FADO E-BULLETIN
March 2024

1. FADO SCREENING REAL TO REEL
   DATE MARCH 14, 2024
   LOCATION TORONTO, CANADA
   SOURCE FADO

REAL to REEL: The Screening

ARTISTS
Heather Rule (Canada)
Margaret Dragu (Canada)
Simla Civelek (Canada)
Gustaf Broms (Sweden)

Thursday, March 14 at 7:00pm
The Commons @ 401 | 401 Richmond St. West, 4th floor
All welcome, free, hot popcorn!

IN-PERSON!
After the screening, Margaret Dragu and Jordan King engage in conversation about their collaboration; and participating will be present for an informal Q & A.

As an immaterial practice, performance art’s relationship to documentation and the archive has always been a fraught one. REAL to REEL invited artists to activate and challenge the archive as a site for, and, of performance. The artists in this series have created new digital works utilizing their own documentation from FADO’s archive collection as either the inspiration or the actual source material. The goal here was not necessarily to cut a new trailer (though reconstituting a self-history in this way is also the artist’s prerogative) rather, the hope was to upend the singular and linear lens that the archive itself implies. Here, we are not only looking back, we are moving forward at the same time, in only the way that performance artists working in the digital realm can.

The form of these new works varies widely: an experimental documentary about a parade from 23 years ago that takes place (where else?) in a parade; a performance film made in the woods in winter using the images from a performance made in the city in spring; a ceramic character reanimates an object experiment (and makes pasta to boot); and fragmented body is further fragmented through time and distance.

DESCRIPTIONS OF THE WORKS

REAL to REEL was made possible with thanks to the Canada Council for the Arts Digital Strategies project grant.

All of the works will be available to screen on the FADO website beginning March 15.

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2. FADO CALL FOR CURATORIAL PROPOSALS EMERGING ARTISTS SERIES
   DEADLINE EXTENDED MARCH 31, 2024
   LOCATION TORONTO, CANADA
   SOURCE FADO

For over 10 years, FADO’s Emerging Artists series was a highly anticipated and exciting staple of the performance art calendar. Initiated in 2003 by Canada’s own performance art matriarch Tanya Mars, FADO’s Emerging Artists series was created to provide a professional platform for emerging artists to develop and present a new performance, working within a specific curatorial framework. The intention of the series was to nurture new work and ideas, provide direction and mentorship for artists, and to showcase the work of the city’s newest perspectives in performance art.

As the series developed, it became clear that this was an opportunity to nurture not only emerging performance artists, but also emerging curators. In this way, FADO encouraged new curatorial voices in performance art, and in exchange were exposed to new communities of artists (new communities were exposed to FADO too). Soon after, the series started to include artists not just from Toronto, but regionally as well, giving local audiences a taste of the emerging performance scene across Canada.

Some of your favourite performance artists and curators cut their teeth making performances and developing curatorial projects in this context, and we want to do it all again!

Please read the full call for proposals on the website for detailed requirements, suggestions, and helpful links.

Deadline date: March 1, 2024

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3. FADO HOSTS LIBRARY OPEN HOURS & VITRINE EXHIBITION
   CONTINUING WEDNESDAYS FROM 12–4pm
   LOCATION TORONTO, CANADA
   SOURCE FADO

The (FADO) LIBRARY (and research centre) is OPEN… because WHAT? Performance Art is fundamental!

Wednesdays, from 12:00pm–4:00pm
Library Research Centre, The Commons @ 401 | 401 Richmond St. West, 4th floor

Each Wednesday (until we decide to stop) the Commons @ 401 Library & Research Centre will be open for drop-in reading and research time, hosted by FADO Performance Art Centre. Our head librarian Claudia Edwards will be on hand. You are welcomed to stop by and peruse the books and archive items in FADO’s collection, do a little light reading or some leisure researching. Email us at info@performanceart.ca if you have questions or research queries or just come on by.

PLUS!!
Ephemeral Library Society: Group Archival Exhibit
On View at 401 Commons Library & Research Centre Vitrine
Visiting Hours: 10:00am–5:00pm, Tuesday–Friday

In the aftermath of our community gatherings, you are invited to come and view our group exhibit consisting of personal archival materials, formed by participants during the final session of the six-week series that explored themes relevant to performance art and archives. We hope you will enjoy spending time with the materials presented here, before they’re gone!

Featuring Works & Collections by:
Christopher Peterson
Claudia Edwards
Elliot Creager
Esther Splett
Heather Rule
Irene Xie
Isaak Fong
Jordan King
Johanna Householder
Leena Raudvee
Marisa Kelly
Mikiki
Rita Camacho Lomeli

4. EVENT SOUND OFF FESTIVAL
   DATE MARCH 5–10, 2024
   LOCATION EDMONTON, CANADA
   SOURCE SOUND OFF

SOUND OFF is Canada’s national festival dedicated to the Deaf performing arts.

SOUND OFF is dedicated to making theatre accessible for both Deaf and hearing audiences and celebrating the stories and talents of Deaf performers from across Canada, as well as the beauty of American Sign Language.

SOUND OFF is pleased to present both live and in-person performances and events this year and will continue to offer a diverse range of online performances and events for those outside Edmonton.

Our 8th annual festival brings together 6 mainstage performances from Alberta, Ontario, and Quebec. The 6-day event will be offering a wide range of activities and events for audiences participate in. These include panel discussions with Deaf artists, Deaf-led workshops and staged readings by Deaf playwrights, and much more.

Accessible! All performances and SOUND OFF events are accessible for both Deaf and hearing audiences. Most shows are in American Sign Language (ASL) and all shows will have interpretation for both languages where necessary.

Artistic Director: Chris Dodd

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5. EVENT MARGARET DRAGU/DOCKTOR DRAGU AT CONCORDIA UNIVERSITY
   DATE MARCH 8, 2024
   LOCATION MONTREAL, CANADA
   SOURCE DOKTOR DRAGU

Doktor Dragu Explains It All to You

Friday, March 8, 2024
6:00pm–7:30pm
Concordia University, Visual Arts Building (room 114), 1395 René Lévesque West, Montreal

In this presentation, Margaret Dragu will reflect on her more than fifty years of artmaking, performance, and feminism.

This event will be held in-person only. Seating is first-come, first-served and everyone is welcome. For those who cannot attend, video documentation will be uploaded to our Youtube channel after the event.

Margaret Dragu has created performances, videos, publications, and participatory artworks since the 1970s. Dragu’s early practice was formed in contemporary dance and burlesque scenes in New York, Montreal, and Toronto. Her prolific body of art in performance, film and video, and collaborative and community-based art spans more than five decades. Dragu has also worked in commercial film, television, and radio as an actor, producer, writer, and director; choreographed for theatre, film and television; and has curated and written about performance art, dance, culture, and politics. Margaret was the recipient of a Governor General’s Award for Visual and Media Arts in 2012. In the same year, she was named Éminence Grise by the performance art festival 7a*11d, and in 2000 was selected for FADO Performance Art Centre’s publication series Canadian Performance Art Legends.

Conversations in Contemporary Art is a free event series sponsored by Concordia University’s Studio Arts MFA Program. The series provides a unique opportunity to hear artists, designers, critics, writers, educators, and curators share their practice(s) and perspectives. All events are held in English. In-person seating is first-come-first-served and everyone is welcome.

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6. EVENT PERFORMANCE & INTER #143 LAUNCH
   DATE MARCH 9, 2024
   LOCATION MONTREAL, CANADA
   SOURCE VIVA! ART ACTION

An evening of long duration actions + launch: Inter #143 / VIVA! Portfolio

March 9, 2024
7:00pm
Ateliers Belleville, 545 Legendre West, Montreal

Join us to celebrate the launch of the most recent issue of Inter, art actual! The issue, “Arts altercapacités,” presents situations of creation in which people with different abilities propose fresh perspectives on the relationship between art and bodies, spaces, temporalities, mobility and the sensorial. The issue also contains a special portfolio that looks back on the 8th edition of VIVA! Art Action. Combining images with the texts written by our two authors-in-residence, Emma-Kate Guimond and M. Gnanashahami, the parasite publication plunges readers back into the recent edition of the festival via the author’s reflections on both the performances and the overall atmosphere of VIVA!. The magazine will be available to read or to purchase throughout the evening.

The event will also include a program of long-duration actions by Serge Olivier Fokoua, Rachel Echenberg, and Christian Bujold. The solo performances will unfold simultaneously in a shared space, and are expected to have a duration of approximately two hours. The public will be encouraged to circulate throughout the space during the actions, and will be able to retreat to a lounge area, where refreshments will be available.

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7. CALL FOR CONTRIBUTIONS PRECARIHOUSINGTHEMAP BY CLAUDE WITTMANN
   DEADLINE DATE MARCH 9, 2024
   LOCATION TORONTO, CANADA
   SOURCE CLAUDE WITTMANN

This call for contributions is for Toronto-based artists who identify as/are invisibly disabled, episodically disabled, neurodiverse, neuroatypical, living with a DSM/ICD diagnosis, with mental illness or identifying equivalently.

This call is for short texts, images or sound recordings that portray housing insecurity/crises.

Your sharing will become part of precarihousingthemap, a project that invisibly disabled artist claude wittmann has been leading since 2021, together with the super dedicated artists I’mme, Serena McCarroll, Julie Scrivener, Alec Butler, and access coach Tristan Whiston. These artists work together as the dispossessed disabled artists demanding housing (ddadh). precarihousingthemap has had the specific goal to convince Workman Arts to have on staff a person addressing their members’ housing in the long term, but despite given hopes, nothing has moved in this direction. This call is part of the last phase of the project.

precarihousingthemap has been supported by the Toronto Arts Council (TAC) and the Ontario Arts Council (OAC). We are aware that sharing housing insecurity can be transformative, but it is also a revisiting of trauma. In all cases, it is work. if you would like to be compensated for your contribution, please feel encouraged to send us an email.

MORE INFORMATION & TO CONTRIBUTE

8. CALLS FOR SUBMISSIONS PERFORMANCE RESEARCH V.29, ISSUE 8
   DEADLINE DATE APRIL 2, 2024
   LOCATION THE WORLD
   SOURCE PERFORMANCE RESEARCH

Performance Research
Volume 29, Issue 8 – On Exits and Endings
Edited by Richard Gough and Helena Grehan

In this issue of Performance Research, we investigate exits and endings. Our focus on exits considers death, performance, mourning and ritual. But we also embrace the matter of endings. While death is, we might argue, the ultimate ending, there are other endings that are less definitive. These endings can be powerful and comforting but can also be painful or even excruciating. In performance examples may include attending live work without an end but that instead drifts into slow decay, where the audience members or participants must force an ending. Or when we, as spectators, end our experience of a performance by walking out of the theatre, by falling asleep or intervening physically or vocally to bring things to a close. How do directors and actors cope with these kinds of forced endings, the rupture of the walk out (and the disturbance it causes)? How do they resume their craft in response? How do they adjust, adapt and survive? What of the never-ending ‘farewell tour’ or the final performance by an actor, the decision to end one’s career? How do we think about the tribute band, or immersive, machine-generated copy or group that keeps the work alive in some fashion or other? Are these examples a failure to end and exit with grace, or are they important continuations or reincarnations of a sort?

Exits and Endings often work together. One dies and therefore exits the world of the living, but the rituals associated with this event demand a performance of the end. A ceremony is held. People gather, they lament and there is, perhaps, healing. This leads to questions about what exits and endings might entail. What cultural protocols are put in place and how do these protocols shape and inform behaviours? What if the protocols are blocked or inhibited for some reason? If the exit is incomplete? What happens to the body, the soul, the community in this case?

[…]

We welcome single-authored essays, co-authored contributions, artistic interventions, short provocations, critical reports and other materials engaging with the topic.

Submissions may include but are not limited to:
The politics of death on stage
State funerals and the performance of mourning
How do we perform or represent a useful or a good death?
How to exit gracefully
Acts of resistance in the face of exits and endings. Refusing to go…
What is the relevance of ‘ars moreindi’ (the art of dying well) in the contemporary context
Professional mourning and its impact on grieving
Paying respects – queuing, singing, remembering the dead
Dying for one’s art; the art of stage death and death on stage
Accounting for the end of a species
Bringing on the end; responding to work that refuses
Exiting the theatre; when to go and when to stay.
Rendering the end of the planet through performance

Visit the Performance Research website to read call for submissions text in its entirety.

Schedule:
Proposals: Outcomes April 2024
First drafts: July 2024
Final drafts: October 2024
Publication: Spring 2025

MORE INFORMATION & SUBMISSION GUIDELINES

9. WORKSHOP LET DOWN YOUR HAIR WITH AARON WILLIAMSON
   DATE APRIL 5, 2024
   LOCATION COPENHAGEN, DENMARK
   SOURCE TOASTER & FRIISLAND LIVE

In connection with the Managing Discomfort Festival, EVU, in collaboration with Toaster, the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, and the Department of Theatre and Performance Studies at the University of Copenhagen, has organized six short workshops with international artists from the festival. Each workshop will delve into the individual working methods and expressions of the artists.

Workshop with Aaron Williamson
Friday, April 5, 2024
10:00 am–1:00 pm
Cost: 60DKK (includes performance admission)

Experience Aaron Williamson’s piece “Let Down Your Hair” at the Managing Discomfort performance festival and gain insight into his artistic choices, expressions, and working methods in this 3-hour workshop.

As a deaf, blind, or mobility impaired person, it is uncomfortable when train changes are only announced over the loudspeaker, when one keeps getting lost, or when one cannot lift the shopping basket? Others may be aching to help, but are unsure how. In his works, Aaron Williamson exposes the audience’s bewilderment and their well-meaning pity by turning the tables on them.

The workshop is based on seven existential questions that not only explore Aaron Williamson’s individual working methods and expressions but also invite you to reflect on your own creative processes:
What methods do you use in your work?
How do you come up with ideas for projects?
What kind of experiments do you do in your process?
How do you generate material?
What inspires your work?
How do you decide which material to use from your experiments?
What criteria do you use to select your material?

Participants in the workshop will be a mix of professional performing artists from all disciplines interested in performance, as well as students from the Academy of Fine Arts and the Department of Theatre and Performance Studies at the University of Copenhagen.

Aaron Williamson (b. 1960) was born in England and his work is based on his experience of becoming deaf and on a political, yet humorous sensitivity to disability. In a lecture at the University of California, San Diego in 1998, Williamson coined the term ‘Deaf Gain’ as a counterpoint to ‘hearing loss’. Over the past twenty-five years, Aaron Williamson has created more than 300 exhibitions, performances, videos, installations and publications for galleries, museums and festivals for, among others, the Venice Biennale; Nippon Performance Art Festival – Japan; Columbia Uni., Chicago, USA; ANTI Art Festival – Finland, Tate Modern, Tate Britain, Serpentine Gallery, Whitechapel Gallery, Victoria and Albert Museum and many others. Williamson holds a D.Phil in Literature from the University of Sussex (1997) and has lectured on BA and MA Fine Art courses in the UK (Dartington College of Arts, Birmingham Institute of Art and Design, Goldsmiths College); and has also been a guest lecturer for several institutions internationally.

MORE INFORMATION & REGISTRATION

10. EVENT FRIISLAND LIVE! WITH KRISTOFFER AKSELBO & AARON WILLIAMSON
    DATE APRIL 6, 2024
    LOCATION COPENHAGEN, DENMARK
    SOURCE LIVE ART DENMARK

Friisland Live!
A vernissage and two live performances!

ARTISTS
Kristoffer Akselbo (DK)
Aaron Williamson (UK)

April 6, 2024
2:00pm–6:00pm

Toaster and Live Art Denmark are the organizers behind the international performance festival, Managing Discomfort. Managing Discomfort comprises a series of performances united by the common theme of addressing various discomforts with care and humor. In the spring of 2024, a total of 16 artists will present their works at Toaster/Husets Teater. Their goal is to push the audience out of their comfort zones and activate a sense of discomfort in the spectator seats. More importantly, they investigate how we collectively handle this discomfort together, in the immediate presence of the theater.

Kristoffer Akselbo (DK) from the Royal Art Academy, Copenhagen 2006. His performances typically present enigmatic characters who expose and explore the given environment and context.

Aaron Williamson (UK) is a performance artist who often explores outsider figures in his performances as a means to subverting a context, exposing pretensions or challenging expectations.

We also mark the vernissage of a new work by Aaron Williamson which will be exhibited until May 20, 2024.

FRIISLAND Performance Art Center was founded in 2021 by Live Art Denmark. It is a venue in Nordhavn, Copenhagen for the interdisciplinary and performative investigation of ideas. We also offer talks, lectures, feedback and documentation for artists, students and others. FRIISLAND is supported by the Danish Arts Foundation.

11. EVENT SALT LAKE CITY PERFORMANCE ART FESTIVAL
    DATE APRIL 6, 2024
    LOCATION SALT LAKE CITY, USA
    SOURCE KRISTINA LENZI

The Salt Lake City Performance Art Festival presents its 11th international festival in April. Previously held at the Salt Lake City Public Library, this year’s edition of the festival will take place at the City Academy Charter School. The festival is curated by Kristina Lenzi and photographed by Winston Inoway.

Saturday, April 6, 2024
10:00am–6:00pm

City Academy Charter School
Salt Lake City, Utah, USA

PARTICIPATING ARTISTS
Marilyn Arsem, Boston, MA
Gustaf Broms, Sweden
Sam Forlenza, SLC, Utah
Jeff Huckleberry, Boston, MA
Dawn Oughton, SLC, Utah
Paul Reynolds, Centerville, Utah
Preach R Sun, USA-based
Eugene Tachinni, Shiprock, New Mexico

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12. CALL FOR APPLICANTS QUEER AND TRANS RESEARCH LAB
    DEADLINE DATE APRIL 12, 2024
    LOCATION TORONTO, CANADA
    SOURCE UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO

The Queer and Trans Research Lab (QTRL) at the University of Toronto invites all qualified applicants to apply be our artist-in-residence for the 2024–2025 school year. The QTRL residency will provide financial and other material support for artists working in any medium (photography, sculpture, visual art, media arts, theatre, poetry, playwriting, fiction, etc.), whose work centres on LGBTQ2S+ lives, communities, histories, and cultures. The residency will culminate in a funded exhibition, reading, screening, or performance of the resident’s work-in-progress.

The successful applicant is expected to be in residence in the Greater Toronto Area during the period of their award and will join the faculty and students who make up our intellectual community and participate in activities at the Mark S. Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies. These may include guest lectures, a public artist talk, office hours with our students, and a general presence at the Centre. They will be given office space and access to the vast faculty resources, manuscript archives, and library collections available at the University of Toronto and the Bonham Centre.

In addition to financial support for a final artist showcase the successful candidate will receive a stipend of $20,000. To get a sense of the wide disciplinary range and diversity of the Bonham Centres community and academic offerings visit our website.

To apply, please submit a short 1-page cover letter and curriculum vitae to qtrl.sds@utoronto.ca. The letter should discuss your work in general and the project you plan to undertake while in residence. Please also include an example of your work in the form of an on-line link, PDF, JPEG, or other format.

Applications due: April 12, 2024.

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