FADO Performance Art Centre is proud to present new solo performance works by Victoria Gray (UK) and Dorothea Rust (Switzerland) in the context of the ongoing International Visiting Artists series. Dorothea Rust and Victoria Gray’s appearances in Toronto are presented in partnership with VIVA! Art Action, the next stop on the artists’ tour. Established in 2006, VIVA! Art Action is an international performance and live art festival presented once every two years in MontrĂ©al.
Ballast by Victoria Gray
Often durational, Victoria Gray’s performances utilize slowness and stillness, in conjunction with performing unsighted, bringing a cellular-attention to kinesthetic sensations. Integrating affect studies, process philosophy, political theory, and somatics, her work aims to bring dormant psychosomatic memory to consciousness. Specifically, that which subsists at the sentient level of the bones, muscles, organs, fluids, glands and nerves. This cellular-attention aims to disturb âcommon-senseâ hierarchies of sensory organization, activating the political potential of a body that is intimately attuned to affective experience. Each work is highly contingent upon the audience’s particular presence and the specificities of each performance space. In this sense, like time, affect becomes a material in performance, it is “shaped” moment-by-moment in an immediate exchange between performer, audience and site.
Ăbung / Exercise No. 6 – Gender – Render by Dorothea Rust
My (our) languages is (are) (long ago already) ramified: expanding to technological documentation and medias of expression, onto the handling with objects, including music, sound, text and movement/choreography and probably more to come. Thus constantly throwing another (new) light onto the relationship and my (our) being with others present or absent in a (different) space/place, be it audience, visitors, co-performers.
I donât consider performance as an ephemeral, singular event, disappearing like a soap bubble. I see it as a space and a ‘milieu’ [The term ‘milieu’ refers to Jean-Luc Nancy in: Sybille KrĂ€mer: Medium, Bote, Ăbertragung â Kleine Metaphysik der MedialitĂ€t, 2008 , pages 54â66], me (us) moving in it, being part of a flow, of a social, cultural environment, hence performance an incident, an intervention, a disturbance, a time/moment in a process …Â
Any kind of preparation and processing before and afterâsuch as script, notation, documentation, narration, photos, video, audioâcan function as a possible trace which can become again a script and material for the next performance, a new intervention, disturbance etc., like Ariadneâs thread in a labyrinth with many exits, which is picked up not only by me but by others. Thus the performance doesnât belong to me, itâs part of a ‘milieu,’ others as much belonging to it and being part of it as me.
© Dorothea Rust, Ăbung / Exercise No. 6 – Gender – Render, 2015. Photo Henry Chan.