Teresa Dillon’s body of work includes locative-based performance, site-specific installation, sound art, and academic and applied research. She is the Director of Polar Produce, producing events and collaborations including N.I.P. research and touring network; UM: International Festival of Experimental Media (Portugal) and OFFLOAD programme. Her work has been shown and published internationally and she holds a PhD in creative collaborative processes using music technologies from The Open University, UK.
Curated and presented by FADO Performance Art Centre at the 7a*11d International Festival of Performance Art.
This new work by Teresa Dillon is a three-part collective sound and dance performance, created in collaboration with twenty men from the city of Toronto who are over the age of sixty years. Over the course of the festival, Dillon will work with the men to create a sound and dance piece, comprised of three parts which we will perform together for a live audience. As each element of the performance is delivered aspects will be captured and replayed into the gallery space, creating a layered sound and dance composition.
CALL FOR PARTICIPANTS Are you a dancer (any style), male and over sixty? Would you like to take part in a short dance piece? Or maybe you have never danced before but would like to try? If you answer “yes” to any of the above questions, I would like to invite you, to create a simple dance piece together. What will you need to do? Simply to turn up and be interested in learning some a simple dance and movement-based routine. Be available for one-hour rehearsal sessions. No previous performance experience is required, however, you must be open and comfortable to participate in a public performance.
CREDITS Thanks to the men who participated in Small Acts of Great Significance. The final work was created by Teresa Dillon with Roy Mitchell, Andrew J. Paterson, Ken Fraser and Joe Borowiec.
Irish artist Teresa Dillon’s piece, by contrast, was both improvisatory, in the moment, and trace-like. Having invited men over fifty to collaborate with her on a work that combined visuals and music, Dillon and her small entourage had created the performance earlier that morning. Lights dimmed, patterns pulsed on the screen on the back wall. Andrew Paterson appeared with an electric guitar and began playing a low, repetitive refrain, the other men following with microphones singing ditties reaffirming their desires and life. Dillon meanwhile literally hissed into the microphone, her voice seeming to come from a megaphone in some old revolution. In the end, Dillon’s piece had a slow, beautiful violence to it that got under one’s skin and is ultimately difficult to describe.
—Daniel Baird, Toronto
PROGRAM & EVENTS
Performance: Small Acts of Great Significance by Teresa Dillon October 30, 2010 @ 8:00 pm XPACE Cultural Centre, 58 Ossington Avenue, Toronto
This fragrance opens us to the question, has the show started? It's winter, the theatre is colder than the street and the room is filled with people and all their winter smells: wet faux leather, down, too much shampoo, and beer breath. The atmosphere is a trickster. Am I late, am I early?