Performance
A Score of Scores

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 ways—from 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, “event scores” 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

Artist
Naseh Kamgari

Naseh Kamgari is a writer, director, educator, and set designer. He studied set design for performing arts and holds a master’s degree in Dramatic Literature from the University of Tehran (2000). His books include Three Plays on One Set (2022), Three Animal Plays (2021), The Ceiling of this Home is Low (51 short stories, 2018), A Song at the End of a Dark Alley (six plays, 2017), The Boar (a story, 2000), and The 366th Day of the Leap Year (four plays, 2001), all published in Farsi. Forthcoming books Eastern Night (two plays) and In the Absence of Farhad (three plays) will be published in 2023. Notable works as set designer include I Can’t Remember Anything by Arthur Miller (2001), The Condemned of Altona by Jean-Paul Sartre (2006), Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar (2006), and over 20 Iranian plays. He has directed his own plays, Eastern night (2016), A Song at the End of a Dark Alley (2014), Snowman and Spring (2010), Poem of a Queenless Ant (2007), In the Absence of Farhad (1999), among others. Most of his plays engage anti-war themes and criticize socio-political matters. He lives and works in Tehran, Iran.

Artist Orange

Just as a performance artist uses their body as their medium, this is a fragrance composed entirely of the orange tree: fruit, leaves, bark, roots, and flowers. Artist Orange performs itself.

Top Notes

neroli, blood orange

Middle Notes

fresh orange juice, petit grain

Base Notes

orange twig, orange seed