I offer them an opportunity to use the time spent engaged in the performance to metaphorically cleanse or alleviate tensions they may have in relation to their identities. Throughout the massaging of the hands, I also sing to the person receiving the massage, further heightening the intimacy of the gesture and interaction between us.

In her solo performance-series Eat Your Enemy #3 I am the Coca-Cola of art, Janine Eisenächer works with the Brazilian cultural concept of Antropofagia (cannibalism) and by that explores its potential of being an alternative subversive strategy. Focusing on processes of incorporation and transformation, the performance artist discusses matters of identity in relation to work and gender-specific questions, the (post)colonial discourse of “the other”, and the economic structures in the field of artistic work itself. By using text, objects, body and sound in a ritualistic structure, Eisenächer each time undertakes a new self-experiment of an imaginary voyage to overcome felt dependencies and to follow her own desires. The starting point for Eat Your Enemy #3 is a quote by the female performance art-legend Marina Abramovic, mentioned in the German art magazine monopol: “I am the Coca-Cola of art.” Eisenächer has been researching and working with Coca-Cola as material in her performance work since 2007, and Abramovic’s claim is the perfect basis for a new anthropophagic investigation…this time Eisenächer incorporates Abramovic and transforms into the Coca-Cola of Art herself. The traces of the live performance remain in the gallery space as ongoing installation. The artist would like to thank the Goethe Institute (Munich and Toronto), Edgy Women Festival (Montréal) and La Centrale.

Madame Blanche Hears Your Confessions by Laura Margita was a serious, heartfelt performance with all the things that make a performance professional like invitations, assistants, a videographer, a sculpture technician and a location in an artist run centre with a highly educated audience. The audience/participants were horrified, amused and afraid for me and the documentation of the events is one of the most embarrassing and distressing displays of loss of control that I have ever seen recorded on video. I may have lost the tape on purpose or not. I will try to find it or recreate it for this performance and take what I can learn from it in the service of my search for:

1. meaning
2. self awareness
3. forgiveness
4. love
5. power
6. artistic expression for a community of people that is 
a. beautiful
b. nourishing
c. scary
d. sad
e. funny

© Janine Eisenächer, Eat Your Enemy #3 I am the Coca-Cola of art, 2011. Photo Henry Chan.

Extra-Rational is a series of performances by emerging Canadian artists that embrace the aesthetics of popular culture and seek to recuperate/utilize these “low brow” processes of production and cognition. The artists in Extra-Rational intentionally make use of aesthetic choices and methods of production that directly challenge the rubric of high-brow vs low-brow culture. These artists use the position of the trivialized, the unmentionable, the frivolous, the carnal and the other as a means to challenge the rationalization of high culture. 

ARTISTS
Amy Jenine Ling Wong
Amy Lam
Johnny Forever
Iris Fraser-Gudrunas
Lisa Visser
Marisa Hoicka

Trust My Gut: A Drag Opera Surgery, performed by Mini Maul and Uncle Wink (two characters selected from the drag oeuvre of Johnny Forever and Marisa Hoicka) dramatizes the recent merging of home and stage on social networking sites such as YouTube, Vimeo and facebook. This eight-hour durational installation references Orlan’s televised performance art surgeries of the early ’90s. Framed by a crochet replica of a YouTube window, Mini Maul performs surgery on Uncle Wink with a pair of tailor’s scissors, crochet hooks and a sewing needle. While splayed open Uncle Wink remains gloriously conscious as Mini Maul crafts his innards, a mass of yarn and fabric, into outrageous sculptural forms that rise from his belly and spill onto the floor. From time to time patient and doctor break into lip-synced duets chosen by audience members from a nearby laptop.

Insight mixes with consumerism and pop culture to create intuitive knowledge in Iris Fraser-Gudrunas’ performance Pop Tarot. Fraser-Gudrunas divines the future and answers the viewers’ life questions using a collection of strange and unfamiliar pop bottles. Viewers are invited to blindly select 4 beverage bottles/cans from a large inventory, stored in a nondescript cardboard box. The bottles represent the past, present, future and soul of the participant. Carefully analyzing the qualities of the consumer packaging, the clarity of the labels, the visual nature of the liquid and the list of ingredients, Fraser-Gudrunas provides the viewers with insight and guidance. 

NANA by Amy Jenine Ling Wong is a four-hour durational performance that references narcissism in youth culture and questions the rise of the self-made Internet celebrity. Occupying the gallery’s street level window, Wong confronts viewers caught off guard with the image of her slowly licking a honey-encrusted monitor. Under the honey, the monitor flickers with a mirror image of herself performing various actions. NANA is an extension of Wong’s online Vimeo library, in which she plays a wide variety of characters including: a young girl offering advice on the application of Avatar make-up, a sullen woman smoking a cigarette while explaining her attempts to replicate the “real community” of the ‘60s on facebook and a teenager aimlessly video blogging about piercing her nose.

Droozle Help Me, a performance that references the comedy sketch genre, makes use of humour and high concept comedy. In this performative lecture Amy Lam plays a character named Droozle who is looking for a new roommate. She uses inappropriate props and costumes in her attempt to be persuasive. As the performance unfolds Lam creates deliberate incongruence between herself as performer, the goals of her character and the audience’s reactions. Lam’s work continues the dialogue started by female comics of the ’50s who used intelligence, wit and a fair amount of acting out to comment on contemporary culture.

We Don’t Love Each Other is a reflexive performance that investigates the female abject body. Composed of a series of simple actions and objects, Lisa Visser drinks a copious amount of hard alcohol while attaching her left arm to her right with the use of a sewing needle and thread. The performance combines contrasting images of harm and repair: what appears to be harmful (sewing) is conceptually approached as repair – or reclamation – of not just a body but everything that is given and compromised in a relationship. And the repair – drinking and drowning one’s feelings in alcohol – is actually harmful. The piece is implicitly humorous; the artist is drunk, awkward and bloody, while the audience is compelled to watch seriously and earnestly while the hour-long performance unfolds.

PROGRAM
March 8 @ 1:00pm–5:00pm
Trust My Gut: A Drag Opera Surgery by Johnny Forever & Marisa Hoicka

March 12 @ 1:00pm–5:00pm
Pop Tarot by Iris Fraser-Gudrunas

March 12 @ 7:00pm
Trust My Gut: A Drag Opera Surgery by Johnny Forever & Marisa Hoicka
NANA by Amy Jenine Ling Wong
Droozle Help Me by Amy Lam
Pop Tarot by Iris Fraser-Gudrunas
We Don’t Love Each Other by Lisa Visser

ARTISTS
Jo SiMalaya Alcampo
Simon Rabyniuk
Yumi Onose

They see us. They perform in front of us. We see them perform. We see them. They feel us. They perform near us. We feel their work. We feel them. Something happens. Something goes through us. Something goes through them. They process the encounter. We process too. We eat. We sleep. We dream. We think. We all come back the next day. We see them. They see us. We see their response to the day before. We see more. Way more. We feel more. They feel more. Way more.

Jo SiMalaya Alcampo, Yumi Onose and Simon Rabyniuk perform on Friday and the next night they present a new work in response to the previous evening’s performance, creating an interrelated series of actions that exist in dialogue with each other. This situation challenges the artists to work directly and immediately with site, a changing and repeating audience and to consider the impact and influence of working side by side over a duration of time.

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

This new work by Teresa Dillon is a three-part collective sound and dance performance, created in collaboration with twenty men from the city of Toronto who are over the age of sixty years. Over the course of the festival, Dillon will work with the men to create a sound and dance piece, comprised of three parts which we will perform together for a live audience. As each element of the performance is delivered aspects will be captured and replayed into the gallery space, creating a layered sound and dance composition.

CALL FOR PARTICIPANTS
Are you a dancer (any style), male and over sixty? Would you like to take part in a short dance piece? Or maybe you have never danced before but would like to try? If you answer “yes” to any of the above questions, I would like to invite you, to create a simple dance piece together. What will you need to do? Simply to turn up and be interested in learning some a simple dance and movement-based routine. Be available for one-hour rehearsal sessions. No previous performance experience is required, however, you must be open and comfortable to participate in a public performance.

CREDITS
Thanks to the men who participated in Small Acts of Great Significance. 
The final work was created by Teresa Dillon with Roy Mitchell, Andrew J. Paterson, Ken Fraser and Joe Borowiec.

Irish artist Teresa Dillon’s piece, by contrast, was both improvisatory, in the moment, and trace-like. Having invited men over fifty to collaborate with her on a work that combined visuals and music, Dillon and her small entourage had created the performance earlier that morning. Lights dimmed, patterns pulsed on the screen on the back wall. Andrew Paterson appeared with an electric guitar and began playing a low, repetitive refrain, the other men following with microphones singing ditties reaffirming their desires and life. Dillon meanwhile literally hissed into the microphone, her voice seeming to come from a megaphone in some old revolution. In the end, Dillon’s piece had a slow, beautiful violence to it that got under one’s skin and is ultimately difficult to describe.

—Daniel Baird, Toronto

PROGRAM & EVENTS

Performance: Small Acts of Great Significance by Teresa Dillon
October 30, 2010 @ 8:00 pm
XPACE Cultural Centre, 58 Ossington Avenue, Toronto

Performance Art Daily: Artist Talk with Teresa Dillon
October 28, 2010 @ 12:00pm–2:00pm
Toronto Free Gallery, 1277 Bloor Street West, Toronto

© Teresa Dillon, Small Acts of Great Significance, 2010. Photo Jasmine Savoy.

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

A visual image, one performer, pressure from the inside, pressure from the outside. One or several actions, the audience is invited, what are you carrying? We meet, we share, after it is over, what do we have left? It remains to be seen.

Norwegian artist Agnes Nedregård’s performance, on the other hand, was all intensity. A board hanging on a rope from the ceiling and a board with two holes on the ground, she began by placing a mouthpiece in her mouth that held it open grotesquely, her tongue poking out. A metronome ticked to one side. She blew a whistle. She took her rubber boots off and prowled past the audience in stockings full of dirt and rocks, scowling. She then took her jacket off, revealing an old shirt ripped loose down the front between her breasts. Using needle and thread, she then began sewing the flaps of the shirt to the sides of her breasts and chest. She approached individual audience members, staring at them intensely, the pieced the needle through her skin, pulling the thread tight. She blew the whistle again. The metronome continued to tick. She fit her legs through the holes in the board on the ground and set herself on the one hanging from the ceiling, gazing, again, with a blank intensity at the audience. Then she suddenly leaped off the board, and it snapped back up toward the ceiling, swinging. The performance ended with her putting her jacket and boots back on and stopping the metronome, whose ticking by then permeated the room. Nedregard’s performance might seem to be about the denial of the body, and of women’s bodies in particular, but it struck me as too physically intimate and present for that; it seemed to me more about the fragility and instability of the body as it exists in time, where time, through the metronome, has become an active, physical, literal part of the performance.

—Daniel Bard

PROGRAM & EVENTS

Performance: Even Out The Pressure by Agnes Nedregård
October 28, 2010 @ 8:00 pm
XPACE Cultural Centre, 58 Ossington Avenue, Toronto

Performance Art Dailies: Artist Talk
With Teresa Dillon, Agnes Nedregård, Irma Optimist and moderator Andrew James Paterson
October 28, 2010 @ 12:00pm–2:00pm
Toronto Free Gallery, 1277 Bloor Street West, Toronto

© Agnes Nedregård, Even Out The Pressure, 2010. Photo Henry Chan.

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

American artist Jamie McMurry’s epic new performance work, Ranchero, begins inside at Mercer Union and using a moving vehicle filled with audience members moves to a second location.

The cacophonous actions and objects that one encounters in everyday life are not only often absurd but also are the unseen details that define our characters and separate us from all others as individual beings. McMurry’s recent performance installation works as part of the Ego series have sought to make manifest these day-to-day actions and interactions with objects to illustrate a vocabulary with the outside world that has been developed over the span of his life. Ego instalments 1-4 have been presented in Bangkok, Los Angeles, Glasgow and Séte, France and have typically taken place in very small spaces over the course of several hours. This context only allows for a few viewers to see the ongoing work for a short period and leaves them with a fraction of a glance into the biography being depicted in these performances, much as we all encounter one another’s biographies in everyday life. With Ranchero McMurry continues to share this language of one’s history through performative acts but instead of having the viewers pass through the work, the work will pass through the viewer.

© Jamie McMurry, Ranchero, 2010. Photos Henry Chan.

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

Every breath has its own quality. Once you breathe in, there is no chance to control what is going on inside your body. If you transform the idea of breathing into a question about the content of philosophical values, is it the same? Once you “inhaled” an idea, is there no chance of re-questioning the content? Is religion a drug? Do we still need to know about sins? What is a sin? Maybe the answer is to be found if the black water is inhaled…

This new performance work of Helge Meyer deals with the idea of breathing as a visible sign of being alive. The performer is searching for poetic images that make the fragility of human existence obvious.

PROGRAM & EVENTS

Performance: Pneumatic Vision: Cut by Helge Meyer
October 21, 2010 @ 8:00 pm
Mercer Union, 1286 Bloor Street West, Toronto

Performance Art Dailies: Artist Talk
With Jeffery Byrd, Helge Meyer, Gwendoline Robin, and moderator Berenicci Hershorn
October 22, 2010 @ 12:00pm–2:00pm
Toronto Free Gallery, 1277 Bloor Street West, Toronto

© Helge Meyer, Pnuematic Vision: Cut, 2010. Photo Henry Chan.

ARTISTS
Amanda Heng
Kai Lam
Lee Wen

FADO Performance Art Centre is pleased to present an evening of performance from Singapore’s most influential contemporary performance artists, a cross-section of generations and approaches. From participatory to material-based—the work of these three artists traverses a range of approaches, often incorporating social and political commentary. 

Often audience-participatory in nature, Amanda Heng’s work mixes Eastern and Western values, traditions and gender roles. Kai Lam’s performance works are created in response to urban pluralistic society. And finally, Lee Wen’s performances and installations expose and question the ideologies and value systems of individuals, as well as social structures. 

Amanda Heng, Kai Lam and Lee Wen make their stop in Toronto in the midst of a North American tour which includes stops in Québec to perform at Le Lieu and New York City to perform at Grace Space.

Our approach to performance is always linked with the feminine, to life and love.

—Gabriela Alonso and Nelda Ramos

A co-presentation by Hamilton Artists Inc., aluCine and FADO Performance Art Centre.

This special evening includes a screening of performance and video compilations of works made by European and South and Central American artists programmed from the Zonadearte Gallery archives in Quilmes, Argentina; live solo performances from Gabriela Alonso and Nelda Ramos; and an informal Q&A period, followed by a reception with the artists.

Gabriela Alonso and Nelda Ramos work with materials related to their personal experiences in Argentina, and their encounters with the world as women. These materials include celebratory communal actions with balloons, the reinvention of symbols of militarism found in children’s games, the use of icons of domesticity such as milk, and other resistant references to violence against women, children and animals.

RELATED PROGRAMMING

Hamilton Artists Inc. presents: Peripheral Zones
Curated by Irene Loughlin
September 10–October 2, 2010

Peripheral Zones is an exhibition of performance work by Gabriela Alonso and Nelda Ramos (Quilmes, Argentina), drawings by Zonadearte gallery artists, and a video compilation of Central and South American and European video/performance from Zonadearte Gallery.

Opening: September 10, 2010
Performances: 9:00pm by Gabriela Alonso and Nelda Ramos
Hamilton Artists Inc., 161 James St North, Hamilton

Hamilton Artists Inc. and Ed Video present: Gabriela Alonso and Nelda Ramos
Nuit Blanche, ED Video, Guelph
September 11, 2010

Curated and presented by FADO Performance Art Centre in the context of the PSi Conference, taking place in Toronto from June 9–12, 2010.

FADO is pleased to present a new performance work by Lori Blondeau. Entitled Feast and/or Famine, the artist creates an image of the hard-at-work Indian Princess/Squaw, preparing the fire and gathering place, juxtaposed with a modern-day feast (the BBQ) that brims over with plenty but feeds no one at the gathering. 

Many thanks to our partners and friends who have made this event possible. Big thanks to OCADU and Johanna Householder, Laura Levin and PSi, the Aboriginal Visual Culture Office (OCADU) and Bonnie Devine, Cheryl L’Hirondelle, Tannis Nielsen, Cynthia Lickers, Shelley Niro, Jennifer Rashleigh and claude wittmann. 

© Lori Blondeau, Feast and/or Famine, 2010. Photo Shannon Cochrane.

To coincide with the Performance Studies International symposium, FADO Performance Art Centre and Gallery TPW are pleased to present work by French curator and critic Guillaume Désanges.

A History of Performance in 20 Minutes is a performative lecture presenting a concise history of the representation of the body in art. The performance lecture aims to divide the history of performance into ten gestures—appearing, receiving, holding back, escaping, aiming, falling, crying, biting, emptying oneself and disappearing—all enacted and subjectively discussed. 

Accompanying the performance is Désanges’ exhibition Child’s Play (June 10–19). The work is the outcome of a workshop with seven Romanian children in 2008. The impetus for the workshop was an assertion that the history of performance art be read as a history of silence rather than discourse—a pre-linguistic history of primary gestures. Perhaps the experience of childhood is closest to this impulse in performance/body art. During the workshop, the kids replayed and interpreted more than fifty iconic performances, including gestures from Futurism and Dada to Paul McCarthy and Francis Alys. The resulting videos and drawings embody the immediate energy, humour, and embrace of the experiential experiment that is essential for an understanding of performance and body art.

Presented in partnership with Gallery TPW, for the PSi Conference taking place in Toronto June 9–12.

© Guillaume Désanges, The History of Performance Art in 20 Minutes, 2010. Photo Shannon Cochrane.

Curated and presented by FADO Performance Art Centre in the context of the PSi Conference, taking place in Toronto from June 9–12, 2010.

It’s been ten years since Alastair MacLennan’s rigorous and unique style of performance installation has been presented in Toronto. FADO is once again pleased to present a new performance work entitled DONE NODE, and other activities by one of the UK’s most respected performance artists.

A primary function of art is to bridge our spiritual and physical worlds. Through crass materialism we have reduced art to cultural real estate. Actual creativity can be neither bought nor sold, though its husks, shells and skins often are. It is possible in art to use meta systems without over-reliance on physical residue and attendant marketplace hustling, jockeying and squabblings. Art is the demonstrated wish and will to resolve conflict through action, be it spiritual, religious, political, personal, social or cultural. To heal is to make whole. As well as ecology of natural environment, there is ecology of mind and spirit. Each is a layer of the other, interfused, three in one. The challenge for us today is to live this integration. Already we are late. Time we have is not so vital as time we make.

—Alastair MacLennan

FADO is proud to support and be part of the team of people and organizations hosting Alastair MacLennan and his various engagements and activities while in Canada. These include:

Present Response
Performances by Paul Couillard (curator), Alastair MacLennan, Margaret Dragu, Aiyyana Maracle
Gallery Lambton, Sarnia
May 6–8, 2010

FADO presents A Symposium on Teaching and Learning Performance Art
Speakers: Alastair Maclennan, Margaret Dragu, Marilyn Arsem, Tanya Mars, Johanna Householder, Paul Couillard, Cheryl L’Hirondelle, Jess Dobkin
OCAD, 100 McCaul Street, Toronto
May 10, 2010 @ 10:00am–4:00pm

FADO presents DONE NODE by Alastair Maclennan
Butterfield Park at OCADU, 100 McCaul Street, Toronto
May 12, 2010 @ 3:00pm–8:00pm

Hamilton Artists Inc. & FADO present NO NOU ME NON by Alastair MacLennan
Hamilton Artists Inc., 161 James St North, Hamilton
May 14, 2010 @ 7:00pm–10:00pm

© Alastair MacLennan, DONE NODE, 2010. Photo Henry Chan.

FADO Performance Art Centre urges you not to miss this evening of new performance works from two of N. Ireland’s new generation of performance artists, Hugh O’Donnell and Sinead O’Donnell, in an evening we are calling Spotlight on Belfast.

Violence is in Me by Sinéad O’Donnell
Invert Two by Hugh O’Donnell

The two O’Donnell siblings have often created performances together. However, in their premiere Toronto performance works, each artist inhabits a different physical—and emotive—space in the gallery. The work of both artists is exemplified by deeply personal image-making manifested in direct response to site, and a provocative use of (and relationship with) their chosen materials. For Sinéad, the materials are a stack of white dinner plates as tall as herself and a khaki green army helmet. For Hugh, these materials are salt, a paint tin full of milk, fresh liver frying in a pan, a single football shoe, a woman’s purse and a pair of gold earrings. Two words are painted on the wall “INVERT STOIC?” and his black t-shirt declares the word “PATH” on the back.

© Hugh O’Donnell, Invert Two, 2010. Photo Henry Chan.

ARTISTS
Corina Kennedy
Guillaume Adjutor Provost
Henry Adam Svec
Joshua Schwebel (cancelled)
Julia Mensink
Michelle Lacombe
Sophie Castonguay
Stacey Ho

Misinformed Informants: Preface to the Performance
By Lisa Visser

Fragments, fleeting words, fights. You’re not listening to me. 

Misinformed Informants invites emerging artists to answer to the idea of miscommunication, misunderstanding, misplaced lines of agreement. Responses range from antiquated expressions of communication to suggestions, covert signals, mis-remembrance and the unapologetically false. Diverse interpretation converges into an overhead problem of mistrust. In trusting the informant (who may be misinformed) misinformation is communicated as true information. Truth and reality negate the very premise of this performance event. I begin to doubt the truth I communicated. And yet: I would never lie to you. But: this is about lies.

This curatorial premise acknowledges the complicated boundaries of curator-performer-audience relationships and pushes past them. These tensions are apparent in the work of Misinformed Informants, and can be as subtle as a gesture, as apparent as a role-reversal, or as confrontational as a slap in the face.    

Julia Mensink’s maybe it was nothing brings a tension to the audience/performer role by inviting her ex-boyfriend to be a participant. Both Julia and her ex tell a lecture-style story, based on their own experiences of the same event. Through the development of the story, what becomes clear is the absence of synchronicity in memories, the highlighting of the fuzzy parts and the uncomfortable inclusion of audience members into a breakup. The audience can choose between listening to Julia or her-ex’s side of the story: a literal choosing of sides. How terrible to be brought in to this. I would like us not to fight.

Joshua Schwebel’s piece deliberately misses the mark, or so it was meant to. Relying on the accuracy of Canada Post, Joshua mis-addressed his application to the call for submissions. However, a glitch delivered the package to the correct address in a sensible amount of time. In following Joshua’s instructions, I rejected the dossier. Joshua’s cheeky approach to the premise has yet to play itself out, but his deliberate determination to accepting and then rejecting causes me to question my role as curator. What have I done in creating these intentionally missed formations of informants?

In a similar farce, Henry Adam Svec plays with the role of the lecturer and delivers a performance rooted in fiction. Stompin’ Tom Connors never wrote The Lost Stompin’ Tom Song. Did he? Henry engages the audience in an experiment that questions and abuses the influence of authority and the audiences’ desire to be patient, active and honest listeners.

Sophie Castonguay toes the line between performer and director, creating a confusion that arises from the conditioned reverence of the audience for the performer and the space of performance art. You took the words right out of my mouth puts audience members under the direction of the performer. The audience wants to know what is happening. The performer is in control. Is this the performance? Sophie withholds the one thing the audience wants: clear communication about what will happen next. Going beyond the unexpected is also the under-expected, the under-performed and the under-communicated. 

Stacey Ho invites additional participants in her GROOP MEDITEHSHUNS, a three-part piece that draws attention to breathing, blinks and beats. Each performance will have the participants respond to one another’s bodies with a gesture, a sound, or a slap in the face. By drawing attention to the subtleties of the bodies’ motions, Stacey is over-communicating in a way that is delicate and absurd, respectful and brutal.  

The obsessive nature of this over-observant performance is present in Corina Kennedy’s cheer sir or madam, a durational performance in which letters are typed out on a typewriter, only to be immediately rendered unreadable. Letters of love, protest, and rejection are destroyed upon their completion. What remains are mounds of lonely letters of the alphabet, without a structure or form. Both antiquated forms of communication and obsession elevates these letters until they are objectified and displayed, nearly fetishized.  

Guillaume Adjutor Provost’s fetishization comes into play in a different form, a covert and suggestive gestural work. Guillaume claims a subjective reinterpretation of historical moments, changing meanings and communicating a new history. SLOW READERS, argument no.1 is based on a song meant to inspire spirituality. Through the performance, the song and it’s intent is broken down in subtle movements, hidden meanings and secrets only the performer knows. The secret is there. But we stopped understanding each other long before that. 

The performances in Misinformed Informants break down communication—reducing it to an elemental approach. What results is a step-by-step guide on how to mis-communicate and a deliberate delivery of misinformation. Each artist claims a unique response, playing with issues of trust, structure, defined roles, tensions and obsessions. These are common-place issues. Every moment we are faced with the authority of being an informant and of being the informed. Sweet lies for protection, small in nature, keep us from personal disaster. The authority of the speaker is consistently abused in a way that is difficult to place and even more difficult to accuse.

Your word against mine. But I know you’re lying. I would never lie to you.

Special thanks to Clive Robertson for the hook-ups, Johanna Householder for the coffee and advice, and Shannon Cochrane for a being a model of enthusiasm, dedicated support, and superior decision-making skills, to which I aspire. Also thanks to Sarah E.K. Smith for listening to all my lies. Big thanks to Matthew Williamson and all the staff at XPACE for their help and support.

Exhibition Hours
December 17–19: 12:00pm–8:00pm
Friday & Saturdays: 12:00pm–6:00pm

ARTISTS
claude wittmann
David Frankovich
Ignacio Pérez Pérez
Joanne Bristol
John G. Boehme
Julian Higuerey Núñez
Rodolphe-Yves Lapointe
Tomas Jonsson

Curatorial statement by Don Simmons, November 2009

Daily media reports bombard us with the reality of the current worldwide economic situation. We are in the midst of a recession. Businesses are failing and offering discount prices on everything in the store, the stock market is volatile, companies are looking for bailouts, and government agencies are giving away bloated stimulation packages.

Despite these tough economic times, some businesses are experiencing a boom. Alcohol sales are up; Hollywood movies are experiencing a surge in attendance and theatres are reporting a rise in audience numbers. People need to escape from their problems and forget about reality. During tough economic times, art relating to escapism prospers.

Escapism is an immersive art. It satisfies a desire for sensual pleasure. It envelops the viewer in a hermetic and narcissistic space where reality is suspended. Stimulated by an individual’s need for escape the realm of the imaginary is opened and new possibilities arise. Non-places that do not exist make themselves possible, submerging the individual and leaving them in a state of confusion. Spectators who participate or view an escapist action become disconnected from their everyday surroundings and transport themselves to a place of contemplation or simply blank out. 

Escapist Action: Performance in Recession begins with a weeklong series of performance events that investigate economics and present the audiences with alternative methods of exchange. The series culminates in three evening programs of performance entitled Black Friday, Red Flag Saturday, and Grey Cup Sunday. These three evenings investigate the mixed emotions evoked by the volatile economic market. The performances navigate the sensations of fear, despair, laughter, and hope. The audience is transported from the dark emotions of Black Friday through the humour of Red Flag Saturday arriving at the celebratory Grey Cup Sunday.

Julian Higuerey Núñez and Ignacio Pérez Pérez activate Escapist Action by creating an alternative barter system in which performances and time can be exchanged between the artists and audience. The exchange starts with an Open Barter Market on Monday, November 23, followed by a 72-hour performance (6 days / 12 hours each day). Tomas Jonsson’s work creates a redundant economy across the street from a storefront display he mimics. In the piece Magpie, Jonsson observes the shopkeepers’ display, purchases items from the shop, and then sets up shop across the street. Jonsson consciously contradicts traditional exchange structures by giving away items, available for purchase at the neighbouring store, to passersby who engage the artist in conversation. Joanne Bristol presents an intimate service-based performance dealing with internalized space as a form of escapism in her performance entitled Association for Imaginary Architecture.

The first evening program takes place on Black Friday. Renowned as the biggest shopping day in the US, and an indicator for financial forecast for the upcoming holiday season, Black Friday also refers to the financial crisis of 1869. On Black Friday, Julian Higuerey Núñez and Ignacio Pérez Pérez start the evening with the last performance of their twelve-hour day. claude wittmann explores the fears we experience in times of economic uncertainty and the mob-like tendency to blame it on the “other”. In this case, Wittmann looks at the instances in history where women have been labelled as witches and damned for financial hardship within communities. Rodolphe-Yves Lapointe addresses risk-taking and responsibility in a final desperate act of escapism.

Black Friday is followed by Red Flag Saturday. The Red Flag signifies warning, defiance, left-wing politics and amazing sales at department stores. This evening’s tone is decidedly lighter than Black Friday, compelling the audience to escape from their recessionary blues and find some relief in humour. This evening begins, like Black Friday, with a portion of The Artist and the Beanstalk by Julian Higuerey Núñez and Ignacio Pérez Pérez. Then John G. Boehme explores adolescent escapism and Joanne Bristol encourages Torontonians to relocate to the “wallet-friendly” city of Winnipeg. 

Escapist Action: Performance in Recession concludes with Grey Cup Sunday and a performance party in celebration of escaping the daily grind, with cheap televised entertainment and the excitement of an annual national sporting event. David Frankovich’s Grey Cup Party mixes high- and low-brow activities, morphing the football party with an Earl Grey tea party to reveal hidden sexual truths.

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PROGRAM*

BLACK FRIDAY | November 27, 2009
Association for Imaginary Architecture by Joanne Bristol @ 1:00pm–4:00pm
My First Witch Piece by claude wittmann @ 8:00pm
Nut your way out! by Rodolphe-Yves Lapointe

RED FLAG SATURDAY | November 28, 2009 @ 1:00pm–10:00pm, times various
Magpie by Tomas Jonsson  | 3072 Dundas Street West, Toronto
Calentura by John G. Boehme
My Winnipeg Can Be Yours… by Joanne Bristol

GREY CUP SUNDAY | November 29, 2009
Grey Cup Party by David Frankovich @ 6:00pm | The Gladstone Hotel Art Bar, 1214 Queen Street West

*All performances take place at Inter/Access, 950 Dupont Street Unit 1, unless noted otherwise.
Co-presented by InterAccess Electronic Media Arts Centre.

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PERFORMANCE DESCRIPTIONS 

Association for Imaginary Architecture by Joanne Bristol
This performance involves architectural design and touch. I am interested in investigating relationships between our physical experiences of the built world and how we imagine and internalize those spatial experiences. The performance involves a one-on-one exchange between the audience and myself: I will ask audience members to verbally describe an architectural space. It could be a space from memory, a dream, or any kind of space in the built world that is of significance to them. As the space is described, I will draw a “plan” of it on the speaker’s clothed back with my hands. Sessions will last no longer than five minutes.

My First Witch Piece by claude wittmann
Today, my first witch piece exists as an idea that has to do with my body and with escapist acts, which I see as impulses to avoid or to transform a certain system of beliefs. I am fascinated by myths about fifteenth-century witches, and I allow myself to oscillate between believing and not believing that they had unusual abilities, such as “flying” or temporarily depriving men of their male organs. I wonder what kind of consciousness shift I would need in order to commit to their philosophical view of the world and to see myself become one of them. What are my embodied psychological walls? Doubt? Fear? Judgment? My relationship with death? My goal with this work is to take my audience on a journey that makes visible our resistance to a shift of consciousness.

Nut your way out! by Rodolphe-Yves Lapointe
The intensive use of the spoken word, nonverbal languages and the ingenuous manipulation of props is what typically characterizes Lapointe’s performance artwork (“textactions”, in his own words.) But the theme of escapism induced a restrained use of expressive means, and the Québec-based artist radically reduces his display of objects to a plain hemp rope, and the flow of words to only two: “Pull it!” In Nut your way out!, he leads the public through productive time-killer activities (knot-tying), social games (tug-of-war) and skills tests (rescue techniques) until he reaches the “highest stage” of escapism. The end of the performance virtually lies in the spectator’s hand.

Magpie by Tomas Jonsson
Magpie builds on a personal engagement with a variety store that has been a long-time fixture in the Junction District of Toronto, which is increasingly precarious as a result of the rapidly altering retail identity of the street. Creating a dynamic that resisted the usual flows of investment and speculation (eviction and/or gentrification), this performance installation piece is an ongoing adjunct redundant economy. By selecting, sorting and taking advice from the seller, the collection of items will be built to thereafter be offered on the streets to passers-by for exchange. In place of monetary gain, other forms of exchange are favoured. The objects will function more or less as token opportunities for discussion about the economic and material transformations in the neighbourhood and city, the role and ritual of corner store shopping, and the determination of value and exchange.

Calentura by John G. Boehme
Calentura intends to investigate autobiographical escapist narratives of adolescent disenfranchisement projected through direct akshun.

My Winnipeg Can Be Yours… by Joanne Bristol
In this lecture performance Joanne BristolI will describe the advantages of living in Canada’s low-budget cultural capital. This performance is especially designed for Torontonians who might like to experience the joys of living an in what is arguably North America’s most affordable city.

Grey Cup Party by David Frankovich
The final day of Escapist Action: Performance in Recession ends with a party to celebrate all things…football? Join us for Grey Cup Party by David Frankovich. A team of dandies gather to honour Earl Grey’s Cup over a cup of Earl Grey. The sports bar and the Victorian tearoom collide. Dressed in thrift store finery, they engage in male bonding over tea and biscuits while watching the Grey Cup final. Masculinity is reconstructed through a recession-friendly social ritual. Join us for a cuppa and the game!

Presented in the context of Escapist Action: Performance in Recession

Barter is a relational practice and is as old as the wheel. In a pairing of related performance works, Open Barter Market and The Artist and the Beanstalk, Núñez & Pérez create an alternative exchange and cultural economy, one based not on capitalist value, but on need value. Barter as an opportunity for performance. Performance as an opportunity for escape.

The artists arrived in Toronto carrying with them seventy-two objects from their home country. Objects ranging from the absurd to the personal, trinkets, objects with stories. On November 23, they opened the doors of the gallery with a performance called Open Barter Market. The public was invited to bring an object of their own to trade and barter for one of the objects the artists brought. Or instead of an object, you could trade an hour of your time in which the artists would do an action for you, within reason, at a location of your choosing. After a day of bartering and exchanging objects and stories about the objects, the artists had seventy-two new objects. Some absurd, some personal, trinkets, objects with stories.

The very next day the gallery transforms from a marketplace into a performance space. Using the newly exchanged items as materials in an ever-changing and exchanging series of one-hour performances, the artists begin the next phase of their project entitled, The Artist and the Beanstalk. For six days, twelve hours a day, Higuerey Núñez and Pérez Pérez take turns choosing one of their new seventy-two objects and create a live performance using that object. All of the objects stay in the gallery space, and often (but not always) become a jumping-off point or a part of the next performance. You are encouraged to trade an hour of your time during the six days of The Artist and the Beanstalk to come and witness the performance being made with your item.

SCHEDULE

Open Barter Market
November 23, 2009 @ 2:00pm–9:00pm

The Artist and the Beanstalk
November 24–29, 2009 @ 9:00am–9:00pm

FADO is pleased to present a new durational performance, Potential Fertility Rite, by TallBlondLadies. Established in 2003, TallBlondLadies is a collaborative performance project between Anna Berndtson (Sweden) and Irina Runge (Germany).

Two nearly identical tall blonde women, wearing white folklore blouses, grey leather shorts and white moon boots strapped into traditional wooden snowshoes manipulate large red exercise balls, enacting a traditional invocation rite by utilizing non-traditional gesture, action and costume. In this five-hour performance movement, TallBlondLadies repeat a ritualized synchronized dance using modern-day props, in time to the sound of snowshoes.

TBL inverts female stereotypes through the composition of absurd and unexpected performative gestures, often incorporating a range of accoutrement from high-end fashion to sports gear. Their works present diametrically opposed concepts; beauty and grace are juxtaposed and diminished through brute action and athleticism, tacitly disrupting and challenging gender-based categorizations.

—Artists Space, New York, 2007

TBL will also be performing at Hysteria Festival, an annual festival of women hosted by Buddies in Bad Times Theatre, on October 24, 2009.

© TallBlondLadies, Potential Fertility Rite, 2009. Photo Stephanie Sirant.

Northern Ireland’s Sandra Johnston’s practice is site-reactive, exploring ideas of active intervention in both the history and present physicality of a selected environment and the people who habitually use the space. Most of the working process occurs privately, concealed from public awareness, with only the latter stages of an action framed as performance. Improvising with whatever materials and architectural features are immediately available, in this way, Sandra Johnston’s work often retains the fragility of weighing out new thoughts, remaining unapologetically inclusive of all the doubts and disjunction which invade the human capacity to respond honestly to any given moment.

Using the backspace at Toronto Free Gallery, Sandra Johnston will be working in the locality of the gallery for five days, sourcing ideas through a number of walking actions and periods of sited stillness. From these observation activities, a public performance will be presented in the gallery, a collage of fragments of received behaviour.

Between 2002–2005, Sandra Johnston was awarded an Arts Humanities and Research Council Research Fellowship. During this research, the works she was creating were focused around core issues of trauma, in particular, the concept of “Trauma of Place”—exploring how artists can make creative interventions within spaces associated in public memory with violent events. This research was instigated initially in response to the post-ceasefire situation within Northern Ireland, and subsequently evolving outwards into many different international contexts to develop the core concept of investigating relationships between processes of art, and issues of territory, trauma and commemoration. Johnston also produces video/audio installations and durational drawing installations which are made directly onto architectural features. She has produced work at an international level since the early nineties and recently represented Northern Ireland at the Venice Biennale in 2005.

© Sandra Johnston, preparation for performance, 2009. Photo Shannon Cochrane.

Monika Günther and Ruedi Schill have been making performance work since the late 1970s. Long before meeting and starting to collaborate in 1995, their work shared similar themes, concerns and materials. Their joint performances since exemplify the artists’ dialogue with each other and in their words, offer a commentary on the “intensive rise of the pressing concerns of our times.” The images the artists create strive to illustrate both feelings of being trapped and of experiencing vast spaciousness, collaged through absurd picture combinations reflecting powerlessness and vulnerability.

Monika Günther and Ruedi Schill develop in their performances sparse pictures of suggestive force which are hard to describe in words. Deliberately slow and sedate gestures underline not only their physical presence but also create mysterious sensations of time, emphasized by repetition. The emerging archetypal picture—and sound—scenarios are, in their ambivalence, not only sublime and enigmatic but also depressing and spine-chilling.

—Marie-Luise Lange, Kunst + Unterricht, 2003

Please join us to experience two works from Monika Günther and Ruedi Schill entitled Silence and Fait a la Main. This will be their first appearance in Toronto. While in Canada, the duo will also perform in Montréal and Chicoutimi, Québec.

RELATED PROGRAMMING

September 24, 2009: VIVA! art action (Montréal, Canada)
October 2, 2009: Art Nomade Festival (Chicoutimi, Canada)
October 7, 2009: Art Nomade Festival (Chicoutimi, Canada)
October 8, 2009: Art Nomade Festival (Chicoutimi, Canada)

Pleasure Addicts is a performance landscape, an all-woman carnival, a transmission from another media universe, where an evening of channel flipping is compressed into a single space. Pleasure Addicts explores the love-hate, inherently unstable push-pull nature of mass media conceptions of femininity drawn from celebrity culture, reality television, lifestyle programming, and run-of-the-mill prime-time TV. 

The Pleasure Addicts performance was conceived by Brenda Goldstein after a year-long collaboration with Jesika Joy, Leila Gajusingh, Heather Keung, Jenn Norton, Aubrey Reeves and claude wittmann. Watch for our upcoming video Piece of Me.

Pleasure Addicts is indebted to the support and assistance of FADO, Heather Haynes, the Toronto Free Gallery and the Ontario Arts Council.

CREDITS
Performed by Aubrey Reeves, Brenda Goldstein, claude wittmann, Cathy Gordon, Yvonne Bambrick
Heather Keung, Jennifer Norton, Leila Gajusingh, Jesika Joy, lo bil, Maria Legault, Victoria Moufawad
Set and props by David Frankovich, Stephanie Chris
Video by Cabot McNenly
Make-up by Shawna Renee
Photo by Henry Chan

In Not Waterproof, Julie Andrée T. plays with the codes of representation and refuses all semblance of character. She exchanges the dramatic text for writing based on action. Subjected to a series of ordeals, pulverized and dirtied, her body becomes a dreamscape. In exposing her vulnerability, she quietly conveys the impermanent and ephemeral nature of our lives. Like an effervescent fraternal twin.

When performance-installation encounters theatre in Julie Andrée T’s work, the blend is unsettling and fascinating. Julie’s iconoclastic work is a hybrid of these two approaches in which dialogue, a series of actions and live images are gradually distilled into poetry. Disconcerting, moving and unclassifiable, the piece deploys an astounding transformation of the body by means of a metamorphosis of the stage landscape.

CREDITS
Conceived and performed by Julie Andrée T.
Lighting design by Jean Jauvin
Sound design by Laurent Maslé

FADO Performance Art Centre is pleased to present new performance works from a trio of contemporary Israeli performance and visual artists, Yaron David, Karin Mendelovici and Meir Tati.

FADO invited Yaron David, curator and performance art event organizer, to perform a new work at FADO and to choose two other artists from Tel Aviv he was interested in bringing with him. The result was an intense 10-day working period in Toronto in which David, Medelovici and Tati worked together and collaborated on a new work. This performance, entitled BETI, is the culmination of a continuous and improvised performance and working process that began a month ago before leaving Tel Aviv. Combining video (documentation of the process, both indoors and out, starting in Tel Aviv and edited at the very last moment in Toronto) and live actions, the work of these three artists speaks to the loss of, search for, and the production of meaning in a fragile and chaotic reality, and the collaborative research of confusion. During their adventures, they meet some people (one of them a manicurist named Beti) and work in a variety of sites and spaces.

FADO Performance Art Centre is pleased to present new solo live works from two of Poland’s most exciting, engaging and surprising performance artists, Dariusz Fodczuk and Arti Grabowski. We give them the moniker of the Polish Power Players as an homage to the title of Dariusz Fodczuk’s ongoing performance series entitled Tiny Therapeutic Theatre.

Polish Power Players and Tiny Therapeutic Theatre. Seems straightforward enough. As you read this you imagine yourself understanding what you might see at this event. Don’t be fooled. The titles are full of contradictions. Tiny Therapeutic Theatre is not tiny or therapeutic in a traditional sense. And it’s not ‘theatre’ at all. It’s large, loud, and attempts to—metaphorically—explode the theatre. Performance art as therapy… perhaps. Performance art as self-aware, embracing, and helpful… absolutely. The works presented by these two artists are gentle and abrasive, funny and disturbing, and combine rigorous action with engaged audience interaction. Come prepared for a whole new kind of theatre.

© Dariusz Fodczuk, Tiny Therapeutic Theatre, 2009. Photo Miklos Legrady.

Un party pyjama avec des jeux de société, du chocolat chaud et des contes au lit avant de faire dodo.

Part visual art installation and part interactive performance, Mothering is a four-day pyjama party complete with board games, warm Ovaltine, bedtime stories and the familiar touch of mother’s warm hand on your cheek as you drift off to sleep. Audience members are greeted at the door of the gallery, offered a flannel nightshirt and gently encouraged to become a part of the installation itself. Exploring and confounding the line between audience and performer, Mothering recognizes the audience as significant in the art-making process. Just like Mom would.

Thank you for helping me with the puzzle, thank you for not making me do my own dishes, and thank you for brushing my hair.
—Your daughter, Miriam

Trop cool d’avoir trios maman.
—Your son, Jerome

Of course you can bring your friends and stay as long as you want.
—Love, Mom

CREDITS
Created by Moynan King
Performed by Dayna McLeod, Moynan King and Nathalie Claude

FADO Performance Art Centre is pleased to present two engagements with performance artist and educator, BBB Johannes Deimling, curated by FADO and presented at the 7a*11d International Festival of Performance Art.

The first is a performance art workshop entitled, What is Important? This intensive workshop takes place in the five days leading up to the festival dates. Open to local artists working at any level of their practices or those new to performance practice entirely, the workshop culminates in a public showing of works in progress. 

FADO is also pleased to present a new performance by BBB Johannes Deimling during the festival, entitled Every Rose Has A Thorn. Only a very few images of this performance exist as Deimling asked all but the festival photographer to put down their cameras during the performance.

© BBB Johannes Deimling, Every Rose Has a Thorn, 2008. Photo Henry Chan.

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

It is not the wound that matters. It is the scar. I come up to one of the men in the audience and kneel down behind him. I tie my right foot to his with a bandage. I do the same with our left feet and continue to tie our whole bodies together. I wrap a bandage around my head, so only my hands remain visible. Finally I also hide my hands underneath the bandage and stop any activity, so only the man remains visible. There is silence. After a while the curator or members of the audience assume the performance is over and start to free us from the bandage. Yet when they finish I do not let go of the man and cling to him instead. When he tries to get rid of me I hold on to him as strongly as I can. In different situations I experience a variety of reactions from my performance partners including:
He decides to carry me out of the room on his back.
He does not act to end the situation and lets me embrace him for next four hours.
He turns around to face me and hugs me firmly.
He uses force to get rid of me.

Angelika Fojtuch

© Angelika Fotjuch, 4U, 2008. Photo Henry Chan.

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

The artist, dressed in a baby blue Viagra pill mascot costume, arrives to the opening night of the festival and enacts three classic performances created by three male performance icons:

Failing to Levitate in the Studio by Bruce Nauman
Following Piece by Vito Acconci
And an over the top filing cabinet ‘love scene’ by Istvan Kantor (Monty Canstin AMEN!)

To fulfill our Purpose and achieve our Vision, we abide by enduring values. We are deeply committed. We recognize that people are the cornerstone of success, and we value our diversity as a source of strength. Innovation is the key. We know that to be successful we must work together, frequently transcending organizational and geographic boundaries to meet changing needs. We demand the highest ethical standards, and our products and processes will be of the highest quality. We strive for continuous improvement in our performance, measuring results carefully, and ensuring that integrity and respect for people are never compromised.

Will Kwan

© Will Kwan, Dr. V Does the Classics, 2008. Photo Henry Chan.

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

The material in my performanceʼs work is the possibility of body. I create poetic structures of actions with this unstable language. Sometime I eat an onion to cry, drink beer and vomit later, use endurance, force or the flexibility of my body, make sound with my voice, light fire on myself, etc. This proximity of my own body is just help me to communicate the powerful flame that I feel when I create. But behind that raw love for art appear a rigorous logical structure who support the piece and let emerge sense. Now, there is a continuous strike between rigid sense and unstable sensation. What I am searching in art is this moment when in a piece, itʼs become impossible to mix or separate sense and sensation.

Christian Messier

© Christian Messier, Untitled Performance, 2008. Photo Henry Chan.

êkâya-pâhkaci [ee-guy-uh-puck-a-chee] (don’t freeze up)

êkâya-pâhkaci operates through an intersection of nomadic site-specificity, visual patterning, language, narrative, movement and rhythm. In this work, the artist stages a performance presented under an adaptable travelling tent from where she relates and offers information to the audience using her body, voice and graffiti/tagging. The audience, by proximity and in accepting her invitation to witness her activities “comes in from the cold” and becomes part of her “camp.”

Presented in the context of the imagineNATIVE Film + Media Art Festival

SCHEDULE

Faculty of Art Speaker’s Series: An Evening with Cheryl L’Hirondelle
October 15, 2008 @ 6:00pm
Ontario College of Art & Design, 100 McCaul Street, Toronto

êkâya-pâhkaci by Cheryl L’Hirondelle
October 16, 2008 @ 8:00pm
Toronto Free Gallery, 1277 Bloor Street West, Toronto

Over fifteen years since he first performed On the Table in Toronto at the Ontario College of Art, Seiji Shimoda returns to present this seminal work again. Audiences are invited to experience this rare and unique opportunity to witness, in person, the work of one of Japan’s most respected and established performance artists. More so, the invitation is an opportunity to experience a performance work that has stood – quite literally – the test of time. Shimoda has been travelling and working with this performance, often (in the early years) bringing his own table, for over two decades. 

Thanks to Marilyn Arsem, Mobius and the Museum School of Fine Arts in Boston for their support in helping to bring Seiji Shimoda to North America.

© Seiji Shimoda, On the Table, 2008. Photo Miklos Legrady.

The idea, the thought, the draft form the basis of the execution of my artwork which takes form as performance and installation. Ideas and performance images come from everyday life situations, social and cultural atmospheres. In both performance and installation work, the body, alone, is the means of expression. The subjects I deal with are time, movement, space, material, body, action/interaction. I try to create works of art that create free space for associations and new possibilities for the audience. Taking a special situation from everyday life and without illustrating it exactly, one for one; I place it into a new context. I aim to create art where all of the elements are connected together to form a whole work of art (Gesamtkunstwerk).

—Nezaket Ekici

During this residency, Turkish artist Nezaket Ekici, the artist creates two new video works in addition to presenting a new live performance. The images Ekici creates in her work are from the everyday environment, presented with either a theatrical sensibility or the beauty of minimalist sculpture.

A student of Marina Abramovic (MFA, Hochschule für Bildende Künste Braunschweig, 2004) and a member of IPG (Independent Performance Group), Nezaket’s work has been presented at International Festivals, galleries and events around the world including Germany, Spain, Switzerland, Istanbul, Italy, Taiwan, Holland, France.

SCHEDULE

Exhibition: March 28–29, 2008 @ 12:00pm–5:00pm
Opening reception: March 28 @ 7:00pm
Live performances: March 28 @ 8:00pm & March 29 @ 2:00–4:00pm

© Nezaket Ekici, Tube, 2008. Photo Miklos Legrady.

FADO Performance Art Centre’s 2008 Emerging Artists Series, Vivência Poética, pairs established artists with emerging artists in the creation of a collaborative performance work.

ARTISTS
Diane Borsato & Stacey Sproule
Keith Cole & Diana Lopez Soto
John Marriott & Suzanne Caines

The curatorial premise of this project required an emerging and an established performance artist to collaborate jointly, and in turn with participants within the space in which they work/present. I am interested in the relational aspects within the collaborative process between artists, and how it specifically pertains to questions of authorship, communication, tension, and pedagogy. I am certain that these collaborations will challenge the concept of relational aesthetics as it is outlined by Nicolas Bourriaud in his text Relational Aesthetics.

Erika DeFreitas, curator

Kitchen Dutch (Part 1 & 2) is presented in partnership with the 2008 Images Festival, in the context of Ceremonial Actions at York Quay Gallery at Harbourfront Centre.

Exhibition: Ceremonial Actions
March 8–April 27, 2008

PARTICIPATING ARTISTS
Alissa Firth-Eagland & Brenda Goldstein
Nezaket Ekici
Louise Liliefeldt (performance)
Deirdre Logue
Shana Moulton

Ceremonial Actions is an all-women’s show that explores ideas of ritual and performance. This exhibition, at Harbourfront Gallery, blurs interiors and exteriors both literally and figuratively and spans concepts of mythology, emotion, ritual and psychology. All of the artists in this show have practices based in performance and the artworks investigate these ideas through acts of counting, weaving, rolling, repetition and drawing.

Louise Liliefeldt was born in Cape Town, South Africa in a community described as “coloured”. Travelling back a number of times over the years has resulted in an ongoing process of personal discovery through family and ancestry. Using these sometimes-contradictory images, in the performance Kitchen Dutch, Liliefeldt draws (literally, and on a large scale) a picture of self-identity.

SCHEDULE

March 7, 2008 @ 6:00pm–9:00pm: Kitchen Dutch, Part 1 by Louise Liliefeldt
April 12, 2008 @ 4:00pm–7:00pm: Kitchen Dutch, Part 2 by Louise Liliefeldt

© Louise Liliefeldt, Kitchen Dutch (Part 2), 2008. Photo Henry Chan.

Co-presented with XPACE Cultural Centre
Curated by Paul Couillard

Cellu(h)er Resistance: The Body with/out Organs? is a five-day performance-as-installation process piece by Toronto artist, educator and cancer survivor, Pam Patterson. The work combines sound, drawing, action, video and collaborative writing examining the artist’s body, the body with disease and the body without organs. 

Pam Patterson writes:

After decades of dis-ease and illness, the pain of poverty, dis-ability and being reconfigured by surgery my hands now make another body for my body… there are sounds, images, becomings… it is accomplished the moment I undertake it. It isn’t the case that the body/I like(s) pain per se; rather, the body/I like(s) being a Body without Organs, and the pain is the price the body/I is/am willing to pay for that.

SCHEDULE
Opening Performance: February 27, 2008 @ 8:00pm
Performance-as-Installation: Daily from 12:00pm–6:00pm
Final Performance Action: March 2, 2008 @ 6:00pm

ARTISTS
Coco Rico
David Khang
Irene Loughlin
Juan “Cheto” Castellano
Nao Bustamente
Natalie Loveless
Naufus Ramirez-Figueroa

Curated by Lissette Olivares

Grotesques must be thought of as a site of experimentation, where risk is a seductive ally that pries open the aperture for possibility. In this collective exhibition, the grotesque is invoked as a realm of mutative, transitional, and transgressive potentiality. Employing a range of taboo materials, themes, and forms, the artists move beyond the expected, searching for unconventional ways into the audience’s sensorium. Through symbolic inversion, this group of artist-agents emphasize a return of the repressed, amplifying contemporary political issues that exist within our everyday experience.

Co-presented by A Space Gallery and FADO Performance Art Centre

PERFORMANCES
February 23 | 6:30pm

Untitled by David Khang
White Slavery in Toronto by Naufus Ramirez Figueroa
Mythical Grotesques by Irene Loughlin
Pies con Barro and Muddied Feet by Cheto Castellano
Given over to Want by Nao Bustamante

Lissette Olivares is a theorist, critic and curator. As a cultural diplomat she promotes avant-garde practices and the careers of marginal artists; her PhD analyzes cultural resistance during Chile’s dictatorship.

FADO is pleased to present Barcelona-based artists Maria Cosmès and Carlos Piña in their Toronto premieres, for the ongoing International Visiting Artists series.

Maria Cosmès’ work focuses on relationships, interpersonal relationships, links and ties with one another. Using rope, string, thread and rubber bands, Cosmès builds her performance in collaboration with the audience; each performance is informed by time, space and place. As an anthropologist, she is particularly interested in these differences, and at times, similarities.

In Liens Maria Cosmès acts as mediating interpreter allowing herself to be bound and handled by real ropes which end up forming an autonomous network in which our movements become ambivalent, longing to escape, soothe or submit, in short, they relive that everyday monster, sometimes pleasant or seductive, which at the bottom is the most terrible of all pitiful ghosts: society.

—Deborah Puig-Pey

Carlos Piña’s current work is primarily concerned with memory, informed by a thoughtful observance that in order to prevent the suffering and war we have already lived through, one must preserve and be conscious of the ‘duty of memory’ we have to our children. Using the events of the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939) and working with the concepts of amnesia and reminiscence, Pina’s work aims to investigate histories of power construction, truth, memory and collective silence. Believing that all historical events, though removed, are relatable to one’s own concept of personal history, Pina’s work attempts to slow down or put a stop to the gradual process of forgetfulness we all experience both individually and as a society—caused by an overabundance of information from the mass media—a society in which the past is discarded in favour of the constant search for the new.

We live in societies in which the silence has been imposed, where the impunity has been established under the name of reconciliation, where the amnesia has been promoted so that the powerful do not have to ask for pardon for they did in the past. We are silenced persons, sons and grandchildren of silenced persons, generations plenty of silence. Ignoring the pain that our ancestors have suffered, we live as unknown and incomplete persons; we are, therefore, persons without past for the loss of our historical, family and cultural memory.

—Carlos Piña

© Maria Cosmès, Untitled Performance, 2007. Photo Henry Chan.

FADO is pleased to present Barcelona-based artist Valentin Torrens’ Toronto premiere with Darkness Presence, an evening of short performance selections exploring the relationship of absence to action, artist to audience and darkness to light. Employing chance, ritual, light (or lack of) and the projected body, these short performances focus on the presence of the artist’s body, “light like interpersonal tension” and the ephemeral nature of action taken in a space that slowly moves from total darkness to dim light.

My work tends to the aspects of the aesthetic of the Muromachi period: Asymmetry. Simplicity. Austere majesty or majestic dryness. Refined naturalness. Depth or deep reserve. Suspended serenity. Peace. The fleeting, unique and untrappable character of life says to us that we must catch the ephemeral thing at the moment that it escapes and flees. While it is in flight, there is no time to evoke memory, nor for ideation. Reasoning does not serve here as anything. Language can be used but ideation loses its direct sense and is a weak echo of that which is no longer here.

Valentin Torrens

While in Canada, Valentin will be creating performances for Le Lieu (Québec City), FADO Performance Art Centre (Toronto), Neutral Ground (Regina) and finally NSCAD (Halifax) as part of his four-city tour.

PERFORMANCES

Le Lieu: September 6, 2007
FADO: September 19, 2007
Neutral Ground: September 22, 2007
NSCAD: September 26, 2007

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Torrens is one of three artists from Spain who make up the 2007 International Visiting Artist Series roster. Inaugurated in 1993, this ongoing series reflects FADO’s commitment to fostering international dialogue by spotlighting work and trends by artists from different countries. Most importantly, this series gives Canadian audiences a chance to see work that would not otherwise be accessible.

Many thanks to Bruce Barber, Janice DeMings and the folks at NSCAD who helped make Valentin’s visit to Toronto possible. Thanks as well to Neutral Ground and Robin Poitras, Le Lieu Centre en Art Actuel and Richard Martel. Thanks to Oakville Galleries for their technical support.

© Valentin Torrens, Darkness Presence, 2008. Photo Shannon Cochrane.

ARTISTS
Collette Jacques
Suzanne Joly
Stefan St-Laurent
The Two Gullivers

Curated by Paul Couillard

FADO Performance Art Centre, in collaboration with La Galerie du Nouvel-Ontario and the Toronto Free Gallery, is pleased to present Territoires de Langue. For this project, five francophone artists have been invited to undertake interventions that respond to the question: To what extent does language determine experience? The artists will work in two distinct environments, Toronto and Sudbury, spending a week in each location engaging in street actions and public “manoeuvres.” Join us for a bilingual public presentation in which the artists will share the results of their Toronto research through performances and discussions.

Does each of us have a “place,” a spot where we belong? When we enter space, do we become a part of that space, or do we simply confirm our irresistible, insurmountable isolation? To what extent do we become place by being in place? To what extent does a place, by containing us, become us? What does it mean when we bring particular languages to particular surroundings? To what extent does language determine experience? Is the Francophone “Nouvel-Ontario” different from the Anglophone “Northern Ontario,” for example? Does language cut across regional difference? Can it transcend the divide between a large urban centre like Toronto and a more rural northern community like Sudbury?

Performance gestures offer the potential for psychic (that is, emotional, psychological and spiritual) affect, as well as social and physical effect. For this series, five French-language artists will develop site-specific performance gestures for both Toronto and Sudbury, using tactics that explore the idea of “putting in place.” These gestures—whether or not they utilize spoken word—constitute forms of language, ones that are no doubt inflected by the artists’ native tongue. How translatable will these gestures be? How will these artists use the language of performance to make space for themselves, to “belong?

FADO is pleased to present Vancouver-based artist David Khang new performance, Phalogocentrix. Co-sponsored by Vtape and the Images Festival.

Phalogocentrix is a performance about language and the way it forms and informs our culture. Vancouver-based artist David Khang interrogates constructions and performativity of language that is at once gendered (phallocentric) and culturally specific (logocentric). Part calligraphy, part yoga, and part breakdancing, this syncretic ritual explores African and Asian cultural connectivities, within the theological context of a church. By bringing together traditional and contemporary cultural references, as well as trans-diasporic identities, this work is an attempt to further critical understanding of the relationships between race, gender, and language.

This performance was presented in FADO’s IDea series (2005–2007), curated by Paul Couillard.

FADO is proud to introduce Toronto audiences to the work of renowned Mexican artist Elvira Santamaría Torres, who creates a new piece in-situ, working with the concept of “everyday life words in progress.”

For this project, Santamaría Torres begins with the minimal idea of installing herself in a Toronto window front space and responding to the words found in two different Toronto newspapers each day. Engaged in a sensitive process of daily response Santamaría Torres created a progressive series of actions, images and objects that speak to immediate conditions. The performance could be viewed from the street, or one could enter the space and interact with her. Starting with an 18-hour day, the performance became progressively shorter each day until the final 2-hour action on the last day.

Santamaría Torres writes of her way of working: “I am interested in instant creation. I think that the need for real human communication demands freedom and spontaneity, far away from seeking determinate answers. Action artists are inventing new relationships among others and at the same time they are discovering and reinventing themselves.” (Source: New Moves International)

March 16 @ 6:00am–midnight
March 17 @ 6:00am–10:00pm
March 18 @ 6:00am–8:00pm
March 19 @ 6:00am–6:00pm
March 20 @ 7:00am–5:00pm
March 21 @ 9:00am–5:00pm
March 22 @ 11:00am–5:00pm
March 23 @ 1:00pm–5:00pm
March 24 @ 3:00pm–5:00pm

This performance was presented in FADO’s IDea series (2005–2007), curated by Paul Couillard.

© Elvira Santamaría Torres, Everyday life words in progress, 2007. Photo Miklos Legrady.

FADO in cooperation with Toronto Free Gallery, is pleased to announce the latest instalment of its ongoing Emerging Artists series. In Enter-gration, curated by Nahed Mansour, a roster of local performance artists explore immigration issues.

ARTISTS
Bojana Videkanic
Idil Mussa
Jesus Mora
Karilynn Ming Ho
Rachel Gorman
Reena Katz
Rita Camacho Lomeli
Tejpal S. Ajji

North America is increasingly joining global debates on immigration as new racisms surface. Borders and boundaries are being redefined in the name of security, as movement is facilitated for some groups while others are excluded. The question is who benefits from this security regime? Who is left out? This event is a small step to building our collective awareness of the demands of movement, expectations of submission, and the struggle to fulfill challenges faced by millions with precarious status daily.

Curator Nahed Mansour writes:

Crossing the border into North American society is not a simple act for immigrants and refugees. [“It should be hard! We need safety! How else are we going to know who’s coming into our country?”] In curating Enter-gration, I’m trying to break down these well-worn myths. [“Why?”] I intend to explore ways in which integration through assimilation is a tactic aimed to make visible minorities invisible. [“But we have multiculturalism, don’t we?”].

PROGRAM

March 1, 7:00pm
Crossing Borders/Crossing Bodies by Bojana Videkanic
Illegal Migration by Jesus Mora

March 2, 7:00pm
Transit by Rachel Gorman
Suhbuhk [Lesson] by Tejpal S. Ajji

March 3, 4:00pm
Knot by Idil Mussa
Crossing Borders/Crossing Bodies by Bojana Videkanic
Order to Remedy by Reena Katz

March 4, 2:00pm
Urban Meditations by Rita Camacho Lomeli
Cowboy BeBop (Ode To My Daddy) by Karilynn Ming Ho
Illegal Migration by Jesus Mora

This performance is a part of FADO’s IDea series, and was co-presented by Toronto Free Gallery at the 7a*11d International Festival of Performance Art.

FADO is pleased to announce the North American debut of Glyn Davies-Marshall, hailed as “one of the great undiscovered voices of British performance art” by Andre Stitt. Davies-Marshall’s durational performance trilogy, Somewhere Between Wakefield and Wichita, is an epic three-day journey through a complex terrain of personal history, private mythology, and post-colonial politics. Developing three distinct durational performance environments, Davies-Marshall will attempt to fashion his own “multi-faceted, self-sufficient promised land,” situated somewhere between the bleak reality of rural Britain in the second half of the Twentieth Century and a mythologized North American cowboy frontier fuelled by the plaintive songs of Glenn Campbell.

Artist’s Proposition by Glyn Davies-Marshall
Somewhere Between Wakefield and Wichita – The Final Frontier

Over the last two years my practice has developed at such a speed that I have found myself mentally shelving piece after piece. There have been a couple of instances where I have had the chance to experiment with, and work through many stored concepts on a physical level. These were by no means large scale performances, more like sketches in the hope of sorting out and beginning to put some order and clarification to new issues.

From the early nineties my work has dealt with my own symbolic order, colloquialisms, the words of my father, the stigma of a Northern upbringing and a persistent habit of perceiving situations in an overly romantic fashion. There have been developments and issues that have subconsciously infiltrated my practice and train of thought that have now become fundamental facets within my work. These include Colonialism, Dictatorship, the plight of those who are seeking asylum and a recollection of a place that I once called home.

I now need to get out of my system the above issues, combining live performance, song, soundtrack, video, the ongoing construction of an installation, all under the title of; Somewhere Between Wakefield and Wichita – The Final Frontier. I shall work through many contexts allowing my audience to approach the work at many different levels, some of which may involve their participation as I create my multi-faceted, self-sufficient promised land.

Statement (May 16, 2005)

I will now create with as much detail and clarity the whole journey up to press from ‘Wakefield to Wichita’ rather than showing snap shots, instances and influences from along the way in the hope of putting some things to rest.

I have resigned myself and know full well that I can never finish this journey as I don’t believe that I will ever be able to understand the teachings and the instructions given to me by my father. ‘The Symbolic Order’ after all contradicted its self; instead the words of my father would always include the mother and her importance, along with the importance of everyone around me regardless of creed and colour.

My childhood has left me disillusioned, it has never shown me how to hate but it has instructed me on many levels how people hate. It has taught me control but never how to control others in order to succeed. Yet back then in many cultures including West Yorkshire, now and for the last three hundred years deception, repression and the power to exploit and overthrow has been a fundamental facet of progress. If we cannot have it, then we will take it. My country is an ulterior motive, I’m proud to wear its flag on my ass.

Forgive me if I am unable to find the right order in which to lay down my text. This is how the information comes to me in short snippets, like running through slides on a projector, yet they come on many levels, sometimes the information is not too clear and although the actions or objects seem very random, they fit, but I don’t know why.

Wakefield is a place in West Yorkshire. I was beaten there. My Grandfather died in the mines there raising money for stately homes. My father lost his sight there but it was never dealt with, not properly. Wichita is a place mentioned in a Glen Campbell song. Its Sunday afternoon, I’m small, Dad’s been working, I can smell the plaster on his clothes.

Part 1: Palamino
October 24, 2006 @ 6:00–10:00pm

Part 2: Number 33
October 25, 2006 @ 4:00pm–10:00pm

Part 3: The Wichita Line Man is Still on the Line
October 26, 2006 @ 6:00pm–10:00pm