LAB #1: 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
Mikiki is a performance and video artist and queer community health activist of Acadian/Miâkmaq and Irish descent from Ktaqmkuk/Newfoundland, Canada.
Mikiki has worked as a high school Sex Educator, a Bathhouse Attendant, Drag Karaoke Hostess, in various capacities in the Gay Menâs Health and HIV response, in Harm Reduction Outreach and HIV testing all over Canada.
Mikiki is irregularly found hosting their Golden Girls screening and queer cultural studies lecture series Rose Beef and recently produced One Brief History of Drag; a quarter century retrospective of their drag performance work at The Rooms Provincial Gallery realized and interpreted by some of their best and most adored comrades.
Over the course of a five-day intensive workshop led by Sara Wookeyâone of the few dancers authorized by Yvonne Rainer to “transmit” (to use Rainer’s own phrase) her worksâa mixed group of dance and performance artists will learn several of Rainer’s dance works, focusing primarily on Trio A (1966).Â
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. Rainerâs 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.
FADOâs Transmitting Trio A (1966) project overlaps with Yvonne Rainerâs visit to Toronto where she will deliver an artist talk (Saturday, March 21, 7:00pm) entitled Whereâs the Passion? in the context of the AGOâs 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 20â28) curated by Jacob Korczynski and Kim Simon. Entitled, ââŠa 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,â the series responds to and thinks alongside the performances initiated by FADO, allowing the opportunity to see Rainerâs dance again within a constellation of conversations, readings and newly commissioned work.
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, 4:00â5:00pm @ 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 projectâs 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.
FADO Performance Art Centre presents Silent Dinner, an eight-hour performance in which a group of people arrive to the theatre space, set up a rudimentary kitchen, and then prep, cook and eat a dinner in shared silence, without communicating in their language of origin, in front of the attending audience. The performance is created with special guest artist Irish performance artist Amanda Coogan who is CoDA (Child of Deaf Adults) and twelve performer/participants who are a combination of Deaf and hearing performers and non-performers from Toronto.
Silent Dinner is inspired by a choreographic exercise devised by Canadian dance artist Justine Chambers entitled Family Dinner, and American artist Lois Weaver’s well-known public discourse practice, The Long Table. In Weaverâs Long Table (inspired by Marleen Gorris’s film Antonia’s Line, in which the dinner table continually extends to accommodate the growing community of outsiders and eccentrics, until finally the table must be moved out of doors), the rules of engagement allow those sitting at the table to participate in the conversation in whatever way they wish, without limit or restriction to access or content. Using the table as a structure to orchestrate a conversation around, this long table combines community interaction with theatricality. As a form The Long Table, âacknowledges the sometimes uncomfortable side of both private exchange and public engagement, while celebrating the potential for new forms of knowledge-making and -sharingâ, while the rules (or rather, the helpful hints as Weaver calls them) state that there can be silence.
In FADO’s Silent Dinner, silence is transformed from a potential born of discomfort or newness, and transformed into the landscape in which indirect communication between people who donât share the same language is negotiated. The dinner table becomes a meeting place for the intersection of culture and language (hearing and Deaf culture, English and ASL, performance as language) via a performance score employing the everyday activity of sharing a meal. Over the course of the 8-hours of the performance the performers experience, and the audience bares witness to, the many varied and complex layers of communication, compromise, and decision-making that are being performed through construction and deconstruction, art and food, theatre and everyday ritual, the performance of the public and the private. The table functions as both motif (in theatre the table is a prop, in performance it is material) and metaphor for community and connection.
CREDITS Conceived by Shannon Cochrane & Amanda Coogan Performed by Ahmed Muslimani, Alexandrose Dayment, Amanda Coogan, Anselmo DeSousa, Catherine, MacKinnon, Christopher Welsh, Keli Safia Maksud, Mary Balint, Michelle Bourgeois, Mikiki, Laura Nanni, Sage Willow, Shannon Cochrane
POST-PERFORMANCE Q&A Join us at 9:00pm for coffee, dessert and a post-performance Q&A with the performers of Silent Dinner. ASL interpretation provided.
FADO would like to offer a big THANKS to our friends and colleagues who have helped us and made this project possible, including Signs Restaurant and Rachel Shemuel, Nicka Noble, Jess Shane, Deanna Bradley-Coelho, Kerry Grandfield and Corene Kennedy and the 2nd and 3rd year students of the ASL-English interpreter program at George Brown College, and our team of trained professional ASL-English interpreters Amanda Hyde, Tara Everett, Shelly Nafshi and Silvia Wannam.
SummerWorks, in partnership with The Theatre Centre and a roster of Toronto theatre and performance organizations/presenters and companies including FADO Performance Art Centre, Buddies in Bad Times, Dancemakers, Why Not Theatre, Video Fag, and Volcano Theatre, brings the world to Toronto with Progress: an International Festival of Performance and Ideas, February 4â15, 2015.
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?
