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.
