Tag: Performance Academy

FADO Performance Art Centre’s newest recurring series, Performance Academy, takes on the abstract form of a school, a university, a workshop, a class or a course, in the form of our own homemade academy. Performance: Academy is not a workshop and it’s not a school either. It’s best understood as a public engagement opportunity with an artist who is invested in inverting notions of authority in practice, research, and pedagogy.

Performance Academy 3: Good Bodies with Cindy Baker

What can your body do? What CAN’T your body do? The history of performance prioritizes movement that “pushes the limits” of our bodies and capabilities, creating points of tension between ease and difficulty. As artists with disabilities, our limits often seem like failings and if we can’t push as “far” as able-bodied people, we are seen as or feel like our work is less interesting; less advanced. We are also often inclined to make work that pushes our own limits in a way that is harmful to our well-being, using our work to prove our value and ability beyond our disabilities. Conversely, as able-bodied artists, we are usually blissfully unaware of the privilege of having a mechanically proficient body. We may want to make work that is sensitive to the notion of ability and limitations, or to proactively make work that acknowledges that our bodies will eventually begin to fail and that this does not mark an end to our practices.

How do we make work that respects the limits of our bodies and exploits and highlights our abilities and strengths, without making that work be “about” disability? How do we make work that talks about other ideas that we are interested in while remaining sensitive to our own abilities?

This will be a collaborative session in which we brainstorm ideas for new work and tease out ideas for fresh approaches to our practices. Baker will pose a series of questions and lead a discussion on the ideas generated. Attendees may be asked to participate in movement exercises based on their own ideas. Bring pens and paper or your preferred recording implements and any supportive or assistive props that you personally use and feel comfortable bringing.

This academy is open to all participants of all levels of study and/or experience, including the just plain curious. Admission is free. ASL interpretation and attendant care provided.

In partnership with Tangled Art + Disability, FADO welcomes Cindy Baker to Performance Academy for a one-time engagement, Good Bodies with Cindy Baker. This Performance Academy is presented in conjunction with the Tangled Art + Disability’s exhibition Home: Body, in which Cindy Baker presented a durational performance work entitled Crash Pad.

© Cindy Baker, Crash Pad, 2017. Photo Shannon Cochrane.

FADO Performance Art Centre’s newest recurring performance series takes on the abstract form of a school, a university, a workshop, a class or a course, in the form of our own homemade academy. Performance: Academy is in session for the second time this October, performed by Dino Dinco.

Performance Academy 2: Performing the Critique with DINO DINCO

Performance Academy 2 is presented in multiple sessions and is offered free of charge to audience-participants. There is limited enrolment for this academy, so we ask that audience-participants commit to attending as many sessions as possible. This workshop is open to all participants of all levels of study and/or experience (including the just plain curious).

DINO DINCO is a performance art curator and maker, film and theatre director, arts educator and writer. Dinco lives and works in Tijuana and Los Angeles and his research includes experimentation with performance presentation and the relationship between documentation and scholarship.

In this Academy, participants (audience) will: take a hard (and subjective) look at the current state of performance praxis and strategies of performance presentation; examine goals, ideals and expectations with making and/or attending performance; address the relationship of performance within a visual art context, including the burgeoning trend of performance being collected by museums and private collectors; consider the Performance Festival Industrial Complex; and explore how and why all of this can (and arguably should) be challenged. Participants will be expected to perform as part of this research and investigation.

FADO Performance Art Centre is pleased to offer the first iteration of our newest recurring series Performance Academy, with Bethany Ides’ Inconsolable Solvency, taking place at our new home in The Commons @ 401, over three consecutive Sundays in September. 

What extra-sensory signals do we exchange when we trade money for goods, services and conveniences? How out of whack would a transaction have to be in order to hardly be recognizable as such? Would it—could it—seem like something else entirely? Like love? Like devastation? Like relief?

In this workshop, we will be troubling the methods of assessment and valuation we rely on every day in order to manage and/or mitigate our senses of security, trustworthiness, likability and fairness. Participants will work collaboratively to re-interpret and re-model concepts like “efficiency,” “transparency” and “trust,” by inventing tools for dissolving those social structures that depend on them. During each meeting, individuals and smaller clusters will propose experimental contracts or modes of currency for possible use by the group as a whole. Readings will be distributed and short process/speculative writing will be assigned each week. This workshop is offered free of charge. There is no fixed monetary cost, other kinds of equitable exchange are welcomed and encouraged. 

Inconsolable Solvency is presented in three sessions. If you cannot join each of the sessions, that’s okay, but it is preferable that participants make a commitment to attend at least two of the sessions. This workshop is open to all participants of all levels of study and/or experience (including just plain curiosity).

Bethany Ides’ Performance Academy is presented in conjunction with, in relationship to, and in the context of the work she is developing at HATCH entitled Deathbeds. Described as an opera created in community, Deathbeds is a multi-platform work about desire as a contested resource and the ways various commodification compulsions affect romantic and economic ecologies alike. And how harrowing matters get when we try to break through all that–how funny but also jittery, how dizzyingly everything becomes blur the more emphatically we expect the expiration of the patient, Capitalism. With accelerated excitations, we imagine a body on the brink and tend to it even as we call for its demise.

FADO Performance Art Centre newest recurring performance series takes on the abstract form of a school, a university, a workshop, a class or a course, in the form of our own homemade academy. 

Performance Academy is a platform in which artists constitute their own school of learning—performing pedagogy—for an audience in the form of peer-to-peer academia, where self-organizing and personal experience as knowledge is valued over institutionalized frameworks. Artists, writers and creative thinkers from the performance art milieu as well as adjacent practices such as curation, social practice, film/video and more, develop and offer mini-courses (of three or more sessions disseminated over several weeks) presenting ideas and covering a range of topics and  that each facilitator is already an expert in (however one might define “expert”).

Performance Academy is not a workshop and it’s not a school either. It’s best understood as a public engagement opportunity with an artist who is invested in inverting notions of authority in practice, research, and pedagogy. Through a sustained commitment to collective learning, Performance Academy transforms the concept of a course into a group performance. A workshop in the form of a performance; a performance in the form of a school.

Performance Academy 1
Inconsolable Solvency with Bethany Ides
September 10, 17 & 24, 2017

Performance Academy 2
Performing the Critique with Dino Dinco
October 11, 18 & 25, 2017

Performance Academy 3
Good Bodies with Cindy Baker
December 16, 2017