Tag: Cara Spooner

A performance series for the start of times

Put together by Shannon Cochrane and Francesco Gagliardi

ARTISTS
Cara Spooner (Toronto)
Claudia Edwards (Toronto)
Jehan Roberson (USA)
Joe Culpepper (USA)
Mani Mazinani (Toronto)
Marcin Kedzior (Toronto)
Mathieu Lacroix (Montréal)
Nadège Grebmeier Forget (Montréal)
Sue Murad (USA)
Vanessa Dion Fletcher (Toronto)

PLUS limited-edition placemats designed by Lisa Kiss, with drawings by Hazel Meyer.

On the Table Off the Table is a series of commissioned performance works engaging with the table as context, stage, and trope. Aspiring to aesthetic neutrality or demanding attention as a chosen object, the table reappears throughout the history of performance, at times taking center stage, at other times hiding in plain sight.

For this series, artists working at the confluence of performance art and a range of diverse practices—from writing to dance, from sound to magic—will create live work in conversation with performance traditions about, around, and on tables.

FADO Performance Art Centre’s first post(?)-pandemic live series, On the Table Off the Table also intends to provide artists and audiences with an opportunity to re-learn together how to inhabit the space of public presentation, rediscovering the solitary workstation as a place of gathering and play.

DETAILS & INFO

• There will be 1–2 performances each evening.
• Doors will open at listed times. Performances will start 30 minutes later.
• Mask-wearing for audience is mandatory in the performance space. Exemptions respected.
• Performers will not necessarily be masked while performing.
• Accessible washrooms are located on the 4th floor.
• Non-alcoholic drinks will be served, please eat your dinner before arriving.

Free. All welcome. Tell us you will be attending. Register on Eventbrite.

SCHEDULE
September 23 @ 7:00pm: Cara Spooner, Vanessa Dion Fletcher
September 24 @ 7:00pm: Joe Culpepper & Marcin Kedzior, Claudia Edwards
September 29 @ 7:00pm: Sue Murad, Mathieu Lacroix
September 30 @ 7:00pm: Mani Mazinani, Nadège Grebmeier Forget
October 1 @ 5:00pm: Jehan Roberson

Jehan Roberson’s performance is co-presented by Hemispheric Encounters, a partnership project supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council.

Canada
www.caraspooner.com 

Cara Spooner is a choreographer, caregiver and caretaker who makes performances, maps and gardens in relation to the moving body and site. Her performance work has been presented at the National Arts Centre (Ottawa), The PuSh International Performance Festival (Vancouver), Canadian Stage (Toronto), The Goethe Institut (Toronto), Stromereien 11 (Zürich), Theatre Der Welt (Düsseldorf) and her Audience Handbook has been translated and printed internationally. She worked in Public Programming at Workman Arts from 2015-2020 and is currently the Artistic Producer at Dancemakers. She is of Belgian, Scottish, Ukranian and Russian Jewish ancestry based in Tkaranto under Treaty 13. 

Film: Rope is curated and produced by FADO Performance Art Centre, and presented in the context of 2013 Images Festival.

Created by Francesco Gagliardi
Performed by Cara Spooner, Francesco Gagliardi, Marcin Kedzior and Michael Caldwell

Film: Rope explores the relationship between cinematic space and the space of live performance, and our ways of interpreting and recollecting the experience of movement within the film frame.

In Dangling that Rope, Andrew James Paterson writes, “In Film: Rope, Gagliardi has accentuated the simultaneous clash and fusion of different disciplines by using as source material a film that has been controversial at a number of different levels: Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope (1948). Rope is something of an anomaly within the Hitchcock canon, as it is directed to appear as if consisting almost entirely of one continuous shot. In this respect it breaks the modernist dictum that film should not appear simply to be recorded theatre. The film eschews montage altogether.”

Rope (1948) is considered one of Alfred Hitchcock’s most experimental films. Containing only four unmasked cuts, it was shot in single 10 minute takes (the length of a camera roll), tracking in an out of black surfaces (the back of a jacket or a piece of furniture) to create the illusion of even longer continuous shots. This virtuoso technique, which required the constant shifting of stage walls, furniture, and props to make way for the camera, was partly developed by the director in order to convey the illusion of theatrical real time and continuous space.

By paradoxically attempting to re-embody and transpose the movements and positions of the characters in the film in relation to a live audience, Film: Rope perversely exposes and explores the discontinuities and incongruities between cinema and live performance.

PERFORMANCES
April 12, 13, 14 @ 3:00pm
April 16 @ 7:00pm & 8:30pm

FADO ARTIST TALK
April 14 @ 4:30pm
Moderated by Andrew James Paterson

IMAGES ARTIST TALK
April 15 @ 4:00pm
Urban Space Gallery, 401 Richmond Street West
Performance and Media Art: Tools with Which to Deconstruct
With Francesco Gagliardi, Tanya Lukin Linklater and Duane Linklater

© Francesco Gagliardi, Film: Rope, 2013. Photo Henry Chan.