Artist
Julie Andrée T

Canada

Julie AndrĂ©e T.’s installations and performance works have been shown in Canada, USA, South America, Asia and Europe. She was part of Compagnie PME for several years, an experimental theatre company directed by Jacob Wren. She has collaborated with numerous artists, choreographers and directors including Benoit Lachambre, Xavier Le Roy, Dominique Porte, Martin BĂ©langer and the filmmaker Dominic Gagnon, as well as working with the PONI collective from Brussels as co-artistic-director in 2007. Since 2003 Julie has worked with and performed internationally with the renowned performance group Black Market International.

For Julie Andrée T., practicing art should be a reflection of daily life and the dark ages we are presently in. Body and space are the center of her research. She uses the body as a space and vehicle for metaphors and poetry. She tries to reach a place where personal identity is lost. Although this is a utopia, it might be the only way to find a common abstract language to understand what we do and who we are.

Julie Andrée T. was from 2008 to 20011 guest artist Faculty at the School of museum of Fine Arts in Boston (USA) where she was teaching performance art. An occasional curator, she is part of the programming comity of Inter/Lieu (Québec city) an artist-run centre dedicated to performance and Installation.

Artist
Frank Moore

June 25, 1946 – October 14, 2013
USA

Frank Moore’s remarkable output of work includes countless intimate ritualistic works for individuals and groups, an ever-changing popular cabaret show called The Outrageous Beauty Review that ran for three years in the Bay area (San Francisco), numerous videos, publication projects (including a regular ‘zine called The Cherotic [r]Evolutionary, personal manifestos such as Art of a Shaman, and his extensive website, the Web of All Possibilities) and even a web radio station (Luver). Moore acts as an initiator and a visionary. Part of his genius is in his ability to attract a tribal community of creative collaborators. He lives and works with his wife Linda Mac and colleague and former student Michael LaBash.

Additional resource: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Moore_(performance_artist)

Artist
Stefanie Marshall

© Stefanie Marshall, where do I go from here?, 2000. Photo Paul Couillard.

Canada

Stefanie Marshall is a Toronto-based artist and educator. Her multidisciplinary practice spans installation, performance, design, public art, textile works, curatorial and community-based projects. She has presented work in galleries, museums, theatres, artist-run centres and non-traditional sites in Canada, United States and the United Kingdom. Her interest in green spaces, textiles, architecture, the history of objects, shifting perspectives, community, collecting, and playing with language inform her art practice.

Artist
Bernice Kaye

Canada

Bernice Kaye is a performance and visual artist, and one of the co-founding members of the Fado Performance Inc. collective.

Artist
Ed Johnson

Ed Johnson. Legs, Too, FADO Performance Art Centre, 2015. Photo by Henry Chan.

Canada

Ed Johnson is a visual artist who has been creating performance art works since 1996. His solo work has often explored issues of communication/non-communication (Box, Words of Love) and of HIV status (Inquisitive/Inquisitor, Untitled “[sic]”). Currently, the focus of his work is on the landscape of male bodies and self-image, including works such as Pro tanto quid retribaumus (for so much what shall we repay). Ed Johnson is a co-founding member of Fado Performance Inc., an artist-run centre for performance art located in Toronto.

Artist
David Johnston

Canada

Digital net-artist-poet concentrating on integrating advanced computational techniques (neural nets, VR, and fluid dynamics) into the creation of art installations and spoken word performances that expose and question human-machine symbiosis. One-half of jAT & jHAVE with Julie Andrée T.

Artist
Frank Green

1957 – 2013
USA

Frank Green was an artist and writer living in Cleveland, Ohio. He was a six-time Ohio Arts Council fellowship recipient in the areas of performance art, media arts, interdisciplinary art, and criticism. He performed throughout the U.S. and Canada, including five times as a feature artist in the Cleveland Performance Art Festival, and at Franklin Furnace and Dixon Place in New York, the Lab in San Francisco, 7A11D Performance Festival in Toronto, Wexner Center in Columbus, New Gallery in Calgary and AKA in Saskatoon. He was the art critic for the Cleveland Free Times, an alternative weekly newspaper.

In Memoriam: Frank Green by Paul Couillard

Artist
Fiona Griffiths

Canada
www.fionagriffiths.com

Fiona Griffiths is a teacher, coach, mover, actor, choreographer/creator, nurse and body worker. Fiona studied many movement and acting techniques from Feldenkrais, Alexander, and Kinetic Awareness to clown, bouffon, Theatre of the Oppressed, and Suzuki and Grotowski work. She has performed extensively in dance, theatre, clown and video. Fiona studied and taught with Richard Pochinko and Linda Putnam for many years. She was founder and director of Atelier Pochinko at the Theatre Resource Centre for ten years and became the Artistic Director from 1990–1992. She teaches and coaches actors, dancers and clowns in movement, acting and source work. Fiona has taught in the graduate theatre programs of York and Yale Universities and choreographed and coached for many professional theatre and dance companies. In 2007–2008, during a sabbatical year at the Central School of Speech and Drama in London, England, she completed an MA in training and coaching actors. As well as running independent workshops and coaching performers, Fiona also teaches at the School of Toronto Dance Theatre, Hart House, Equity Showcase and the Clown Farm.

Artist
May Chan

Hong Kong / Canada

May Chan was born in Hong Kong and she immigrated to Canada in 1963. Chan studied painting and drawing at Concordia University in MontrĂ©al, graduating in 1967. She earned a degree in art education from Queen’s University in 1976 and an M.F.A. from York University in 1984. Chan currently is based in Kingston, Ontario, working as a visual artist and writer and performance artist, but is perhaps best known as a performance artist. Her work is characterized by a steadfast, careful observation of everyday details and a keen eye for the expressive elements of personal history, which she uses to bring the audience into her way of perceiving. She has presented work extensively in Canadian artist-run centres over the past 25 years.

Performance
Five Holes: Touched

Curated by Paul Couillard

ARTISTS
Ed Johnson
Fiona Griffiths
Frank Green
Frank Moore
Julie Andrée Tremblay & David Johnston (jAT & jHAVE)
May Chan
Stephanie Marshall

Five Holes: Touched is the second in a series of performances dealing with the five senses. The first part (Five Holes: I’ll be seeing you, A Space, 1995) used the device of a peep show to explore the sense of sight and the process of seeing. For Touched, artists are using the nooks and crannies of Symptom Hall to create performance installations that explore aspects of touch and our attitudes surrounding it.

All of tonight’s work is being presented simultaneously; each installation is available for viewing according to a timetable negotiated between you as an audience participant and the artists involved. Some pieces, like the work of Frank Moore and Frank Green, have a specific time cycle that may require waiting and committing to going through a kind of journey. Others, like May Chan’s, have ‘peak’ times that request a captive audience for short periods of time. Still other pieces can be entered at any point and experienced for as long as your attention span lasts. Explore, Enjoy. Remember, the work is about ‘touch’.

Co-presented by the 7a*11d International Festival of Performance Art and sponsored by the Theatre Resource Centre.


PROGRAMME

Sense of Touch
May Chan
My performance is about Chinese culture, about being a woman, and about living. I use sound, action and reading poem-stories. I deal with sense of touch abstractly, more in the sense of keeping in touch. Paul Simon sings, “Touch the sound of silence.” Part of the performance is about food and cooking. I come from Hong Kong, close to Canton in Southern China/ Canton is famous for its cooking. For people In Canton, cooking (eating) is important. Their sense of taste is well developed. Their art s their dishes of foods. Their art galleries are their restaurants. I keep in touch with my background – food.

Anonymous Test Site
Frank Green
With Thea Miklowski, Holly Wilson, Michell Allard, Churla Burla, Lucia Cino, Curtis MacDonald
Since testing positive for antibodies to HIV in 1988, I have practices my art as a ritual of self-healing. I now consider myself to be cured of my dis-ease. My work differs from much of current cultural practice around AIDS in its radical refusal of victim or patient status. I have analyzed and criticized various aspects of western medical ideology through a series of self-photographs, performances, and installations focused on my own body as evidence. I am now examining the phenomenology of the test, in which parts of the body are subjected to arcane processes in laboratories inaccessible to the subject, resulting in ‘diagnoses’ that have profound social implications.

Touched
Fiona Griffiths
by
.When I am touched by
.a transformation occurs, a momentous infinite stop in time. Then I am nothing.

Threshold
Ed Johnson
Craving sensation, we quickly learn to set in motion whatever is needed to satisfy our expectations.

To Touch Is To Feel
Bernice Kaye
A blindfolded exploration of different textures, including living creatures.


she said nothing waiting
Stefanie Marshall
counting
1 2 3 4
ooooooohhhhhh
touch

The Cave of the Metasensual Beast
Frank Moore
With Michael LaBash & Linda Mac
Will you let yourself be guided into the cave of passion, imagination, healing human exploring touch, and the unlimited erotic possibilities of blindness? The Beast is waiting for you!

gravity light wind thought scent
Julie Andrée Tremblay and David Johnston (jAT & jHAVE)
Does the floor touch you? Or does gravity touch you? Does wind touch? Does it ask permission? The existence of identity seems to co-exist with illusion/desire for control over what touches us: we choose our food, clothes, lovers. What are we? What do we become when we are touched? Where does touch occur? Inside the body? Where inside? Can you smell it? Paranoia and trust are the parallel poles of touch. Look: no hands, no skin; only synapes and the skin inside the skin. Invisibly touched.

Series
Five Holes

Curatorial Statement by Paul Couillard

Five Holes foregrounds our bodies by examining aspects of the five basic human senses. The presence of bodies—the performer’s body and the audience members’ bodies—is an essential element of performance. We ‘perform’ when we bring our bodies into relationships with an audience in time and space. Five Holes considers some of the ways in which sight, touch, smell, hearing and taste allow us to perceive. At the core of this project is a concern with our bodies as a root aspect of humanness. The presence of bodies—the performer’s body and the audience members’ bodies—is an essential element of performance. We ‘perform’ when we bring our bodies into relationships with an audience in time and space. Five Holes foregrounds our bodies, considering some of the ways in which sight, touch, smell, hearing and taste allow us to perceive.

Civilization has constructed a worldview where ‘virtual’ reality has become a tantalizing ideal – a desired end point that will offer our consciousness and imagination a new beginning and a new territory to explore. At the same time, cultural theory has come to consider our bodies as something separate from our selves – referring to an objectified Other, ‘the body’, sometimes understood as a ‘text’, and sometimes considered as one ‘site’ among many to be inhabited. Our bodies are now subject to interrogation on multiple fronts, particularly in the realm of performance – from Stelarc’s assertions that “the body is obsolete” to Orlan’s surgical remodeling of her physical appearance. It seems that we are following an inevitable path, guided by RenĂ© Descartes’ oft-quoted maxim, “I think, therefore I am.” We are in a headlong rush to abandon our bodies – our imperfect, traitorous physical forms that suffer, wear out and eventually die. We seek immortality and omnipotence, two qualities that our ‘minds’ can imagine but that our ‘bodies’ can never attain.

But where and how are knowledge and imagination generated? For me, the answer lies in the daily struggles and resistances that my body undergoes. I am motivated by imperatives – survival, empathy, a search for fulfillment – that are bodily driven. Learning does not come from having my thoughts fully realized the moment that I think them; learning comes from experience, which is another way of saying that it develops through the process of making my thoughts manifest in physical form. Learning happens as I go about trying to reconcile my theoretical ideal with the exigencies of physical laws and available resources. To ‘do’ inevitably brings a deeper, more nuanced understanding than to ‘imagine’. This is not a simple or straightforward process: it brings pain as well as pleasure, and often what I discover seems neither fair nor friendly. Nevertheless, I am not so eager to leave behind my cross-eyed, bow-legged body. I love this life, and I am certain that what I have to learn or discover can only be manifested through my body.

We define our living bodies in multiple ways: as material (flesh, blood and bone); as process (respiration, circulation, electrical impulses); and as vessel (of experience and consciousness). It could be argued that our senses are what constitute our bodies. We associate our senses most directly with ‘sensation’, the domains of pleasure and horror, but our senses also play a larger role in connecting us to the world and shaping our identities. They are how we apprehend the world—the points of intersection between our individual consciousnesses and the actuality of time and space. It is through our senses that we undertake and negotiate our relationships to each other and our surroundings. Human senses have developed over time. Each sense provides us with a different set of information, evolving, if we believe Darwin, according to what best allows us to survive and prosper as a species. As conditions change, and as our bodies adapt in other ways, presumably our senses could also change. Five Holes provides artists and audiences with an opportunity to test their senses as they are now, informed by both history and imagination.

Five Holes brings us together in this time and this space to see, touch, smell, hear and taste. These varied projects are united in their search for the possibilities—not only for pleasure, but also for knowing – that the senses have to offer.


Five Holes was a multi-year, multi-event series curated by Paul Couillard. Spanning the years 1995–2006, each iterative event highlighted one of the body’s five senses.

Five Holes: I’ll be seeing you (1995)
Five Holes: Touched (1997)
Five Holes: reminiSCENT (2003)
Five Holes: Listen! (2004)
Five Holes: Matters of Taste (2006)

Series Purple

An ode to FADO's history, Series Purple is composed of a collection of purple fragrance materials dating back to the Roman Empire. Dense, intense, and meandering, this fragrance tells us non-linear stories.

Top Notes

huckleberry, violet

Middle Notes

cassis, lilac, heliotrope

Base Notes

orris root, purple sage, labdanum