MayDay Workshop with VestAndPage

April 14ā€“19, 2014Artscape Youngplace, 180 Shaw Street, Toronto9:00 am to 6:00 pm

In this 6-day intensive MayDay performance art workshop, participants experience VestAndPageā€™s unique method through the process of making a performance art piece. Through practical exercises and reflecting on the use of the body as a tool, the workshop will focus on introspection as a way to develop authentic modes of expression and artistic action, and participants will be provided with the means to conceive, develop, and realize their own performance piece. Through methodology aimed at understanding prevailing behavioral patterns, participants will develop new ways of communicating and overcoming fears created by conflicting contemporary conditions. The workshops will also offer insight into the framework of process-led and conceptual art practice, with the aim to provide basis for future material. Participants will develop a heightened awareness of mind and body, with the means to stimulate artistic personal action though inner sensitivity.

As facilitators, VestAndPage will lead exercises on a range of performance techniques and approaches which blur the boundaries between fine art, live art and contemporary performance practices:Working solo and as a group;

  • Creating intimate solo performance material;
  • Devising and improvisation techniques;
  • Actions/rules/chance-based techniques;
  • Objects and actions in space as performance;
  • Developing quality of presence;
  • Confidence in using the physical self as a vehicle for meaning in performance;
  • Audience-performer relationshipsā€”levels and modes of interaction;
  • Exploring the role of time and pattern, e.g. duration, endurance, speed, and repetition.

Through the following processes:

  • To work towards touching point zero in judgment and intention, heightening perception, introspection, to then rebuild an authenticity-based expression, to transform visions and ideas into a concrete artistic action.
  • To take distance from being virtuous by establishing, evaluating, and energizing the personal action in se.
  • To free oneself from common behavorial patterns so as to create new ways of encountering, collaborating and living.
  • To overcome the fragile constituent limits, may they be based on physicality, fears or social patterns.
  • To touch and strengthen the most human inner sensors in order to activate personal and universal memories, for using as germinal matter for future artistic substance.
  • To enter a state of heightened awareness and perception, in order to conceive out-of-the-ordinary artistic visions, being in first instance process-led.

Actions and exercises are innovative and process-led, inspired by processes and methods such as: Dynamic Creative Breathing, Social Theater, Living Theater, Grotowski, Barba Stanislavsky, Leclerc, Oriental Theatre, Martial Arts, Contemporary Dance & Butoh, Authenticity, Inner Library, Liminality, Breath, Archetypes, Rituality, Memory activation, Object work, Time-Duration-Rhythm, Voice/Sound, Emotional Atmosphere, Inter-activity, Group dynamics, Macro- and Microspherology.

There will be a final public presentation on May 19 @ 7:00pm

Andres Pagnes & Verena Stenke, 2014. Photo Henry Chan.


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