Warren Arcand

Performance

Melting Point: An Amusement by Warren Arcand

FADO presents a new performance by Warren Arcand. Melting Point: An Amusement is a reflection on Aboriginal experience in Canada early in the 21st Century. Melting Point is presented as part of the Drake’s Notes from the Underground series and is a part of FADO’s on-going IDea series.

Melting Point: An Amusement offers a set of actions regarding desire and identity, a body in heat, a pantomime of becoming—combining elegant, cynical wit with an extra-strength dose of hopeful persistence. Pulling together disparate threads of historical, political and cultural theory, the performance plays out through a vaudeville of hilarity tinged with monstrousness. Filtered through the perspective of “the Abo experience within the idea of Canada,” this performance is, in the artist’s words, “. . . an Amusement regarding nations, naming, the making or modelling of an individual, what it is or isn’t—and maybe finally arriving at an appreciation that much is at stake at making Individuals because it entails making a claim on the world—a potentially totalitarian reproduction.”

Warren Arcand

Canada

Warren Arcand lives and works in Vancouver, where his artistic output includes performance art, film and video, theatre and text based work. He has taught performance art at the Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design; was the Artistic Director of the Centre for Indigenous Theatre, and also ran a video post production company, where he worked on or was associated with dozens of projects, from loops for installations to feature length documentaries; and has worked in broadcast television.

His past performance pieces include Six Gun Sufi (cowboy ballads and sexdeath mysticism); Surgery (hermaphrodism as a metaphor for Abo identity); Flamingo Killer (a ‘based-on-a-true-story’ performance featuring a suburban kid and his grisly abreaction to behaviour modifying drugs); and Superchannel (audience members received wireless headsets giving them access to 7 channels of selectable audio where they could mix their own ‘soundtrack’ for Warren’s simple performance task of ‘making eye contact’).

Artist Orange

Just as a performance artist uses their body as their medium, this is a fragrance composed entirely of the orange tree: fruit, leaves, bark, roots, and flowers. Artist Orange performs itself.

Top Notes

neroli, blood orange

Middle Notes

fresh orange juice, petit grain

Base Notes

orange twig, orange seed