With the return of the Emerging Artists Series in 2025, we are initiating the Emerging Artists Series LAB. In the EAS LAB, emerging artist-curators bring forward their most pressing performance art dilemmas, queries, and wandering ponderings. Working in collaboration with the FADO’s Director, the curators of the 2025 Emerging Artists Series, and their EAS LAB cohort, our LABists work through a research project of their own devising. Questions are asked, methods chosen, and outcomes are not guaranteed. Results vary—from podcasts to public performance experiments, and everything in between.
The Emerging Artists Series LABists for 2025 are:
Christina Anna Trutiak
James Knott
Vanessa Godden
LAB #1: Threshold
A public performance series proposed by Christina Anna Trutiak
Threshold is a research project that invites local artists to make an outdoors performance on a public staircase in Toronto. Locations and details coming in April.
April 13: lwrds
April 19: Isaak Fong
April 26: Tess Martens
LAB #2: We Could Break Performance
A podcast by Vanessa Godden and James Knott
May 2025
We Could Break Performance is a podcast hosted by artists Vanessa Godden and James Knott investigating the question: “How do we evaluate the substance of tropes enacted in performance art?”
Each episode of will We Could Break Performance will feature a local performance artist and ourselves in conversation, to help us tackle our dilemma and provide perspective on the values of performance art tropes that we may share or disagree on. Does performance go harder if the performer gets harmed? Or is that negligence in disguise. Is endurance awe-worthy? Or is it sometimes used to unpoetic ends? Does nudity really bare all? Perhaps by the end this series’ run, we could break performance.
