Category: Engagement

With Jess Dobkin and Martha Wilson

With Jess Dobkin and Martha Wilson

PUSH.PULL

Curated by Dainty Smith & Golboo Amani

PUSH.PULL is a six-month online series of interdisciplinary events examining emergent and intersectional developments in performance art and QT BIPOC cabaret. Curated by storyteller, producer and stage performer Dainty Smith and multidisciplinary artist Golboo Amani, PUSH.PULL highlights QTBIPOC cabaret performers at the intersections of live stage performance and radical political performativity.

PERFORMANCES by:
 Adrienne Huard, Anasimone, Babia Majora, Betsy Swoon, Cara De Melo, Cat Zaddy, Crocodile Lightning, Dolly Berlin, Gay Jesus, Imogen Quest, Ivory, James Knott, Johlene, Kimora Koi, LAL, Lucinda Mui, Lwrds, Mikiki, Ravyn Wngz, Suki Tsunami, Tanya Cheex, Tygr Willy.


SPECIAL APPEARANCES by: Perle Noire
, Rania El Mugammar, Aggie Panda
, Amber Dawn

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PUSH.PULL presents three online Showcases featuring performers from across North America. Each showcase offers a diverse range of contemporary practices reflecting the theatrical, political and emotional range and depth of cabaret performance. 

PUSH.PULL presents BARE
Friday April 9 / 9:00pm (EST)  

Featuring: Suki Tsunami, Lady Ore, Crocodile Lightning, Gay Jesus, Ivory, LAL  

BARE: A showcase of sensual exploration that reimagines and extorts the expectations of our own desires. Performances offering consensual and deliberate confrontations, challenging the idea of the submissive and passive nude. When skin is presented, when nudity is shown, who is vulnerable? Who is powerless? 

PUSH.PULL presents TAUNT
Friday April 23 / 9:00pm (EST)  

Featuring: Betsy Swoon, Dolly Berlin, Johleen, Ravyn Wngz, Lucinda Miu, James Knott, Anasimone

TAUNT: A show that celebrates the power of seduction; of intentional sexuality. A thread of rage runs though burlesque. Burlesque is unapologetically rebellious, it is where the feminine, self-love, sexual agency and manipulation are performed without shame or explanation. It is a place and space where we can all misbehave together and where we are taunted by sexuality wielded like a weapon. 

PUSH.PULL presents TOPPED
Friday May 14 / 9:00pm (EST)  

Featuring: Imogen Quest, Babia Majora, Cara De Melo, Tanya Cheex, Cat Zaddy, Mikiki, Tygr Willy, Adrienne Huard

TOPPED: Cautions, titillates and teases. The cabaret is a feminized, glamourous and glittered, a holy and sacred place. Moving and living through expressions of sexuality in its full scope of dominance and assertion, the performer toys and plays with gender, power, laughter, vulnerability, and seduction. In cabaret, we have the audacity to believe that our bodies are important, invaluable, meaningful and worth listening to. 

FREE Tickets for all showcases: Buddies in Bad Times Theatre 

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PUSH.PULL includes a three-part speaker series inviting performers and cultural creatives to engage in conversations at the intersections of visual culture, sex work, performance and politics by recognizing cabaret as a site of cultural production and community engagement. We’ve also included a series of workshops led by professionals in the field, aimed at engaging audience participants and community members in immersive skill-sharing experiences deepening appreciation, interest and critical engagement with cabaret.

April 14: Speaker Series: Unusal Business: The business of being a showgirl

April 28: Workshop: Body Love with Dainty Smith

For more information about PUSH.PULL workshops AND artist talks, visit Aluna Theatre

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PUSH.PULL is presented in association with Buddies in Bad Times Theatre & Aluna Theatre. Sponsored by FADO Performance Art Centre. Funded by the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council.

FADO Performance Art Centre was pleased to help support Bricks & Glitter for their online and in-person (socially distanced) 2020 festival.

Bricks & Glitter is a community arts festival celebrating Two-Spirt, trans and queer talent, ingenuity, caring, anger and abundance. We are a trouble of queers who believe in creativity, collectivity and practicing the future in the now. We are intersectional be default and critical by necessity. Our 2020 festival centres Black, Indigenous and racialized artists coming together to imagine a world worth living in—for all of us. 

Bricks & Glitter on Facebook
Bricks & Glitter on Instagram 

ARTISTS
Ms. Nookie Galore
Franny Galore
Mikiki
leZlie lee kam
Tamai Kobayashi
Rhona Spencer
Buster Cherry
David Bateman
Jord Camp
DJ Xeynamay
DJ Mirass
DJ MXMSXY
DJ Pothound
Ivory
TravoyInTheFlesh
Mango Lassi
Drag King Sebastian
Pastel Supernova
Cat Zaddy
Midnight Wolverine
Billie the Kid
Namitha Rathinappillai
Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures Collective
Mina Minou
Cat Zaddy
Tygr Willy
Ola Minou
Daddy Gambino
Kareena Pussy Couture
Sage Lovell
Thurga Kanagasekarampillai
AND MANY MORE!

Bricks & Glitter 2020 was funded by the Ontario Arts Council, Toronto Arts Council, FADO Performance Art Centre and Groundswell Community Justice Trust Fund.

Learn more about Bricks & Glitter: https://bricks-glitter.com/

Join us for an afternoon conversation with Bruce Barber on the occasion of the launch of his latest two volume book, Performance, [Performance] and Performers (edited by Marc James Leger, YYZBooks, 2007).

Conversation moderated by Clive Robertson

Bruce Barber is an artist, writer, curator, and educator based in Halifax, Nova Scotia, where he teaches at NSCAD University. His artwork has been shown at the Paris Biennale, the Sydney Biennial, the New Museum of Contemporary Art, the Walter Phillips Gallery, London Regional Gallery, and ArtSpace Auckland. Barber is the editor of Essays on Performance and Cultural Politicization and of Conceptual Art: the NSCAD Connection 1967-1973. He is co-editor, with Serge Guilbaut and John O’Brian of Voices of Fire: Art Rage, Power, and the State. His critical essays have appeared in numerous anthologies, journals and magazines. His art practice is documented in the publication Reading Rooms. He is best known for his early performance work, his Reading Rooms, Squat Projects and his writing and theory on Littoral Art.

“Bruce Barber is the quintessential dissident theorist/artist. Navigating the history of contemporary performance and performative conceptual art with ease, he maintains the position of the artist, the maker. His unique approach is dense and rewarding, a virtual intervention into the standard social performance narratives. Barber’s subtle iconoclasm—aimed at the generalizations (we) critics have promulgated—expands the context in which performance is considered and creates in the process a new kind of criticism that tackles the contradictions embedded in postmodernism and political art activism. Barber zeroes in on the function of the work, monitoring a kind of chain reaction as it acts on culture, rather than as an enactment in culture. These two volumes contain the most intelligent treatment of performance phenomena to date.” ~Lucy R. Lippard, author of Get the Message? A Decade of Art for Social Change

A Conversation with Bruce Barber
May 3, 2008 @ 1:00pm
VMAC Gallery, 401 Richmond Street West, Toronto

From Iconic to Ironic: The Performance Works of Tanya Mars
Edited by Paul Couillard

Tanya Mars has been a key figure in Canadian art since she burst on the scene in 1974 with her first groundbreaking exhibition, Codpieces: Phallic Paraphernalia. Provocative and political, Mars has relentlessly shown us that the way to the jugular is through the funny bone, creating a series of compelling “three-dimensional pictures” that have made her one of Canada’s most acclaimed and important performance artists. This anthology offers a comprehensive look at her career, including a DVD with photo and video documentation of many of her major works.

“An innovative leader in the performance art scene here and internationally, Tanya Mars makes art that is courageous, humourous, operatic and original. Ironic to Iconic gives the reader a cogent and too little-known background to Mars’ career and her role in the development of performance art in Canada.” ~Jessica Bradley, curator and director of Jessica Bradley Art + Projects

Publication Launch
May 10, 2008 @ 1:00pm–3:00pm
Art Metropole, 788 King Street West Toronto

Time Zones Residency with Tania Bruguera and Glenda Leon

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In this 6-day intensive MayDay performance art workshop, participants experience VestAndPage’s unique method through the process of making a performance art piece. Through practical exercises and reflecting on the use of the body as a tool, the workshop will focus on introspection as a way to develop authentic modes of expression and artistic action, and participants will be provided with the means to conceive, develop, and realize their own performance piece. Through methodology aimed at understanding prevailing behavioral patterns, participants will develop new ways of communicating and overcoming fears created by conflicting contemporary conditions. The workshops will also offer insight into the framework of process-led and conceptual art practice, with the aim to provide basis for future material. Participants will develop a heightened awareness of mind and body, with the means to stimulate artistic personal action though inner sensitivity.

As facilitators, VestAndPage will lead exercises on a range of performance techniques and approaches which blur the boundaries between fine art, live art and contemporary performance practices:Working solo and as a group;

• Creating intimate solo performance material;
• Devising and improvisation techniques;
• Actions/rules/chance-based techniques;
• Objects and actions in space as performance;
• Developing quality of presence;
• Confidence in using the physical self as a vehicle for meaning in performance;
• Audience-performer relationships—levels and modes of interaction;
• Exploring the role of time and pattern, e.g. duration, endurance, speed, and repetition.

Through the following processes:

• To work towards touching point zero in judgment and intention, heightening perception, introspection, to then rebuild an authenticity-based expression, to transform visions and ideas into a concrete artistic action.
• To take distance from being virtuous by establishing, evaluating, and energizing the personal action in se.
• To free oneself from common behavorial patterns so as to create new ways of encountering, collaborating and living.
• To overcome the fragile constituent limits, may they be based on physicality, fears or social patterns.
• To touch and strengthen the most human inner sensors in order to activate personal and universal memories, for using as germinal matter for future artistic substance.
• To enter a state of heightened awareness and perception, in order to conceive out-of-the-ordinary artistic visions, being in first instance process-led.

Actions and exercises are innovative and process-led, inspired by processes and methods such as: Dynamic Creative Breathing, Social Theater, Living Theater, Grotowski, Barba Stanislavsky, Leclerc, Oriental Theatre, Martial Arts, Contemporary Dance & Butoh, Authenticity, Inner Library, Liminality, Breath, Archetypes, Rituality, Memory activation, Object work, Time-Duration-Rhythm, Voice/Sound, Emotional Atmosphere, Inter-activity, Group dynamics, Macro- and Microspherology.

COST: $150
We don’t want cost to be a barrier. Please contact us is you are experiencing economic circumstances that might prevent your participation. For more information and to register: info@performanceart.ca

CONDITIONS: Participants are asked to commit to the entirety of the workshop period. Maximum number of participants is 15.

Location: Artscape Youngplace, 180 Shaw Street, Toronto
Workshop: April 14–19, daily from 9:00am to 6:00pm
Public Presentation: April 19 @ 7:00pm

Thanks to the Goethe Institut in Toronto for hosting this very special artist talk with performance artist Boris Neislony. This artist talk accompanies a new performance entitled, Four Nature Studies.

Artist Talk with Boris Neislony
November 17, 2003 @ 6:00pm
Goethe-Institut Toronto | 163 King Street West, Toronto

Four Nature Studies by Boris Neislony
November 18, 2003 @ 8:00pm
Cinecycle | 129 Spadina Avenue, Toronto

This 5-day intensive performance art workshop will be led by internationally recognized performance artist and educator BBB Johannes Deimling. Presented in partnership with the 7a*11d International Festival of Performance Art, the participants will present final performances in the context of festival programming.

Workshop dates: October 17–21, 2008
Final performances: October 23–24, 2008

PARTICIPATING ARTISTS
lo bil
Val Desjardins
Agnieszka Forfa
Alica Grant
Rodolphe-Yves Lapointe
Hélène Lefebvre
Christian Messier
Guillaume Provost

ABOUT 7A*11D
7a*11d is a not-for-profit, artist-driven collective that curates and produces English Canada’s oldest ongoing biennial of performance art. In non-festival years collective members engage in a variety of other performance-based projects. 7a11d was established in 1997 by a group of performance artists, collectives, and organizers, eager to develop a forum for performance art in Toronto. The first 7a11d International Festival of Performance Art, in August 1997, presented the work of 60 local, national and international artists.

Performance Art is often defined as a non-objectual art practice that celebrates proudly its ephemeral character by creating situations that are experienced live. Despite this almost every performance art work can be characterized by the interaction of the artist’s body with objects in concrete time and space. This performance art workshop aims to focus on the different uses, potential interactions and properties regarding this very important performance element: the object. 

Some objects seem to gaze back at us and attract our attention and curiosity. The workshop will explore these “special” objects and our relation to them through the concepts of aura, fetish, relic, symbol, poetic, memories, body, narration, fiction, transformation, function, meaning, (im)materiality, (in)visibility, presence/absence etc. in order to create a performance based on a composition of actions involving objects. 

The workshop will provide each participant with cross-disciplinary artistic instruments (such as text, speech, sound, video, photography, painting, sculpture, installation) and with historical and contemporary examples of different strategies for dealing with objects (including Dadaism, Happenings, Fluxus, Body Art, Minimalism, Conceptual Art, Arte Povera, Visual Poetry, Concrete Music) in order to obtain the necessary theoretical and practical background for developing their own performances. 

Every participant is asked to bring three personal objects to work with during the workshop. These objects will be the starting point for the various tasks and discussions in the workshop. The objects could be personally very resonant, reminding of a specific time or place, or they can be mundane objects that are encountered on a daily basis. In either case they will be treated as propositions for potential actions and conceptual exploration. 

STRUCTURE OF THE WORKSHOP

Day 1: Introduction of the participants and of the workshop topics through the presentation of the personal objects. Physical exercises to warm up the body and get confidence in the group and in the space. Exploration of the body as an object: Exercises to be present and neutral. 

Day 2: Some group tasks and improvisations interacting with objects: exploring the meaning, function, use and properties of specific objects. Research around the immateriality and invisibility of objects and our personal memories and stories related to them. Some historical and contemporary examples of art works that approach objects from an interesting point of view. Screening of videos and photos to illustrate each position and open discussion.

Day 3: Some individual tasks and improvisations based on interacting with objects. Preparation of a proposal for an own performance based on the three personal objects. Individual discussion of the proposal with the facilitator and group. 

Day 4: After a period of individual preparation. Workshop culminate in an informal public presentation of the performances. 

PARTICIPATION CRITERIA 

The workshop is open to students and professional artists who have a background in contemporary art practice. Although this is a performance art workshop, applicants are welcome from any artistic background, as long as they have a desire to engage with a performative process and tasks. The workshop may be of particular relevance to visual artists or text and sound based artists who have an interest in more conceptual based processes. 

Performance Art Workshop: Interaction with Objects
Workshop: February 20-23, 2013
Performances: February 23, 2019 @ 3:00pm
The Theatre Centre Pop-up, 1095 Queen Street West, Toronto

This workshop is presented in association with The 34th Rhubarb Festival and coincides with the presentation of Step by Step, a performance by Andrés Galeano and Ieke Trinks, taking place at Buddies in Bad Times Theatre from February 23–March 3, 2013.

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Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum.

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A one-day performance workshop + performance experience

Nonsense Group Photo of 111 Toronto Citizens is a playful project in which the artist will gather 111 Torontonians for the sole purpose of taking a group photograph with a large format camera at a selected Toronto landmark or tourist location. Reminiscent of summer travels with family, this project is both a guerrilla intervention challenging the norms of “acceptable” behaviour on a public street corner and a hilarious group performance, documented in real time, elaborated by size and scale.

We need exactly 111 participants for this unique performative social experience. Bring your friends and families, everyone is welcome. Meet in the lobby of the 401 Richmond Street West building where we will organize ourselves, hear instructions from the artist, and venture out as a group to our photo location.

Nonsense Group Photo of 111 Toronto Citizens by Yoshinori Niwa
A one-day performance workshop + performance experience
July 17, 2009 @ 1:00pm–4:00pm
401 Richmond Street West, Toronto

This workshop is presented in conjunction with the The Arts of Togetherness exhibition
Gendai Gallery at the Japanese Cultural Centre
July 11–August 23, 2008
With artists Sandee Moore and Yoshinori Niwa
Guest curated by Milena Placentile

Thanks to community and presentation partners including the Japanese Canadian Cultural Centre, Manitoba Arts Council, Tani Miki and The Japan-Canada Fund.

The A Space Events Committee in cooperation with FADO is pleased to sponsor a poetry reading by Vancouver artists Deanna Ferguson and Judy Radul, who are currently on tour to promote their new books. 

Poetry reading and book tour with Deanna Ferguson and Judy Radul

Paul Couillard, 1994

Deanna Ferguson’s collection of poems The Relative Minor was recently published by Tsunami Editions of Vancouver. Her work has also been published in absinthe, Front, hole, Jag, Raddle Moon, Writing, West Coast Line and the anthology East of Main (Pulp Press). Ferguson’s poems are a collage of fragmented images and familiar phrases, peopled with pop icons from Jack Kerouac and Sid Vicious to Spock and Elvis. The effect is a distillation of the violent and the mundane framed in an unsettling shorthand.

Judy Radul is an interdisciplinary artists who has worked with the spoken and written word, performance, installation, photography, video and film. She has published three books including Character Weakness rivulets cross cross cross vision (1993), Boner 9190 and the weak (1989), both by KNUST press in Holland, and Rotating Bodies (1988) by Peterad Press in vancouver. She was recently the editor of Front magazine published by the Western Front in Vancouver, and is currently the curator Front Gallery. 

Judy Radul’s writings follow visceral experiences to unexpected conclusions. She probes the soft underbelly of first-person experience, finding the degradation, humiliation and occasionally exultation in being. Character Weakness rivulets cross cross cross vision is a limited edition hand-made artist’s book printed in full colour using a special process involving old and new Gestetner printing processes.

Paul Couillard, 1994

This Performance Club WORKSHOP will consider several of David Bateman’s past performance works, and ways in which he has re-considered various narratives/performance texts around sex and gender over the past thirty years. Works to be looked at may include: Death, Sex, & Macrame (2019), I Wanted To Be Bisexual But My Father Wouldn’t Let Me (1992), and Art Immuno Deficiency Syndrome, subtitle; Does This Giacometti Make Me Look Fat? (2016).

Expect reading, writing and macrame curtain weaving.

Save your Thursdays this September for the ultimate trio of Queer Performance Clubs performed by Moe Angelos (September 10), Hope Thompson (September 12) and David Bateman (September 14 & 19).

WORKSHOP: Death, Sex, & Macrame with David Bateman
September 14, 2019 @ 2:00pm–5:00pm
The Commons @ 401 | 401 Richmond Street West, 4th floor, Toronto

Anna Banana is a Canadian artist from Vancouver known for her performance art, writing, and work as a small press publisher. She has been described as an “entrepreneur and critic”, and pioneered the artistamp, a postage-stamp-sized medium. She has been prominent in the mail art movement since the early 1970s, acting as a bridge between the movement’s early history and its second generation. As a publisher, Banana launched Vile magazine and the “Banana Rag” newsletter; the latter became Artistamp News in 1996.

In this artist talk presented by FADO Performance Art Centre at A Space, Anna Banana talks about her work in performance, and her various mail art projects including ARTISTAMP News and BANANAPOST.

The Hemispheric Encounters dinner party series is a collaboration between Joyce LeeAnn, Jess Dobkin, Shalon Webber-Heffernan and Justice Walz. 

These gatherings are an offering—and importantly, an experiment—for artists, academics, archivists and activists to gather across borders, language, time zones and cultures for sensory, intimate connection in pandemic times. 

This series of dinner parties were made possible by Hemispheric Encounters, a partnership project supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council and FADO Performance Art Centre.

Hemispheric Encounters: Developing Transborder Research-Creation Practices is a partnership project that seeks to develop a network of universities, community organizations, artists, and activists across Canada, the US, and Latin America actively working in and with hemispheric performance as a methodology, a pedagogical strategy, and tool for social change. 

For more information and to follow projects and initiatives as they develop, please visit the Hemispheric Encounters website.

Blowing because mouth knows how to blow and makes a sound for ears to hear
WORKSHOP with Liina Kuittinen
September 21, 2019 @ 11:00am–1:00 pm
TMAC (Toronto Media Arts Centre), 36 Lisgar Street, Toronto

This workshop is, in itself, an experiment in process sharing, modest but direct. During the 2-hours of the workshop, Liina will expose the process of creation behind her most recent performance work, referencing her work presented in Toronto (see below) as the starting point for a series of practical experiments that Liina and the workshop participants will elaborate on together.

“I consider my artistic practice as minor scale resistance to the dominance of language. For example, it is difficult to say anything new about blowing, without blowing; whereas every blow is different from the previous. My performance practice evolves from the physicality of being and action. The body and its habits are my main material.”

DETAILS of the workshop:
This workshop is offered free of charge.
The space that the workshop is offered in accessible.
The maximum number of participants is 15.
The workshop will be offered in English.
You will be asked to participate in various exercises which may involve movement and voice.
It is not necessary to have previous experience in performance-making to take part; however it is highly recommended that participants attend Liina’s performance on September 20th as a precursor to the workshop (see below).

International Visiting Artists: performances by Liina Kuittinen (Finland), Marita Bullman (Germany), Ignacio Pérez Pérez (Venezuela/Finland)
September 20, 2019 @ 8:00pm
TMAC (Toronto Media Arts Centre), 36 Lisgar Street, Toronto
Presented in collaboration with VIVA! Art Action (Montréal)