Tag: Stephen Jackman-Torkoff

Canada

Stephen is a wandering poet/fool who creates poetic dreamscape odysseys. This year they are working on their multidisciplinary solo piece called Die Phantasie and touring living rooms in Toronto (Do you have a good one?). Stephen has acted in several productions across Canada including Angels in America, Botticelli in the Fire/Sunday in Sodom, The Glass Menagerie and Trout Stanley. Stephen is the poet in the Queer Songbook Orchestra. Stephen’s work explores the inherent power in people, the relationships between us and the unknowns within. They seek to create work that activates the soul and takes us into a world of unleashed imagination. Like Willy Wonka.

In 2016, I was gifted a ton of Joyce Wieland’s marble scraps. A few pieces of it are here with us today.

What gets stored in a shoebox? Deposited into an archive? Shoved into a corner? Catalogued as important? Fever pitched towards a garbage can?

Literally and figuratively centred on a pile of marble scraps that once belonged to Joyce Wieland, Meyer’s The Marble in the Basement untangles issues of power, memory and inheritance by anthropomorphizing a forgotten object from this influential Canadian artist’s domestic archive. Surrounded by Meyer’s chosen family of objects which include a moveable staircase, an insulated football cape, a hooked rug and a hole the size of the tip of a ballpoint pen, Wieland’s marble is the anchor and next of kin, orchestrating the choreography that unfolds.

With a mixture of tenderness, fannish enthusiasm and a keen sense for the absurdities that shape which histories are told, Meyer’s performance invites us to help bear the weight of feminist lives lived and lost.

—Gabrielle Moser, Toronto

CREDITS
Curated and Presented by FADO Performance Art Centre
Conceived and performed by Hazel Meyer
Performed with Moe Angelos and Stephen Jackman-Torkoff
Puppet Design by Jamie Shannon
Production Manager is Deb Lim
Lighting Design by Adrien Whan

PERFORMANCES
January 30, 2020 @ 7:00pm
January 31, 2020 @ 7:00pm
February 1, 2020 @ 4:00pm (Q&A to follow)

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Hazel Meyer’s The Marble in the Basement is curated and presented by FADO Performance Art Centre as part of Progress, an international festival of performance and ideas. Progress is presented in partnership by SummerWorks and The Theatre Centre, and is collectively curated and presented by a series of Toronto-based companies, operating within a contemporary performance context. This fifth edition of the Festival is curated by Broadleaf Theatre, FADO Performance Art Centre, DLT, RT Collective, SummerWorks, The Theatre Centre, and Why Not Theatre.

© Hazel Meyer, The Marble in the Basement, FADO Performance Art Centre, 2020. Photo Polina Teif.