Francesco Gagliardi is a performance artist, writer, and occasional filmmaker based in Toronto. His performance work has been presented internationally in venues including Issue Project Room (Brooklyn, NY), The Ontological-Hysteric Theater and The Stone (NYC), The Wulf and Pieter (Los Angeles), Esorabako (Tokyo), Fondazione Mudima (Milano), FADO Performance Art Centre, Harbourfront Centre, and 7a*11d (Toronto). His film work screened in venues including TIFF Wavelengths, the Torino Film Festival, Images Festival, and it was the subject of a retrospective at Pleasure Dome (Toronto) in October 2017. He teaches in the Department of Philosophy and at the Centre for Drama, Theatre, and Performance Studies, University of Toronto.
Over the course of a five-day intensive workshop led by Sara Wookey—one of the few dancers authorized by Yvonne Rainer to “transmit” (to use Rainer’s own phrase) her works—a mixed group of dance and performance artists will learn several of Rainer’s dance works, focusing primarily on Trio A (1966).
Consisting of a four-and-a-half minute sequence of movements that progress without repetition, phrasing, or emphasis and performed without musical accompaniment, Trio A(1966) is largely considered to be one of the originative works of the postmodern dance movement, as well as one of the most influential works in the canon of twentieth-century dance. Rainer’s interest in task-based movement, the ephemeral, the un-spectacular, and rethinking the performer-audience relationship are characteristic concerns of both contemporary dance artists and performance artists.
The starting point for this project is the shared conversation between dance and performance artists around the distinctions between repertoire and reenactment, in particular consideration of how these modes of archiving in live art relate to the increasing interest in presenting performance art and choreography in the museum.
The results of the project are a series of presentations of Trio A (and other works in the Rainer repertoire) in a variety of contexts: a dance studio, a gallery, and a museum; as an open rehearsal, a single iteration, and a rotating relay.
FADO’s Transmitting Trio A (1966) project overlaps with Yvonne Rainer’s visit to Toronto where she will deliver an artist talk (Saturday, March 21, 7:00pm) entitled Where’s the Passion? in the context of the AGO’s Radical Acts Unconference taking place on March 21. In addition, there are other activations to experience: Sara Wookey will be giving a lecture demonstration about Trio A and Gallery TPW will present a discursive series (March 20–28) curated by Jacob Korczynski and Kim Simon. Entitled, “…a container for mere possibilities that have not yet happened, a body in a state of becoming through time, or a structure for the expression of time as it moves both forwards and backwards at once,” the series responds to and thinks alongside the performances initiated by FADO, allowing the opportunity to see Rainer’s dance again within a constellation of conversations, readings and newly commissioned work.
CREDITS Curated and presented by FADO Performance Art Centre Directed by Sara Wookey, concieved by Yvonne Rainer Performed by: Aleesa Cohene, Ame Henderson, Andrea Nann, Francesco Gagliardi, Jon McCurley, Margaret Dragu, Martin Bélanger, Mikiki, Robert Abubo, Shannon Cochrane, Simon Rabyniuk, Sara Wookey Workshop partners: Dancemakers & Public Recordings Performance venue partner: AGO Gallery partner: Gallery TPW
PROGRAM & EVENTS
Lecture Demonstration: Dance is Hard to See: Capturing and Transmitting Movement through Language, Media and Muscle Memory, by Sara Wookey March 19, 7:30pm @ Dancemakers, Distillery District, 15 Case Goods Lane
Performance: Trio A (1966) by Sara Wookey March 24, 7:00pm @ Gallery TPW
Open rehearsals: Trio A (1966) March 22, 4:00–5:00pm @ Dancemakers March 25, 7:00-8:00pm @ AGO, 317 Dundas Street West March 28, 12:00-5:00pm @ Gallery TPW, 170 St. Helens Avenue
THANK YOU. This project is possible because of the generous support of Dancemakers (Ben Kamino and Emi Forster) in making the workshop possible. Warm thanks to Public Recordings (Ame Henderson) in conceptualizing the project and helping to assemble the group. Thanks to the AGO (Kathleen McLean and Paola Poletto) for inviting this project into their activities. Thanks to the contribution of Gallery TPW as main host venue, and to curators Jacob Korczynski and Kim Simon for their keen thinking in organizing a series of discursive events in response to the project’s proposal.
Above: Trio A rehearsal with Yvonne Rainer. 2015. Photo by Henry Chan. Below: Trio A dinner with Yvonne Rainer. 2015. Photo by Henry Chan.
First up in the Golden Book series features Francesco Gagliardi’s performance Film: Rope, presented during Images Festival 2013, with an essay written by Andrew J. Paterson. 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.”
Golden Book 1: Film; Rope (2013) Author: Andrew James Paterson Editor: Chris Gehman Design: Lisa Kiss Publisher: FADO Performance Art Centre Series: Golden Books, 1st 16 pages; 4.24 x 6 inches ; Print Book, English
Curated and produced by FADO Performance Art Centre, and presented in the context of the 2013 Images Festival.
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 ten-minute takes (the length of a camera roll), tracking in and 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.
CREDITS Created by Francesco Gagliardi Performed by Cara Spooner, Francesco Gagliardi, Marcin Kedzior and Michael Caldwell
PROGRAM & EVENTS
Performances April 12–14, 2013 @ 3:00pm April 16, 2013 @ 7:00pm & 8:30pm The Theatre Centre Pop-Up, 1095 Queen Street West, Toronto
FADO Artist Talk, moderated by Andrew James Paterson April 14, 2013 @ 4:30pm The Theatre Centre Pop-Up, 1095 Queen Street West, Toronto
Images Artist Talk: Performance and Media Art: Tools with Which to Deconstruct With Francesco Gagliardi, Tanya Lukin Linklater and Duane Linklater April 15, 2013 @ 4:00pm Urban Space Gallery, 401 Richmond Street West, Toronto
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?
