Tag: MONOMYTHS Stage 1

Metis/Cree Nation / Canada
www.cheryllhirondelle.com

Cheryl L’Hirondelle is an Alberta-born, Metis/Cree, interdisciplinary artist and singer/songwriter. Since the early 1980s, L’Hirondelle has created, performed and presented work in a variety of artistic disciplines, including music, performance art, theatre, performance poetry, storytelling, installation, and new media. Her creative practice investigates a Cree worldview (nêhiyawin) in contemporary time-space. L’Hirondelle develops endurance-based performances, interventions, site-specific installations, interactive net.art projects, and keeps singing, making rhythm, songs, dancing, and telling stories whenever and wherever she can. She has performed and exhibited her work widely both in Canada and abroad, and her previous musical efforts and new media work have garnered her critical acclaim and numerous awards.

MONOMYTHS is conceived and curated by Shannon Cochrane and Jess Dobkin.
The series is presented by FADO in the context of Progress.

MONOMYTHS invites a diverse collection of artists, scholars, and activists to revise Joseph Campbell’s conception of the hero’s journey through performance art, lectures, workshops, and other offerings. This new assemblage of non-linear un-narratives proposes a cultural, political and social feminist re-visioning of the world. The MONOMYTHS perception of the universal journey dispels the notion of the lone patriarchal figure on a conquest to vanquish his demons—both inner and outer—in consideration of community, collectivity, and collaboration.

Nikamon Ochi Askiy (Ke’tapekiaq Ma’qimikew): The Land Sings
Ursula Johnson, in collaboration with Cheryl L’Hirondelle 

Post Performance / Conversation Action
Maria Hupfield

Nikamon Ochi Askiy (Ke’tapekiaq Ma’qimikew): The Land Sings is an audio-based endurance performance by Ursula Johnson created in collaboration with Cheryl L’Hirondelle, and is offered as an apology to the land for the ways in which our human impact has shifted and shaped the landscape, displacing the voices of many First Nations. 

Ursula Johnson and Maria Hupfield’s works are presented in conjunction with #callresponse, a Canada Council {Re}Conciliation initiative project. #callresponse positions the work of First Nations, Inuit and Métis women and artists as central to the strength and healing of their communities. This socially engaged project focuses on the “act of doing” through performative actions, highlighting the responsibility of voice and necessity of communal dialogue practiced by Indigenous Peoples. #callresponse is a multifaceted project which brings together five site-specific art commissions that invite collaboration with individuals, communities, lands and institutions, culminating in an exhibition in October 2016 at grunt gallery in Vancouver. The The fifth visitation of Ke’tapekiaq Ma’qimikew: The Land Sings will be a part of this exhibition.

Following The Land Sings, Maria Hupfield presents Post Performance / Conversation Action, a hybrid performance and conversation with Ursula Johnson and Cheryl L’Hirondelle on how revitalization, collaboration, and the act of refusal are used in performance art to shape current dialogue on Reconciliation.

SummerWorks, in partnership with The Theatre Centre and a roster of Toronto theatre and performance organizations/presenters and companies including Aluna Theatre, Dancemakers, FADO Performance Art Centre, Summerworks, The Theatre Centre and Volcano Theatre brings the world to Toronto with Progress, an international festival of performance and ideas from January 14–February 7, 2016.

Conceived and curated by Jess Dobkin and Shannon Cochrane

MONOMYTHS invites a diverse collection of artists, scholars, and activists to revise Joseph Campbell’s conception of the hero’s journey through performance art, lectures, workshops, and other offerings. This new assemblage of non-linear un-narratives proposes a cultural, political and social feminist re-visioning of the world. The MONOMYTHS perception of the universal journey dispels the notion of the lone patriarchal figure on a conquest to vanquish his demons–both inner and outer–in consideration of community, collectivity, and collaboration.

Joseph Campbell’s influential book, The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949) prescribes a common pattern to all of the world’s mythic narratives. According to this fundamental structure, the archetypal hero is challenged to embark on a monumental quest. Over the course of the hero’s journey, trials and obstacles must be overcome until a victory is won and the hero returns home with new knowledge about himself and the world. Campbell’s concept of the monomyth (‘one myth’) is a recognizable motif in both ancient mythology and contemporary culture, including film, music, literature, sports, and advertising. A current trend in popular visual culture replaces the male character with a female one, in spite of the fact that our heroine–from the get-go–would make different choices if the conditions, and conditioning, allowed. While each MONOMYTHS stage stands alone, the work of each presenting artist is interdependent and connected. These independent visions, when stitched together through the audience’s collective presence, form an exquisite corpse of a larger experimental narrative.

The year-long MONOMYTHS project is presented in three sections starting in February 2016 and concluding in February 2017.

Part 1 (February 3–7, 2016)
Stage 1: The Ordinary World/Call to Adventure
Stage 2: Refusal of the Call
Stage 3: Meeting of the Mentor
Stage 4: Crossing the Threshold
Stage 5: Belly of the Whale

Part 2 (May 2016–January 2017)
Stage 6: Tests, Allies, Enemies
Stage 7: Ordeals
Stage 8: Atonement with the Father/State
Stage 9: Apotheosis/Journey to the Inmost Cave

Part 3 (February 15–19, 2017)
Stage 10: The Road Back
Stage 11: Refusal of the Return
Stage 12: Mistress of Two Worlds
Stage 13: Freedom to Live
Stage 14: The Return Home