LAB #1:Â 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: âHow do we evaluate the substance of tropes enacted in performance art?â
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 seriesâ run, we could break performance.
10 artists. 10 score writers. A score is an old term for ‘twenty’ of something = A Score of Scores.
ARTISTS & SCORE WRITERS Abedar Kamgari & Naseh Kamgari Holly Timpener & Enok Ripley James Knott & Francisco-Fernando Granados Keith Cole & David Roche Laura Paolini & Tomasz Szrama Mikiki & Jan Peacock Paul Couillard & Elvira SantamarĂa-Torres Rita Camacho Lomeli & Alejandro Tamayo SA Smythe & Autumn Knight Tanya Mars & Myriam Laplante
Put together by Shannon Cochrane and Francesco Gagliardi
FADO’s spring performance art series invites 10 artists to perform the interpretation of a performance score, written for them by an artist of their own choosing. Artists from across a spectrum of practices grounded in live performance (including cabaret, music, experimental composition, intermedia, video and more) interpret a score designed for them by an array of Canadian and international artists. The duos have chosen to strategize their collaboration in myriad waysâfrom conspiring together to revealing the final score only moments before the live presentation.
Emerging in the early 1960s in the context of the FLUXUS movement and in conversation with the expanded compositional practices of John Cage and LaMonte Young, âevent scoresâ relied on elements of collaboration, improvisation, and chance to challenge traditional understandings of originality and artistic creation. Often very short, event scores typically consisted of lists of prompts and instructions ranging from the mundane to the elusively abstract and were circulated among fellow artists with an open invitation to interpret and perform them however they wanted.
A Score of Scores is an experimental back-to-basics platform for artists to create new small-scale work in a spirit of experimentation, collaboration, and agility.
PROGRAM May 12, 2023 @ 7:00pm: James Knott, Tanya Mars May 13, 2023 @ 7:00pm: Keith Cole, Laura Paolini May 18, 2023 @ 7:00pm: Paul Couillard, Holly Timpener May 19, 2023 @ 7:00pm: Mikiki, SA Smythe May 20, 2023 @ 7:00pm: Rita Camacho Lomeli, Abedar Kamgari
Francisco-Fernando Granados (he/him) was born in Guatemala and lives in Toronto, Dish With One Spoon Territory. Since 2005, his practice has traced his movement from convention refugee to critical citizen, using abstraction performatively, site-specifically, and relationally to create projects that challenge the stability of practices of recognition. His work has developed from the intersection of formal painterly training, working in performance through artist-run spaces, studies in queer and feminist theory, and early activism as a peer support worker with immigrant and refugee communities in unceded Coast Salish territories.
.sight.specific. proposes performance art as the staging of sight as site: observation as contour, terrain, and architecture for modes of aesthetic embodiment. The project consists of four commissioned live works in search of situated perspectives on the possibilities of performance as a contextual spatial practice. The works situate artists and audiences by trading knowledge on the streets, tracing trans-planetary sight lines, creating home and hospitality in real time through cyberspace, and staging variations on absurdity. The shapes of these relationships brings into focus questions of knowledge and memory, contact and distance, longing and belonging.
.site.specific is co-presented with Xpace Cultural Centre
PROGRAM & EVENTS
Performance: The School of Bartered Knowledge by Golboo Amani Fridays and Saturdays in March 2013 @ 2:00pmâ6:00pm
Performance: Planetaria by Cressida Kocienski March 8, 2013 @ 8:00pm
Performance: T.M.K.L Presents: beit Suad by Basil AlZeri March 15, 2013 @ 8:00pm Co-presented by FUSE Magazine and Israeli Apartheid Week Toronto
Workshop: T.M.K.L Presents: beit Suad by Basil AlZeri March 16 & 17, 2013 @ 1:00pm
Performance: Variations on Absurdity by Maryam Taghavi March 22, 2013 @ 8:00pm
Exhibition opening: .sight.specific. residue/ephemera March 28, 2013 @ 7:00pm
Panel Discussion:Â Viewing .sight.specific. With Basil AlZeri, Golboo Amani, Cressida Kocienski, Maryam Taghavi, and moderators Johanna Householder and Francisco-Fernando Granados March 30, 2013 @ 2:00pm
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?
