FADO E-BULLETIN
October 2026

1. PERFORMANCE BAND BAND CLOCK BY LISA KISS
   DATE OCTOBER 3, 2026
   LOCATION TORONTO, CANADA
   SOURCE FADO

Presented by Nuit Blanche with the support of FADO and many collaborators

band band clock by Lisa Kiss
October 3, 2026
7:00PM – 7:00PM | every hour on the hour

Nathan Philips Square
100 Queen Street West, Toronto

A marching band of marching bands, with players of all ages, including professional musicians and talented enthusiasts from across Toronto, will form for one night only to chime in the thirteen hours of Nuit Blanche. The 2026 Nuit creative campaign, designed especially for the 20th anniversary by Lisa Kiss, will come to life on the ramp at City Hall as bands appear every hour on the hour to ring in the time.

Led by Keith Cole, performance artist and drum major extraordinaire, and costumed by local fashion hero Susan Dicks, this super band—led by Nolan Murphy—will process across Nathan Philips Square in grand style. This will be a band band to remember!

Concept and Design: Lisa Kiss
Producers: Naomi Campbell, Caroline Hollway
Band Leader: Nolan Murphy/SHOUT!
Drum Major: Keith Cole
Costumes: Susan Dicks
Photography: Henry Chan
Video: Peppercorn Imagine Studio

One of Toronto’s leading graphic designers, Lisa Kiss has worked in the cultural sector since the ‘90s. Educated at Queen’s University, Seneca College and the Ontario College of Art, she opened Lisa Kiss Design in 2000 to specialize in art books and identity work for artists, museums and galleries. She works extensively in dance, theatre, visual and performance art with many of Canada’s leading artists. Her own art practice involves creating sculptures from books. She loves crashing cymbals and marching bands.

Nuit Blanche’s theme this year—Tomorrow’s Memories—looks back to the artists, curators, communities and places that defined Nuit Blanche and hold its histories. But this is not just about the past, it’s a way to look at the present and a provocation for the future. Past Nuit Blanche artworks will be revisited, re-visioned and recontextualized while artists can also create new works that consider personal and collective memory and histories as a tool for storytelling, reflection and dreaming of possible futures. Projects may also explore ideas around memory itself, nostalgia and ephemerality.

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2. FADO EVENT OUR BODIES KEEPING SCORE
   DATE NOVEMBER 5–8, 2026
   LOCATION TORONTO, CANADA
   SOURCE FADO

Our Bodies Keeping Scores
Presented by FADO Performance Art Centre
A curatorial project by Jess Dobkin

I’m thinking about our bodies: singular, plural, collective, communal, human, and other-worldly; with abandon and abandoned, in power and empowered, possessed and self-possessed, exalting and exalted. Political, primal, passionate.

This program of artists reaches into and beyond conversations of trauma carried in the body to explore embodied scores that run parallel and perpendicular to wounding, and to perform the archives of our physical, personal, political, and transcendental bodies. Bodies on the line, bodies transgressing boundaries, bodies keeping scores. It is also an opportunity for local and international artists to meet, to encounter each other’s work, and to meet Toronto audiences. You are warmly invited to join us in spaces of gathering, sharing, and experimentation with artists, curators, activists, musicians, dancers, scholars, students, and seekers. Together, in our vessels and vibrations, we take shape and shapes.

With collaboration and support from Hemispheric Encounters: Developing Transborder Research-Creation Practices, York University, and the Queer and Trans Research Lab, Mark S. Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies, University of Toronto and OCADU University.

ARTISTS
Germaine Liu (Toronto, CA)
Juma Pariri (Abya Yala/São Paulo, Brazil)
Juru (Fortaleza, Brazil)
Karen Finley (New York, USA)
Leslie Ting (Toronto, CA)
María de Lourdes Santana Arcos (Havana, Cuba)
n:u (melissandre varin) (Benin/Birmingham, UK)
Sara Baron-Goodman (Toronto, CA)
Tamar Carter-King (Toronto, CA)
Twysted Miyake-Mugler (Toronto, CA)

PROGRAM
November 5
Performances: Juma Pariri, María de Lourdes Santana Arcos, n:u (melissandre varin)
Food activation: Sara Baron-Goodman & Music-Composition: Germaine Liu

November 6
Performance: Believe by Karen Finley
Food activation: Sara Baron-Goodman & Music-Composition: Leslie Ting
Talkback: Karen Finley & Jess Dobkin

November 7
Screening: This is Ballroom (documentary, 2024) by Juru & Vitã
Conversation: Juru, Twysted Miyake-Mugler, Mother Tamar Miyake-Mugler

November 7
Artist Engagement: Creatives Anonymous with Karen Finley

November 8
Writing Workshop: Grief, Loss and Creative Transformation with Karen Finley

ARTIST BIOS, PROGRAM DETAILS, VENUE INFORMATION

3. FADO PERFORMANCE ART RADIO WALK-AND-TALK PODCAST
   LISTEN NOW TO EPISODE 6 WITH LISA KISS!
   LOCATION ONLINE
   SOURCE FADO

FADO Performance Art Centre presents FADO Performance Art Radio presents
Walk-And-Talk podcast with Francesco Gagliardi & Julian Higuerey Nunez

LISTEN NOW!
Episode 1: Colin Cudmore
Episode 2: Lisa Deanne Smith
Episode 3: Marcin Kedzior
Episode 4: Keith Cole
Episode 5: Shawn Micallef
Episode 6: Lisa Kiss

Walk-And-Talk podcast accompanies a performance series of the same name which took place from 2024–2025. The series invited artists to investigate two of the foundational gestures of the performance art vocabulary—walking, talking—through performances and discursive interventions that explore their intrinsic mutual imbrication. In this podcast series, hosts Francesco Gagliardi and Julian Higuerey Nunez, invite local artists, researchers, and other creative folk to go on a walk and talk about the ways that walking informs their practices. Each episode is the length of a short walk, no edits, just walking and talking.

Organized and hosted by Francesco Gagliardi & Julian Higuerey Nunez
Produced by FADO Performance Art Radio
Music and sound by Peppercorn Imagine

MORE INFORMATION & TO LISTEN

4. PERFORMANCE TO A FLAME | PRESENTED BY NIGHTWOOD
   DATE CLOSING OCTOBER 4, 2026
   LOCATION TORONTO, CANADA
   SOURCE NIGHTWOOD THEATRE

To A Flame
September 22 to October 4, 2026
Nancy & Ed Jackman Performance Centre, Toronto

A 1s1 Theatre and Nightwood Theatre co-production
In association with Modern Times Stage Company and Why Not Theatre

Written by Erin Shields, To a Flame is an explosive theatrical feast of image and language that pulls us deep into a Victorian Gothic Horror. Three confined women await the conclusion of their stories in the ancestral home of the man they call Father. Secrets burn to be revealed, aches of the past refuse to be suppressed, and the very house itself vibrates with desire for revenge.

This groundbreaking work intertwines American Sign Language and English with vibrant movement and live music into a haunting, multi-sensory performance for Deaf and hearing audiences. Featuring celebrated Deaf performer and cultural leader Dawn Jani Birley, internationally-renowned director Josette Bushell-Mingo, and vivid text by Governor General Award-winning playwright Erin Shields, with the support of the company.

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5. EMPLOYMENT OPPORTUNITY DANCEMAKERS
   DEADLINE DATE OCTOBER 9, 2026
   LOCATION TORONTO, CANADA
   SOURCE DANCEMAKERS

Dancemakers is searching for an Interim Co-Artistic Producer to cover a 12-month parental leave. The ideal candidate will have experience in grant-writing, arts administration and align with Dancemakers mission, values and policies.

To apply, please read the full description on the Dancemakers website and send an Expression of Interest (.pdf) of 1–2 pages and your resume to artistic@dancemakers.org by October 9, 2026.

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6. EVENT ROUYN-NORANDA PERFORMANCE ART BIENNIAL
   DATE OCTOBER 14–17, 2026
   LOCATION ROUYN-NORANDA, CANADA
   SOURCE L’ECART

Presented by L’Écart
12th Rouyn-Noranda Performance Art Biennial
October 14–17, 2026

ARTISTS
Geronimo Inutiq
Gui BB
Ingri Fiksdal and Louis Schou-Hansen
Katie Ward
Kidows Kim
Marc A. Reinhardt
Olivia Shortt
Poland-underground
Salomay Julien
Samir Kennedy
Sarah Chouinard-Poirier
Xavier Michel
(Un)habitable margins : double launch

Returning for its 12th edition, the Biennale celebrates collaboration, extends its reach, fosters encounters, and connects artworks, places, and people. It flourishes from the margins, inhabits the spaces of L’Écart, and radiates far beyond. Beneath the surface, its reach intersects with other presences: specters of labor, progress, catastrophes, ancient festivals, and forgotten violence, mobilized as metaphors for what returns unresolved—logics of production and power that permeate bodies and narratives.

These specters mingle with the pulse of the present, with voices overflowing from language and bodies. The artists explore these uncertain passages—between the living and the revenant, the intimate and the collective, memory and fiction—where new imaginaries of resistance emerge. We move around, listen, and fantasize, forming a temporary community attentive to what emerges beneath the surface, to the possibilities that are invented in the margins, where what it means to live together is constantly replayed.

Audrée Juteau, Artistic Director

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7. EVENT FIERCE FESTIVAL
   DATE OCTOBER 14–18, 2026
   LOCATION BIRMINGHAM, UK
   SOURCE CLAYTON LEE

Fierce Festival
October 14–18, 2026
Birmingham, UK

Fierce is one of the UK’s foundational live art organisations. Since 1998, Fierce has been Birmingham’s cultivator of artists, audiences and contexts for contemporary performance, placing experimental, interdisciplinary, and queer voices centre stage. Across exhilarating performances, works-in-progress, and artist-hosted meals, Fierce Festival 2026 is an invitation to indulge in the radical possibilities of more is more. More collaboration, more cross-pollination, more experimentation, more camaraderie, more Birmingham: more pleasure.

ARTISTS
Chou Tung-Yen
Emergency Chorus
Ewa Dziarnowska
Dana Michel
Dickie Beau
Faye Driscoll
Hana Umeda
Helen Noir
Josh Anio Grigg
Justine A. Chambers
n:u (melissandre varin)
Serafine1369
Shannon Cochrane
Steven Cohen
Wojciech Grudzinski
Yirramboi

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8. EVENT FIERCE JAMS 03: HIGHBURY HALL
   DATE OCTOBER 16, 2026
   LOCATION BIRMINGHAM, UK
   SOURCE FIERCE FESTIVAL

Fierce Jams 03: Highbury Hall
Highbury Hall, Birmingham

October 16, 2026
11AM–5PM

We have a mammoth line-up for Fierce Jams 03: Highbury Hall. You might even say it’s an entire festival within a festival. All are welcome at Fierce Jams 03.

Highbury Hall is one of Birmingham’s architectural treasures, a Venetian Gothic mansion completed in 1880. It was home to Joseph Chamberlain, who, in his role as Secretary of State for the Colonies between 1895 and 1903, oversaw much of Britain’s empire during a period of rapid expansion, particularly in Africa. Highbury Hall also served as the inspiration behind the iconic board game Cluedo, transposing much of its layout.

ARTISTS
Alina Arshi + Kairaan Kika
Aliaskar Abarkas
Shannon Cochrane + Dickie Beau
Emergency Chorus
Kirstin Halliday
Valentina Kappes
Autumn Knight
Laura Lulika
Samra Mayanja
Gusta Mara
Jessie McLaughlin
Michelangelo Miccolis
Francesca Millican-Slater
Fernanda Muñoz-Newsome
Heidi Rustgaard
P. Piton
Martin Soria
Sym Stellium + Victoria Gray
Stone Motherless Cold
Aby Watson
Wet Mess + Naissa Bjørn

This event has been collectively curated with national and international partners, including Unlimited, Live Art Development Agency, Take Me Somewhere, DISRUPT/Cambridge Junction, YIRRAMBOI, and Cuerpo Sur. Fierce Jams is made possible in partnership with Fabric’s International Support programme, which is designed to support dance artists from England to be present across the world.

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9. CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS PERFORMANCE RESEARCH: ON INVISIBILITY
   DEADLINE DATE OCTOBER 22, 2026
   LOCATION THE WORLD
   SOURCE PERFORMANCE RESEARCH

Performance Research Vol. 32, No. 6: On Invisibility
Edited by Anne-Lise Brevers, Jasper Delbecke, Kyoko Iwaki, Sarah Lucie, Jonas Schnor

Deadline: 22nd October 2026

This issue of Performance Research invites contributions that investigate how contemporary performance embraces invisibility. Amidst the current sociopolitical economy that prioritizes optics—where images proliferate faster than attention and visibility become a dominant currency—performance reminds us that not everything that matters can, or should, be seen. This issue turns towards performances that suspend the primacy of vision, moving beyond both the imperative of capitalist representation and limits of human eyesight to activate other perceptual registers: aural, haptic, olfactory, atmospheric, thermal, vibrational, as well as the durational and the temporal. Rather than understanding invisibility through absence, negation, suppression or disappearance, we approach it as a generative force that enables alternative ways of sensing, relating and imagining the world. Based on this thought, the issue editors embrace the invisible as a site of more-than-human performance, where toxins, neurons, heat waves, atmospheric pressures, microbes, radioactive particles, algorithms and cosmic forces continuously perform, relate and transform, regardless of whether they enter the field of human spectatorship.

Read the full call and submission guidelines on the Performance Research website.

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10. 10. WORKSHOP FUTURE RITUAL PRESENTS JULIA BARDSLEY
        DATE OCTOBER 20–24, 2026
        LOCATION LONDON, UK
        SOURCE FUTURE RITUAL

Black Box Curiosities + Enchantments: A Real-Time Process Laboratory Workshop
With Julia Bardsley

October 20–24, 2026
Bussey Building, Rye Lane, London UK

In this real-time process laboratory, we will be constructing and inhabiting a black box cosmos of slow-time enchantments. Working with the fading autumn light, we will visually map and model thinking and creative process, forge coexistent choreographies and generate twilight performative beings. This is an approach that reimagines the black box (theatre, cinema, camera, mind, and eye/i) as a site of strange speculative agency, slow cognition, radical adaptation, and analogue experimentation. The abyss methodology investigates the creative process as an act of conjuring and of cultivating the conditions for wonder – into/out of the dark. The workshop draws on and expands Julia’s extensive experience working with the interplay of performance, pinhole photography, video projection, sculptural objects, psychological garments and hybrid personae.

Other FUTURE RITUAL workshops COMING SOON
November 11–15: Constructing Phenomena [III] with Ron Athey
November 22–26: Perforated Places – Urban Thresholds with Gustaf Broms

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11. 11. CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS ARENA FESTIVAL
        DEADLINE DATE OCTOBER 31, 2026
        LOCATION ERLANGEN, GERMANY
        SOURCE ARENA

ARENA… of the young arts is a festival for dance, theatre and performance and was established in 1991 in Erlangen, Germany. The festival considers itself to be a platform for interdisciplinary, contemporary and experimental productions. A special focus lies on projects that take place in public spaces or less conventional theatre spaces. In 2027, the 37th ARENA festival is themed “vergissmeinnicht” and is going to take place from June 10–13. Artists from all over the world are invited to deal with the theme individually and creatively. As the festival is organised by students AT the University Erlangen-Nuremberg voluntarily, we can only cover the artists’ travel expenses, accommodation and catering, but no further payment.

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12. WORKSHOP TIME IN ACTION WITH NADÈGE GREBMEIER FORGET
    DATE NOVEMBER 6–8, 2026
    LOCATION MONTREAL, CANADA
    SOURCE NADÈGE GREBMEIER FORGET

Time in Action | Moment 1/3
Anchoring the Body in Duration: Attention Practices in Performance Art
Presented by Nadège Grebmeier Forget

November 6–8, 2026
Studio Proto, 5333 Casgrain Avenue, Montreal

This training constitutes the first part of a three-part research journey entitled Time in Action. Stemming from the artistic research process that Nadège Grebmeier Forget has been developing for almost twenty years in performance art, it is based on a practice where the body, duration, attention and states of presence or absence to oneself and to the world are considered as materials of creation.

This first “moment” proposes to explore the transformations brought about by a sustained practice over time, particularly in performance art, but also in any approach where repetition, attention and duration actively participate in the artistic process. The training thus opens up a space for collective reflection on the conditions which allow us to maintain a living practice, in a contemporary context which often leaves little room for slowness, stopping and unproductive forms of attention. Through guided body practices, attention and interoception exercises, extended performative explorations, periods of silence, observation, and discussion, Nadège Grebmeier Forget will accompany participants in exploring their lived experience. Performative practice will be approached as an ongoing process of research, perception, adjustment, and transformation.

This training is intended for professional and emerging artists with an active practice in performance art. Artists from other visual arts disciplines may also participate if their practice involves familiarity with artistic research, exploration of the body, performance formats, or somatic approaches.

GOALS OF THE WORKSHOP
At the end of the training, participants will be better equipped to:
• to observe their bodily, perceptual and emotional states more precisely;
• exploring silence, saturation and duration as creative materials;
• to recognize the conditions that support or weaken their artistic practice;
• consider performative practice as a continuous process of research and transformation;
• to put into words and/or images their experiences, their intuitions and the questions that run through their approach;
• to identify personal strategies to support their practice over time.

Read the full workshop description at the link below.

Nadège Grebmeier Forget is a performance and visual artist based in Tiohtià / Mooniyang / Montreal. Her performance and installation practice explores the processes of self-representation, transformation, and mediation in the digital age. Grounded in the body as a site of intelligence, memory, and experience, her work interrogates the relationships between image, presence, and visibility, as well as the dynamics of power and influence.

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