Performance

MONOMYTHS Stage 1: The Ordinary World

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Performance

MONOMYTHS Stage 12: Mistress of Two Worlds

Performance

MONOMYTHS Stage 13: Freedom To Live

Performance

MONOMYTHS Stage 11: Refusal of the Return

Performance

MONOMYTHS Stage 6: Tests, Allies, Enemies

Performance

MONOMYTHS Stage 4: Crossing The Threshold

Performance

MONOMYTHS Stage 3: Meeting of the Mentor

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MONOMYTHS Stage 2: Refusal of the Call

Performance

Good Bodies with Cindy Baker

Performance

Lost in Trans- by Dickie Beau

Performance

x for staying here with us now by Sherri Hay

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Performing the Critique with Dino Dinco

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GOOD BUY! by Tanya Mars

Performance

What Tammy Needs To Know about Getting Old And Having Sex by Lois Weaver

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Inconsolable Solvency with Bethany Ides

Performance

Ghost Days by Terrance Houle with Simla Civelek

Performance

Legs, Too

Offered as an antidote to Toronto’s annual all-night “art thing” Nuit Blanche, LEGS, TOO is an all-day performance art relay. The form of the event is dictated by a chosen duration (in this case 8-hours), which is then divided equally by the number of performance artists from the local community who invited to participate.

We asked a staggering 116 artists to participate, and 53 decided to join in. For this second iteration of LEGS, TOO, audience will witness a continuous performance work made up of 53 eight-minute performances over the course of 8 hours.

Participating artists are suggested by other participating artists, snowballing a self-organizing event that is disinterested in traditional curation. Founded on a belief in community trust, performative dialogue and artistic self-determinancy, the resulting collective event lets participating artists be responsible not only for the continuous stream of idea- and image-making, but also for the realization of event itself. There is no staff, no coordinator, no stage manager, only artists working together. LEGS has legs. LEGS is a manifestation of the social and performing body through the collective network and expanded community.

The first iteration of LEGS was presented in our sister performance art network in Montréal on February 7, 2015, at Le Cercle Carré. The score and format of the event was initially imagined by an informal collective of artists (including Christian Bujold, Michelle Lacombe, Marie-Claude Gendron, Nadège Grebmeier Forget, Katherine-Josée Gervais and Jean-Philippe Luckurst-Cartier) and was created with the intention of activating and making-visible the often fragmented local performance art community.

(The score) LEGS,

is made by local artists (local/provincial) participating on a voluntary basis.
is not crafted by a singular artistic direction or selection method, and refuses all curating models (there is a lead organizer who acquires a space and starts the chain of invitations – this is the only entity-driven action).
is intergenerational, and the invitation is extended to performance artists at all stages of their careers. It does not however pretend or attempt to be an exhaustive representation of a community.
is a minimum of 7 hours and a maximum of 9 hours long; the durational for each work is decided by dividing the total chosen time with the number of participating artists in order to realize a continuous performance relay without pause. The order of the performances is arbitrary.
is not performed for the sake of the camera, but is photo documented and live streamed, if possible. Images will be collected by the transmitter, made available to participating artists, and published on a collective LEGS website, where the multiplying manifestations can co-exist.
is characterized by the fact that each participating artist is autonomous; there is no technical or material support. Artists are responsible for their own set up and clean up (which is part of their allotted time). No performance will be stopped but artists will begin at their scheduled time.
is not financed by any public program or entity and doesn’t generate monetary profit for the organizers or the participants.
asks, if desired, for a donation from attending audience who are free to come and go as they please; the collected donations compensate venue rental or documentation, if necessary, and the remainder is spent on refreshments for all.
can only be transmitted to/in another community by an individual (or a small group) who has participated in the directly previous edition, and the physical participation of these transmitters in the next event is preferred.
is shared through this score and set of principals across the performance art network
LEGS in Toronto is initiated by FADO Performance Art Centre. The custodians of this iteration are Shannon Cochrane and Adriana Disman. There will be two LEGS transmitters from the authoring collective/performers from the first iteration present in Toronto.

Audience is invited to come and go throughout the day. If you cannot make it, consider tuning in to the LIVE STREAM. Here is the link: www.youtube.com/watch?v=a6ob2ZZYpUQ

ARTISTS (in order of appearance)
Nadège Grebneier Foget (transmitter from Montréal), Katherine-Josée Gervais (transmitter from Montréal), Tiffany Schofield, Adam Filek, Ed Johnson, Shaista Latif, Kate Barry, Emma-Kate Guimond, Katie Kehoe, Holly Timpener, Yan St Onge, Ellen Furey, Johannes Zits, Jonathan Simpson, Fiona Griffiths, lo bil, Anna Sarchami, Adam Herst, Lauren Scott, Eroca Nicols, Andrew James Paterson, Coman Poon, Alisha Mascarenhas, Brianna MacLellan, Alan Peng, Maggie Flynn, Dorothea Rust, Paul Couillard, Clayton Lee, Moynan King, Bojana Videkanic, Carrie Perreault, Johanna Householder, Christopher Willes, claude wittmann, Juliana Pivato, Liz Khan, Simon Rabyniuk, Robert Luzar, Marcin Kedzior, Golboo Amani, Liz Peterson, Aliya Pabani, Chad Dembski, Berenicci Hershorn, Teena Lange, Francesco Gagliardi, Zeesy Powers, Jessica Cimó, Alex Beriault, Rosa Mesa, Raki Malhotra, Tanya Mars, Adriana Disman, Shannon Cochrane

For an archive of the collected events in the LEGS series including the original event in Montréal, and subsequent events in Toronto and Zurich, visit the LEGS website.

Performance

Weather to Store by Kristina Guison

Performance

International Visiting Artists: Marita Bullmann, Liina Kuittinen, Ignacio Perez Perez

Performance

In Search of Friedrich Nichtmargen by Vassya Vassileva

Performance

ndn wars are alive, and…well? by Aiyyana Maracle

Performance

Vivência Poética | curated by Erika DeFreitas

Performance

Every Rose Has a Thorn by BBB Johannes Deimling

Performance

single use salmon plogging by Ayumi Goto

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4U by Angelika Fojtuch

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Performance by Christian Messier

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Cock & Bull by Nic Green

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Wind From Sky & Best Place to Sleep by Sakiko Yamaoka

Performance

Ruth Belinga, Michel Bitimbhe, John Court, Serge Olivier Fokoua

Performance

Four Nature Studies by Boris Neislony

Working in collaboration with the Goethe-Institut Toronto, FADO is pleased to present an artist talk and new performance work featuring Boris Nieslony, one of Germany’s foremost performance artists.

Boris Nieslony creates unpredictable and unrepeatable improvisational performance works that manifest “an encounter and its effects.” Responding to local circumstances, Nieslony develops images attuned to the moment, rigorously searching for the truth of self-recognition at the intersection of history and live presence. His impressive performance style stems from the motto “life is art enough.”

The decision on how a performance will transpire is mostly made when the artist is already on stage. Nieslony describes his process: “One small bag filled with helpful objects and photos will accompany me and I will attend them. Even people and certain materials from a given environment can appeal to me as support for my ideas.”

Boris Nieslony’s Canadian tour is a joint project of FADO (Toronto), grunt Gallery (Vancouver), and Open Space (Victoria).

Four Nature Studies by Boris Neislony
November 18, 2004 @ 8:00pm
Cinecycle, 129 Spadina Avenue, Toronto

Performance

Visa Trauma (IV) by Gusztav Uto

Performance

Intimate Karaoke, Live at Uterine Concert Hall by Dayna McLeod

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Walking Woman by Margaret Dragu

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Toronto Tableable by Artur Tajber

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Kitchen Dutch by Louise Liliefeldt

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DOCUMENTS by Autumn Knight

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On the Table by Seiji Shimoda

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Daydream in Toronto & Tube by Nezaket Ekici

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Everyday life words in progress by Elvira Santamaria

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Phalogocentrix by David Khang

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Eyeblink: Fires with Myung-Sun Kim & Julieta Maria

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Open Surgery by Oreet Ashery & Svar Simpson

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Big Yawn by Yoshimichi Takei

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Pleasure Addicts by Brenda Goldstein

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Not Waterproof by Julie Andrée T

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Somewhere Between Wakefield and Wichita by Glyn Davies-Marshall

Performance

International Visiting Artists: Carlos Pina & Maria Cosmes

Duty of Memory – Anamnesis by Carlos Pina

When We Were Weaving by Maria Cosmes

Performance

-AND- (2021)

12 hour on-line performance event
Curated and organized by Christof Migone

In partnership with and in the context of -AND- (2021), FADO is pleased to present the work of Erika DeFreitas and Adrian Piper in Hour 1.

-AND- (2021) is a 12 hour online event organized by Christof Migone. It’s the second in a series of twelve annual events taking place on December 12, from noon to midnight EST with the collaboration of multiple artists, venues and partners in Canada, China, Germany, Korea, UK, USA. Each year the event moves through each word of the 12 word phrase, “you and I are water earth fire air of life and death and activates the word of the year in myriad ways.” For more information about this 12 year project, visit https://youandiarewaterearthfireairoflifeanddeath.com/

In 2021, the word is ‘and’, consequently the focus is on repetitions, conjunctions, and duos. Last year it started with ‘you’, this year we connect you to anything and everything, you are together-with. Or, we get stuck in the very act that ‘and’ opens up, into the enormity that the so-what-next that ‘and’ implies. ‘And’ is all possibilities in a nutshell. A secular litany that follows pi into infinity.

Erika DeFreitas’s (Toronto) multidisciplinary practice includes performance, photography, video, installation, textiles, drawing and writing. Placing emphasis on gesture, process, the body, documentation and paranormal phenomena, DeFreitas mines concepts of loss, post-memory, legacy and objecthood.

Adrian Piper (b. 1948, USA/Germany) is a first-generation Conceptual artist and analytic philosopher. She began exhibiting her artwork internationally at the age of twenty, and graduated from the School of Visual Arts in 1969. While continuing to produce and exhibit her artwork, she received a B.A. in Philosophy with a minor in Medieval and Renaissance Musicology from the City College of New York in 1974 and a Ph.D. in Philosophy from Harvard University in 1981. Adrian Piper produces artwork in a variety of traditional and nontraditional media, including photo-text collage, drawing on pre- printed paper, video installation, site-specific sculptural installation, digital imagery, performance and sound works.

Hour 1
12:00pm–1:00pm EST

Seriation #2a: _and (with thoughts of Adrian Piper) (2021)
In this newly commissioned work, DeFreitas creates a score based on Piper’s essay Passing for White, Passing for Black by isolating the word ‘and’ on the pages they appear. DeFreitas then performs this score, reciting the word ‘and’ evenly spaced within the timeframe of 1 minute per page.

Seriation #2: Now (1968)
Soundwork by Adrian Piper; Performed by Erika DeFreitas
DeFreitas was given permission by Piper to perform Seriation #2: Now. The original soundwork consists in 18 minutes of Piper uttering the word “now,” in a measured tone, at shorter and shorter intervals, from one minute to every second. Accompanying the audio are visuals created by DeFreitas to question our presence in the ‘now’.

Performance

Queer Lines (For Agnes) by Kate Barry

Performance

Re-Solutions by W. A. Davison

RE-SOLUTIONS is a collection of 6 performances for video by W. A. Davison, created in the context of FADO Performance Art Centre’s Performance Resolution(s) at-home residency in 2021.

These six informal performance experiments re-interpret the theme “resolutions” as “re-solutions,” meaning, new solutions to problems that have already been solved.

Over the past few years, I’ve been engaged in a number of creative projects that involve exploring, and making use of, material from my archive of past work—finished pieces, documentation, sketches, ideas, etc., accumulated over several decades of artistic activity. The idea of finding new solutions to problems I’ve already solved, i.e. finding new ways to approach, develop, and execute creative problems and premises from my past, is an intriguing concept and ties in nicely with my recent archive-based work.

Working alone in my studio, I conducted a series of performance experiments which were documented on digital video. In these experiments, I examined a selection of finished works from my archive—visual art, writing, film and video, audio, past performances, etc.—determining the basic premise/problem in each one, and then, through an informal, organic, and intuitive process, found new ways in which those problems might be solved. Since the residency is focused on performance practice, these “re-solutions” took the form of performative actions/events/situations. I was particularly interested in what happens when I attempt to translate ideas from other media (drawings, collages, films, audio pieces, etc.) into performance. This was challenging at times but, almost without fail, led to interesting work. The project was process-oriented so I was not necessarily looking to create new performances for an audience. These are, literally, experiments, most geared toward helping me gain insight into my past work, as well as find new and interesting directions for future work.

Is a work of art ever “finished” or an idea used up? “Re-Solutions” helps answer that question.

THE RE-SOLUTIONS

Dead Horse Dérive (07:10, video slideshow, 2021) is based on a multimedia drawing/painting from 2009 called Wasteland 2. I took one of the main elements of the painting, a dead horse, and traced the contours of it. I then superimposed this simplified contour drawing over a map of downtown Toronto. Finally, on the afternoon of July 10, 2021, I made a dérive (a type of psychogeographic exploration of the urban environment) on bicycle, following as closely as possible the route indicated by the drawing on the altered map. I documented the dérive by photographing streets, intersections, laneways, and whatever caught my eye during the bicycle trip. The final form of the piece is a video slideshow.

Floating Orb (08:09, video performance, 2021) is based on an untitled collage from 2016. The collage features a spherical object floating in front of a desert landscape. For my “re-solution” I came up with a simple action involving a ball being tossed (from off camera) in front of a number of photographs that were taped to the wall of my studio.

Eye Projections (01:34, video performance, 2021) is based on an untitled sculptural assemblage from 2016. For this “re-solution” I took one of the main features of the assemblage, namely the cloth projecting from the doll’s eye sockets, and interpreted that as a performative action for the camera

Red Branches (02:01, video performance, 2021) is based on a series of sound/radio art pieces from 2020 called RE/CYCLING. In the RE/CYCLING series, I constructed a number of textured platters that were placed on a record player and amplified with a contact microphone. My “re-solution” was to make myself the revolving, textured surface, brushing against amplified tree branches.

R.P.M. Redux (01:23, video performance, 2021) is based on a super-8 film called R.P.M. that I made in 1991, in which I put a super-8 camera on a record player, and filmed while it spun around. For this “re-solution” I did exactly the same thing, this time with a video camcorder, the difference being my presence in the film/performance. I sat next to the record player and appear once every revolution.

Object Poems (11:25, video performance, 2021) is not based on a specific work. Instead, I chose to base the work on one of the techniques I use frequently in my poetic writing, namely stream-of-consciousness or surrealist automatism. The technique involves an unedited flow of words, free from rational control. In my “re-solution” I substituted found objects from around my studio for words in a poem, constructing an improvised, visual poem by juxtaposing objects next to each other or otherwise interacting with them.

Performance Yellow

This fragrance opens us to the question, has the show started? Its 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?

Top Notes

yellow mandarin, mimosa

Middle Notes

honey, chamomile, salt

Base Notes

narcissus, guaiac wood, piss, beer