FADO E-BULLETIN
August 2022
Index
- FADO HOSTS COMPASS to re-orient our practice of being together with lo bil
DATES September 6–9, 12–16 & 17, 2022
LOCATION in-person, Toronto - FADO WORKSHOP Performance on Camera with Rah Eleh
DATE September 10–11, 2022
LOCATION: in-person, Toronto - FADO PERFORMANCE M. Gros [Mr. Big] by Geneviève et Matthieu
DATE September 7, 2022
LOCATION in-person, Toronto - FADO PERFORMANCE SERIES On the Table Off the Table
DATES September 23, 24, 29, 30 & October 1, 2022
LOCATION in-person, Toronto - EXHIBITION/PERFORMANCES Speaking Across the Divide by Abedar Kamgari
DATE August 4–28, 2022
LOCATION Toronto, Canada
SOURCE Abedar Kamgari - EVENT Between Sky & Sea VI: Temporal Horizons
DATE August 8–20, 2022
LOCATION Nordøyane, Norway
SOURCE PAB - EVENT ‘open the door a window’ with Tokio Maruyama & Rocio Boliver
DATES August 28 & 30, 2022
LOCATION Cologne & Giessen, Germany
SOURCE asabank - WORKSHOP PAS #79 “In every empty bottle is a story”
DEADLINE DATE August 28, 2022
LOCATION Québec City, Canada
SOURCE PAS - WORKSHOP PAS #80 “The Air Is Not Empty”
DEADLINE DATE September 4, 2022
LOCATION Montréal, Canada
SOURCE PAS - CALL FOR PROPOSALS Performance Research Vol. 28, No. 3: ‘On the Mundane’
DEADLINE DATE September 5, 2022
LOCATION the world
SOURCE Performance Research - FESTIVAL 7a*11d International Festival of Performance Art
DATE September 6–11, 2022
LOCATION Toronto, Canada
SOURCE 7a*11d - CALL FOR PROPOSALS OFFTA 2023
DEADLINE DATE November 1, 2022
LOCATION Montréal, Canada
SOURCE OFFTA
- FADO HOSTS COMPASS with lo bil
DATES September 6–9, 12–16 & 17, 2022
LOCATION in-person, 401 Richmond Street West, Toronto
Facilitated by lo bil and hosted by FADO Performance Art Centre
COMPASS is an on-going participatory research project and an opportunity for performance artists to develop the possibilities of solo practice while in a group setting. Devised by lo bil, COMPASS offers sites for co-presencing while in artistic process and a venue to negotiate the artist-audience exchange. Each COMPASS session offers artists the space and time to work on their own practices concurrently with other artists. In this, we notice pathways between co-working artists; responses to correlative energetic states that might deepen artistic assemblage; and the integration of action-based witnessing. The aim is to support one another through presence and to find ways to be together in a studio that invites moving in unusual ways but doesn’t impose one way of working. You decide on the space and tone of the atmosphere you need and the degree to which others working around you influence your work.
While this is performance-artist-based invitation, there is no imperative to perform for others. Through presence and attending to what you wish to do, you are potentially helping others attend to doing something they wish to do. Artists can use the time and space in any way they wish, however it is important to note that this project makes space for different forms of movement to occur. COMPASS is a cross between a studio, a gym, a playground, a library and something unknown that welcomes all kinds of action and participation from both artists and visitors.
This iteration of COMPASS in Toronto has two parts.
PART 1
We are seeking artists who wish to spend 2–3 hours between September 5–9 in a process of navigating shared space while engaging in their own performance practice. Each session will be very open for experimental approaches, varying levels of public interaction, and is intended as real-time embodied research. Each artist will discover for themselves the benefits and challenges of working in this way. Artists may choose to attend one or more sessions. Artists are also welcome to drop by during this first week or the final showing to see what’s up and/or to participate in unexpected ways.
September 6–9, 2022
11:30am–2:30pm, daily
The Commons @ 401, 401 Richmond Street West
PART 2
From September 12–16, a smaller group of artists from the first week will continue to develop the discoveries they have encountered, working towards a public showing on the afternoon of September 17 from 1:00pm–4:00pm. Artists involved in this second week of COMPASS will be paid a small honorarium for their participation. We welcome proposals from artists who cannot be physically present at COMPASS sessions to connect via video call or to offer provocations for public to engage in. All contributions, whether in-person or remote, will be credited. Everyone from emerging to established artists are welcome to join.
If you would like to join COMPASS for one or more days, send an email with the subject line ‘COMPASS/FADO’ to: lbil@rogers.com and include the following:
- Your name and contact details
- Dates you would like to join us between September 6–9
- Artist statement or description of your art interests
- Short proposal of how you would like to use the space and time (not knowing is always an option)
- FADO WORKSHOP Performance on Camera with Rah Eleh
DATE September 10–11, 2022
LOCATION in-person, 401 Richmond Street West, Toronto
Performance on Camera
Facilitated by Rah Eleh
Hosted by FADO Performance Art Centre
Performance on Camera investigates the intersections between performance art and the camera. It is a two-intensive workshop hosted by the performance and video artist Rah Eleh. During the first day of the workshop, attendees can expect to do a series of physical exercises that will focus on character development, exploration and physicality. The second day of the workshop will be a lecture about filmmaking techniques such as framing and lighting.
Workshop attendees will be given the opportunity to create their own video that will be screened at 401 Richmond in FADO’s presentation and screening space at a later date (TBD). Attendees do not need any knowledge of performance or video production to attend, however a camera (phone or tablet cameras are acceptable) will be required for participation. Some knowledge of post-production editing is beneficial but not necessary. Attendees are welcome to explore a character they have previously developed or explore a new one. Participants will provide their own camera and any necessary materials (costumes, props, pen and paper are encouraged).
Rah Eleh is a video, net and performance artist. Her work focuses on and critiques the visual stereotypes and performative aspects that shape female gender identity and national and ethnic identity. She is interested in how race, gender and nationalsim are performed from multiple layered perspectives: exilic, decolonial, queer and diasporic. Rah is a Phd candidate at Die Angewandte in Vienna, and has lectured and exhibited extensively internationally at institutions including: NYU Tisch, The New School, Alfred University, Venice Biennale (ECC, Palazzo Mora), Images Festival (Toronto), Museum London, Carleton University Art Gallery (Ottawa), Williams College Museum of Art (Williamstown, MA), Miami Art Basel, Nieuwe Vide (Haarlem, Netherlands), PAO Festival (Oslo, Norway), and Onassis Cultural Center (Athens, Greece).
Workshop: Performance on Camera
Date: September 10 & 11, 2022
Time: 11:00am–4:00pm
Location: The Commons @ 401, 401 Richmond Street West, Toronto
This workshop is offered for free of charge.
Space is limited to 15 participants.
Attendance is required on both dates.
This workshop is in-person.
Masks are required in the co-working space and when social distancing is not possible.
- FADO PERFORMANCE M. Gros [Mr. Big] by Geneviève et Matthieu
DATE September 7, 2022
LOCATION in-person, The Theatre Centre, 1115 Queen Street West, Toronto
Presented in partnership with L’Ecart Lieu D’Art Actuel, and in the context of the 7a*11d International Festival of Performance Art
Gros [Mr. Big] by Geneviève et Matthieu
Do you have a special relationship with your sculptures? What if they were the ones performing? How would they do it?
This installation-performance is inspired by the Canadian investigative technique called “Mr. Big,” which allows an undercover police officer to obtain a confession from a suspect of a serious, unsolved crime. Led by shape-shifting characters, living sculptures, dual weapons and a televisual soundscape, M. Gros [Mr. Big] tackles identity issues relating to surveillance, infiltration, idea theft and copying; but moves beyond classic investigative games with a narrative that pays special attention to a contemporary art ecosystem.
7a*11d International Festival of Performance Art
September 6–10, 2022
The Theatre Centre, 1115 Queen Street West, Toronto
Geneviève et Matthieu started working together in the late 1990s, blending visual art, performance, music and everyday life. Geneviève et Matthieu create group performances and productions of social tableaux that are at times festive but always human. Between the baroque, abstract expressionism and arte povera, their works have been presented over forty times in Québec, across Canada, USA, France, Belgium and Spain. Actively involved in their community, Geneviève et Mathieu managed and developed the artist-run centre L’Écart and the Biennale d’art performatif de Rouyn-Noranda for over 20 years.
- FADO PERFORMANCE SERIES On the Table Off the Table
DATES September 23, 24, 29, 30 & October 1, 2022
LOCATION in-person, Toronto
On the Table Off the Table is a series of commissioned performance works engaging with the table as context, stage, and trope. Aspiring to aesthetic neutrality or demanding attention as a chosen object, the table reappears throughout the history of performance, at times taking center stage, at other times hiding in plain sight. For this series, ten artists working at the confluence of performance art and a range of diverse practices—from writing to dance, from sound to magic—will create live work in conversation with performance traditions about, around, and on tables. FADO’s first post(?)-pandemic live series, On the Table Off the Table also intends to provide artists and audiences with an opportunity to re-learn together how to inhabit the space of public presentation, rediscovering the solitary workstation as a place of gathering and play.
Put together by Shannon Cochrane and Francesco Gagliardi
ARTISTS
Joe Culpepper (USA)
Claudia Edwards (Toronto)
Vanessa Dion Fletcher (Toronto)
Marcin Kedzior (Toronto)
Mathieu Lacroix (Montréal)
Mani Mazinani (Toronto)
Sue Murad (USA)
Jehan Roberson (USA)
Cara Spooner (Toronto)
PLUS limited edition placemats designed by Lisa Kiss, showcasing the drawings of Hazel Meyer.
*Jehan Roberson’s performance is co-presented by Hemispheric Encounters, a partnership project supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council.
Dates/Times
Friday September 23 @ 7:00pm
Saturday September 24 @ 7:00pm
Thursday September 29 @ 7:00pm
Friday September 30 @ 7:00pm
Saturday October 1 @ 5:00pm
Location
Bachir/Yerex Presentation Space, The Commons @ 401
4th floor, 401 Richmond Street West, Toronto
FREE, all welcome
DETAILS
Doors open at listed times. Performances will start 30 minutes later.
There will be 1–2 performances each evening.
Evening pairings (and registration links) announced in September.
Mask-wearing for audience is mandatory in the performance space. Exemptions respected.
Performers will not necessarily be masked while performing.
Accessible washrooms are located on the 4th floor.
Non-alcoholic drinks will be served. Please eat your dinner before arriving.
- EXHIBITION/PERFORMANCES Speaking Across the Divide by Abedar Kamgari
DATE August 4–28, 2022
LOCATION Toronto, Canada
SOURCE Abedar Kamgari
Speaking Across the Divide by Abedar Kamgari
Exhibition: August 4–28, 2022
Opening Reception: August 4, 7:00pm–9:00pm
Performance 1: August 6, 2:00pm
Performance 2: August 10, 7:00pm
Rain Date: August 11, 7:00pm
When I was eight years old, my father wrote a play foreseeing my mother and I’s imminent emigration. In this play, entitled ماهیِ با قلاب گریخته / Runaway Hooked Fish (2003), an immigrant father goes to visit his young child but the mother is not home, and so father and daughter end up having an exchange from either side of a locked door. My baba’s dramatized adaptation of the original short story by Beroj Akeri portrays a door that remains closed to the end.
The father recounts passages from Ahmad Shamlu’s poem “Pariya” (1953) to his young daughter, who, despite poor fluency in her mother tongue seems to know the poem by heart. “Pariya” tells the story of three pari—beautiful, otherworldly beings with long, blacker-than-black hair. From the outset, the pariya are positioned within a liminal space: before them lies a downtrodden city where the people have just won a great victory against their oppressors, while behind them stands the cold and ominous fortress of legends. Yet the mysterious pariya seem landlocked; perched unsteadily between city and fortress, reality and fantasy, they occupy a treacherous borderland between past and future.
The artworks exhibited in Speaking Across the Divide draw inspiration from the play and poem as well as their parallels in baba and I’s experiences as a father and child living with geographical, cultural, linguistic, generational, and gendered distances. I reimagine objects from the set of the play—a lone door in the foreground and a long curtain in the background—as manifestations of the context and conditions of displacement and diaspora. Through performative and material explorations, I bring these symbolic elements into conversations with a range of poetic, archeological, and linguistic threads reflecting distances both personal and global.
Visiting & Accessibility
Wheelchair accessible. No washrooms onsite. Free admission. Performances and reception will take place outdoors with social distancing. Masks required inside the gallery, optional outdoors.
Location
the shell projects, 13 Mansfield Ave (back alley), Toronto
Gallery hours
Wednesdays to Fridays, 1:00pm–6pm
Saturdays, 1:00pm–4pm
August 21–28 and Sundays, by appointment
Abedar Kamgari is an emerging artist, curator, and arts worker based in Hamilton and Toronto. In her practice, Abedar considers contexts and conditions of displacement and diaspora using site-responsive, performative, and relational approaches. Her current projects explore diasporic archives, familial inheritances, and the idea of distance, inspired by a play written by her father and garments passed down from her grandmothers. Abedar received a BFA in Studio Art from McMaster University (2016) and has performed, screened, and exhibited in a range of institutional contexts across Southern Ontario since. She is currently pursuing an MFA at OCAD University.
- EVENT Between Sky & Sea VI: Temporal Horizons
DATE August 8–20, 2022
LOCATION Nordøyane, Norway
SOURCE PAB
Performance Art Bergen is happy to announce the 6th Between Sky & Sea VI, with the theme, Temporal Horizons. From August 8–20, 2022, we will host a production-camp for a selection of eight international artists in Nordøyane, an island community north of Ålesund. Longva Residency is our local organizer, and curators are Terese Longva and Rita Marhaug. The main idea for the first and also later festivals, was to gather a group of artists to work in a specific outdoor environment for a week to be showed in public during one festival day. After the first festival, the next two ones took place at Herdla, also an island north of Bergen, this time in collaboration with Herdla Museum and the municipal of Askøy.
TEMPORAL HORIZONS: On the Nordøyane islands there are traces of the Caledonian mountain range (Caledonian orogeny) that arose during the collision between Scandinavia and North America some 450 million years ago. At that time, the two continents were situated slightly south of the equator. The more than 10000 m high mountains were eroded in less than 100 million years. On Nordøyane, today we can find remnants of the root zone of this mighty mountain range in the form of spectacular rocks such as eclogite, garnet-peridotite and garnet-kyanite gneiss.
This event in geological time has laid the geophysical foundation of the continental shelf off the northwest coast of Norway. Later (about 8,200 years ago) a giant underwater land slide was unleashed at Storegga 80 km from the coast. The sediments covered an area on the seabed as large as Denmark. The slide triggered one of the world’s largest known tsunamis—the Storegga tsunami. Today, Storegga is one of the world’s richest fishing banks and a unique breeding ground for many fish species and their nutritional base. It is a combination of the Gulf Stream’s warm water masses and the special edge formation on the seabed which today is also the basis of this important organic reservoir. Here we see an example of a connection point where a geological temporality and a human temporality are expressed and determine how this coast has been a good place for people. Now geologists are talking about the Anthropocene—a new geological period where human activity may alter the geological longue durée.
LECTURERS
Anders Johansen, anthropologist (University of Bergen)
Oddvar Longva, geologist (Geological survey of Norway)
Jennie Klein, Professor of Art History, Ohio University School of Art & Design
Harald Dyrkorn, social scientist
ARTISTS
Frauke Materlik (DE)
Sabine Popp (NO/DE)
Tina Mariane Krogh Madsen (DK)
Gunnhildur Hauksdóttir (IS)
Chuyia Chia (SE)
Esa Kirkkopelto (FI)
Ine Harrang (NO)
Monroe Isenberg (US)
- EVENT ‘open the door a window’ with Tokio Maruyama & Rocio Boliver
DATES August 28 & 30, 2022
LOCATION Cologne & Giessen, Germany
SOURCE asabank
Performance art series: ‘open the door a window’
With Tokio Maruyama (Japan) + Rocio Boliver (Mexico)
August 28 @ 5:30pm: Kulturbunker Köln-Mülheim, Cologne,
August 30 @ 7:00pm: Kunsthalle Gießen, Giessen
In this project, we bring together two outstanding performance artists whose practice is in a special tension with each other. On the one hand, the potential of the performance archive that wants to be created and is waiting to appear. On the other hand, boundless curiosity about the now, what has become. For each encounter, two performers who have not worked together before or have not met before will come to Cologne for several days. What happens in the encounter? What energies and patterns are at play in performative practice when different performance representations create references to each other, even though the personal intentions of the artists involved and the given situations are diametrical or even contradictory? What and how are these antagonisms that then come together in the performances to form a surprising “event”? This experience, which has been recurring for years, remains without a stringent explanatory model and yet is the decisive spark of cross-border performance art. Physical encounters, from which nets are woven, are the link.
Upcoming in the series:
Zhou Bin (China) + Kurt Johannessen (Norway): September 25 & 27
Wang ChuYu (China) + Sinéad O’Donnell (Ireland): October 23 & 24
The International Performance Art Archive BLACK KIT | DIE SCHWARZE LADE has been growing for 40 years. It contains information on about 4000 artists and preserves thousands of photos, books, relics and videos. Since 1981, it has also accompanied the comparatively young performance art with festivals, conferences, workshops and lectures. In this way, the ever-hungry archive has developed a supporting network and is inviting ten top international performance artists to Cologne in 2022.
- WORKSHOP PAS #79 “In every empty bottle is a story”
DEADLINE DATE August 28, 2022
LOCATION Québec City, Canada
SOURCE PAS
A 7-day learning program on Performance Art practice in collaboration with Inter Le Lieu, in Québec City from September 11–17, 2022
Led by the PAS Team: BBB Johannes Deimling, Laurence Beaudoin Morin and Monika Deimling
A story that I tell myself is a very lonely story. This story would not have the chance to travel through other ears and minds and make its way around the world. It will not inspire, wonder, fascinate or bore and will at some point drown in the hole of forgetting. A story is made to be shared at least with one other person to unfold its magic. “A friend of mine told me…”, “I have heard a story that…” are the sentences where the told story extends its existence and continues to live on. It is important that stories live on, mainly when they speak about us as humans trying to maneuver in the precarity of life because they might be useful to others. And sometimes talking can destroy atmosphere. Performance art practice has developed several ways to tell a story by using a completely different vocabulary. And that offers many options because some stories are difficult tell. A first starting point to visual talking can be the gesture or the movement. Both transform an inner feeling, emotion into something that speaks very clearly. For instance, hands in motion can combine many sentences in one slight movement. A course of action is able to extend or even condense a moment in that we can combine with materials and objects. And that could already be an intensified dialogue. By placing the poetics into an artistic context or environment a rich expression emerges and words are then just obsolete. Performance art uses an alphabet of actions, movements, gestures and many other features that works like a morse code. But we don’t need to decode the visuals because we are able to listen with our eyes and see with our ears.
In the 79th edition of PAS (Performance Art Studies) we want to have a closer look into performance making that addresses the huge variety of choices that we have to express our thoughts and artistic concepts that we want to share. How to start an artistic process from a gut feeling, from a vague idea and how to build visual bridges to the other. We want to open the research in all possible directions to find strategies to convey our stories, our content or our message. In this sense, we need to collect many bottles and look for the stories inside.
MORE INFORMATION & registration
- WORKSHOP PAS #80 “The Air Is Not Empty”
DEADLINE DATE September 4, 2022
LOCATION Montréal, Canada
SOURCE PAS
A 5-day learning program on Performance Art practice in Montreal, Canada from September 21–25, 2022
Led by the PAS Team: BBB Johannes Deimling, Laurence Beaudoin Morin and Monika Deimling
Especially in the arts, there is this certain attraction for abandoned places and vacant lots. These free but often neglected spaces that had their history and glory days are still filled with options. Artists and art initiatives are often the first ones drawing attention to these places to reactivate them, to give them a new purpose and vision. Art pumps creative air into these forgotten places and lets them breathe – again. This air is not empty. Through artistic gatherings, these places become alive and a projection screen for ideas, exchange and communities. The revitalizing act is not only an artistic act but also a social, environmental, and political statement about what our times have sacrificed to the future and development. The next step of these thoughts would be to ask if we as humans have such vacant lots or abandoned places within our existence? And if so, where are they located and also why we have abandoned them? The vacant lots in our lives are maybe located in our memory or in our life’s history, in our teenage wasteland time, in our unfulfilled desires, broken hopes and distorted visions. How to bring air again into these vacuums to refresh, reactive, to reuse and these places again? Since these human vacant lots are hidden in our bodies, performance art might be the right tool to activate them again, similar to a CPR practice to see if they still respond. The artistic response to an abandoned space or a vacant lot (made of stone or flesh) is a spatial and time-based intervention in which another spirit is brought to ask questions and engage in dialogue.
In PAS (Performance Art Studies) #80 | “The air is not empty” we will combine our personal vacant lots with existing vacant lots in Montréal to use the made research to create new performance art works bringing fresh air to our attention, awareness and perception.
MORE INFORMATION & registration
- CALL FOR PROPOSALS Performance Research Vol. 28, No. 3: ‘On the Mundane’
DEADLINE DATE September 5, 2022
LOCATION the world
SOURCE Performance Research
Performance Research Vol. 28, No. 3: ‘On the Mundane’ (Apr/May 2023)
Proposal Deadline: 5 September 2022
Issue Editors
Sozita Goudouna, Goldsmiths, University of London
Eleni Kolliopoulou, University of Peloponnese
Eero Laine, State University of New York at Buffalo
Kristen Lewis, Osgoode Hall Law School and Gull Cry Dance
Rumen Rachev, Auckland University of Technology
This issue of Performance Research examines the mundane as an analytic of day-to-day performance and as an inspiration for art and performances. Here we consider the long histories of avant-garde and other artists who have embraced and highlighted even as they disrupted and destroyed the mundane and the attendant monotony and conventions of daily life. Despite the extraordinary events of the past few years, we continue to embrace and even rely on the mundane as an often-invisible structure to our lives and performative practices. Examining the mundane presents a paradox wherein the unexceptional is made notable or no longer mundane. This special issue takes seriously the potential expansiveness of performance to investigate that which is so commonplace as to be often overlooked. We thus invite the field to push the logics of performance through the lens of mundanity.
The topic of research into the mundane has a long and ongoing trajectory that expands into multiple academic fields. This issue, ‘On the Mundane’, seeks to expand the scope of existing related academic enquiry by considering how performance addresses the quotidian, especially as notions of the mundane often reverse the relationship between performance and labour, as well as models of value-production in the arts. […] To read the entire call, visit the Performance Research website.
The Performance Research issue ‘On the Mundane’ welcomes contributions and will present the broadest possible perspectives with regards to the materials presented as well as the methods for approaching the mundane. We invite proposals for articles and shorter essays and provocations, including artist pages and other contributions that use distinctive layouts and typographies. Topics might include but are not limited to:
Mundanity and the everyday
Performing the mundane/The mundane in performance
Theatre of the mundane
Mundane value and labour
Idle theatre, idleness, and the mundane
The mundane and the sublime or the profound
The collaborative and the mundane/Shared mundanities
The mundane as failure or success
The materiality of the mundane/Mundane materials
Historical and contemporary connections between anthropology, sociology, performance studies
The mundane in science
The ‘non-mundane’ or reactions to the mundane
Format
Please send 300-400 word abstracts (with a 100-word author bio) for critical essays, artist pages, interviews, practice-research essays or provocations that attend to (but are not limited to) any aspect of the above. For the curated, collaborative mundane section, please indicate your interest and experience working collaboratively and a short list of mundane activities you are interested in thinking and writing about.
Issue Contacts
All proposals, submissions and general enquiries should be sent direct to Performance Research at info@performance-research.org
Issue-related enquiries should be directed to the issue editors via Sozita Goudouna, University of London, at sozita@gmail.com
Schedule
Proposals: September 2022
First drafts: December 2022
Final drafts: March 2023
Publication: May 2023
- FESTIVAL 7a*11d International Festival of Performance Art
DATE September 6–11, 2022
LOCATION Toronto, Canada
SOURCE 7a*11d
Welcome to the 7A*11D International Festival of Performance Art, active in Toronto since 1997. Toronto Performance Art Collective (TPAC) is pleased to announce the 13th edition of our festival, taking place September 6–10, 2022 at the Theatre Centre and various outdoor locations. This long-awaited event, originally scheduled for the fall of 2020, follows a long tradition of bringing together an eclectic mix of innovative live performance works featuring local, national, and international artists.
ARTISTS
Éminence Grise: Alain-Martin Richard (Québec)
Archer Pechawis (Mistawasis First Nation/Toronto)
Geneviève et Matthieu (Québec)
Jackson 2bears & Janet Rogers (Six Nations)
Jana Omar Elkhatib (Palestine/Canada)
Julie Lassonde (Toronto)
Rita Camacho Lomeli (Toronto)
Jusuf Hadžifejzović (Bosnia and Herzegovina)
Keira Boult (Toronto)
keyon gaskin (USA)
Lucky Pierre (USA)
Michelle Lacombe (Québec)
Taiwo Aiyedogbon (Nigeria)
Performance art has always been a somewhat contingent practice, inhabiting a space somewhere in between the artist’s intentions and the accidents of circumstance. If theatre champions the techniques of the ‘as-if’ by rehearsing and simulating imagined worlds, then perhaps we could say that performance art operates more in the terrain of the ‘what-if,’ creating open-ended situations where audience witnesses/participants and artists embark on a shared journey of discovery to ferret out what can and will happen under particular circumstances. Our festival has never been a ‘themed’ event, but after two and half years of a pandemic that seems to have erased whatever certainty we might have had around what constitutes ‘normal’ life, this year’s performances seem particularly infused with—or at least informed by—concerns around contingency, precarity, and speculation. Expect works that prompt, in large and small ways, informed by personal and systemic histories, questions like: What is true? What is just? What is possible? What is impossible?
Covid Protocols
The ways in which we feel it is ‘safe enough’ to gather have been in constant flux over these past two and half years. There’s still no one consensus on the best practices to balance our human need to come together and the very real risks of infection. For this festival, we are following the blanket rules currently in place at our venue, the Theatre Centre. These could and probably will change based on circumstances at the time of the festival. Full details of the theatre’s policy can be found on their website here: https://theatrecentre.org/your-visit/covid-policy/
- CALL FOR PROPOSALS OFFTA 2023
DEADLINE DATE November 1, 2022
LOCATION Montréal, Canada
SOURCE OFFTA
An annual artistic event created on the edge of the Festival TransAmériques (FTA), the OFFTA is a festival dedicated to emerging creation in performing arts. This festival allows artists to share performances that displace festival-goers and open up new artistic spaces. The works which will be supported will question, transform and resist preconceptions. OFFTA offers a platform to emerging artists who, neither seeking consensus nor speaking with one voice, deploy their pluralities and contribute to the renewal of established models. The festival team is currently seeking proposals for the programming of its 17th edition, which will be held in late May/early June 2023. Following a reflection on our resources and the needs of the milieu, we are taking the decision to further distinguish 2 types of projects presented.
On the one hand, we will welcome finished projects, that are ready to tour. These projects will be presented as completed. Their creation periods will have been fully realized. They will be presented in the appropriate technical conditions to appreciate their full potential. Fees offered per finished project range from $1,400 to $3,000 for the full series of performances. The size of the teams involved in the performances and the agreed number of performances will inform the final fee offered per project.
In a second part, the festival will present works in progress. These projects, still in development, will have the chance to be shared with festivalgoers, peer artists and professionals of the milieu in a benevolent context. These first stages of work, open studios or tests could be presented during grouped programs. They will have light technical means. It is the opportunity to test, experiment, share one’s approach and to find feedback and support from the communities involved. Fees offered per work in progress projects range from $300 to $800 for the full series of performances. The size of the teams involved in the performances and the agreed number of performances will inform the final fee offered per project.
This formula, which was in place but more discreet in the last editions, will enable, we hope, a renewed audacity, while still respecting the distinct development phases of live arts projects. It will allow OFFTA to reaffirm its pioneering and irreverent nature while connecting emerging practices to eager festival-goers. This orientation was taken to respect the resources available to the organization and recognize the artistic teams’ work in a more equitable way. The call is therefore open to all forms: “atypical projects that don’t fit anywhere,” completed shows, reruns, first stages or creations, laboratories, indoor or outdoor site-specific performances, remote, online and offline performances, conferences etc. Our call is open to all Canadian projects. However, travel and accommodation costs to Mooniyang/Montreal/Tio’tia:ke cannot be covered by the OFFTA.
A committee of peers appointed by the Artistic Director, Claudel Doucet, will select the projects to be supported. The committee will give a particular consideration to projects that demonstrate:
–Transformative experiences that stand out in advancing the practices and careers of the artists and collaborators in question.
–Audacity and innovation.
–Disciplinary merging, or proposals with distinctive compositions.
–Collaborative methodologies and respectful dialogue.
–Practices that are informed by and engaged with their communities or contemporary realities.
–Projects that are compatible with the festival’s mission and resources.
–Diversity of art forms, realities and cultures represented.
The OFFTA affirms its support for historically underrepresented voices and marginalized identities. To foster an inclusive selection process, LA SERRE is available to accompany artists who may face accessibility barriers in submitting their application.