FADO E-BULLETIN
May 2026

1. FADO EVENT PRISM OF FIRE
   DATES MAY 22 & 23, 2026
   LOCATION TORONTO, CANADA
   SOURCE FADO

Co-presented by FADO Performance Art Centre and Alleyway Gallery
PRISM OF FIRE performance series
May 22 & 23, 2026

Friday, May 22 | 6:30pm
Dermot Wilson
Fan Wu
Gwen MacGregor
Quan Steele
Marilyn Yogarajah

Saturday, May 23 | 3:00pm
Christopher Petersen
Isaak Fong
Johannes Zits
lo bil
lwrds duniam

How to find Alleyway Gallery

Prism of Fire performance series, curated by Johannes Zits, features 10 artists offering distinct responses to this fractured landscape against the backdrop of the city. Positioned in a downtown laneway, the billboard Through the Prism of a Fire pulls a distant, damaged landscape into sharp focus. This large-scale image of a wildfire’s aftermath, clear-cut terrain swept into devastation, becomes the anchor for a series of performances in the final stretch of the CONTACT Festival in May.

Through forms such as spoken word, sound, fleeting installations, and subtle gestures, the artists stage live conversations between the scorched forest and the urban space that holds it. Working with the laneway’s acoustics, interruptions, and constraints, each artist initiates their own brief bridge between altered forest and public life. Together, these actions reimagine the billboard as a site of exchange where memory, place, and embodied presence meet in the tense space between destruction and renewal.

Through the Prism of a Fire reflects on the growing intensity of wildfires across Canada, capturing the aftermath of a 2024 blaze in the Cariboo region of British Columbia, on Lhtako Dene Nation territory. While fire is a natural part of the forest’s life cycle, increased and sustained human activity has disrupted this balance. Industrial logging, monocultures, and conventional forestry practices have stripped away the diversity and resilience that once allowed ecosystems to recover.

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2. SYMPOSIUM STREET ACTIONS: WOMEN PERFORMING IN MTL & TO (1970-80)
   DATE MAY 7, 2026
   LOCATION MONTREAL, CANADA & ONLINE
   SOURCE OPTICA

Symposium: Street Actions: Women Performing in Montreal and Toronto (1970–1980)
4th Space, Concordia University, Montreal

May 7, 2026
10:30AM–5:45PM
Free / Live streaming available: registering for the Zoom LINK or on Youtube

PARTICIPANTS
Analays Álvarez Hernández
Rose Marie Arbour
Elizabeth Chitty
Marie Décary
Marie Claire Forté
Johanna Householder
Kamissa Ma Koïta
Kama La Mackerel
Po B. K. Lomami
Map
Lise Nantel
Women With Kitchen Appliances (WKKA)

This one-day symposium builds on the key elements of the exhibition Street Actions: Women Performing in Montreal and Toronto (1970–1980) presented by OPTICA, un centre d’art contemporain l a centre for contemporary art.

This includes moving geographically between Toronto and Montréal, as well as linguistically across French and English; focusing on the importance of dance, movement, and the kinesthetic in shaping experimental practices of the 1970s; looking at questions of changing feminisms as they evolved in public and cultural spaces; and attesting to historical and current practices by artists infiltrating outdoor and institutional sites with their bodies. By bringing together different generations of artists, curators, and cultural workers, this day of conversation and exchanges aims to acknowledge and record the past while making room for new and intersectional conversations.
~ Didier Morelli

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3. EVENT SALT LAKE CITY PERFORMANCE ART FESTIVAL
   DATES MAY 8 & 9, 2026
   LOCATION SALT LAKE CITY, USA
   SOURCE KRISTINA LENZI

Salt Lake Performance Art Festival
Sugar House Monument Plaza, Salt Lake City

May 8: 4PM–9PM
May 9: 11AM–4PM

ARTISTS
Steve Creson, SLC, Utah
Lisa DeFrance, SLC, Utah
Erin Esplin, SLC, Utah
Sam Forlenza, SLC, Utah
Stephanie Garcia, SLC, Utah
Molly Heller, SLC, Utah
Jeff Huckleberry, Boston, MA
Sandy Huckleberry, Boston, MA
Kristina Lenzi, SLC, Utah
Jorge Rojas, SLC, Utah
Eugene Tachinni, New Mexico
Maybelle Tibbs, Texas
Lu Wei, SLC, Utah

Curated Kristina Lenzi
Photographed by Winston Inoway

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4. EVENT THE HOUSE ATREUS BY EMMA BRENNAN & THOMAS WELLS
   DATES MAY 9, 2026 ++VARIOUS
   LOCATION DUBLIN, IRELAND
   SOURCE BBEYOND

The House of Atreus by Emma Brennan & Thomas Wells
Pallas Projects/Studios, Dublin, Ireland

Open Studio: May 9, 12PM–4PM
Performance: May 12–16, 10AM–6PM
Exhibition Viewing: May 20–23, 12PM–6PM
Closing Event: May 23, 6PM (Last entry 7PM)

The House of Atreus* is a collaborative project by Irish artists Emma Brennan and Thomas Wells that explores how working-class architecture reflects contemporary social and moral systems. This partnering of experiences intersects gendered labour practices, working-class identity and the entanglement of domestic and industrial spaces. Drawing from MYCKET’s queer feminist performative architectures and queer Marxist critiques of factory labour, the project engages with how gender, sexuality, and identity are regulated and exploited under capitalism.

By weaving together histories of Irish and UK industrial cities, migration, exploitation, and resilience, the project also reflects on the new economies shaping post-crash Ireland. Cultural references such as CMAT’s Euro-Country capture the anti-romantic post-Celtic Tiger era that Brennan and Wells themselves entered ‘The Workforce’. Echoing its mythological namesake, the project treats architecture not as a neutral backdrop but as a site where social, political, and moral systems are inscribed.

*Greek mythological dynasty plagued by a curse of mistrust and suffering that culminates in its downfall, this myth illustrates how architecture reflects the moral failings of its inhabitants.

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5. EVENT LILT FESTIVAL 2026
   DATE MAY 13 & 14, 2026
   LOCATION TORONTO, CANADA
   SOURCE LILT FESTIVAL

LILT Festival 2026
Gallery TPW, 170 St Helens Ave, Toronto

May 13–14, 2026
3:00–7:10 PM

LILT Festival is a performance art festival dedicated to platforming neurodivergent performance artists. The 2026 festival unfolds over two days and includes a wide range of live, durational, and experimental performances by artists working across different forms, energies, and access needs.

Tickets are available on a sliding scale from $1–$20 CAD, with all proceeds from ticket sales going directly to the presenting artists. Audiences are welcome to attend a single performance or stay for a longer portion of the program.

TICKETS

FULL PROGRAM

6. EVENT FAAS 8: HASZARD
   DATES MAY 13–16, 2026
   LOCATION SUDBURY, CANADA
   SOURCE GNO

Presented by Galerie du Nouvel-Ontario (GNO)
Foire D’Art Alternatif De Sudbury 8

FAAS 8: Haszard
May 13–16, 2026
Larch Street, Sudbury

ARTISTS
Blank Hands
Cedar Eve
Cell Driver
Clayton Windatt
Collective Bean
Collective Debajehmujig
Emilio Portal
Fait Maison
Félix & Lizbeth
Geneviève Matthieu
Guillaume Morin
Heritier Bilaka
Juan Velasco
Kristel Tremblay
Massy Emond
Mélanie Paulin
Myths and Mirrors
Sébastien Cournoyer
Tarun Godara
Geneva Jacuzzi
Jefferson Campbell-Cooper
Melanie St-Pierre-Bednis
seth cardinal dodginghorse

‘Hasard’ in French refers to an unpredictable, fortuitous event with no known cause or a force acting randomly, often linked to luck or fate, implying an absence of plan or control. It can be an unexpected coincidence (by chance), logical unpredictability (in games), or a philosophical concept of unnecessary causality.

‘Hazard‘ is an unknown and unpredictable phenomenon that causes an event to result one way rather than another. As a verb, it means to take a risk, especially for the chance of a good return. You might hazard your chances at the roulette table or hazard a guess – that is, risk making a guess when you aren’t certain.

Big buses, flatbeds, trucks, cars, wrecks… the vehicles will serve as a canvas to convey multiple perspectives. Set up and developed over the course of a week, artists and the public will come together bumper to bumper for these spontaneous encounters. Beep beep! Let’s go for a joy ride! Turn on your hazard lights! By bringing artistic experimentation directly into shared urban spaces, FAAS 8 reimagines everyday infrastructure as a place of connection, curiosity and collective imagination.

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7. EVENT OUT OF SITE CHICAGO | FLOW EMBODY IN SITE 2026
   DEADLINE TO REGISTER MAY 17, 2026
   LOCATION FARA SABINA & ROME, ITALY
   SOURCE CARRON LITTLE

Flow • embody in site 2026 organized by Out of Site
Announcing Open Call for Flow • embody in site, 2026
Public Performance Art Symposium from July 20 27, 2026

Out of Site Chicago is thrilled to announce our fourth symposium of Flow • embody in site that will be in-person in Fara Sabina, Italy and Rome, Italy. This is a week-long retreat of public performance art in the Italian town of Fara Sabina, Italy in the region of Sabine that is the site of Convent delle Clarisse Eremite that lived in Silence from the 1673 to 1967. This historic town is situated on the walking trail of Saint Francis of Assisi celebrating the Jubilee Year.

Participants will stay at the Convent where meals will be prepared and group convenings will take place. The day will begin with a meditation of tai chi practice led by Carron Little, Artistic Director of Out of Site, and followed by four days of public performance workshop culminating in a public performance event in Fara Sabina on Sunday July 26 and a performance art festival in Rome on Monday July 27 in partnership with Performance Art Rome.

For more information about the embodied retreat focused on public performance art please visit Flow • embody in site.

Registration: opens May 4, 2026
RSVP deadline: May 17, 2026
Dates: 7-day residency from July 20–27, 2026
Cost: inclusive of accommodation, two meals a day, and workshop tuition = $1,250

Out of Site Chicago (OoS) creates unexpected encounters in outdoor public places and has been producing a public performance festival in Chicago since 2011. OoS has developed a methodology of working in public spaces that supports diverse ideas and representations of diverse artistic practice. We are committed to a practice of social engagement with diverse publics. In 2020 Out of Site pivoted into an international network and platform engaging in biweekly meetings to decide on our programming.

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8. EVENT DFBRL8R RELIC ACTIVATION LAB
   DATES MAY 19–24, 2026
   LOCATION CHICAGO, USA
   SOURCE DFBRL8R

Dr AL | DFBRL8R Relic Activation Lab
19–24 May 2026
Mana Contemporary | Chicago
Public-facing culminating event: May 23, 2026

The DFBRL8R Relic Activation Lab [Dr AL] is a free intensive in which a small group embodies the DFBRL8R Relic Collection. Participants work collectively with a living archive of performance art relics: sorting, handling, cataloging, researching, activating, and making. The Lab treats the archive not as storage but as a site of study, transmission, and transformation. The labor is the praxis. Think archaeological dig, not art workshop. You show up, you work, you find things, you record them, you make something from what you encounter.

Anchoring the Lab is the Department of Dismemberment (DoDis), a framework for working with relics designated for transformation, dispersal, activation, or controlled removal from the archive. The Lab asks how relics of live art might persist not only through preservation but through handling, reinterpretation, fragmentation, redistribution, and use. Some things are kept. Some things are changed. Both are forms of care.

Who should apply: Artists, researchers, students, archivists, writers, curators, and anyone whose practice intersects with performance, the body, ephemerality, material culture, or archival questions. We are specifically interested in building an intergenerational, cross-disciplinary cohort. All levels of experience are welcome. What matters is willingness to work, curiosity about the collection, and commitment to a week of sustained collective effort.

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9. EVENT MARK OF A WOMAN BY CHISATO MINAMIMURA
   DATES MAY 22 & 23, 2026
   LOCATION TORONTO, CANADA
   SOURCE THEATRE PASSE MURAILLE

Mark of A Woman by Chisato Minamimura

May 22: 7:30PM
May 23: 2:00PM

Theatre Passe Muraille, 16 Ryerson Ave.
Tickets are PWYC starting at $15

Deaf performance artist and choreographer Chisato Minamimura returns to Toronto with her acclaimed show Mark of A Woman, celebrating and exploring personal histories & authentic accounts of the undertold relationships between women and tattooing cultures. Using Visual Vernacular, digital animation, kinetic projection and Woojer™ belt technology, this is an exciting, accessible new exploration into women’s social, cultural and historical relationships to body marking.

The show contains ASL, Visual Vernacular, some captioning and voice-overs, and is accessible for both Deaf and hearing audiences. All shows are Relaxed Environment. Woojer™ straps will also be available – they are vibrating belts designed to offer an additional sensory experience for audiences by enabling the user to feel sound vibrations.

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10. PUBLICATION LAUNCH GINA PANE ACTIONS THROUGH TIME
    DATE MAY 27, 2026
    LOCATION LONDON, UK
    SOURCE LADA

PUBLICATION LAUNCH
Gina Pane: actions through time
Sophie Delpeaux & Alice Maude-Roxby

May 27, 2026
Live Art Development Agency

Join us for a thought-provoking evening celebrating the launch of Sophie Delpeux and Alice Maude-Roxby’s new book, Gina Pane: actions through time.

During the 1970s Gina Pane (1939–1990, Italy/France) was well known for a series of live actions that took place in domestic spaces and galleries in Europe. Pane’s actions were meticulously orchestrated to communicate viscerally and visually, often putting her body at risk and marking an indelible exchange between herself and the viewer.

This new anthology from Sophie Delpeux and Alice Maude-Roxby is the result of three years of close collaboration. It aims both to show evolution in the perception of Gina Pane’s actions over the fifty years since the live performances took place, and the extreme diversity within that perception. Alongside writings and interviews by Gina Pane, the anthology includes multiple perspectives from writers, to historians, from curators and exhibition producers to artists who witnessed the actions in the 1970s, to those re-encountering the works through re-enactments in the present. The ambition with this publication is to make it clear that Gina Pane’s actions were addressed to the collective and that a collective is necessary to take them on.

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11. EVENT OFFTA LIVE ART FESTIVAL
    DATES MAY 29–JUNE 7, 2026
    LOCATION MONTREAL, CANADA
    SOURCE OFFTA

OFFTA 20th edition
Produced by La Serre – arts vivants

May 29–June 7, 2026
Various venues, Montreal

ARTISTS
Althena Lucie Assamba
Flame
Alegría Gobeil
Dada
Real Sweat Performance Group
Ghinwa Yassine
Geneviève Matthieu
Flavie Lemée
Sabrina Ratté
Sarah Chouinard-Poirier
+ conversations, parties, workshops, works-in-progress and more

The 12 projects in the 20th edition, gathered by JJ Houle, Camille Huang, Sovann Rochon-Prom Tep and Claudel Doucet, offer us 12 sensitive vessels carrying us towards magnificent dreams where we can hope for ever greater light, solidarity and joy.

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12. OPEN CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS ‘ON SPIRITUALITY’ | PERFORMANCE RESEARCH
    DEADLINE DATE JUNE 1, 2026
    LOCATION THE WORLD
    SOURCE PERFORMANCE RESEARCH JOURNAL

Performance Research Journal
Vol. 32, No. 1: On Spirituality
Edited by Theron Schmidt and Evelyn Wan

This issue invites the study of spirituality via a performance studies lens, considering the ways in which attention to spiritual practice can foreground alternative lineages of knowledge transmission, subaltern histories and marginalized figures, and non-standard views on media, technology, ecology, and embodiment. Spirituality encompasses a vast tapestry of practices and beliefs across time and space, including, among others, Indigenous wisdom traditions, shamanic lineages, earth-based religions, witchcraft, and Western esotericism. It extends from ancient arts of astrology and energy healing to contemporary New Age and post-New Age practices, and finds new followers in the digital sphere. Today, the popularity of astrology apps like CHANI and Co-Star, tarot readings on TikTok, and the rise of spirituality and wellness influencers testify to renewed interests in such discourses. Some of these practices are inspired by Indigenous and animist cosmovisions of the world from ancestral and diasporic cultures, and embrace the active agency of nature and non-human species. But also, in Euro-American contexts, New Age and New New Age practices are part of a specific historical and cultural shift towards the ‘celebration of the self’ (Heelas 1996), and their focus on individual development should be understood as both antidote and symptom of contemporary neoliberalist attitudes.

[Please visit the Performance Research Journal website for the full call for submissions text.]

Submission by: 1 June 2026
Outcomes: July 2026
First drafts: October 2026
Final drafts: March 2027

MORE INFORMATION & SUBMISSION GUIDELINES

13. EVENT THE CHAINS BY EVAN WEBBER
    DATES JUNE 3–7, 2026
    LOCATION MONTREAL, CANADA
    SOURCE FTA

The Chains by Evan Webber
Produced by Evan Webber + Public Recordings
Presented in the context of Festival TransAmériques

June 3–7, 2026
Cité-des-Hospitalières, Montreal

In a room bathed in light, small groups of people are seated at tables. You take your place among them, holding in your hands an unusual questionnaire. Is this a story, a test, or a collective ritual? The timer begins. Bells ring. And you face a series of questions about your beliefs, your desires, your optimism and your despair. Gradually, the scene transforms. The figure of Antigone appears in late-90s Toronto, a city reeling from the policies of Mike Harris and the rise of the War on Terror. In The Chains, each participant discovers they have a role to play, re-enacting Sophocles’ classical tragedy in a new context.

Evan Webber turns the theatre into a laboratory where the personal and political collide. After Other Jesus, performed at FTA 2019, he returns with a stark and deeply human work. The Chains makes audience participation an act of thinking and sharing—and tests how freedom and responsibility can survive their contradictions.

For twenty years, Toronto writer and performer Evan Webber has been challenging our preconceived notions about theatre: who acts, who watches, who decides. He has developed a stripped-down dramaturgy with methods of disconcerting simplicity. Co-creating and coauthoring his projects with longtime collaborators such as choreographer Ame Henderson and Public Recordings, his work reveals the structures that govern us and the mechanisms that shape our actions—cultural narratives, inherited myths, political constraints, collective frameworks, etc.

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14. EVENT YOU CANNOT CAN BY DANA MICHEL
    DATES JUNE 3–7, 2026
    LOCATION MONTREAL, CANADA
    SOURCE FTA

You Cannot Can by Dana Michel
Presented in the context of Festival TransAmériques

June 3–7, 2026
UQAM Sports Center, Montréal

Performance artist Dana Michel considers the ability to swim to be one of the ways in which we might embody self-trust and wonders why, despite many attempts at learning, she still cannot really feel at ease in the water. And what is it that holds back the majority of her family from swimming, despite hailing from an island that is surrounded by both the Atlantic Ocean and the Caribbean Sea? How safe can you feel in the world if you cannot float in the liquid that makes up a large part of your body?

With YOU CANNOT CAN, Michel creates a new solo performance in a swimming pool. Surrounded by the audience, she wades inside global histories and socio-economic realities of swimming and safe access to water. She uses her kaleidoscopically curious approach to focus on how we might shake off fears. Might this watery adventure be an entry point to ultimate liberation?

Acclaimed in both Canada and abroad, Michel has received numerous prestigious awards. These include the ImPulsTanz Award (Vienna, 2014), the Silver Lion for Innovation in Dance at the Venice Biennial (2017), the ANTI Festival International Prize for Live Art (Kuopio, Finland, 2019), the Canada Council for the Arts’ Jacqueline Lemieux Prize for her contribution to dance in Canada (2022), and the Prix de la danse de Montréal International Touring Award (2024).

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15. CALL FOR PROPOSALS CTR THE FAILURE ISSUE
    DEADLINE DATE JUNE 29, 2026
    LOCATION TORONTO, CANADA
    SOURCE CHRIS DUPUIS

Canadian Theatre Review announces a call for proposals for a special issue exploring the subject of “failure.” Failure plays a key role in many aspects of the Canadian theatrical landscape. This includes hindering the development of specific works, limiting the careers of individual artists, and restricting the growth of companies and presentation platforms. Conversely, failure is often cited as a creative tool, which leads to the generation of new ideas and approaches by enabling alternate ways of sharing, learning, and relating. How might failure and failing engage these tensions and be mobilized as a strategy for producing emergent connective pathways, new ways of thinking, and alternative methodologies?

Potential topics can include (but are not limited to):
Failure as a creative/learning tool
Failure as resistance
How failure inhibits/supports the creation of new work in Canada
How failure shapes an individual artist or company’s trajectory
Failure in acting, writing, directing, designing, or producing
Technical failure
Emerging technologies, failure as possibility
Curatorial failure
Scholarly/pedagogical failure
Failure of the individual subject and collective engagement
Failure of an institution/company
Failure by governmental agencies/policy makers
The challenges of audience development and fundraising
How to create more productive spaces for failure
Examples of failure from Canadian theatrical history

We will consider scholarly articles (around 2,500 words and exceptionally up to 5,000 words) as well as interviews, personal reflections, and photo/text collages (around 1,000-1,500 words). Submissions should be made to the email addresses listed below.

Submissions should include:

• Names, email addresses, and institutional affiliations (if applicable) of all co-authors
• The proposed title of the piece and word length
• An abstract (250 words)
• A bio for each co-author (100 words)

Along with scholarly articles, the issue will include space for performance practitioners to reflect on their work, their working processes, and the wider field. In either case, potential contributors can contact the editors to discuss their ideas prior to submitting a proposal/abstract. If you want to arrange a meeting, please contact the editors Esteban Donoso and Chris Dupuis at ctrfailureissue@gmail.com.

Deadlines
Submissions/Abstracts: June 29, 2026
First Drafts: November 16, 2026