The FADO website, created by the unique minds at I Know You Know, is guided by colour and scent.
The navigation menu contains the various categories by which FADO presents our work. The menu on the left side of your browser, where you see “about,” “performance,” “series,” “engagements,” and so on, highlights these areas. Each of the categories is color-coded and contains a description of a unique fragrance. The scent illuminates the qualities of the various ways FADO works. You can read the description of the categories/colours/scents in the footer of each web page. The notes of each scent (top, middle, and base) conjure the elements, memories, and characteristics of our performances, artists, engagements, writing, bulletin, and the archive.
The fragrances are conceptual and actual. Some remain on the website as a description, in the form of a digital scratch n’ sniff that you can read and imagine for yourself. Some are formulated and are for smelling. Really smelling.
FADO and I Know You Know are producing small editions of scented postcards and collectible objects for selected scents in the FADO scent collection. The second scent in the series is titled ENGAGEMENT PINK. Here we consider how artists and audiences connect, communicate, and engage. The engagements include artist talks, studio visits, workshops, round tables, Q&As, and more. Audiences ask, and artists answer.
Subscribe to the FADO mailing list and include your mailing address. If you are already on our mailing list, update your profile with your mailing address. DO THAT HERE, and your PERFORMANCE YELLOW-scented postcard will be on its way.
So instead of talking about Tanya I will talk about myself, and I will tell you about the first time I sat eyes on Tanya Mars. It was about ten years ago – at the Lower Ossington Theatre: just a few doors north of her old apartment, which many of you will remember. Seiji Shimoda was performing his then already famous table piece, in which he cavorted on and around a table for about an hour wearing no clothes. The piece was originally performed using a custom-built table, but by the time I saw it, it involved the use of what Seiji referred to as “indigenous” tables: tables found on site and somehow connected to the ecosystem of specific performance communities. At the end of the evening, Shannon Cochrane – then, as tonight, the wizard behind the curtain – thanked Ms. Mars for lending the table. She waved off the acknowledgement rather brusquely, shaking her head in a way that was soon to become familiar to me: a sort of modified hair flip, the last phase of an elaborate sequence of actions starting with her glasses repeatedly traveling up and down between the bridge of her nose and the crown of her head, and invariably getting entangled in her platinum blond hair. It was 2008 and she had just been awarded the Governor General’s Award in Visual Arts. I found her rather formidable.
In retrospect, it makes perfect sense that it was Tanya who lent the table, and not just because she lived next door: she sat (at her table) at the very centre of the city’s performance ecosystem. As I came to learn, if you needed something, chances were that Tanya had it. And, if she had it, she would lend it to you no question asked. A rotary telephone or a rotating tray, a yard of pink fabric or a pair of riding spurs, faux fur, real fur, fake eyelashes, thigh-high fishing boots or tap shoes, a thurible, a button in the shape of a gondola or a gondola made of buttons, two identical cocktail hats or five boxes of plastic bobblehead dogs.
Over the years, this extraordinary collection has grown while traveling from Montreal to Toronto to Shelburne Nova Scotia, and back to Toronto – aboard moving vans and cars, up and down elevators and flights of stairs, in and out of storages rooms, attics, and unfinished basements – in labelled and unlabelled boxes and plastic bags, or rattling inside containers that were themselves part of the collection: hatboxes, slide projector cases, 1950s Bakelite handbags hand-made by nuns behind the Iron Curtain. Over the years, out of this accumulation, Ms. Mars has built her performance worlds: the costumes, the sets, the props – her tools and weapons. You might recognize a clear-plastic umbrella from The Pursuit of Happiness, a toy baby grand piano from Tyranny of Bliss, silver shoes that have glimmered in several pieces since the 1960s.
But building worlds requires discipline and discrimination. Four buttons may not be enough, but six is one too many. The shape of the vase may be right, but if the weight is not, you can’t use it. Mixed in with the performance relics, still radiating the afterglow of their brief tenure as art objects, a lot of what fills the room next door is just stuff that has never been used. Not exactly refuse, but material waiting to be called to life – a sort of counter-image of Tanya’s world: the feathers that didn’t make it onto the hat, the five gorilla dolls discarded at the last moment, the gloves that would have been perfect if only they had been a brighter yellow. This shadowy double (the dark side of Mars, if you will) is not only revealing of an artist’s discernment and taste, but full of potential waiting to be activated. It was chosen and collected with care, it almost came to life and didn’t – but it still could. It lies dormant, waiting to be awakened from the uncertain repose of objecthood.
Like in every fairy tale awakening, it is always the sleeping princess, really, who awakens the prince. So listen to the murmur of the feathers, feel the golden fabric, let those turquoise slippers entice you: they might bring you places you didn’t even know existed.
Wake up, make sure you have the exact change, and GOOD BUY!
ARTISTS Cheli Nighttraveller Clara Ursitti Helen Paris & Leslie Hill Millie Chen & Evelyn Von Michalofski Shawna Dempsey & Lorri Millan
reminiSCENT, is the third instalment in FADO’s performance series, Five Holes, which examines the significance of the body and the senses.Â
PROGRAMME
Pull Up To The Bumper by Clara Ursitti Street intervention: September 18, no set times Exhibition and limo tour: September 20 @ 6:00-9:00pm Karen Schreiber Gallery, 302-25 Morrow Avenue, Toronto
Pull Up To The Bumper, by Clara Ursitti, occurs in a white stretch limousine, the acme of celebrity display and mobile partying. For selected performance-goers and chance passers-by, an intimate conversation and olfactory experience awaits as they cruise the streets of Toronto. The limo’s sensuous, private interior, complete with refreshments and other luxury comforts, is a chamber redolent with the spirit of seduction. In this gender reversal, a woman holds the balance of wealth, status and sexual agency as the artist inquires into the dynamics of stardom and urban prowling.
On The Scent by Helen Paris & Leslie Hill (with guest artist Lois Weaver) September 19–21, please register to experience this performance 168 Simcoe Street, Toronto
On The Scent by Helen Paris and Leslie Hill, in collaboration with Lois Weaver, reconfigures an apartment with olfactory performances and interventions. Visitors journey through a series of visceral encounters that infuse the residence with heightened experiential potential. A trail of scents leads to stories and confessions wafting unexpectedly through the space and secreted away in compartments and corners. Reflecting upon the significance of smell in everyday life, this aromatized environment intensifies the role scent plays in identity, emotion, place and memory. Each performance lasts 30 minutes and is performed for 2 audience members. Please reserve your spot, there are a maximum of 40 participant spots in total.
Untitled by Cheli Nighttraveller September 20 @ 12:00pm Berczy Park, Front Street, Toronto
Cheli Nighttraveller’s untitled performance addresses racism operating at the level of the body and hygiene. Since the era of first contact, the so-called “odour of the other” has served as a pernicious means by which European colonizers stigmatized First Nations peoples. Reflecting at the edge of a fountain in Berczy Park, Nighttraveller recalls an episode in the life of Quannah Parker, the last chief of the Comanches, who once caused a stir by bathing in a public fountain. The artist will satirically confront the misconceived but persistent fiction of “cultural stench.”
The Seven Scents by Millie Chen & Evelyn Von Michalofski September 20–21 @ 12:00pm–4:00pm Harbourfront Centre, 235 Queens Quay West, Toronto
Inspired by the legendary exoticism and adventure of The Seven Seas, Millie Chen and Evelyn Von Michalofski provide an occasion for virtual travel with The Seven Scents. Cruise ship deck chair recliners face the waters of Lake Ontario and invite bystanders to lie back, relax, listen to a series of soundscapes and inhale the ambiance of distant locales. Like spa therapists, the artists will gently facilitate each lounger’s sensorial reverie. Distilling together sound and scent, romance and reality, the piece evocatively contemplates the fantasies of escape and the economic actualities of tourism.
Scentbar by Shawna Dempsey & Lorri Millan September 20 @ 6:00pm Karen Schreiber Gallery, 302-25 Morrow Avenue, Toronto
Shawna Dempsey and Lorri Millan’s Scentbar promises unique, personalized scents scientifically tailored to each client’s memories, anxieties and desires. Trained technicians will tally the answers to visitors’ scent-questionnaires and concoct custom-made perfumes in their laboratory cum parfumerie. Drawing from a top-secret odour palette, their potions transcend the use of scent for fashion or flirtation. These one-of-a-kind distillations connect the wearer intimately and olfactively to the complexities of the contemporary world—they are fragrances for troubled times.
FADO Performance Art Centre is pleased to kick off its 12-month durational performance art series, TIME TIME TIME, with a new work by acclaimed US artist Linda Montano, Appreciating the Chakras.
In a 3 1/2 hour public presentation created in collaboration with local artists, Montano will offer Toronto audiences a ‘happening’ environment using music, chanting, video projections, text and live performance. Audience members are invited to participate through their presence and through single-question Tarot readings with Linda. The more adventurous and dedicated are also invited to reserve a spot in the second part of the performance, during which Linda will enact a 7-hour healing meditation for participants’ chakras, followed by a morning talking circle.
In performances over the past 25 years, Linda Montano has steadily sought to erase the barriers between art and life. Her demonstrations of the theory that attitude, intent, and awareness transform ‘life’ into ‘art’ are a terminal assault on the art-as-commodity establishment. Montano’s work redefines art as a vigilant state-of-mind.
In 1984, Montano assured her place in art history along with Tehching Hsieh when the two completed an art piece in which they were tied at the waist with an 8 foot rope for a full year, never touching. That same year she began a personal experiment in attention, studying the body’s chakra system, in which she wore only one-colour clothes; listened to one note 7 hours a day; stayed in a coloured space 3 hours a day; spoke in a different accent each year; and for 7 years read palms and gave Art/Life Counselling in a 7-year installation at the New Museum. Her work in the areas of performance, writing, video and installation have had a profound effect both in their own right and in the influence they have had on artists around the world.
Performance Yellow
This fragrance opens us to the question, has the show started? It's winter, the theatre is colder than the street and the room is filled with people and all their winter smells: wet faux leather, down, too much shampoo, and beer breath. The atmosphere is a trickster. Am I late, am I early?
