Tag: Frank Moore

June 25, 1946 – October 14, 2013
USA

Frank Moore’s remarkable output of work includes countless intimate ritualistic works for individuals and groups, an ever-changing popular cabaret show called The Outrageous Beauty Review that ran for three years in the Bay area (San Francisco), numerous videos, publication projects (including a regular ‘zine called The Cherotic [r]Evolutionary, personal manifestos such as Art of a Shaman, and his extensive website, the Web of All Possibilities) and even a web radio station (Luver). Moore acts as an initiator and a visionary. Part of his genius is in his ability to attract a tribal community of creative collaborators. He lives and works with his wife Linda Mac and colleague and former student Michael LaBash.

Additional resource: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Moore_(performance_artist)

“As artists, our tools are magic, our bodies, taboos, and dreams.” ~Frank Moore

FADO continues its 12-month duration performance art series, TIME TIME TIME, with a new work by acclaimed US performance artist Frank Moore. Performed with Michael LaBash and Linda Mac, featuring guest artists Philip Cairns, Harry Cee, Paul Couillard, Anna DiPede, LInda Feesey, Fred Hatt and Heidi VanderMolen.

Dying is Sexy is a 48-hour erotic, musical, ritualistic, intimate, personal climax of the magical life of the American controversial/revolutionary performance artist Frank Moore, a web of many small improvisations.

In a two-day performance that blurs the distinctions between life and art, audience members will have opportunities to engage directly with the artist and his cast in an improvisational setting. From intimate daytime rituals to performance evenings that echo the style of cabarets and “happenings,” Moore will bring to bear all of the skills he has acquired in a career of art- and ritual-making that extends back to the early ’70s. Variously called a shaman and a trickster, Moore transforms what at first glance may seem unbelievable, corny, or even tacky into an awake dream of deep transformative power.

Born with a severe form of cerebral palsy that leaves him unable to walk or speak, Frank Moore has spent a lifetime exploring and breaking taboos—from the fear and ignorance that keeps many disabled people unnecessarily institutionalized to the phobias against touch, intimacy and pleasure that pervade our culture. He writes:

“There are all kinds of art. There is art that calms, art that pacifies, art that sells, art that decorates, art that entertains. But what I am committed to is art as a battle, an underground war against fragmentation. Performance, like any avant-garde art, is the way society dreams; it is the way society expands its freedom, explores the forbidden in safety, loosens up. Society needs its dream art, just as an individual needs to dream or will go insane.”

Linda Mac recalls:

“When Paul Couillard first invited Frank to perform at his festival TIME TIME TIME he told Frank that the series was inspired by Frank’s extended time performances. Frank said he would like to do a 72-hour performance for this series. This was almost two years before the performance was scheduled to happen. During that two year period Frank performed at a week-long festival the WE FEST in Wilmington North Carolina after which he got pneumonia and was hospitalized and was very sick and had this 72 hour performance coming up in Toronto! So Frank changed it to a 48 hour performance, had Paul rent him a hospital bed and changed the name of the performance to DYING IS SEXY figuring if he died during the performance it would be on theme!”

Additional resource: https://www.eroplay.com/Cave/dyingissexy/dyinghome.html

Curated by Paul Couillard

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

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.