Year: 2011

Commitment Issues presents the work of five artists and one collective who use their bodies as primary source material to investigate qualities and dimensions of commitment—to ideas, to performance, to audience and to the artists themselves. Through play, risk, intimacy and sexuality, these artists transcend fixed social, psychological, physical and spiritual notions of commitment.

Further confounding the interplay of fixed notions of commitment, the venue for Commitment Issues is Oasis Aqualounge, home to Toronto’s preeminent swinger’s club. Performance sites will include the outdoor heated swimming pool, steam room, hot tub and locker room. Audiences are invited to stay late and enjoy all of Oasis Aqualounge’s amenities that also include a sauna, two bars and multiple lounges. Locker and towel service provided. Bring your bathing suit or birthday suit. Admission restricted to patrons 19+ years of age.

ARTISTS
Cassils (Montréal / USA)
MC Coble (USA / Sweden)
Alicia Grant (Toronto)
Dominic Johnson (UK)
Dana Michel (Montréal)
The Pole Club (Toronto)

Processing: Artist’ Panel & Reception
Studio Theatre, Helen Gardiner Phelan Playhouse, 4 Glen Morris Street
November 17, 2011 @ 7:30pm

The panel is co-sponsored by the Graduate Centre for Study of Drama at the University of Toronto and the Mark S. Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies at the University of Toronto.

FADO Performance Art Centre is proud to present Imagined Spaces / Lost Objects, a programme of performance works curated by Victoria Stanton for the 2011 Edgy Women Festival presented at Studio 303 in Montréal.

Between the timeless and the transitory, between dream and reality, fact and fantasy, there emerges a potent junction. This intersection, a “no-man’s land,” straddles temporal veracity and produces a space difficult to pin down. In this imagined space, a series of self-consciously constructed identities come to embody an invested trace – of lost love, lost words, of lost or stolen objects. Lost and yet, the trace of what remains sticks in the memory, and to the body. And in this “no-man’s land” we find four women – charting four distinct paths on land in-between multiply defined world.

ARTISTS
Janine Eisenächer (Berlin)
Amalie Atkins (Saskatoon)
Julianna Barabas (Calgary)
Laura Margita (Saskatoon)

Within the context of a fictional world, Amalie Atkin’s work investigates aspects of loss, isolation, transformation, and ritual to create a mythology both awkward and spectacular. Over the past few years I have been working in film, performance, fibres and photography, using these mediums in ways that at once inform one another and contribute to the creation of these fantastical environments. Fusing these separate entities together this seires marks the first appearance of my cinematic work in the context of performance. Initially made as a 16mm film for this event, Three Minute Miracle will be presented as a live performance, incorporating a live audio component and additional performative elements that tie into key events and objects in the film.

Antidote by Julianna Barabas is a series of performance actions designed to break down social norms around touch, gestures of care, vulnerability and public intimacy. Using hand washing and then massage of the hands of the audience participants, I offer them an opportunity to use the time spent engaged in the performance to metaphorically cleanse or alleviate tensions they may have in relation to their identities. Throughout the massaging of the hands, I also sing to the person receiving the massage, further heightening the intimacy of the gesture and interaction between us.

In her solo performance-series Eat Your Enemy #3 I am the Coca-Cola of art, Janine Eisenächer works with the Brazilian cultural concept of Antropofagia (cannibalism) and by that explores its potential of being an alternative subversive strategy. Focusing on processes of incorporation and transformation, the performance artist discusses matters of identity in relation to work and gender-specific questions, the (post)colonial discourse of “the other”, and the economic structures in the field of artistic work itself. By using text, objects, body and sound in a ritualistic structure, Eisenächer each time undertakes a new self-experiment of an imaginary voyage to overcome felt dependencies and to follow her own desires. The starting point for Eat Your Enemy #3 is a quote by the female performance art-legend Marina Abramovic, mentioned in the German art magazine monopol: “I am the Coca-Cola of art.” Eisenächer has been researching and working with Coca-Cola as material in her performance work since 2007, and Abramovic’s claim is the perfect basis for a new anthropophagic investigation…this time Eisenächer incorporates Abramovic and transforms into the Coca-Cola of Art herself. The traces of the live performance remain in the gallery space as ongoing installation. The artist would like to thank the Goethe Institute (Munich and Toronto), Edgy Women Festival (Montréal) and La Centrale.

Madame Blanche Hears Your Confessions by Laura Margita was a serious, heartfelt performance with all the things that make a performance professional like invitations, assistants, a videographer, a sculpture technician and a location in an artist run centre with a highly educated audience. The audience/participants were horrified, amused and afraid for me and the documentation of the events is one of the most embarrassing and distressing displays of loss of control that I have ever seen recorded on video. I may have lost the tape on purpose or not. I will try to find it or recreate it for this performance and take what I can learn from it in the service of my search for:

1. meaning
2. self awareness
3. forgiveness
4. love
5. power
6. artistic expression for a community of people that is 
a. beautiful
b. nourishing
c. scary
d. sad
e. funny

In April 2011, Imagined Spaces, Lost Objects brought together four women hailing from Berlin, Calgary, Saskatoon, and Ottawa to present recent works at Cinecycle in Toronto. This disparate group of artists with a diverse range of creative practices had individually crossed my path at various key moments within the previous year. Although performance is not necessarily the foundation for each of the artist’s individual work, I observed undeniably performative aspects inherent in each of their practices, even in those not coming from a time-based background.

In putting together this program, I followed an intuitive process, with a desire to collaborate with these four artists whose practices resonated deeply within me, embodying the performative from several perspectives:

Between the timeless and the transitory, between dream and reality, fact and fantasy, there emerges a potent junction. This intersection, a “no-man’s land,” straddles temporal veracity and produces a space difficult to pin down. In this imagined space, a series of self-consciously constructed identities come to embody an invested trace – of lost love, lost words, of lost or stolen objects. Lost and yet, the trace of what remains sticks in the memory, and to the body. And in this “no-man’s land” we find four women – charting four distinct paths on land in-between multiply defined worlds.

What are the ways in which each of these artists creates work that challenges their own sense of a self-constructed identity? The self vis-à-vis personal myth-making, and the myths that we confront in order to help us to break through to another level of awareness, of compassion and of consciousness – about who we are and about the world around us. 

Juliana Barbaras: Antidote

The evening began with Julianna’s relational, one-on-one performance, Antidote. At the front of the room Julianna sat in a chair with a plank of wood across her lap facing an empty chair. A bowl of warm water rested on the wooden plank and beside her sat a pile of soft white towels. As the audience milled around and socialized, waiting for the event to start, Julianna patiently waited in a relaxed yet focused manner. Slowly one person at a time took their turn and sat across from her.

My encounter with Antidote was like that of a warm blanket, a softness that surrounds you. The blanket doesn’t ask: “Can I warm you?” – it simply does. As I sat having my hands tenderly washed with warm soapy water then gently massaged (this being the core of the action), I viscerally understood that this was a performance about compassion in its most transparent and available form, offered by a grounded and conscientious individual with an ability to listen to what is not necessarily being directly said. Julianna’s unique capacity for empathy allowed her to be fully present to each and every person sitting across from her. 

Julianna has presented this work previously in performance contexts that were private, unlike this version, which was presented in front of a seated audience in the space that would soon become the stage for the rest of the evening. This created a whole other kind of dynamic where Julianna was on display and meeting intimately with one person at a time. Her actions were witnessed both by the participant and the assembling audience producing the feeling of a space within a space. It also generated an echo of empathy that unwittingly set the tone for the remainder of the event.

Amalie Atkins: Three Minute Miracle: Tracking the Wolf

Two performers entered the space wearing red dresses and matching shoes. They walked down the middle aisle in serene unison, separating to take up residence at their respective stations. Amalie Atkins took her seat on a stationary bicycle (sitting slightly behind the audience in the middle of the space) while Tanjalee Kuhl veered off to the side to take her place behind a keyboard. As Tanjalee began to play, Amalie began to pedal. Magically, a film appeared on the screen, brought to life by Amalie’s bicycle powered projector. Carried along by Tanjalee’s live soundtrack, Three Minute Miracle: Tracking the Wolf is a fanstasmatic journey of loss and discovery involving human-animal forms, snowshoes and a giant white frosted cake. In the darkened space of Cinecycle – a bike repair shop and a micro-cinema in one – this performance was uncannily fitting and quite mesmerizing, and created an atmosphere akin to the wondrous world appearing on the screen.

Captivated by the images it came as a delightful surprise when rather unexpectedly incidental sounds in the film (for example, birds chirping in a tree) were heard coming from the audience seated in the back row. When the main character of the film, The Wolf, began to lead a choir of animal-people in song, suddenly this entire row of audience members stood up, instantly forming the live choir, and launched into a rousing and somewhat psychedelic song about losing teeth. Suddenly Amalie stopped cycling and the film came to an abrupt pause. The lights came up and a third performer entered the space. It was The Wolf, holding a white cake plate trimmed in pink frosting. There was an Alice in Wonderland dream-like three-dimensional feeling to the appearance of this doppelganger. Removing the lid and exposing a small mound of golden teeth, The Wolf handed the platter to Amalie who proceeded to distribute the perfectly sculpted gleaming (and edible!) molars to the audience. An oddly cannibalistic gesture ensued when we started to hear (and feel) the crunch of teeth – between our own teeth.

Once the plate was emptied, Amalie moved back to her helm at the bicycle projector and revved up the motor again. The lights dimmed, the image returned and the choir, both on-screen and in-person, sang us to the conclusion of the teeth dilemma, in a shimmering vocal crescendo. 

The various audio components of Amalie’s performance played an important role in the audience’s layered experience of the work, from the melancholic melody of the keyboard to the voices of the “spontaneous” choir, punctuated by the repetitive sounds of the bicycle and the projector itself; a series of constant clickings and whirrings functioning as the heartbeat of the performance. 

The combined doubling of live and mediated images created by the live presence of the filmmaker, characters and sound from the film created a prolonged liminal space – like being inside a living dream. The effect of this slippery state was hallucinatory – a sustained uncanny experience in which a successive joining and separating of the rational and the irrational produced an undeniably irresistible destabilized present.

Laura Margita: Madame Blanche Serves Hors d’oeuvres from the Underworld

The sensation of a destabilized present continued with the next performance. In a cream-coloured peasant dress and sparkling vest, Laura Margita coyly took to the stage. Behind her a video image appeared: Laura in décolleté camisole with her face in shadow. Reminiscent of popular cop shows or courtroom dramas where the witness’s identity is protected, Laura began telling a tale and we quickly understood the reason for concealment. Laura was protecting herself from herself. We all listened (the “real-life” Laura included) as she told us the story of a disastrous failure of a performance that she would rather have completely forgotten. 

The image changed to Laura sitting by a campfire, lit only by the flames, reading aloud some selections of her own poetry. As she finished each poem, she placed the sheets in the fire to watch them sizzle and burn up purging unnecessary remnants from her “sordid” past. 

Laura’s performance was an exercise in peeling away layers of carapace – literally demonstrated when the artist took off her peasant dress to reveal a skin-toned bodice underneath. Ornamented with a low-slung belt and holster (a kind of shamanistic, protective shield), Laura moved through the audience, giving even more details of her performance failure, a work entitled Madame Blanche Hears Your Confessions. During this segment, she approached random audience members to offer them a strawberry to eat – delivered directly into their mouths on a plastic spoon attached to a toy car, hurdling down a foot long piece of plastic racecar track.

In between the campfire poetry readings, and Laura’s on-stage free-flowing recitation, one singular image from the past performance in question flashed on the screen. This image was the only document of the work left and its content attested to her still palpable mortification: an exceedingly intoxicated Laura being dragged away from the performance space by two friends.

Why re-visit such a painful past, and so publicly?

Laura created a work that intentionally wished to dig up a dark and dirty secret. Confronting her past with the audience as witness, she indirectly asked how we can muster compassion toward ourselves. In re-visiting this past, she opened up the space for another reading, not just a gratuitous spectacle of self-exploitation but an opportunity to demonstrate forgiveness for herself. Making vulnerability the key ingredient, the excruciation factor was extremely high: we felt for Laura, we cringed for Laura, and then we rejoiced for Laura, for her erroneous past and her questioning present – a moment of 20/20 hindsight in which her public disclosure affirmed a great deal of clarity.

Laura’s performance was intensely compelling in its poignancy, its lack of pretension and its honesty. She managed to ride a very fine edge between being in control, and being totally out of control. Keeping the audience on this dangerous precipice between art and life (what part is the art and which part is the life?) we were never quite sure whether she was actually performing or just being Laura. This contributed to an ongoing discomfort, extreme embarrassment – and simultaneous joy – that underlined her work, and our experience of the performance. An immediate intimacy was installed, and Laura made us feel completely at home in her orbit, even as the world around us became somewhat unbalanced. In searching for her equilibrium, we shared her journey of re-visiting her past in order to better understand the present.

Janine Eisenaecher: Eat Your Enemy #3, I am the Coca Cola of Art

Janine Eisenaecher presented another kind of purging ritual in which the demons of corporate culture, and two of its perceived representatives – Marina Abramovic and Coca Cola – were held up for display and (gentle) disparagement. This forged complicity came directly from a quote by the famous performance artist in question, in which she stated: “I am a brand like Coca Cola. I am the Coca Cola of Art.” This and other problematic things Abramovic has said got Janine thinking – about art, economics, power politics and the commodification of the artist: 

“In Japan I was treated like God. If I would have told the students to jump out of a window they would have done it.”

“I can’t bear feminism. I can’t stand that in the USA they first of all count how many women there are in a group exhibition. Art never was democratic. […] When I started my career in Italy there were no female artists at all. I didn’t consider this a problem. I took it on like a man instead. I never felt underprivileged. I always felt superior.”

Janine read aloud these quotes and other litanies of “key terms” from pieces of paper, which she then taped to her dress. Using a sound processor and several pedals, she began to mix the sound of her own voice speaking Abramovic’s words with sounds bites from a video about a performance art boot camp that Abramovic gave in preparation for her now infamous performance The Artist is Present, creating rhythmic loops that slowly built up, intensified and then decayed. The stage was lined with bottles (a tall glass bottle format not found here in Canada) and cans of coke, which became an instrument as well, with its various attributes (for example, the flip-top tab) amplified through contact mics and further electronically treated. 

Although sound was a crucial element, I wouldn’t necessarily consider this performance primarily a sound work. The ambient loops served as a soundtrack to the artist’s ritual, with the audio acting as another layer of the text:

“In real like I like to have fun.”

“You have to put your whole self in, say something. That makes you an artist. Spill your guts. No compromises. Be radical. Invent something new.”

“Discipline. Duration. Silence. Sex. Pain. Violence.”

Re-enactments of past Abramovic performances permeated the space – with actions such as Freeing the Body in which a dancer moves to an unheard soundtrack wearing nothing but a cagoule to hide the face and head; and AAA-AAA (in which a vocalist stands and repeatedly chants “AAA)”. Janine re-created her own Abramovic mini-retrospective infused with an additional level of critical thought and distance from the work.

Creating a series of actions that served to highlight the corporatization of art, Janine took us on a journey of self-effacement, a kind of emblematic erasure of “the artist”, for if the artist is subsumed, are we left with merely the symbol of the artist? In a sense Janine consumed herself through her performance. In a final exultant gesture, having lined up a row of coke bottles in the centre aisle, Janine popped them open one by one, doused herself and the other re-enactment performers and then urgently drank. This bubbly ebony elixir provided a kind of cleansing bath, and the last sips were probably the most harrowing to watch. After several bottles, she had to force it back, but her gag reflex finally gave way to a definitive, and triumphant affirmation: an enormous and sustained belch. 


In presenting seemingly incongruent works, the ensemble of performances organically wove a tangible thread from one piece to the next. While it is a natural impulse to want to make links between disparate things, in the unfolding of the evening, the links built themselves. As theatre director and performance theorist Anne Bogart says, “It is not difficult to trigger the same emotion in everyone. What is difficult is to trigger complex associations so that everyone has a different experience.” As each artist offered her particular brand of authentic and empathetic presence, Imagined Spaces, Lost Objects became just that trigger.

Extra-Rational is a series of performances by emerging Canadian artists that embrace the aesthetics of popular culture and seek to recuperate/utilize these “low brow” processes of production and cognition. The artists in Extra-Rational intentionally make use of aesthetic choices and methods of production that directly challenge the rubric of high-brow vs low-brow culture. These artists use the position of the trivialized, the unmentionable, the frivolous, the carnal and the other as a means to challenge the rationalization of high culture. 

ARTISTS
Amy Jenine Ling Wong
Amy Lam
Johnny Forever
Iris Fraser-Gudrunas
Lisa Visser
Marisa Hoicka

Trust My Gut: A Drag Opera Surgery, performed by Mini Maul and Uncle Wink (two characters selected from the drag oeuvre of Johnny Forever and Marisa Hoicka) dramatizes the recent merging of home and stage on social networking sites such as YouTube, Vimeo and facebook. This eight-hour durational installation references Orlan’s televised performance art surgeries of the early ’90s. Framed by a crochet replica of a YouTube window, Mini Maul performs surgery on Uncle Wink with a pair of tailor’s scissors, crochet hooks and a sewing needle. While splayed open Uncle Wink remains gloriously conscious as Mini Maul crafts his innards, a mass of yarn and fabric, into outrageous sculptural forms that rise from his belly and spill onto the floor. From time to time patient and doctor break into lip-synced duets chosen by audience members from a nearby laptop.

Insight mixes with consumerism and pop culture to create intuitive knowledge in Iris Fraser-Gudrunas’ performance Pop Tarot. Fraser-Gudrunas divines the future and answers the viewers’ life questions using a collection of strange and unfamiliar pop bottles. Viewers are invited to blindly select 4 beverage bottles/cans from a large inventory, stored in a nondescript cardboard box. The bottles represent the past, present, future and soul of the participant. Carefully analyzing the qualities of the consumer packaging, the clarity of the labels, the visual nature of the liquid and the list of ingredients, Fraser-Gudrunas provides the viewers with insight and guidance. 

NANA by Amy Jenine Ling Wong is a four-hour durational performance that references narcissism in youth culture and questions the rise of the self-made Internet celebrity. Occupying the gallery’s street level window, Wong confronts viewers caught off guard with the image of her slowly licking a honey-encrusted monitor. Under the honey, the monitor flickers with a mirror image of herself performing various actions. NANA is an extension of Wong’s online Vimeo library, in which she plays a wide variety of characters including: a young girl offering advice on the application of Avatar make-up, a sullen woman smoking a cigarette while explaining her attempts to replicate the “real community” of the ‘60s on facebook and a teenager aimlessly video blogging about piercing her nose.

Droozle Help Me, a performance that references the comedy sketch genre, makes use of humour and high concept comedy. In this performative lecture Amy Lam plays a character named Droozle who is looking for a new roommate. She uses inappropriate props and costumes in her attempt to be persuasive. As the performance unfolds Lam creates deliberate incongruence between herself as performer, the goals of her character and the audience’s reactions. Lam’s work continues the dialogue started by female comics of the ’50s who used intelligence, wit and a fair amount of acting out to comment on contemporary culture.

We Don’t Love Each Other is a reflexive performance that investigates the female abject body. Composed of a series of simple actions and objects, Lisa Visser drinks a copious amount of hard alcohol while attaching her left arm to her right with the use of a sewing needle and thread. The performance combines contrasting images of harm and repair: what appears to be harmful (sewing) is conceptually approached as repair – or reclamation – of not just a body but everything that is given and compromised in a relationship. And the repair – drinking and drowning one’s feelings in alcohol – is actually harmful. The piece is implicitly humorous; the artist is drunk, awkward and bloody, while the audience is compelled to watch seriously and earnestly while the hour-long performance unfolds.

PROGRAM
March 8 @ 1:00pm–5:00pm
Trust My Gut: A Drag Opera Surgery by Johnny Forever & Marisa Hoicka

March 12 @ 1:00pm–5:00pm
Pop Tarot by Iris Fraser-Gudrunas

March 12 @ 7:00pm
Trust My Gut: A Drag Opera Surgery by Johnny Forever & Marisa Hoicka
NANA by Amy Jenine Ling Wong
Droozle Help Me by Amy Lam
Pop Tarot by Iris Fraser-Gudrunas
We Don’t Love Each Other by Lisa Visser

ARTISTS
Jo SiMalaya Alcampo
Yumi Onose
Simon Rabyniuk

They see us. They perform in front of us. We see them perform. We see them. They feel us. They perform near us. We feel their work. We feel them. Something happens. Something goes through us. Something goes through them. They process the encounter. We process too. We eat. We sleep. We dream. We think. We all come back the next day. We see them. They see us. We see their response to the day before. We see more. Way more. We feel more. They feel more. Way more.

Jo SiMalaya Alcampo, Yumi Onose and Simon Rabyniuk perform on Friday and the next night they present a new work in response to the previous evening’s performance, creating an interrelated series of actions that exist in dialogue with each other. This situation challenges the artists to work directly and immediately with site, a changing and repeating audience and to consider the impact and influence of working side by side over a duration of time.

The following text, THIS is Performance Art, was written by the renowned American performance artist Marilyn Arsem in January 2011, with the intention to be published in conjunction with Infr’Action Venezia’11. This manifesto was conceived for a time when performance art’s true and intrinsic qualities are being confused by notions of live art and re-enactment created by the art media, and is drowning in the unclear matter of its opposite: the staged, the theatrical, the spectacle.

THIS is Performance Art
 

Performance art is now.
Performance art is live.
Performance art reveals itself in the present.
The artist engages in the act of creation as s/he performs.
Performance art’s manifestation and outcome cannot be known in advance.
Re-enactment of historical work is theatre, not performance art.
 
Performance art is real.
Performance art operates on a human scale.
It exists on the same plane as those who witness it.
The artist uses real materials and real actions.
The artist is no one other than her/himself. 
There are no boundaries between art and life.
The time is only now.
The place is only here.
 
Performance art requires risk.
The artists take physical risks using their bodies.
The artists take psychic risks as they confront their limits.
Witnessing a performance challenges an audience’s own sense of self.
Sponsoring performance art, with its unpredictability, requires taking risks.
Failure is always possible.
 
Performance art is not an investment object.
The work cannot be separated from the maker.
It cannot be held.
It cannot be saved.
It cannot be reproduced.
Performance art is experience – shared time and space and actions between people.
The record of performance art resides in the bodies of the artist and the witnesses.
 
Performance art is ephemeral.
It is an action created by an artist for a specific time and place.
Witnesses are privy to a unique experience that will never happen again.
Performance art reveals the vulnerability of living.
Performance art reminds us that life is fleeting.
We are only here now.