LAB #1: We Could Break Performance A podcast by Vanessa Godden and James Knott
We Could Break Performance is a podcast hosted by artists Vanessa Godden and James Knott investigating the question: “How do we evaluate the substance of tropes enacted in performance art?”
Each episode of will We Could Break Performance will feature a local performance artist and ourselves in conversation, to help us tackle our dilemma and provide perspective on the values of performance art tropes that we may share or disagree on. Does performance go harder if the performer gets harmed? Or is that negligence in disguise. Is endurance awe-worthy? Or is it sometimes used to unpoetic ends? Does nudity really bare all? Perhaps by the end this series’ run, we could break performance.
LAB #2: Threshold A public performance series proposed by Christina Anna Trutiak
ARTISTS Isaak Fong lwrds duniam Tess Martens
Staircases vary in shape and size and reflect the architectural and cultural norms of their time. Symbolically, a staircase suggests a continuum for human growth that unites two things; places, ideas or states of being. Stairs feature a duality; they can act as a passage facilitator or a major barrier; an aesthetic delight or a spine-chilling obstacle.
Threshold is a site-specific performance series that invites emerging performance artists to choose a staircase in Toronto and to develop a performance in reflection to this transitional space.
A staircase’s inherent uncertainty and duality will provide a context for progressive actions, interesting dialogues and images for the audience and for the performers themselves. Depending on their context, location, materiality and function; there is a dependence in which our mind and body considers while walking on stairs. We must imbue a sense of trust. The action and option of ascending and descending on a structure integrates a decision that the performer is driven to make in contrast to a monospace of horizontal descent.
The staircase is an odd, fluid and queer space that exists as a threshold for human growth.
Threshold features solo performances representing autonomy within a larger system of interconnectivity. These transitional spaces bridge gaps toward other destinations.
A certain step may change things. A certain step may evoke something new. One action will lead to another.
PROGRAM DETAILS
lwrds duniam Date: Sunday, April 13 Start time: 3:00pm Duration: 1 hour, RAIN OR SHINE Location: 1755 Lake Shore Blvd West, Toronto, M6S 5A3 Sunnyside Park revetment steps, adjacent to the boardwalk south of Gus Ryder outdoor pool. Intersection of Parkside Drive & Lake Shore Boulevard West.
I often dream of stairs surrounded by bodies of water. There are spiritual interpretations for staircases that consider them symbolic for life’s journeys and the cyclical nature of death and rebirth. oneiric, atemporal, sanctuary space is a site-specific land-based performance dreamscape, collaborating with the energies of the stones in relationship to the lake, tapping into their memories, and connecting my body to the magic of the water and land.
Isaak Fong Date: Saturday, April 19 Start Time: 9:00am, RAIN OR SHINE Duration: 25 minutes Location: Harbord Street Bridge, Harbord Street & Grace Street, 400 Grace St, Toronto, M6G 3A9 Performance consists of a 10-minute field study presentation followed by a 15-minute performance. After the performance, audience is invited to join in walking the route of Garrison Creek with the artist and other “walking collaborators” to the creek head at Lake Ontario near old Fort York (approximate walk duration 1.5 hours).
A field study where artist Isaak Fong performs the role of para-anthropologist/eighteenth-century log driver to facilitate a group “re-excavation” of The Lost Giant Steps buried along the western abutment of the Harbord Street Bridge to break up the “Log Jams” that conceal the City’s buried hydrology.
Whether it be daily workdays or nightly parties, I grind. The travel to work 9-5 grind. The nightclub genital grind. Grind on stairwell railings with a skateboard just like Tony Hawk’s video game. In this performance, I will be climbing the Toronto Baldwin Park steps and sliding down the railing until I get too tired or my vagina hurts from the “pole burn”. After each grind, using sanitary wipes to clean the public railings. Showing the play and leisure of sliding down the railings and the work and labour of cleaning afterwards. I will wear a women’s suit with a skirt and pink underwear to be a working 9-5 woman. Bridget Jones’ famous scene where a camera catches her sliding down a fire pole and the audience can see her knickers will be references. I will play Dolly Parton’s Working 9 to 5 on repeat on a boombox. Grinding 9-5 is a feminist and humorous performance about work and leisure with an absurdist take.
With the return of the Emerging Artists Series in 2025, we are initiating the Emerging Artists Series LAB. In the EAS LAB, emerging artist-curators bring forward their most pressing performance art dilemmas, queries, and wandering ponderings. Working in collaboration with the FADO’s Director, the curators of the 2025 Emerging Artists Series, and their EAS LAB cohort, our LABists work through a research project of their own devising. Questions are asked, methods chosen, and outcomes are not guaranteed. Results vary—from podcasts to public performance experiments, and everything in between.
The Emerging Artists Series LABists for 2025 are: Christina Anna Trutiak James Knott Vanessa Godden
LAB #1: Threshold A public performance series proposed by Christina Anna Trutiak
Threshold is a research project that invites local artists to make an outdoors performance on a public staircase in Toronto. Locations and details coming in April.
April 13: lwrds April 19: Isaak Fong April 26: Tess Martens
LAB #2: We Could Break Performance A podcast by Vanessa Godden and James Knott May 2025
We Could Break Performance is a podcast hosted by artists Vanessa Godden and James Knott investigating the question: “How do we evaluate the substance of tropes enacted in performance art?”
Each episode of will We Could Break Performance will feature a local performance artist and ourselves in conversation, to help us tackle our dilemma and provide perspective on the values of performance art tropes that we may share or disagree on. Does performance go harder if the performer gets harmed? Or is that negligence in disguise. Is endurance awe-worthy? Or is it sometimes used to unpoetic ends? Does nudity really bare all? Perhaps by the end this series’ run, we could break performance.
After a 10-year hiatus, FADO’s emerging Artists Series is back in 2025!
A much-loved staple of FADO’s programming year from 2003 to 2014, FADO’s emerging Artists series was created to provide a platform for younger artists to develop and present a performance piece in a professional context, often for the first time. As the series developed, the opportunity it provided extended to nurturing new performance curators. Each new project in the series has interpreted in its own particular way the central term of its mandate reformulating who/what should be considered ‘emerging’ in the context of performance art practice as presented through the FADO frame.
For the 2025 Emerging Artist Series, ‘emerging’ is discarded as a label that reveals age, defines time spent or as a qualification of perceived depth of experience. Instead, from February through May two curators and three series researcher residents develop performance installations, performance events and research projects that bring the notion of ‘emerging’ into relationship with community and forms of practice.
2025: On View | curated by Jordan King 2025: not knowing is the most intimate | curated by Shalon T. Webber-Heffernan 2025: EAS LABists: Christina Anna Trutiak, James Knott, Vanessa Godden 2014: 11:45 P.M. | curated by Kate Barry 2013: .sight specific. | curated by Francisco-Fernando Granados 2011: Extra-Rational | curated by Gale Allen 2009: Misinformed Informants | curated by Lisa Visser 2008: Vivência Poética | curated by Erika DeFreitas 2007: Enter-gration | curated by Nahed Mansour 2005: Open Airway | curated by Elle McLaughlin 2005: Feats, might | curated by Alissa Firth-Eagland 2004: Home Repair by One Night Only 2004: Game City | curated by Craig Leonard 2003: Gestures | curated by Tanya Mars
FADO’s Emerging Artists series was initiated in 2003 by Canada’s own performance art matriarch and educator Tanya Mars, who recognized that the best way to encourage young artists was by offering them a professional presentation opportunity. Her vision was one of mentorship, targeting an interesting mix of new and emerging artists, many of them former students, whom she commissioned to develop new works responding to a thematic context. The first event, curated by Mars, included ambient, conceptual and cabaret-style performance art gestures. This event later developed into the Emerging Artists Series. FADO’s intention with this on-going series was to nurture new work and ideas, provide direction and mentorship, and showcase the work of the city’s newest perspectives in performance art.
As the series developed, it became clear that this was an opportunity to nurture not only emerging performance artists, but also emerging curators, allowing FADO to encourage new curatorial voices in performance art, and introducing FADO to new communities of artists (and new artists to FADO). The series has continued to develop and change, later including the work of artists not just from Toronto, but regionally as well. This way, the series exposes local audiences to the range of performance work happening in the emerging performance scene across Canada.
Series Purple
An ode to FADO's history, Series Purple is composed of a collection of purple fragrance materials dating back to the Roman Empire. Dense, intense, and meandering, this fragrance tells us non-linear stories.
