Tag: Ribbon Cutting Ceremony

Join writer and artist Cason Sharpe for four public ribbon-cutting ceremonies to commemorate the partial unveiling of Alexandra Park, a neighbourhood that’s been under re-construction for the past decade. Each ceremony will occur live in four different locations around Alexandra Park, bordered by Dundas Street West, Augusta Avenue, Queen Street West, and Cameron Street in Toronto. Combining the civic rituals of the walking tour and the ribbon-cutting ceremony, this series of performances turns a neighbourhood stroll into a travelling circus, a spectacle through which we may catch a glimpse of an ever-changing city. 

Four ceremonies. Four opportunities to witness. See you at the circus.

The Ribbon Cutting Ceremony: A Travelling Circus is part of FADO’s newest on-going series, Walk-and-Talk, put together by Francesco Gagliardi and Julian Higuerey Núñez.

CEREMONY 1: Saturday, September 21 at 3:00pm
Meet at the foot of Kensington Avenue (one block west of Spadina Avenue), by the construction hoarding on the south side of Dundas Street West.

CEREMONY 2: Saturday, September 21 at 7:00pm
Meet outside the basketball courts on the corner of Cameron Street and Paul Ln Gardens.

CEREMONY 3: Sunday, September 22 at 3:00pm
Meet outside 75 Augusta Square, in front of the rose bushes across the street from Randy Padmore Park.

CEREMONY 4: Sunday, September 22 at 7:00pm
Meet on the corner of Augusta Avenue and Grange Avenue (one block south of Dundas Street West), by the construction debris next to the dumpsters.

Curated by Francesco Gagliardi and Julian Higuerey Núñez

There’s a storytelling technique, originated in procedural TV and later adopted by narrative films and videogames, in which two or more characters have an important conversation while walking between places. The technique is generally used as a way of conveying large volumes of information in a dynamic way, while introducing the audience to the relative placement of various locations and communicating a sense of urgency. As a narrative device, it effectively functions as a way of combining two distinct vectors of a narrative (the visual and the aural) into a more compact and efficient whole. 

This technique is referred to as Walk-and-Talk. 

While there isn’t anything analogous in the realm of performance art, walking (to and from the site of a performance; as a component of the performance itself; as a stage of the creative process) and talking (as part of the performance or around it, like in the “artist talk”) are, for artists and audiences alike, such commonplace components of the experience of making and watching performances, that they tend to be taken for granted and disappear from view.

In this new, ongoing series, FADO highlights and investigates these foundational gestures of the performance art vocabulary—walking, talking—through performances and discursive interventions that explore their intrinsic mutual imbrication. After all, isn’t the stroll of the flâneur always also the articulation of an argument? Aren’t the verbal excesses of every character in a classic novel who pines for an unattainable elsewhere just another way of getting there?

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2024: The Ribbon Cutting Ceremony: A Travelling Circus by Cason Sharpe
2024: part of the ramble that remained in the end without by Mark So
2025: Walk-And-Talk, the audio podcast series (coming soon!)