FADO Performance Art Centre has a long history of collaborating with Buddies in Bad Times Theatre to present the work of Canadian and international performance artists at the Rhubarb Festival including 2Fik (2011), Sian Robinson Davies (2012), Paul Couillard and Ed Johnson a.k.a Duorama (2014) and Staceyann Chin (2017).
For the 39th edition of the festival, we are excited to be collaborating once again to bring the work of celebrated feminist performance icon Lois Weaver to the stage at Buddies. Weaver will be developing and presenting a Toronto iteration of her part-chat show, part-concert performance, What Tammy Needs to Know About Getting Old and Having Sex.
Performed in the guise of her alter-ego Tammy WhyNot, a “sixty-five-year-old trailer trash blonde who left Nashville for a career as a performance artist”, the performance is created through a collaborative workshop process with local LGBTQ elders in the week leading up to the performance. What Tammy Needs to Know About Getting Old and Having Sex looks at intimacy, relationships, desire, and sex in people over fifty. No matter your age, Tammy shows us that love, desire, friendship, sexual health, and losing your keys in your handbag are universal concerns. Several iterations of this performance have been developed with a growing community of seniors in the UK and around the world. Sharing their stories and her own, Tammy invites you to quit worrying why… and start thinking, Why Not?
ABOUT TAMMY WHYNOT
Tammy WhyNot has accompanied Weaver since 1978 as Weaver’s alter-ego, performance partner and research associate. The character was conceived in The Lysistrata Numbah created and performed by Spiderwoman Theatre in 1978 and born again in a caravan under the Brooklyn Bridge in a show called Upwardly Mobile Home, written and performed by the Split Britches Theatre Company in 1984.
Tammy got her start in show business in the late eighties as a solo artist on the New York downtown performance scene appearing at WOW, PS122, The Club at La MaMa and the Limbo Lounge. Following that, she has mostly appeared in the UK and around the world.
She made her first international appearance as mistress of ceremonies for Club Girrls at the ICA in 1994. After that she toured the UK with cLUB bENT, presented in association with It’s Queer Up North and Gay Sweatshop. Her London appearances include Saturday nights at Duckies, Club Deviance at the Almeida Theatre, Tammy WhyNot’s X-rated Xmas Xtravaganza at the Oval House and Tammy’s Art and Beauty Salon and East End Collaborations at Queen Mary, University of London. She has also performed in Helsinki, Warsaw, Buenos Aires, Bogota, Rio de Janeiro, Montreal, Sydney, New York and Los Angeles.
