Tag: Dainty Smith

Curated by Dainty Smith & Golboo Amani

PUSH.PULL is a six-month online series of interdisciplinary events examining emergent and intersectional developments in performance art and QT BIPOC cabaret. Curated by storyteller, producer and stage performer Dainty Smith and multidisciplinary artist Golboo Amani, PUSH.PULL highlights QTBIPOC cabaret performers at the intersections of live stage performance and radical political performativity.

ARTISTS
Adrienne Huard, Aggie Panda, Amber Dawn, Anasimone, Babia Majora, Betsy Swoon, Cara De Melo, Cat Zaddy, Crocodile Lightning, Dolly Berlin, Gay Jesus, Imogen Quest, Ivory, James Knott, Johlene, Kimora Koi, LAL, Lucinda Mui, Lwrds, Mikiki, Perle Noire, Rania El Mugammar, Ravyn Wngz, Suki Tsunami, Tanya Cheex and Tygr Willy.

PUSH.PULL presents three online Showcases featuring performers from across North America. Each showcase offers a diverse range of contemporary practices reflecting the theatrical, political and emotional range and depth of cabaret performance. 

PUSH.PULL presents BARE
April 9 @ 9:00pm (EST)
Featuring: Suki Tsunami, Lady Ore, Crocodile Lightning, Gay Jesus, Ivory, LAL  
BARE: A showcase of sensual exploration that reimagines and extorts the expectations of our own desires. Performances offering consensual and deliberate confrontations, challenging the idea of the submissive and passive nude. When skin is presented, when nudity is shown, who is vulnerable? Who is powerless? 

PUSH.PULL presents TAUNT
April 23 @ 9:00pm (EST)
Featuring: Betsy Swoon, Dolly Berlin, Johleen, Ravyn Wngz, Lucinda Miu, James Knott, Anasimone
TAUNT: A show that celebrates the power of seduction; of intentional sexuality. A thread of rage runs though burlesque. Burlesque is unapologetically rebellious, it is where the feminine, self-love, sexual agency and manipulation are performed without shame or explanation. It is a place and space where we can all misbehave together and where we are taunted by sexuality wielded like a weapon. 

PUSH.PULL presents TOPPED
May 14 @ 9:00pm (EST)
Featuring: Imogen Quest, Babia Majora, Cara De Melo, Tanya Cheex, Cat Zaddy, Mikiki, Tygr Willy, Adrienne Huard
TOPPED: Cautions, titillates and teases. The cabaret is a feminized, glamourous and glittered, a holy and sacred place. Moving and living through expressions of sexuality in its full scope of dominance and assertion, the performer toys and plays with gender, power, laughter, vulnerability, and seduction. In cabaret, we have the audacity to believe that our bodies are important, invaluable, meaningful and worth listening to. 

PUSH.PULL includes a three-part speaker series inviting performers and cultural creatives to engage in conversations at the intersections of visual culture, sex work, performance and politics by recognizing cabaret as a site of cultural production and community engagement. We’ve also included a series of workshops led by professionals in the field, aimed at engaging audience participants and community members in immersive skill-sharing experiences deepening appreciation, interest and critical engagement with cabaret.

April 14: Speaker Series: Unusual Business: The business of being a showgirl
April 28: Workshop: Body Love with Dainty Smith
For more information about PUSH.PULL workshops AND artist talks, visit Aluna Theatre

PUSH.PULL is presented in association with Buddies in Bad Times Theatre & Aluna Theatre. Sponsored by FADO Performance Art Centre. Funded by the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council.

Canada
www.daintysmith.com

Dainty Smith is a Toronto based Actor, Burlesque Performer, Writer, Producer, and Speaker. Dainty believes that through the art of storytelling and a willingness to be exposed that genuine human connections can be made. Her performances often tell deeply vulnerable stories regarding race, religion, sexuality and challenging social boundaries. Dainty took performing arts at George Brown College and is a powerful self taught storyteller, performer, and orator. She acted in the acclaimed theatre group Les Blues and has starred in two short films: How To Stop A Revolution, and Red Lips (Cages for Black Girls). Her diverse array of stage performances include the Mayworks Festival, Gladstone Hotel, Buddies in Bad Times Theatre, the Tranzac, Artscape, and Daniels Spectrum Theatre.

Over the past decade Dainty has brought her utterly raw, emotional artistry to her burlesque performances. She co-produced the performance art collective Colour Me Dragg and founded Les Femme Fatales: Women of Colour burlesque troupe, the only burlesque troupe for women of colour in Canada. Her performances have been showcased at Rock. Paper. Sistahz, the Rhubarb Festival, Harbourfront Centre, Killjoy’s Kastle: A Lesbian Haunted House conceived by Allyson Mitchell and countless venues throughout the city of Toronto. Recently, her speaking engagements have included workshops with women and youth on themes of empowerment, glamour, beauty, self love and self care as revolutionary acts. She has taught workshops at Ryerson University, University of Ottawa, and York University on radical body positivity, survival and thriving.Dainty has written for Sway magazine, Lover Magazine, About magazine, Xtra! Newspaper, Sage Blog, Shameless Magazine and The Witness Journal.

MONOMYTHS is conceived and curated by Shannon Cochrane and Jess Dobkin.
The series is presented by FADO in the context of Progress.

MONOMYTHS invites a diverse collection of artists, scholars, and activists to revise Joseph Campbell’s conception of the hero’s journey through performance art, lectures, workshops, and other offerings. This new assemblage of non-linear un-narratives proposes a cultural, political and social feminist re-visioning of the world. The MONOMYTHS perception of the universal journey dispels the notion of the lone patriarchal figure on a conquest to vanquish his demons—both inner and outer—in consideration of community, collectivity, and collaboration.

MONOMYTHS Stage 3: Meeting of the Mentor
The Exquisite Course

Performances by Dainty Smith, Tamyka Bullen, Eliza Chandler, Zanette Singh, Ariel Smith, Johnson Ngo

The Exquisite Course, presented by the Feminist Art Gallery (F.A.G.), is an evening of short lectures by feminist and/or queer artists and creative folks from a variety of disciplines, interests, and positions. A mixture of fiction and non-fiction, The Exquisite Course collages real-life stories and performance mythologies around the microphone campfire to stitch together tales of meeting real-life mentors.

The Feminist Art Gallery is a response, a process, a site, a protest, an outcry, an exhibition, a performance, an economy, a conceptual framework, a place, and an opportunity. We host we fund we advocate we support we claim. The Feminist Art Gallery (F.A.G) is our geographical footprint located in Toronto and is run by Allyson Mitchell and Deirdre Logue.

This event will be ASL interpreted.

SummerWorks, in partnership with The Theatre Centre and a roster of Toronto theatre and performance organizations/presenters and companies including Aluna Theatre, Dancemakers, FADO Performance Art Centre, Summerworks, The Theatre Centre and Volcano Theatre brings the world to Toronto with Progress, an international festival of performance and ideas from January 14–February 7, 2016.