Welcome!

Performances by Anna White, Ashley Howe, Dalia Levy, Emilio Rojas, Francis & Patrick Cruz, Genevieve Cloutier, Glena Evans, Jaclyn Blumes, Jason Fielding, Naufus Ramirez-Figueroa,  and Martina Comstock

The Performance that Never Happened

BY JACLYN BLUMAS

As every performance is unique to each live moment, a performance cannot be duplicated in quite the same manifestation. The spontaneity of a performance feeds off its audience and changes its energy, which in turn the audience members. After a performance is finished there is a sense of high vibration and excitement, creating a relationship between the audience and the performance. As they both become part of the experience of the event that just took place, there is a mutual understanding of the event that just happened on stage.

What would a performance be like if their was no audience to witness its event? What if the audience was exposed to a performance as it was ending? For my performance on the big stage I would like to set up a scenario where the stage has been set up with already used props, such as shreds of cut up fabric, a pail with a watering can, some musical instruments, a chair, a mirror and a teacup, and lots of blue paint.(It's not Yves Klein's blue, but something close?) All the props and sceanarios are staged to draw references to some of my favorite performance pieces and artists. As the doors open for the show, I will take my bow and begin to clean up the stage.

In my booth I will be displaying what a performer goes through after a performance. I will be winding down from the ‘high’ that is experienced performing through meditation and yoga exercises. I will be cleaning myself up from dirt and markings that happened during the “performance”. I will post some Polaroid’s of the performance where audience members can feel free to enquire about the show that they had missed.

In a sense my whole piece is not about what actually happened during the performance, but the idea of what a performer undergoes in the complete experience of what it is to perform.

Transitional Acts

BY THE CRUZ BROTHERS

We the Cruz brothers are proposing transitional acts that will bridge performances as a means of continuity. The acts are meant to change the tempo and focus of the performance while the other performances are being setup or brought down. Our acts will run approximately under one minute each and will be decided up spontaneously depending on the dry run rehearsal of the show. The "Transitional Acts" will be critically positioned between each main performance.

Manifesting Success

BY JASON FIELDING

Manifesting Success is a look at the projected notions of material success commonly portrayed in contemporary media. The image of success according to the material standards of popular media is ever-present and can be personified in the likeness of the motivational speaker character in its many forms. The activities of the Motivational Speaker increase in difficult times, giving the masses a message of hope; temporarily filling the void that many feel exist in their lives. Discontentment, disillusionment, and despair provide the motivational speaker with an audience and a steady flow of income. Historically, these figures utilized religion and spirituality to inspire the downtrodden with a message of hope. Today, with the success of films such as The Secret, we are seeing a resurgence of these figures preaching on a plethora of topics from sales, marketing, spirituality, health and fitness, and even a combination of them all. From Deepak Chopra to Anthony Robbins, we are being sold the ideal of a better, happier, and more successful us.

For this performance I have created a video of myself playing the role of a Motivational Speaker character named Jay Fielding. Jay Fielding is inspiring his audience to “take action” and create opportunities for themselves to achieve financial independence. Ironically, Jason Fielding, is an actor playing the part of the motivational speaker and is an artist without financial independence. I will also be in the audience, dressed like Jay Fielding, on my knees, writing notes, worshipping, and trying to emulate the image on the screen. I will then become Jay Fielding and hand out my business cards to the audience members. This work is investigating the cultural role of the teacher/speaker/guru and also examining the relationship of the artist to the market.

Heaven and Hell

An Endurance Piece 

BY ASHLEY MARIE HOWE

“Heaven and Hell” explores the extremities of life's choices and raises existential questions about the things we love and hate. This is an experiment to see if there is a limit to my love for two of my favorite things: music and dancing. Ironically, this piece will require a degree of self-control to sustain my over-indulgence.

I chose the following six songs to reflect the binary extremes. For example, “Disorder” by Joy Division deals with a person’s attempts to experience normalcy. “God Only Knows” by the Beach Boys began with the lyric, “I may not always love you,” a controversial opening line for a 1960’s pop song. Brian Wilson’s struggles with mental illness and drug abuse are well documented and it took an unusual amount of restraint for him to overcome these challenges.

Each song will play for an hour on repeat.

5pm – Jefferson Airplane - “Somebody To Love” [Surrealistic Pillow]
6pm – Elliott Smith - “Needle In The Hay” [Elliott Smith]
7pm – Sex Pistols - “God Save The Queen” [Never Mind The Bollocks]
8pm – Nirvana - “Lithium” [Nevermind]
9pm – Joy Division - “Disorder” [Unknown Pleasures]
10pm – Beach Boys - “God Only Knows” [Pet Sounds]

Eema Eema / Mother Mother

I would first like to acknowledge that my performance takes place on unceded Coast Salish territory.

In October 2008 I produced an experimental performance art video titled “Eema Eema/ Mother Mother. I would like to continue with the same eco-feminist tropes in my live performance while experimenting with the intersection of live performance and this already produced work.

“Eema Eema / Mother Mother” is an exploration of abandonment and reclamation of Mother Earth as engendered through embodiment of “trash” and a return to my ancient mother tongue Aramaic. Through simultaneous embodiment of both object and subject, the performance challenges the viewer’s gaze of the female body as I occupy both performance spaces. The piece also questions the implications of colonialism on women and the environment as it manifests in mainstream consumer cultures. These expansionist behaviours of infinite growth, ever-increasing volumes of subordinating mass media and the commodification of nature are normative components of economies and civil society within settler-states like Canada. I am rendered silent throughout the performance besides calling out for my mother interpreted here as “Mother Earth.” It should be noted that the language I speak (ancient Aramaic) was lost to Roman colonization resulting in eventual reworking of the alphabet into further dying Jewish languages such as Yiddish and Ladino.

A common thread throughout my work seen here is the use of the Brechtian “alienation effect” employed to arouse an awakening, critical consciousness in the viewer. It is employed through the participatory element of the performance incorporating the spectator in the embodiment process.

For the booth component of the show I attach garbage to my costumed body with thread (sewing) and gaff tape embodying Vancouver’s litter corporeally and matrifocally. My costume is the same as in the filmed piece wearing a black evening gown, black tights and dress shoes evocative of the neutrality of the woman as any one of us. The performance engages spectators with the garbage allowing them to enter my booth and attach litter to their bodies with or without my assistance by taping or sewing drawing upon the spectators’ creativity in reclaiming what has been discarded and invoking a sense of connectedness within the piece.

Centre stage, the video performance is silently projected onto the back of the studio and I continue the performance. I engage with the audience by taping garbage to them representing among other things the blind contamination of our bodies and the universal relevance of environmental degradation and connectedness to Mother Earth. I aim to conclude the performance by calling out in sync with the film “Eema, Eema” reconnecting with what has been lost.

Free Curries for Refugees (After Clair Bishop)

BY NAUFUS RAMIREZ-FIGUEROA

-a table laid with masala curry powder (in small containers or packages).

-a caucasian actor with a beard, wig, and darker skin make up pretending to be me promotes the "free curries to refugees". He is adamant that he is me and explains things from a small script to convince visitors of the what he is giving out (a provocation to rethink the role of refugees in the arts, and other marginal people...as sometimes people of colour are said to have an easier time getting ahead because they can sell their issues to a white guilted art audience.)

My practice enacts the connection between art and research. I combine academic research with fieldwork by visiting and spending time in communities while I develop my ideas and visual language.

I often work with impermanent materials, such as candy, fruit, earth, and fireworks. By working with ephemera I seek intense aesthetic experiences in time. I enjoy how an ephemeral work may make us acutely aware of the present moment, as well as transport us to emotions and associations drawn from our past.

Though my creative process is committed to experimentation and research, and my subject matter often deals with things such as the Guatemalan Civil War, the results are often absurd and humorous. I have found that refugees and survivors of war are often that way; nothing in life is ever so dire as to be unworthy of a joke or two.