Category: Performance

What is at rest is easy to hold;
What has not given a sign is easy to plan for;
The brittle is easily scattered;
Act on it before it comes into being;
Order it before it turns into chaos;
… Those who act on it ruin it;
Those who hold on to it lose it …
He learns not to learn and return to what the masses pass by;
He could help all things to be natural, yet he dare not do it.

Te-Tao Ching, Chapter 64

FADO inaugurates its newest performance art series, Public Places / Private Spaces, with a 4-day window performance by artist Tony Romano. Evanescent Rumour uses personal memory as the departure point for a meditation on both the functionality and aesthetics of visual communication. The artist will sit in a storefront window for four days drawing images based on a specific memory. Audience members will be able to watch the artist drawing and view his drawings on a monitor through a live video feed, but as each image is completed, the previous one will be obscured, erased – in a word, shredded. In the end, only one image will remain. What will we glean from these images, and how will the making of them alter the artist’s own understanding of the event they attempt to portray?

Romano writes of this work:

This piece deals with the validity and quality of memory… Memory exists, but how certain can one be about its truth? How free are one’s ideas from emotions, physical environment, customs and habits? …In the process of receiving, storing, recalling and communicating, the idea becomes over simulated, fragmented and distorted. This evanescent cycle leads to false analogies, which become one’s reality.The wall between the subjective and objective (private & public) is created by mediation. My work serves as a tool to investigate reality and its make up. I wish to erase the walls between “art” and “reality”, bringing to light illusion, which is the grand mysterious reality of life. We live in a world surrounded by a trompe-l’oeil. In the spirit of the iconoclasts, I wish to break down all analogies that have served as the foundations of Western Culture. We have lost mystery and have constructed reality.

© Tony Romano, Evanescent Rumour, 2000. Photo by Paul Couillard.

GOOD
Automatic Dishwashers
Chamois & Cloth Napkins
Vinegar & Water
Saran Wrap
Some Bleach
Hot Hot Water & Soap
String Mops
Vacuum Cleaners

BAD
Smelly Wet Dishrags that Aren’t Hung Out
Paper Towels & Paper Napkins (however, washing/drying and re-using is okay)
Glass Cleaners in Spray Bottles (however, it is excellent for chrome)
Hippie Rule of Baking Soda Only is Dumb
Greasy Dishwater
Sponge Mops (unless industrial)
Feather Dusters are Stupid Except for Photo Ops

—La Dragu’s Cleaning Oh Yes/Oh No List, July 7, 2000

Canadian Performance Art Legend and “international cleaning lady” Margaret Dragu invites Toronto audiences to participate in Cleaning and Loving (It). This performance art event is a celebration of small-scale community ritual and of Dragu’s long-standing love affair with cleaning and laundry. Already underway as a series of intimate cleaning performances for Toronto-based friends and colleagues of the artist, Cleaning and Loving (It) goes public on Sunday, July 16.

Rain or shine, join us for a warm and witty afternoon of festivities that begins with a “walk and roll” parade starting at Queen’s Park at noon and wending its way down to Vtape located near Spadina Avenue and Richmond Street West. People of all ages are welcome to show up on foot, in wheelchairs, on bikes, rollerblades or other non-motorized transportation. Feel free to bring your own favourite cleaning supplies and tools (buckets, mops, brooms, rags, scrub brushes, spray bottles, etc.) as your banner of choice, and learn the simple secrets of Margaret’s famous “Xs and Os” choreography.

PARADE ROUTE

Start time @ 12:00pm
Beginning at Queen’s Park, south along University to Orde Street,
west along Orde to McCaul Street, south along McCaul Street to Grange Park,
west and south through Grange Park to John Street,
south along John Street to the alleyway in between Queen Street West and Richmond Street West,
west along the alleyway to Peter Street,
south along Peter Street to Richmond Street West,
and then west on Richmond Street West to Vtape located at 401 Richmond Street West building.

The parade concludes at Vtape at 1:30pm, where everyone is invited to an old-fashioned ‘social’ that will include screenings of cleaning and laundry sequences from Dragu’s many performances, films and videotapes, plus plenty of snacks and refreshments.

Margaret Dragu is a warm-hearted, fearless and indomitable spirit who has left her mark across disciplines and across the country. Dragu’s astonishing output of work spans back to 1969 and includes forays into theatre, film, video, writing, choreography and above all, performance art. She is perhaps best known for her work in the 1980s, including her long-running X’s and O’s series, which began with a solstice mega-spectacle in Hamilton in 1983 (X’s and O’s on the Longest Day of the Year) and continues with her recent Improvisation for X’s and O’s. Her 1988 film project I VANT TO BE ALONE reads as a who’s who of the Toronto art scene of the 1980s, while her smaller, more intimate 1990s work has been produced and seen mainly on the West Coast.

Over the years Dragu has tackled various issues ranging from love to labour to death, colouring the mundane and everyday with a spirit of celebration and a touch of the fanciful. Multilayered, sexy and political, her work is firmly rooted in the lessons of the mortal body while playfully engaging with images of glamour and passion. Adept in both solo and collaborative environments, she is a major influence in contemporary Canadian performance art.

FADO celebrates the solstice on December 21 with Trace Elements, a new performance by Paul Couillard. This is the final event in FADO’s 12-month durational performance series, TIME TIME TIME. Lasting a full 24-hours, the piece will begin and end at astronomical twilight – 6:28 pm local time.

Trace Elements will generate a numerological mandala that re-marks 2000 years of calendar time. In this ‘action/installation,’ Couillard will turn YYZ gallery into a room-size colour field sculpture made up of 2000 pieces of cloth saturated in spice. The performance, anchored in the ritual action of creating the installation, will unfold through a series of casual and intimate one-on-one encounters between the artist and audience members.

In advance of the work, Paul offers these thoughts:

I see this piece as a representation of experience, how history layers and accretes, how time marks us. The whole piece is a personal time marker, both in the doing of the action and in the physical presence that is generated by the doing. It seems to me that our relationship to time – which was once more rooted in the rhythms of day, night, and the seasons – has become very shaky. We have no attention span for time; our ways of looking at it, and of representing it, are inadequate. We need new metaphors to help us envision time’s workings, not to mention its scale.

In part, Trace Elements is a hopeful conjuring act against the hype – and especially the boredom – of millennium frenzy. I think our boredom comes from a frustration with the lack of any real significance to attach to that flip of the zeroes. I’m willing to go to this place of boredom because of what all of my training has taught me, which is that boredom is a fantastic gateway to uncovering and creating meaning.

On December 11, FADO will mark 30 years of cultural production by senior Canadian artist Clive Robertson, presenting his new work, The Confessional. This is the latest event in FADO’s 12-month durational performance series, TIME TIME TIME.

In The Confessional, Robertson revisits the idea of the “museum display installation,” first explored in his 1975 work In Video Traction. The Confessional features a tool-shed scale folk museum attached to a similar-sized museum shipping crate in which the artist is “…temporarily and voluntarily incarcerated.”

Visitors are invited to enter the installation to engage in one-on-one, two-way exchanges about art production and the interruptions of everyday life. Each visitor is given a range of choices for talking or listening. Both parties can independently decide on the length and degree of responsiveness that will constitute the interaction.

Robertson describes some of the work’s intended resonances:

“The performance and its architecture … recognize an expectation of reflective speech technologies from the church confessional to ‘visits with Santa,’ from living history performances at heritage sites (including relics of Tom Thompson’s shack or Robert Fillou’s Tool-Shed) to the chat-rooms of cyberspace. Within the options provided by a dominant cultural rhetoric of interactivity, this performance chooses reciprocity over feedback.”

Performance hours: 8:00am – 8:00pm
Public Hours: 10:00am – 6:00pm

FADO is pleased to present San Francisco-based artist Jenny Strauss in Intake, the latest event in its 12-month durational performance series, TIME TIME TIME.

A ‘fat femme dyke’, Jenny Strauss is one of the most uncompromising performance artists to emerge from the United States in the past ten years. In Intake, a new work timed to coincide with US Thanksgiving, Jenny Strauss will spend 24 hours living like a ‘pig’. Inhabiting an environment of easy chairs, mud, garbage, hay, junk food and urine, Strauss will delve into her archetypal ‘pig’ self. Expect a visceral performance that confronts our basic assumptions and projections around bodies of flesh. Audience members are invited to bring garbage to leave behind.

Strauss explains:

The pig is one of the oldest domesticated animals on earth, raised almost exclusively for human consumption. The pig is also a highly anthropomorphized creature in North American culture – an icon of love and helplessness shown in movies, and figuratively portrayed in endless precious figurines and collectibles. But at the same time that the pig is adored as a darling animal, it is also reviled as a symbol of sloth and filth.

I have often been compared to a pig, and associated with the misunderstood habits of this common farm animal. For the 24 hours coinciding with the U.S. Thanksgiving, I will inhabit the (imagined) characteristics of the human/animal pig – thought to be lazy, slow, dirty, disgusting, stupid, voracious, shameful and unhealthy.

I do this work because I am interested in spiritual transformation – and moving toward what’s hard or hidden or shamed is one way I encourage such a transformation into being. My values, beliefs and fears/hopes are entwined into my work as I use the primary element – my fat body – to meld the mind/body fracture trained into me by society. Other sculptural elements include mud, garbage, hay, raw pork, junk food, urine and an oversized piggy bank.

Acknowledgements

This piece came into life with the incredible support of my friends and family. Thank you to the White Food girls, Terry Berman, Katherine Steele and especially Liane Collins, for your passionate engagement with creativity and remarkable friendship. To my dear friend Kebo Drew – you are an amazing creative force and beautiful spirit – thank you for giving me your poet’s attention in the development of this piece and for standing by me with unwavering support. To my husband, Emily Howard – for your willingness to love (yet another) artist. To Elizabeth Grainger and Robin Maltz, for your friendship and femme sisterhood. To Tracey Grogan for your inspiring design work. To Paul Couillard for your incredible commitment to exposing and supporting the work of performance artists and for encouraging me during the development of this piece. Finally, I dedicate Intake to my mother, Maggie Nura Uehara, whose adventurous spirit, creativity and beauty I can never get enough of.

© Jenny Strauss, Intake, 1999. Photo Paul Couillard.

FADO is pleased to announce Clock by Jennifer Nelson and Glen Redpath, the latest event in its twelve-month durational performance series, TIME TIME TIME.

Visit seats of government around the world and you will find towering clocks. Situated at the centre of public life, they mark the passing hours and give order to the day, fulfilling that most basic of human impulses—to know the time. In an unusual US-Canada collaboration, two performance artists will offer Toronto’s city hall a different kind of monumental timepiece—a “human clock.”

At sunrise, Jennifer Nelson will begin moving almost imperceptibly around the reflecting pool at Nathan Phillips Square, completing a single circle as the sun sets almost twelve hours later. Meanwhile, Glen Redpath will follow the same path at a run, covering the distance of several marathons over the course of the same twelve-hour day. Testing human limits of speed and endurance, these two artists will act like the hands of a clock, using their bodies to mark the time.

Nelson writes, “Time … appears in the space between seconds, when the strain of prolonged physical and mental concentration alters perceptions of what is slow or what is long.”

Nelson and Redpath began working together four years ago when both were at the San Francisco Art Institute. They continue to collaborate despite the geographical separation – distance fueling their interest in the possibility of a universal body. Both artists use duration in their performances as a way of allowing time to contribute its influence on their bodies.

Presented with travel support from the Manitoba Arts Council / Conseil des art du Manitoba.

passage: n. passing, transit; crossing, being conveyed, from port to port; corridor; (pl.) what passes between two persons; part of speech or literary work.

Bring two artists who usually work together to the same city a continent away from home. Split them up and set them loose in different parts of the city. After five days, bring them back together with 24 tape recorders for 12 hours to hear what they have to say to each other. The result is Passage, the latest performance in FADO’s 12-month duration performance art series, TIME TIME TIME.

Upon arrival in Toronto, the two members of otiose will go to separate locations, unknown to the other. The following 5 days will be a solitary process of speaking, searching & witnessing; for each other. This will culminate in a 12 hour public dialogue between them.

Ailith Roberts and John Dummett, known collectively as otiose, have been working together for the past three years, presenting actions and installation works that invite us to reconsider our relationship to the world while calling into question the nature of public space. Past performance activities by otiose include what may well be the quintessential British performance – 3 days of repeatedly making single cups of tea. This piece was part of otiose’s Showhouse series, which also featured an 8-hour performance spent arranging 6 ornaments on a mantelpiece, and an in situ exhibition of 10,000 Polaroids of an empty house. Whether fingerprint dusting the floors and walls of a public gallery to reveal traces of past activity, or spending hours browsing in a supermarket to see how long it will take to be noticed and asked to leave, their works point out the uneasy links between inhabited space and human behaviour.

Travel support provided by the British Council.

As artists, our tools are magic, our bodies, taboos, and dreams.

 —Frank Moore

FADO continues its twelve-month-duration performance art series, TIME TIME TIME, with a new work by acclaimed US performance artist Frank Moore. Performed with Michael LaBash and Linda Mac, featuring guest artists Philip Cairns, Harry Cee, Paul Couillard, Anna DiPede, Linda Feesey, Fred Hatt and Heidi VanderMolen.

Dying is Sexy is a forty-eight-hour erotic, musical, ritualistic, intimate, personal climax of the magical life of the American controversial/revolutionary performance artist Frank Moore, a web of many small improvisations.

In a two-day performance that blurs the distinctions between life and art, audience members will have opportunities to engage directly with the artist and his cast in an improvisational setting. From intimate daytime rituals to performance evenings that echo the style of cabarets and “happenings,” Moore will bring to bear all of the skills he has acquired in a career of art- and ritual-making that extends back to the early 70s. Variously called a shaman and a trickster, Moore transforms what at first glance may seem unbelievable, corny, or even tacky into an awake dream of deep transformative power.

Born with a severe form of cerebral palsy that leaves him unable to walk or speak, Frank Moore has spent a lifetime exploring and breaking taboos—from the fear and ignorance that keeps many disabled people unnecessarily institutionalized to the phobias against touch, intimacy and pleasure that pervade our culture. He writes:

“There are all kinds of art. There is art that calms, art that pacifies, art that sells, art that decorates, art that entertains. But what I am committed to is art as a battle, an underground war against fragmentation. Performance, like any avant-garde art, is the way society dreams; it is the way society expands its freedom, explores the forbidden in safety, loosens up. Society needs its dream art, just as an individual needs to dream or will go insane.”

Linda Mac recalls:

When Paul Couillard first invited Frank to perform at his festival TIME TIME TIME he told Frank that the series was inspired by Frank’s extended time performances. Frank said he would like to do a seventy-two-hour performance for this series. This was almost two years before the performance was scheduled to happen. During that two year period Frank performed at a week-long festival the WE FEST in Wilmington North Carolina after which he got pneumonia and was hospitalized and was very sick and had this seventy-two-hour performance coming up in Toronto! So Frank changed it to a forty-eight-hour performance, had Paul rent him a hospital bed and changed the name of the performance to DYING IS SEXY figuring if he died during the performance it would be on theme!

Additional resource: https://www.eroplay.com/Cave/dyingissexy/dyinghome.html

© Frank Moore, Dying is Sexy, 1999. Photo Ed Johnson.

FADO continues its 12-month duration performance art series, TIME TIME TIME, with local artist Shannon Cochrane. Her 3-day performance, Get Trained: Celebrating 13 Years in the Service Industry, takes a practical approach toward the ‘job’ of performance art.

Over the course of three days, Cochrane will recreate her career in the service industry in the name of art. Shannon describes her performance regimen:

“On June 23rd, you will be able to find me pounding the pavement armed with my resume. I will complete an 8-hour work day attempting to deliver my resume to every business that crosses my path. No stone will remain unturned. Bars, restaurants, offices, clothing shops, galleries. I work my way from Bloor West Village to the Annex, Yorkville to the Eaton Center, Kensington Market to Queen West. Finally I work my way through Parkdale and up Roncesvalles to finish.

On June 24th, I will wait with my phone by my side for any interest that comes my way. I will spend the day making follow-up calls and scheduling interviews. I never quit a job until I have another, so potential employers should keep in mind that I am only available after I have completed my shift tomorrow. My last day.

On June 25th, I go to work as I have for 13 years. Only this time, you will be able to see examples of ALL my work, scattered throughout the Queen West community. Following a preset itinerary, I will be employed for 12 hours at a minimum of six different establishments, two hour shifts each. I am the girl serving drinks at the bar, greeting customers at the door, offering advice about home furnishings, dusting the shelves, selling books, the employee that made your cappuccino. I am energetic, responsible and prompt. I am a hardworking and loyal employee.”

To receive a “Get Trained” package, including the complete itinerary for the June 25 performance, a detailed copy of Shannon Cochrane’s resume, her CV and letters of reference, send an e-mail to get_trained@hotmail.com or leave your name and address at (416) 821-4674. If you are based in Toronto, she’ll deliver it to you while on her rounds on June 23rd.

© Shannon Cochrane, Get Trained: Celebrating 13 Years in the Service Industry, 1999. Photo Paul Couillard.

FADO continues its 12-month duration performance art series, TIME TIME TIME, with Scottish artist Roddy Hunter in Statement of Matter: Performance(s) of Indefinite Duration.

Hunter’s performance will begin at noon on June 2, 1999 and continue into sometime the following day. Evidence of the performance will be on view through to midnight on June 3, 1999.

Through his work, Hunter investigates and creates charged, complex environments. Using simple materials, he moves through and acts upon a space, mapping out territories and time periods, tracing and erasing interrelationships among himself, his audience, and whatever objects are present. For this performance, his primary materials will be an empty white room, two video monitors with live feeds, a large sack of flour and a roll of white gaffer tape.

Statement about Statement of Matter by Roddy Hunter:

This performance is one of an ongoing series of inherently interdisciplinary negotiations of anterior spaces, places and actions. This anteriority does not imply, however, that these exist in the past, that they are lost to us. Rather, these states of matter and being remain ‘before’ conceptions and perceptions of causal thinking and doing in linear time frames. As such we are in their midst and by uncovering them we realise participation in a new milieu where previously rigid forms are no longer assured.

In our climate of syntactical formalism, I propose that the actuation of installation, through its precise location of action as the site of both the perception and conception of the aesthetic matrix, provides a necessary undoing of any preexisting equation whereby language solely equals thought.
~Roddy Hunter, Some notes and sources toward a realisation of installation, 1999

Statement of Matter: Performance(s) of Indefinite Duration is one of a series of projects bearing the same title. In a manifesto for these works, Hunter writes: “Art has, for too long, operated as a formal ‘response’ to the world… The realisation of Performance Art… is… a realisation of the difference between uncovering and understanding (or translating)… [T]here is no thing to understand, or put an other way, it becomes impossible not to understand everything. When art is lived, so living is art; and when living is art, so art is lived.

FADO continues its 12-month duration performance art series, TIME TIME TIME, with Toronto’s own Tanya Mars in a new performance entitled HOT.

Tanya Mars is well-known for performance works in which she creates spectacular images that function as living pictures. HOT is a sensitive look at middle age and the persistent desire for intimacy. In an elegant, slowly evolving tableau, Mars considers the search for unconditional love.

As always, humour, absurdity, and a dense overlay of visual metaphors are the essential building blocks of Mars’ complex vision. Forsaking the ‘hot’ sexuality of youth for the ‘hot’ flashes of menopause, Mars offers us the image of a bearded lady, setting thousands of household mousetraps with red cinnamon candy hearts as a video projection of a woman cuddling with a dog suggests where true companionship and uncomplicated bonding might be found. Irony, poignancy and even pragmatism play a role in this meditation on the lessons time has to offer aging baby boomers at the end of the millennium.

Mars notes: “It is ironic that just when a woman reaches intellectual maturity and is in her prime, her level of desirability as a mate plummets. HOT is not about sexuality, but about comfort, companionship and loyalty.”

© Tanya Mars, HOT, TIME TIME TIME series, 2009. Photo Paul Couillard.

FADO continues its 12-month duration performance art series, TIME TIME TIME, with Manifesto, a new work by Canadian artist Rebecca Belmore.

Sitting in a storefront window where she can be viewed and heard from the street, Belmore will spend twelve hours writing and speaking. At the end of twelve hours, she will organize her writing into a neat pile and invite people to an ‘opening’—the exhibition of her writing.

Belmore says of this piece: “I do not enjoy writing about my own work. But I like writing. I speak about my work in front of others. Revisiting sites. Places. Looking again at my ideas. Hearing the sounds made by my voice trying to remember time. ‘Manifesto’ is a place to hear the sound of my own writing. It is a private inner place made public. I like writing. But never real writing like a writer. Just my hand and my head working to mark down and speak beyond my body…. I view this experience as a process where I have the time and space to make my thoughts into an object. The result of this performance work will be the writing, not to be read but to exhibited as an object.”

For the past ten years, Rebecca Belmore has been exploring issues of identity and place through installation and site-specific works as well as performance art pieces. She has performed in numerous festivals, conferences, public galleries, artist-run centres and unofficial spaces for a wide range of audiences. Some venues include the Havana Biennale (1991), two performance biennials in Québec City (Premiere biennale d’art actuel de Québec, 1990; Rencontre internationale d’art performance de Québec, 1994), the American Indian Art Institute (1995), the Banff Centre (1997), 7a*11d Performance Art Festival (1997) and a tour of Germany organized by Boris Nieslony in 1998.

© Rebecca Belmore, Manifesto, 1999. Photo by Paul Couillard.

FADO continues its twelve-month-duration performance art series, TIME TIME TIME, with EMIT TIME ITEM, a new work by internationally acclaimed Irish artist Alastair MacLennan. Famous for his “actuations,” MacLennan’s term for his performance installation works, he is a key practitioner in the field of durational performance.

In EMIT TIME ITEM, MacLennan uses the number thirty as a departure point to explore the past thirty years of political and social turmoil in Northern Ireland, known as “The Troubles.” The piece will run for thirty hours, presenting a subtly but ever-changing image of thirty place settings at an expansive white table. Like MacLennan’s previous work, this piece deals with political, social and cultural malfunction. “The Troubles” are an ongoing concern for the Belfast-based artist, who represented Ireland at the Venice Biennale in 1997 with an intermedia work commemorating the names of all those who died as a result of the political trouble in Northern Ireland since 1969.

In keeping with TIME TIME TIME’s curatorial focus on duration and its effects in performance, MacLennan will place an emphasis on marking time as his key role as the performer in the work. He writes, “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.”

During the 1970s and 1980s, MacLennan made long durational performances of up to 144 hours each, non-stop, usually neither eating nor sleeping throughout. Since 1975, he has been based in Belfast, and was a founding member of Belfast’s Art and Research Exchange. He is currently a research professor at the University of Ulster, travelling extensively throughout Europe and North America presenting his actuations. MacLennan is also a member of the European performance group, Black Market International.

MacLennan says of his practice, “A primary function of art is to bridge our spiritual and physical worlds… Art is the demonstrated wish and will to resolve conflict through action, be it spiritual, religious, political, personal, social or cultural.”

© Alastair MacLennan, EMIT TIME ITEM, 1999. Photo Paul Couillard.

FADO Performance Art Centre is pleased to kick off its twelve-month durational performance art series, TIME TIME TIME, with a new work by acclaimed US artist Linda Montano, Appreciating the Chakras.

In a 3 ½ hour public presentation created in collaboration with local artists, Montano will offer Toronto audiences a “happening” environment using music, chanting, video projections, text and live performance. Audience members are invited to participate through their presence and through single-question Tarot readings with Linda. The more adventurous and dedicated are also invited to reserve a spot in the second part of the performance, during which Linda will enact a seven-hour healing meditation for participants’ chakras, followed by a morning talking circle.

In performances over the past twenty-five years, Linda Montano has steadily sought to erase the barriers between art and life. Her demonstrations of the theory that attitude, intent, and awareness transform life into art are a terminal assault on the art-as-commodity establishment. Montano’s work redefines art as a vigilant state-of-mind.

In 1984, Montano assured her place in art history along with Tehching Hsieh when the two completed an art piece in which they were tied at the waist with an 8-foot rope for a full year, never touching. That same year she began a personal experiment in attention, studying the body’s chakra system, in which she wore only one-colour clothes; listened to one note seven hours a day; stayed in a coloured space three hours a day; spoke in a different accent each year; and read palms and gave Art/Life Counselling in a seven-year installation at the New Museum. Her work in the areas of performance, writing, video and installation has had a profound effect both in their own right and in the influence they have had on artists around the world.

Poster, Appreciating the Chakras by Linda Montano, 1999. TIME TIME TIME Series.

Curated by Paul Couillard

ARTISTS
Ed Johnson
Fiona Griffiths
Frank Green
Frank Moore
Julie Andrée Tremblay & David Johnston (jAT & jHAVE)
May Chan
Stephanie Marshall

Five Holes: Touched is the second in a series of performances dealing with the five senses. The first part (Five Holes: I’ll be seeing you, A Space, 1995) used the device of a peep show to explore the sense of sight and the process of seeing. For Touched, artists are using the nooks and crannies of Symptom Hall to create performance installations that explore aspects of touch and our attitudes surrounding it.

All of tonight’s work is being presented simultaneously; each installation is available for viewing according to a timetable negotiated between you as an audience participant and the artists involved. Some pieces, like the work of Frank Moore and Frank Green, have a specific time cycle that may require waiting and committing to going through a kind of journey. Others, like May Chan’s, have ‘peak’ times that request a captive audience for short periods of time. Still other pieces can be entered at any point and experienced for as long as your attention span lasts. Explore, Enjoy. Remember, the work is about ‘touch’.

Co-presented by the 7a*11d International Festival of Performance Art and sponsored by the Theatre Resource Centre.

PROGRAMME

Sense of Touch
May Chan
My performance is about Chinese culture, about being a woman, and about living. I use sound, action and reading poem-stories. I deal with sense of touch abstractly, more in the sense of keeping in touch. Paul Simon sings, “Touch the sound of silence.” Part of the performance is about food and cooking. I come from Hong Kong, close to Canton in Southern China/ Canton is famous for its cooking. For people In Canton, cooking (eating) is important. Their sense of taste is well developed. Their art s their dishes of foods. Their art galleries are their restaurants. I keep in touch with my background – food.

Anonymous Test Site
Frank Green
With Thea Miklowski, Holly Wilson, Michell Allard, Churla Burla, Lucia Cino, Curtis MacDonald
Since testing positive for antibodies to HIV in 1988, I have practices my art as a ritual of self-healing. I now consider myself to be cured of my dis-ease. My work differs from much of current cultural practice around AIDS in its radical refusal of victim or patient status. I have analyzed and criticized various aspects of western medical ideology through a series of self-photographs, performances, and installations focused on my own body as evidence. I am now examining the phenomenology of the test, in which parts of the body are subjected to arcane processes in laboratories inaccessible to the subject, resulting in ‘diagnoses’ that have profound social implications.

Touched
Fiona Griffiths
by….When I am touched by….a transformation occurs, a momentous infinite stop in time. Then I am nothing.

Threshold
Ed Johnson
Craving sensation, we quickly learn to set in motion whatever is needed to satisfy our expectations.

To Touch Is To Feel
Bernice Kaye
A blindfolded exploration of different textures, including living creatures.

…she said nothing waiting
Stefanie Marshall
counting
1 2 3 4
ooooooohhhhhh
touch

The Cave of the Metasensual Beast
Frank Moore
With Michael LaBash & Linda Mac
Will you let yourself be guided into the cave of passion, imagination, healing human exploring touch, and the unlimited erotic possibilities of blindness? The Beast is waiting for you!

gravity light wind thought scent
Julie Andrée Tremblay and David Johnston (jAT & jHAVE)
Does the floor touch you? Or does gravity touch you? Does wind touch? Does it ask permission? The existence of identity seems to co-exist with illusion/desire for control over what touches us: we choose our food, clothes, lovers. What are we? What do we become when we are touched? Where does touch occur? Inside the body? Where inside? Can you smell it? Paranoia and trust are the parallel poles of touch. Look: no hands, no skin; only synapes and the skin inside the skin. Invisibly touched.

ARTISTS
André Stitt (N. Ireland)
BMZ (Hungary)
Dziugas Katinas (Lithuania)
Ed Johnson (Toronto)
Gustav Uto (Romania)
Hong O Bong (Korea)
Hortensia Ramirez (Mexico)
Irma Optimist (Finland)
Istvan Kantor (Toronto)
Julie Andrée T. (Québec)
Louise Liliefeldt (Toronto)
Paul Couillard (Toronto)
Richard Martel (Québec)
Roddy Hunter (UK)
Tari Ito (Japan)

Presented by FADO in cooperation with Le Lieu in Québec City, as a satellite event of Le Lieu’s Rencontre internationale d’art performance et multimédia. This event was organized and curated by Sandy McFadden with the support of Istvan Kantor and Paul Couillard.

Co-sponsored by A Space and The Music Gallery

In Arborite Housedress, the pro/antagonist defends herself against racial and economic difference by clothing herself in the domestic architecture of the times: the house/dress is her shimmering, clean fortress and her prison. Throughout the piece, she reveals her fears (such as gravity, or the fear that “parts of my dangerously sagging self might end up in bad neighbourhoods”) and her fantasies (border town romances, getting down with dirt, and the elimination of her family, so she will have time to devote herself more fully to being a homemaker). The wearable sculpture/costume has been exhibited at many art galleries and has been purchased by The Winnipeg Art Gallery as part of their permanent collection.

“Have you ever noticed that if you wash the floor in the morning, by nightfall it looks just the same as before you started? That you can do all of the dishes, and in a matter of hours someone has gone and dirtied them again? That children are little grime magnets, picking up all manner of stubborn stains and bringing them home again? Well, I’ve been thinking. If I could get rid of my family, it would effectively cut my workload by 60%.”

Arborite Housedress is one performance from The Dress Series (1989–1996), a group of performances that explore the dress as the female ceremonial costume and icon of femininity. In these pieces, cloth is replaced by unlikely materials, creating juxtaposition, new meanings and upending expectations. All costumes fabricated by Dempsey and Millan.

For more information on this performance and the series, visit Dempsey and Millan’s website.

Curated by Paul Couillard

ARTISTS
Bernice Kaye
Ed Johnson
Fiona Griffiths
Paul Couillard
Sandy McFadden

Shake off the New Year’s blahs by taking in a performance art peep show. FADO combines installation and performance art in Five Holes: I’ll be seeing you, featuring new works created by members of the FADO collective. Isolated in individual cubicles, the performers will each create their own six-hour performance work that can only be seen through tiny peepholes. Twenty-five cents buys viewers a one-minute look, or for $5 you can be an audience for the full six hours.

What’s behind that curtain? There’s only one way to find out.

Co-presented by A Space and supported by The Japan Foundation.

The artist would like to thank Aiko Suzuki, Leena Raudvee, David Warren, Naoko Murakoshi, A Space, The Japan Foundation and Canada Square.

“When life comes to an end, the epidermis, which has repeated the process of the birth and death of cells every day, is released from duty. The memory of the cell re-emerges and another individual is made. I don’t feel these processes, because I live in the world of outward stimuli. But there is always the possibility of meeting in a place hitherto unimagined—a sensation of original nostalgia. It is a smell or a wind which touches the skin. The skin is a translator of the inward impulse.”

Tari Ito

© Tari Ito, FACE (Memory of the Epidermis), 1993. Photo Paul Couillard.