Tag: An Afternoon With Margaret Dragu

Join us for a joyful day of video-art BINGE WATCHING. Two different screenings sandwich a guided movement practice for artists. Wear your jammies, drink ginger ale and eat popcorn ALL DAY!!!

FADO Performance Art Centre and V tape are thrilled to present Your New Normal: An Afternoon With Margaret Dragu, part of FADO’s on-going Walk-And-Talk performance series.

2:00PM: screening, NEW NORMAL: an embodied novel
3:00PM: supportTHEsupport (movement practice) with snacks & chats & PAJAMAS!
4:00PM: screening, TICK AND TALK OF COMMON TIME

PROGRAMME

2:00PM: NEW NORMAL: an embodied novel (video, 45:00)

“An embodied novel is a 13-part multi-modal project documenting Dragu’s experiences on public transit while waiting for/recovering from two hip replacement surgeries. This series of poetic-prose stories are articulated in the body as short videos produced by Dragu alongside her collaborators, Justine A. Chambers (choreography) and E. Kage (score), as well as in text in her publication by the same name.” (Yasmine Whaley-Kalaora, C.L.A.M.)

Choreographer: Justine A. Chambers
Composer & Musician: E. Kage
Novelist: Margaret Dragu
Dancers: Rob Abubo, Justine A. Chambers, Stephanie Cyr, Alison Denham, Kate Franklin, Bynh Ho, Mikiki, Claudia Moore

3:00PM: supportTHEsupport (TORONTO VERSION)

supportTHEsupport is an art experiment that began September 2019 during the LIVE! Biennale in Vancouver. supportTHEsupport appears to be dance/fitness classes (live-in-person and live-on-ZOOM ) with members in Vancouver, Montréal, Toronto, Berlin, Hanover and Copenhagen. But it is actually a living studio of amazing and creative artists who help each other make art happen.
***Feel free to bring your own yoga mat, towel, blocks.***

4:00PM: TICK AND TALK OF COMMON TIME (video, 33 min)

“An opus of five variations and five entr’actes. Playing with the idea of TikTok dance trends, the variations feature fifteen live Vancouver-based dancers, three Toronto-based performers and many more [of whom are] dancing over Zoom, as well as several TikTok dance videos. Each variation presents a new choreography set to compositions from five different Canadian composers. The videos of the dancers are often in split screen or overlapping one another in the mainframe. The entr’actes feature improvisational dance by Dragu and Justine A. Chambers set to the sounds of live improvised vocal transcription.” (Nathaniel Marchand, Western Front)

Composers: Mark Haney, Nikita Carter, E. Kage, Sarah Sheard, Brady Marks
Dancers: Justine A. Chambers, Kate Franklin, Vanessa (VK) Kwan, Johanna Householder, Francisco-Fernando Granados, Angelo Pedari, Stephanie Bokenfohr, Margaret Dragu

Curated by Francesco Gagliardi and Julian Higuerey Núñez

There’s a storytelling technique, originated in procedural TV and later adopted by narrative films and videogames, in which two or more characters have an important conversation while walking between places. The technique is generally used as a way of conveying large volumes of information in a dynamic way, while introducing the audience to the relative placement of various locations and communicating a sense of urgency. As a narrative device, it effectively functions as a way of combining two distinct vectors of a narrative (the visual and the aural) into a more compact and efficient whole. 

This technique is referred to as Walk-and-Talk. 

While there isn’t anything analogous in the realm of performance art, walking (to and from the site of a performance; as a component of the performance itself; as a stage of the creative process) and talking (as part of the performance or around it, like in the “artist talk”) are, for artists and audiences alike, such commonplace components of the experience of making and watching performances, that they tend to be taken for granted and disappear from view.

In this new, ongoing series, FADO highlights and investigates these foundational gestures of the performance art vocabulary—walking, talking—through performances and discursive interventions that explore their intrinsic mutual imbrication. After all, isn’t the stroll of the flâneur always also the articulation of an argument? Aren’t the verbal excesses of every character in a classic novel who pines for an unattainable elsewhere just another way of getting there?

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2024: The Ribbon Cutting Ceremony: A Travelling Circus by Cason Sharpe
2024: part of the ramble that remained in the end without by Mark So
2025: Walk-And-Talk, the audio podcast series (coming soon!)