Performance
Five Holes: Matters of Taste

Curated by Paul Couillard

ARTISTS
Tejpal S. Ajji
Jess Dobkin
Gyrl Grip
Irene Loughlin

FADO presents four performance environments dealing with the sense of taste in this final ‘gustatotry’ component of the Five Holes series.

Taste is perhaps the most ‘personal’ of all the senses. It is both primal—providing the impulses that drive consumption—and individualized: one person’s desire is another’s poison. While the word ‘taste’ is often associated with the concept of aesthetic discernment, Matters of Taste places its emphasis on a specific, visceral definition of taste: the perception of flavour and texture that takes place inside our mouths.

This series explores the implications of a sense that operates through the placement of foreign material inside one’s body. Matters of Taste is not concerned with the familiar social terrain of banquets and dinner parties so much as the links between physical sensation, unconscious/conscious drives, and our mouths as a point of contact with the external world. How does one orchestrate a performance for another’s mouth? What are the dynamics that seduce, persuade or convince others to put things in their mouths? What are we or aren’t we willing to put in our mouths? What intentions are bound up in the impulse to stimulate one’s taste buds? What does our sense of taste reveal about our internal desires and external projections?

Performance
Five Holes: Listen!

Curated by Paul Couillard

ARTISTS
Erika DeFreitas
Linda Rae Dornan
Eric Létourneau
So-Yeon Park
Jed Speare

Five Holes: Listen! presents five unique performance ‘maneuvers’ dealing with the sense of hearing. Five Holes: Listen! is the fourth offering in the multi-year Five Holes series that seeks to examine the nature and importance of bodies (performer and audience) in performance art by focusing on individual senses.

This iteration in the series considers acts of “listening” as they are carried out by and impact upon physical, social, political and spiritual bodies. In OPEN, Linda Rae Dornan presents herself as a solitary figure, sitting quietly in the city, listening—encouraging us to also stop for a moment to hear what we normally ignore. Erika DeFreitas performance, entitled Untitled: Selective Hearing, offers her presence for a one-on-one exercise of listening as a way of locating the self. In A Quiet Zone II, Jed Speare lobbies the city for a quiet zone that would serve as an area of sound awareness. So-Yeon Park assembles chanters from various cultures to direct their voices toward individual participants’ wishes as a way of channeling transformative energy in Interfaith Chanting/Praying Ceremony. And in Standard III, Eric LĂ©tourneau evokes silence as a way of marking and remembering all of the world’s victims of political persecution in a multi-layered project that interrogates the role of the State and of mass media in silencing “silence” itself.


PROGRAMME

OPEN by Linda Rae Dornan
September 15, 2004 @ 8:00am–12:00pm | Queen’s Park, Toronto
September 16, 2004 @ 8:00am–12:00pm | University Avenue traffic island, south of Gerrard Street
Artist Talk: September 16, 2004 @ 8:00pm | WARC, 122–401 Richmond Street West

OPEN features Linda Rae Dornan in a durational tableau performance of listening, only listening, in an open space surrounded by non-functioning audio speakers. It is about slowing down, actually hearing the world breathe around oneself, and being part of that breath. Time slows down, and one is absorbed into the soundscape, into hearing oneself and the world.


Untitled: Selective Hearing by Erika DeFreitas
September 25–October 24, 2004
Saturdays & Sundays @ 9:00am–5:00pm | various locations
Presented in conjunction with the 7a*11d International Festival of Performance Art

Untitled: Selective Hearing explores the sense of hearing and more specifically the act of listening as an intimate act of inclusion, trust, and the location and dislocation of self amidst a variety of public venues in Toronto. Artist Erika DeFreitas will be offering her shared presence to those who are interested in taking the time to sit and listen to their surroundings. Participants sign up for a particular place and time to join the artist in a conscious act of listening to the surrounding space. DeFreitas notes about this piece: “Our society depends heavily on conscious auditory perception as being selective, and this perception has created a culture of selective hearing. Our ability to ‘block’ things out allows us to choose when we want to listen, what we listen to, and what we hear. Various components of our surrounding environment have perpetuated this practice of filtering sound and have dictated what is allowed to take root and what must be discarded. Such forms of selective hearing and escapism can alter our environment in a surreal way. In his writing about conceptual art, I believe that an awareness of the ways that a sense of space or environment can be established through sound, as well as an understanding of how we might unconsciously use sound to essentially make an environment transferable, can develop through a process of active listening.”


A Quiet Zone II by Jed Speare 
October 7, 2004
Artist Talk: October 7, 2004 @ 4:00pm | Rectory CafĂ©, Ward’s Island

In A Quiet Zone II, Jed Speare seeks to establish a zone of quiet through municipal channels in a neighbourhood of Toronto—not for the purpose of restricting noise, but for promoting sound awareness and contemplation. Under city by-laws, Quiet Zones regulating noise activity can be established around hospitals and retirement homes. Speare’s proposal seeks to overturn and expand the notion of the Quiet Zone philosophically and idealistically, creating an occasion and site for an aesthetic experience, listening to a particular urban environment. For the past several months, Speare has been seeking the appropriate agency to initiate a formal process to create a zone in the inner harbour at Ward’s Island. From late September, Speare will be working in Toronto to meet with community members and officials and continue this process, culminating in an event on October 7 that will present his progress to-date, at a site and time to be determined. A Quiet Zone II is supported in part by a residency at Do While Studio in Boston and a grant from the Nicholson Foundation. Download Jed Speare’s Quiet Zone (pdf)


Standard III by Eric Létourneau
Artist Talk: October 21, 2004 @ 9:00pm | XPACE, 303 Augusta Avenue, Toronto
Presented with 7a*11d International Festival of Performance Art

Eric LĂ©tourneau’s “manoeuvre” Standard III began as a two-hour uninterrupted nationwide radio broadcast on Radio-Canada on April 11, 2004 (Easter). The program featured 198 30-second periods of radio silence punctuated by an alphabetical listing of every country in the world. The same phrase introduced each silence: “Thirty seconds of silence for domestic and foreign political victims…” This broadcast was recorded live off the airwaves and remixed for publication on two CDs along with a text that considers the effects of administrative regulation and State control on mass media. Beginning in October 2004, copies of the publication will be sent through diplomatic channels to each country of the world. On the occasion of each country’s national celebration, its head of state will be contacted to verify the receipt and subsequent response to the CD.


Interfaith Chanting/Praying Ceremony by So-Yeon Park
January 27, 2005 @ 7:00pm
Alumni Hall of Victoria College, University of Toronto, 91 Charles Street, Toronto

Interfaith Chanting/Praying Ceremony is an interactive event organized by Korean artist So-Yeon Park. Park has assembled a circle of local volunteer chanters from a variety of religious traditions who will direct their voices toward participants’ wishes as a way of channeling transformative energy. Audience members are invited to walk around the circle and listen, as well as to enter the circle and hold a wish while the chanters surround them and pray for their wish to come true. Park explains, “This spontaneous multi-faith circle of chanting and prayer brings together people from many faiths. Religious/spiritual practitioners are invited to experience and share their own deep faith in an environment of diverse spiritual devotion. Viewers will have an opportunity to witness and feel the power of prayer.”

Writing
Five Holes: reminiSCENT

reminiSCENT, curated by Jim Drobnick and Paul Couillard, is the third instalment in FADO’s performance series, Five Holes, which examines the significance of the body and the senses. 

If the sense of smell appears to have been eclipsed by the other senses in Western culture, there is one realm in which it retains an almost mythic stature—memory. reminiSCENT acknowledges the powerful relationship between smell and memory, and explores the artistic and cultural potential of this undervalued sense. Documentation in literature and science indicates that no other sense evokes memory as intensely as smell. For Marcel Proust, a whiff of madeleine conjured up the world of childhood; for Helen Keller, smell was a “potent wizard” that transported one across thousands of miles. Even newborns, after just a few days, recognize and remember their mothers via the distinctiveness of smell. As compelling as these olfactory experiences are, there is a tendency to regard smells purely on the level of immediacy.

Yet fragrances also bear complex social meanings. How, what and why we smell are subject to many cultural influences—one only has to consider hygiene, and the myriad ways in which the body is bathed, cared for and scented, to appreciate the way smell plays a role in embodying and transmitting culture. In short, smell is as much a learned, cultural practice as it is a physical act of perception.

The five projects in reminiSCENT focus on both of these aspects of scent, as a practice and a physical act. Smell and memory can interact in diverse ways, especially when memory is considered via its multiple dimensions: personal, cultural, social and historical. How, for instance, do odours affect the self and the narrative of one’s life? How can scents symbolize or mark political moments and historical eras? In what ways are aromas significant to the creation of cultural memories and identity? How do power and status play out on an olfactory level? Such questions are implicitly raised in the performative installations of reminiSCENT.

Through faux marketing campaigns, quasi-scientific experiments, intimate encounters, unrehearsed rendezvous, and indecent appropriations of public space, these artists engage with the spectrum of smell from the everyday to the abject. Using organic substances, synthesized scents, perfumes, ambient odours, fragrant language and aromatized bodies, these projects foreground the diverse potential of smells in discourse, experience and culture. Visitors may feel their olfactory abilities being tested and their preconceptions about the sense of smell challenged as the role of scent is foregrounded in the contexts of race, tourism, perfume, domesticity and sexuality.

While the main premise of reminiSCENT concerns the role of scent in memory, there is also a more general imperative to recollect the sense of smell itself and its place in culture as a whole. The progressive deodorization of homes, buildings and public spaces since the nineteenth century has created what one geographer calls “blandscapes,” contemporary places that are sensorially numb and devoid of perceptual interest. The artworks of reminiSCENT symbolically and viscerally reconnect visitors with the smell of natural processes and material existence. Even with the rampant commercialization of olfaction in the past decade, evidenced by the profusion of commodities imbued with scents and the appropriation of aromatherapy for air fresheners, it is important to remember that smell has a meaningfulness outside of corporate marketing and brand-name identity. Smell is often declared the oldest of the senses, and this curatorial project rediscovers its capacity for art, knowledge and social significance.


ABOUT THE PROJECTS

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 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.


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.”


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.


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.

Performance
Five Holes: reminiSCENT

Curated by Jim Drobnick and Paul Couillard

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. 


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.

Writing
Five Holes: Touched

Five Holes: Touched is the second in a series of performances dealing with the five senses. The first part (Five Holes: I’ll be seeing you, A Space, 1995) used the device of a peep show to explore the sense of sight and the process of seeing. For Touched, artists are using the nooks and crannies of Symptom Hall to create performance installations that explore aspects of touch and our attitudes surrounding it.

Touch is arguably the most intimate and revealing of the senses, that, above all others, can moves us to ecstasy or shatter us. To touch is to ‘feel’. When we are deeply affected by something, we sometimes say we are ‘touched’. At the same time, to say that someone is ‘touched’ is to say that they are crazy. To give something one’s own ‘touch’ is to infuse it with a personal style, while to keep ‘in touch’ is to maintain contact. Human cultures are rife with taboos around the sense of touch – who, what, how, when and where we can or can’t touch – governing even the touches we give our own bodies.

The common thread among the 8 diverse performances works chosen for Five Holes: Touched include a fascination with the personal, a strong regard for the everyday – whether real or as a staged simulation – and a need to venture into the visceral in search of expression. The artists’ approaches to the sense of touch vary widely – Frank Moore’s hands-on sensual eroticism, May Chan’s handling of everyday foodstuffs in the simple act of cooking, Frank Green’s ‘scientific’ research process – yet each shares a vulnerability that seems essential to the nature of touch.

Artists were chosen both through solicitation and an open call. With the possible exception of Frank Moore – whose cerebral palsy has not doubt had an influence on his interest in touch as a vehicle of communication, expression and transformation – there was a curious lack of response from ‘heterosexual’ men. I believe this reflects how much the concerns with ‘the body’ in art and critical writing over the last 10 years, at least in North America, have in fact been the terrain of those who feel disenfranchised from what we identify as ‘mainstream’ culture. More than anything, however, I think the quality that binds all of these artists is courage. A willingness to enter and explore risky places – whether that means doing work that is quiet, physically grueling, or uncompromisingly simple – is universally evident. Performance is generally understood as a visual form, and to move to an exploration of the tactile demands a whole different approach from both the artists and the audience members who follow them on their journeys.

May Chan, a Hong Kong-born artist who lives and works in Kingston, documents her everyday reality with ‘story poems’ in which plain language is infused with a direct but affecting rhythm. In this work, May explores the associative and metaphorical meanings of touch – how, for example, by handling the foods her mother once did, she completes another link in a chain of touch that stretches back through history.

Frank Green, a U/S. artist based in Cleveland, considers how institutional structures, supposedly created to encourage our well-being, sanitize or even deny touch. The implications of this denial have profound implications for both our civil liberties and our physical and spiritual health. For this performance he is assisted by two other artists from Cleveland, Thea Miklowski and Holly Wilson, as well as several Toronto artists.

Three Toronto-based artists return from the first installment of Five Holes. Fiona Griffiths, whose work about touch reflects a background of research as performer (dance, theatre), body trainer, visual artist, surgical nurse and therapist, is on a hunt to learn the details of an internal void often triggered by touch, a touch that fails to acknowledge the one who is touched. Ed Johnson calls attention to the ‘gesture’ of touch, which begins long before contact, and how the way a touch is given and the way it is received can be entirely different things; one man’s hit is another man’s caress. Bernice Kaye continues her determined journey to strip away superflouous details – all of the bells and whistles that we usually associate with performance – to get at the essence of each individual sense.

Stefanie Marshall, also based in Toronto, has created a body of performance works that feature repetitive, ritualistic actions, obsessive use of everyday objects, and a fascination for pungent, musky materials. In this new work, she seeks to touch the silences that she cannot find the words to express – hoping, perhaps, to find language in the concrete physicality of objects.

Frank Moore – who lives and works in Berkeley with a performance ‘family’ that includes his wife, Linda Mac and student/colleague Michael LaBash – has spent a lifetime exploring the magic potential of touch. Since being “sucked into performance,” as he puts it, as, “
the best way to create the intimate community which I as a person needed and that I thought society needed as an alternative to personal isolation,” Frank Moore has become a powerful philosopher about art in general, performance art in particular, and their potential to shape reality.

Julie Andrée Tremblay (jAT) and David Johnston (jHAVE) of Montréal deal with the confusing nature of touch, understood so easily by our nervous system, but only through metaphor by our brain. The two artists will create an installation that evolves as the festival progresses, a changing passageway of sensual koans.

Performance
Five Holes: Touched

Curated by Paul Couillard

ARTISTS
May Chan
Frank Green
Fiona Griffiths
Ed Johnson
Stephanie Marshall
Frank Moore
Julie Andrée Tremblay & David Johnston (jAT & jHAVE)

Five Holes: Touched is the second in a series of performances dealing with the five senses. The first part (Five Holes: I’ll be seeing you, A Space, 1995) used the device of a peep show to explore the sense of sight and the process of seeing. For Touched, artists are using the nooks and crannies of Symptom Hall to create performance installations that explore aspects of touch and our attitudes surrounding it.

All of tonight’s work is being presented simultaneously; each installation is available for viewing according to a timetable negotiated between you as an audience participant and the artists involved. Some pieces, like the work of Frank Moore and Frank Green, have a specific time cycle that may require waiting and committing to going through a kind of journey. Others, like May Chan’s, have ‘peak’ times that request a captive audience for short periods of time. Still other pieces can be entered at any point and experienced for as long as your attention span lasts. Explore, Enjoy. Remember, the work is about ‘touch’.

Co-presented by the 7a*11d International Festival of Performance Art and sponsored by the Theatre Resource Centre.


PROGRAMME

Sense of Touch
May Chan
My performance is about Chinese culture, about being a woman, and about living. I use sound, action and reading poem-stories. I deal with sense of touch abstractly, more in the sense of keeping in touch. Paul Simon sings, “Touch the sound of silence.” Part of the performance is about food and cooking. I come from Hong Kong, close to Canton in Southern China/ Canton is famous for its cooking. For people In Canton, cooking (eating) is important. Their sense of taste is well developed. Their art s their dishes of foods. Their art galleries are their restaurants. I keep in touch with my background – food.

Anonymous Test Site
Frank Green
With Thea Miklowski, Holly Wilson, Michell Allard, Churla Burla, Lucia Cino, Curtis MacDonald
Since testing positive for antibodies to HIV in 1988, I have practices my art as a ritual of self-healing. I now consider myself to be cured of my dis-ease. My work differs from much of current cultural practice around AIDS in its radical refusal of victim or patient status. I have analyzed and criticized various aspects of western medical ideology through a series of self-photographs, performances, and installations focused on my own body as evidence. I am now examining the phenomenology of the test, in which parts of the body are subjected to arcane processes in laboratories inaccessible to the subject, resulting in ‘diagnoses’ that have profound social implications.

Touched
Fiona Griffiths
by
.When I am touched by
.a transformation occurs, a momentous infinite stop in time. Then I am nothing.

Threshold
Ed Johnson
Craving sensation, we quickly learn to set in motion whatever is needed to satisfy our expectations.

To Touch Is To Feel
Bernice Kaye
A blindfolded exploration of different textures, including living creatures.


she said nothing waiting
Stefanie Marshall
counting
1 2 3 4
ooooooohhhhhh
touch

The Cave of the Metasensual Beast
Frank Moore
With Michael LaBash & Linda Mac
Will you let yourself be guided into the cave of passion, imagination, healing human exploring touch, and the unlimited erotic possibilities of blindness? The Beast is waiting for you!

gravity light wind thought scent
Julie Andrée Tremblay and David Johnston (jAT & jHAVE)
Does the floor touch you? Or does gravity touch you? Does wind touch? Does it ask permission? The existence of identity seems to co-exist with illusion/desire for control over what touches us: we choose our food, clothes, lovers. What are we? What do we become when we are touched? Where does touch occur? Inside the body? Where inside? Can you smell it? Paranoia and trust are the parallel poles of touch. Look: no hands, no skin; only synapes and the skin inside the skin. Invisibly touched.

Series
Five Holes

Curatorial Statement by Paul Couillard

Five Holes foregrounds our bodies by examining aspects of the five basic human senses. The presence of bodies—the performer’s body and the audience members’ bodies—is an essential element of performance. We ‘perform’ when we bring our bodies into relationships with an audience in time and space. Five Holes considers some of the ways in which sight, touch, smell, hearing and taste allow us to perceive. At the core of this project is a concern with our bodies as a root aspect of humanness. The presence of bodies—the performer’s body and the audience members’ bodies—is an essential element of performance. We ‘perform’ when we bring our bodies into relationships with an audience in time and space. Five Holes foregrounds our bodies, considering some of the ways in which sight, touch, smell, hearing and taste allow us to perceive.

Civilization has constructed a worldview where ‘virtual’ reality has become a tantalizing ideal – a desired end point that will offer our consciousness and imagination a new beginning and a new territory to explore. At the same time, cultural theory has come to consider our bodies as something separate from our selves – referring to an objectified Other, ‘the body’, sometimes understood as a ‘text’, and sometimes considered as one ‘site’ among many to be inhabited. Our bodies are now subject to interrogation on multiple fronts, particularly in the realm of performance – from Stelarc’s assertions that “the body is obsolete” to Orlan’s surgical remodeling of her physical appearance. It seems that we are following an inevitable path, guided by RenĂ© Descartes’ oft-quoted maxim, “I think, therefore I am.” We are in a headlong rush to abandon our bodies – our imperfect, traitorous physical forms that suffer, wear out and eventually die. We seek immortality and omnipotence, two qualities that our ‘minds’ can imagine but that our ‘bodies’ can never attain.

But where and how are knowledge and imagination generated? For me, the answer lies in the daily struggles and resistances that my body undergoes. I am motivated by imperatives – survival, empathy, a search for fulfillment – that are bodily driven. Learning does not come from having my thoughts fully realized the moment that I think them; learning comes from experience, which is another way of saying that it develops through the process of making my thoughts manifest in physical form. Learning happens as I go about trying to reconcile my theoretical ideal with the exigencies of physical laws and available resources. To ‘do’ inevitably brings a deeper, more nuanced understanding than to ‘imagine’. This is not a simple or straightforward process: it brings pain as well as pleasure, and often what I discover seems neither fair nor friendly. Nevertheless, I am not so eager to leave behind my cross-eyed, bow-legged body. I love this life, and I am certain that what I have to learn or discover can only be manifested through my body.

We define our living bodies in multiple ways: as material (flesh, blood and bone); as process (respiration, circulation, electrical impulses); and as vessel (of experience and consciousness). It could be argued that our senses are what constitute our bodies. We associate our senses most directly with ‘sensation’, the domains of pleasure and horror, but our senses also play a larger role in connecting us to the world and shaping our identities. They are how we apprehend the world—the points of intersection between our individual consciousnesses and the actuality of time and space. It is through our senses that we undertake and negotiate our relationships to each other and our surroundings. Human senses have developed over time. Each sense provides us with a different set of information, evolving, if we believe Darwin, according to what best allows us to survive and prosper as a species. As conditions change, and as our bodies adapt in other ways, presumably our senses could also change. Five Holes provides artists and audiences with an opportunity to test their senses as they are now, informed by both history and imagination.

Five Holes brings us together in this time and this space to see, touch, smell, hear and taste. These varied projects are united in their search for the possibilities—not only for pleasure, but also for knowing – that the senses have to offer.


Five Holes was a multi-year, multi-event series curated by Paul Couillard. Spanning the years 1995–2006, each iterative event highlighted one of the body’s five senses.

Five Holes: I’ll be seeing you (1995)
Five Holes: Touched (1997)
Five Holes: reminiSCENT (2003)
Five Holes: Listen! (2004)
Five Holes: Matters of Taste (2006)

Performance
Five Holes: I’ll be seeing you

Curated by Paul Couillard

ARTISTS
Bernice Kaye
Ed Johnson
Fiona Griffiths
Paul Couillard
Sandy McFadden

Shake off the New Year’s blahs by taking in a performance art peep show. FADO combines installation and performance art in Five Holes: I’ll be seeing you, featuring new works created by members of the FADO collective. Isolated in individual cubicles, the performers will each create their own six-hour performance work that can only be seen through tiny peepholes. Twenty-five cents buys viewers a one-minute look, or for $5 you can be an audience for the full six hours.

What’s behind that curtain? There’s only one way to find out.

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?

Top Notes

yellow mandarin, mimosa

Middle Notes

honey, chamomile, salt

Base Notes

narcissus, guaiac wood, piss, beer