September 16 - 18, 2016
University of Toronto Mississauga
Various locations across campus
A THREE DAY HYBRID EVENT
With Julia Bryan-Wilson, Mel Y. Chen, Emily Mast, Julie Pellegrin, Julien Prévieux, Sarah Sharma, and Heyward Bracey, Ashley Hunt, Turay Turay & Kim Zumpfe (The School for the Movement of the Technicolor People)
With presentations by:
Alvin Luong, Olive Mckeon, MORTIFIED (Camilla Singh & Jenn Goodwin), Angela Veronica Wong & Caroline Doherty, Francisco-Fernando Granados & Johanna Householder, Gabriel Levine, Amelia Ehrhardt & Fabien Maltais-Bayda, k.g. Guttman, and Stephanie Anderson, Kirsty Robertson & Shannon Stratton
Co-hosted by Christine Shaw and Ame Henderson
Running with Concepts: The Choreographic Edition is part-workshop, part-conference, part-crit session, part-master class, part-experiment, part-chance composition. It is also part of the Blackwood Gallery’s 2016–2017 exhibition program which animates questions of choreography and sets out to mobilize another set of terms: counterproductivity, co-immunity, choreopolitics, and care.
This fourth edition of Running with Concepts traces choreography across individual bodies and the systems that distribute and contain them. Presenters will address choreography’s entanglements with capitalism, power, the global economy, healthcare, pedagogy, collectivism, technology, cartography, and art-making. The conference will play host to performances, processions, demonstrations, workshops, screenings, lectures, interviews, and conversations to open multiple perspectives on the ramifications of the choreographic in the 21st century, including:
The choreography of labour
The circulation of stuff
The capture and control of bodies
The pace of capitalism
The enclosure of territories
The rearrangement of matter
The choreography of fabrication
The imperative to participate
The sharing economy
The choreography of exhibitions
The crisis of care
The potential of rehearsal
Performed across the UTM campus, Running with Concepts: The Choreographic Edition takes aim at the multiple connections between art and globalization and asks how we might think about the relation between choreography and politics today without repeating neoliberal demands and constraints? Running with Concepts: The Choreographic Edition will become a rehearsal space for possible ways of entering the social and of positioning oneself with others.
FRIDAY
5:00pm – Bus departs 280 Bloor Street for UTM
6:00pm – Opening remarks, Blackwood Gallery
6:30pm – Emily Mast, Procession (multiple locations)
7:45pm – Julie Pellegrin, What Does Choreography do to Exhibitions?, CCT Building, Rm 1080
8:45pm –
Reception, e|gallery
9:30pm – Bus returns for Toronto
SATURDAY
9:00am – Bus departs 280 Bloor Street for UTM
9:30-10:00am – REGISTRATION/COFFEE
10:00am – Introduction
10:15-11:15am – Julia Bryan-Wilson, Minds Over Matter, Kaneff Centre, Rm 137
11:15-11:45am – k.g. Guttman, I ask the audience to close one eye, Innovation Complex Rotunda
11:45 – BREAK
12:15-1:15pm – Julien Prévieux, Patterns of Life, Kaneff Centre, Rm L1220
1:15-2:00pm – Stephanie Anderson, Kirsty Robertson, Shannon Stratton, Time and Time Again: A Conversation, Kaneff Centre, Rm L1220
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2:00-2:45pm – LUNCH
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3:00-3:30pm – MORTIFIED, MORTIFIED: Laboratory of Learning, CCT Building, Underground Parking Garage
3:45-4:15pm – Alvin Luong, 10 Aircraft Marshalling Moves for Beginners 10 Minute Daily Routine!, CCT Building, Lobby
4:30-6:30pm – The School for the Movement of the Technicolor People, CCT Building, Circuit Café
6:30pm – Bus returns for Toronto
SUNDAY
9:00am – Bus departs 280 Bloor Street for UTM
9:30-10:00am – REGISTRATION/COFFEE
10:15-10:45am – Gabriel Levine, Practice: Rehearsing a Non-Concept, Instructional Centre, Rm 220
11:00-11:30am – Amelia Ehrhardt & Fabien Maltais-Bayda, Working in (Proximity to) Dance, Instructional Centre, Rm 110
11:30am-12:00pm – BREAK
12:15-1:15pm – Olive McKeon, Dance or/and/as Revolution, Instructional Centre, Rm 110
1:30-2:00pm – Angela Veronica Wong & Caroline Doherty, Model Applications, Instructional Centre, Rm 240
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2:00-2:45pm – LUNCH
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3:00-3:45pm – Francisco-Fernando Granados & Johanna Householder, movement studies: Johanna Householder + Francisco-Fernando Granados in Conversation, Deerfield Hall, Rm 1070
4:00-5:00pm – Mel Y. Chen, Movement Without Disability, Deerfield Hall, Atrium
5:15-6:00pm – Sarah Sharma, A Moving Inventory of Exits, Deerfield Hall, Rm 2060
6:00pm – Bus returns for Toronto
Click here for directions UTM and transit/parking information.
FACULTY
Emily Mast, Procession
Procession includes three physical exercises for the group that will unfold in various venues throughout the UTM campus. The exercises begin near Mast’s exhibition at the Blackwood Gallery and end not far from her installation at the e|gallery. The exercises will somatically work through questions she has been posing in her most recent works regarding categorization, confinement, restraint, and the potential for release. The procession aims to make connections through sensory inquiry and aid participants in letting go, un-thinking, getting lost, and blurring their vision in a way that might shed some light on their personal and mutual vulnerabilities. Participants should wear comfortable shoes and casual clothes they can easily move in.
Julia Bryan-Wilson, Minds Over Matter
In this talk and short workshop, Julia Bryan-Wilson proposes alternative histories to conceptual and performance art in the 1970s by thinking through their coemergence with a rising interest in telekinesis. What happens when we think not of dematerialization but the very rearrangement of matter using the powers of collective imagination?
Julie Pellegrin, What Does Choreography do to Exhibitions?
In this talk, Julie Pellegrin reflects on the intersection of choreograpy and the curatorial. Beginning with Mathieu Copeland’s A Choreographed Exhibition at La Ferme du Buisson in 2008, and the resulting movements, gestures, and relationships produced by it, Pellegrin addresses five central perspectives: the score, the space, time, the body, and memory. Tracing a line between this milestone project and her ongoing curatorial practice, she charts choreographic exhibition-making methodologies across more recent projects. Examining The Yvonne Rainer Project: Lives of Performers (2014) and Alfred Jarry Archipelago (2015), Pellegrin explores the potential of liveness, presence, radical experimentation, and reconfiguration to animate choreographic legacies. Lastly, Pellegrin discusses dance’s potential to displace viewer expectations and disrupt the established codes of contemporary visual art, in projects such as Emily Mast’s Missing Missing (2015).
Julien Prévieux, Patterns of Life
The history of movement analysis starts at the end of the 19th century when Étienne-Jules Marey studied the human gait with his chronophotographic apparatus. He used this technique to capture several sequential frames of an individual walking in order to capture the movements of discrete body parts. From these first experiments to the US National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency’s development of “activity-based intelligence”, Prévieux will trace the genealogy of the quantification and visualization of bodily movement. He will explore various ways of making sense of movement analysis, highlighting their political, economic or military implications. The second section of the talk asks how we can use these techniques to set up different kinds of workshops, addressing the consequences of these schematic bodies and their potential to generate new forms (dance, drawings, sculptures). The goal is to radically reconfigure their purposes to focus on their visual aspects, revealing their creative and ludic qualities.
Sarah Sharma, A Moving Inventory of Exits
This talk locates the male fantasy of exit as it circulates across contemporary culture. From the geopolitical to the intimate sphere, this dream of exit lurks in the technologies of the sharing economy, rightwing Men’s rights movements, exercises of nationalism, and the leftist refusal of work paradigm. While taking stock of the penchant for exit I will consider how exit moves though the social body and the problems it poses for feminism.
School for the Movement of the Technicolor People (Heyward Bracey, Ashley Hunt, Turay Turay, Kim Zumpfe)
Artists and dancers Heyward Bracey, Ashley Hunt, Turay Turay and, Kim Zumpfe will offer a presentation on how their individual practices intersect in their collaboration, the School for the Movement of the Technicolor People (Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, 2015, Diverseworks, Houston, 2016). The project exists as an exhibition in the form of a dance school, informed by the central research question: What is a Black dance curriculum today? This work is a performance platform with the dance company WXPT that takes up the histories of Black education, protest, and collectivity. The artist will discuss the intersections of dance, politics and visual art, and how these exist between choreography, experimental pedagogy and exhibition. Conference participants will be invited to move, share, and enter into this conversations of how the politics of movement that structure Black and queer life are positioned in the fields of art and dance.
SELECTED PRESENTERS
Alvin Luong, 10 Aircraft Marshalling Moves for Beginners 10 Minute Daily Routine!
Alvin Luong will lead a presentation on aircraft marshalling signals, unpacking their history and implications on trade, migration, and warfare. The first half of the presentation consists of a screening of Luong’s video project, Sculpture†In†Reverse†; the second will involve a performative lecture taking the form of a demonstration.
Feel as if your heart is opening when you raise your arms.
Feel as if you are pushing conflict away.
Inhale and exhale, prepare for take off!
Luong will share his favourite aircraft marshalling signals for warm up, cool down, and overall health and wellness! Aircraft marshalling is known for its health benefits and for self-defense. This is a great instructional presentation for aircraft marshaling beginners and also for advance students! After the presentation you may practice aircraft marshalling at home, or in one of five areas: mountain top, forest, river, ocean, or waterfall.
Olive McKeon, Dance or/and/as Revolution
Social movements of many different periods, tendencies, and locations have at least one thing in common: they gather bodies to do things together. This presentation will take up questions of embodiment, corporeality, and movement in relation to forms of protest. Drawing from methods developed by dance and performance scholars, we will focus our attention on what happens with bodies during political mobilizations, strikes, occupations, and riots. How do protests move and use public spaces? Refusing to confine our aesthetic attention to anointed works of choreography, we will look at the dances that take place on the streets, the movement of bodies as they flock and swarm together. We will consider the possible intersections as well as disjunctions between social movements and dance as an artistic field.
Stephanie Anderson, Kirsty Robertson, Shannon Stratton, Time and Time Again: A Conversation
What dominates...all work processes which are performed in the mode of laboring is neither man’s purposeful effort nor the product he may desire, but the motion of the process itself and the rhythm it imposes upon the laborers.
- Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, 1958
Part interview, part discussion, part conversation, this panel is framed around In Time (the Rhythm of the Workshop), an exhibition of three films curated by Shannon Stratton at the Museum of Arts and Design, NYC in 2015. Comprised of works by artists Andreas Bunte, Daniel Eisenberg and Denis Côté, In Time focused closely on the role of gesture in late capitalism, and on the impact of labour on bodies. By considering the ‘choreography of fabrication’ in varied contexts, it encouraged reflection on the tempo of work, objects of labor as measures of time, and the ‘unexpected ways material becomes immaterial” (MAD, 2016). For this presentation, a brief introduction to the exhibition and films will be followed by a conversation amongst the curator, panelists, and audience members. Questions and discussion will consider choreographies of labour, particularly of emotional or invisible labour; the pace of late capitalism and its effect(s) on bodies human, non-human, cyborg; labour as an antagonym, both highly valued and regularly dismissed; and the (conflicted) roles of artists, scholars, and curators in challenging and perpetuating current regimes of labour and being.
MORTIFIED (Camilla Singh and Jenn Goodwin), MORTIFIED (Laboratory of Learning)
MORTIFIED (Laboratory of Learning) is a performance that brings some of the primary motivations we create from into the foreground. For 5 weeks, MORTIFIED will pursue and document two forms of repetitive physical engagement: playing the drums to acquire speed and multi-limb coordination, and swim training. The culmination of our training sessions will be presented at the Running with Concepts event. Jenn Goodwin will perform live and Camilla Singh will be working from Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates, present via video.
Power, control and mastery have complex histories and very different meanings when their objectives are focused inwards versus outwards. In response to the call for ways to think about choreopolitics and the relation between art and politics, we are choreographing our training sessions to embody a relationship between externally imposed notions of masculine and feminine representations of power and strength. Can we apply the meditative learning that is found in a solitary studio practice to think through the ways in which feminine voices are suppressed? Where does strength lie and how can it be attained within a rhythmic phrase of drumming or swimming?
Angela Veronica Wong and Caroline Doherty, Model Applications
How do we enact care? How do we envision that others will enact care towards us? Our performance uses familiar academic furniture, spoken text, and video to begin answering these questions. In the performance, recognizable and representative objects stand in for the unequal affective stakes and material relations of academic labour. Our meticulous transformation of the furniture questions how the university values our labour, attempting to move the university from a transactional space to a collaborative one which values care. Through layering roles of instructor and student, the performance will explore alternative forms of knowledge-production, the multiple complexities of identity, and forefront the necessity of community building over competition and hostility in the academic setting.
Francisco-Fernando Granados and Johanna Householder, movement studies: Johanna Householder + Francisco-Fernando Granados in Conversation
As a politicized tool, choreography can enact the movement of bodies along continuous and discontinuous times and spaces, setting up a common principle in order to make sensible the slippage of form, content, and context. Johanna Householder and Francisco-Fernando Granados share an interest in these sites of politicized slippage in the relationship between score/notation/documentation and performance, whether it is highlighting the not-always-visible gender politics at play in aesthetic theory, framing a form of state violence as a readymade, creating an embodied manifesto to challenge the narrow confines of formalism, or pushing past the boundaries of the identifiable in a slow movement towards self-abstraction. The embodied conversation between the two artists incorporates audio-visual and spatial components, folding in selections from their solo work, their ongoing collaboration, and discussion of works by other artists.
Gabriel Levine, Practice: Rehearsing a Non-Concept
My practice. Her practice. I’ve been practicing x. Theory and practice. See you at practice. Radical practice. Dance practice. Meditation practice. Sometimes a word seems to worm its way into every corner of life and thought, and so it is with the term “practice.” Once used philosophically to designate “doing,” in a triad with “thinking” and “making,” practice has soaked up other connotations: from political action (revolutionary praxis), to professional activity (the practice of law), to rehearsal or training (basketball practice). Contemporary aesthetic discourse tends to blend all of these meanings, with “practice” also standing in for the shift away from the artwork or medium, and toward open-ended actions, series, processes and projects. In art, politics, and everyday life, practice seems to promise a freedom from the strictures of finality and eventfulness: if it’s all just practice, then the pressure is off. Yet the turn to practice also reflects the neoliberal pressures to train oneself, to perform, and to rehearse a marketable set of skills. On this “planet of the practicing,” as Peter Sloterdijk calls it, there are winners and losers, and maybe those who fail should just have practiced a little harder.
The relevance, omnipresence, ambivalence, and obscurity of “practice” suggest that this non-concept needs to be rehearsed. This 30-minute mini-workshop will take the form of a collective exercise in semantic choreography. It will begin with a short talk, and then move into group writing exercises and responses that move across a series of vectors: practice/action, practice/tactics, practice/training, and practice/nonpractice.
Amelia Ehrhardt and Fabien Maltais-Bayda, Working in (Proximity to) Dance
This presentation re-performs a dialogue between two bodies that work in/around choreography. Amelia, a curator and choreographer, and Fabien, a writer and researcher, hack the media of their professions (namely, e-mail) to explore the actions, activities, and gestures that constitute their engagement with dance, while investigating the parameters of their professional/institutional situations. Amelia and Fabien will read each others’ “greatest hits” from this exchange, playfully troubling the dynamics of power, authority, and vocality inflecting their respective positionalities. What kinds of work do the infrastructures around dance support/discourage? How are the ecologies and economies of presenting, disseminating, and responding to dance imbricated with those of choreographic practice? The question of what is inside and what is outside (of choreography, discourse, institutions) emerges as a central concern. These inquiries will circulate around choreographies by Bronislava Nijinska, Fred Herko, Miguel Gutierrez, and Dana Michel, which interrogate conditions of (para)artistic labour, or actively encourage these questions.
k.g. Guttman, I ask the audience to close one eye
I ask the audience to close one eye is a cartographic coming-into-form of personal/ political latencies of love, questions of genetic pre-dispositions, and animate/inanimate relations. Using live performance tactics of proximity, framing, sensing, pausing and pacing, I introduce several items into the space that do not belong to each other immediately.
I start by introducing the red t-shirt folded in front of me/ I announce it will be my friend O for the time being / I put on the t-shirt/ O’s partner is introduced to the audience / I hug them / They introduce their work / I ask the audience to close one eye / My father will start to dance a small dance / A pause / A 1943 photo of O’s great Uncle Beyrish is shown, and his story told / I scroll through the documents of a sperm donor / My father stands up, O’s partner stands up, and they are asked to shake hands.
Julia Bryan-Wilson’s research interests include questions of artistic labour, feminism, queer theory, fabrication/production, performance, visual culture of the nuclear age, photography, and textile handicraft. A scholar and critic, Bryan-Wilson has written about artists such Laylah Ali, Ida Applebroog, Sadie Benning, the Cockettes, Simone Forti, Cristóbal Lehyt, Ana Mendieta, Yvonne Rainer, Yoko Ono, Harmony Hammond, Sharon Hayes, and Anne Wilson, in numerous publications. She is the author of Art Workers: Radical Practice in the Vietnam War Era (2009), which was named a “best book of the year” by Artforum magazine, editor of OCTOBER Files: Robert Morris, and, with Glenn Adamson, co-author of Art in the Making: Artists and Their Materials from the Studio to Crowdsourcing. She is an associate professor of modern and contemporary art at the University of California, Berkeley.
Mel Y. Chen is Associate Professor of Gender & Women's Studies and Director for the Center for the Study of Sexual Culture at the University of California, Berkeley. Chen’s 2012 book, Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect (Duke UP, MLA Alan Bray Award), explores questions of racialization, queering, disability, and affective economies in animate and inanimate “life” through the extended concept of animacy. Chen’s second book project concerns the relationships among the conceptual territories of “toxicity” and “intoxication” and their involvement in histories of the shared interanimation of race and disability. Writing on cognitive disability and method, the racialization of pollution, and more can be found in Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies, Transgender Studies Quarterly, Discourse, Women in Performance, Australian Feminist Studies, Medical Humanities, and GLQ. Chen coedits a book series entitled “Anima,” highlighting scholarship in critical race and disability post/in/humanisms at Duke University Press.
Ame Henderson is a Toronto-based artist originally from the west coast of Vancouver Island. She works regularly with Public Recordings, a collaborative operation that conjoins artistic research, performance creation, learning, and publication. Activating dance and choreography to propose experiential modes of being together, her choreographic experiments have been shared on stages, in found spaces and galleries, and outdoors. Recent projects include performance encyclopaedia (2007-present) with Evan Webber, and rehearsal/performance (2014) at the Art Gallery of Ontario. She has developed work in residence at Gallery TPW, The Theatre Centre and Harbourfront Centre (Toronto); Tanz Quartier Wien (Vienna, Austria); Dance4 (Nottingham, UK); and OBORO, Studio 303 and Tangente (Montreal). She holds an MFA in choreography from the Amsterdam School for the Arts and is an Associate Dance Artist of Canada’s National Arts Centre.
Emily Mast recently staged a solo “choreographed exhibition” called Missing Missing at La Ferme du Buisson in Noisiel, France, and an 18-part roving procession of performances based on the poetry of Joan Brossa at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA). In addition, her video, installation, and performance have been shown at the Hammer Museum’s Made in L.A. Biennial, China Art Objects Galleries (Los Angeles), Mona Bismarck American Center (Paris), Silencio (Paris), Night Gallery (Los Angeles), Robert Rauschenberg Foundation Project Space (New), Public Fiction (Los Angeles), REDCAT (Los Angeles), MUHKA (Antwerp), Human Resources (Los Angeles) and Performa (New York). Mast’s multi-compositional project, The Cage is a Stage, will be presented by the Blackwood Gallery and The Power Plant in summer 2016.
Since 2007, Julie Pellegrin has been the director of the Art Centre of la Ferme du Buisson in the outskirts of Paris. She aims to create a dialogue between contemporary art and other art forms (with a particular emphasis on theatre and dance), as well as social science, focusing on the significance of processes and experimentation in the performative dimension of art. She organises solo (Isabelle Cornaro, Gianni Motti, Denis Savary, Mathieu Abonnenc, Julien Bismuth, Emily Mast, Kapwani Kiwanga…) and group exhibitions (A Choreographed Exhibition, Treasures for Theatre, The Yvonne Rainer Project, Alfred Jarry Archipelago…) mixed with publications, talks and performances. Publisher of over a dozen artist monographs and artists’ books, Julie Pellegrin recently published, together with fellow curator Mathieu Copeland, a collective anthology entitled Choreographing Exhibitions. In 2013, she co-curated Nuit Blanche in Paris with Chiara Parisi.
Work, management, economics, politics, control systems, state-of-the‑art technologies and the culture industry are the many ‘worlds’ that Julien Prévieux’s activities involve. His work often appropriates the vocabulary, mechanisms, and modus operandi of the sectors by which it is informed, the better to highlight their dogmas, excesses and, when all is said and done, their vacuity. Prévieux has had solo exhibitions at Centre Pompidou (Paris), FRAC Basse-Normandie (Caen), Synagogue de Delme Art Center, Domaine de Kerguennec Art Center (Bignan), among others, and was included in the 10th International Istanbul Biennale and the 2015 Lyon Biennale. His work has been included in group exhibitions at DiverseWorks (Houston), Haus der Kulturen der Welt (Berlin), Witte de With (Rotterdam), the Museum of Contemporary Art (Santa Barbara), and Kunstverein Hannover. He received the Prix Marcel Duchamp 2014 and is represented by Galerie Jousse Entreprise, Paris. Julien Prévieux will present an exhibition and performance at the Blackwood Gallery in January 2017.
Sarah Sharma is Associate Professor and Director of the McLuhan Program in Culture and Technology at the University of Toronto. She is a faculty member at the Institute for Communication Culture Information and Technology (Mississauga) with a graduate appointment in the Faculty of Information (St. George). She is the author of In the Meantime: Temporality and Cultural Politics (2014), which won the National Communication Association Critical/Cultural 2014 Book of the Year Award. One key strand of her research has focused on time as a site of social difference in a culture that is imagined to be technologically speeding up. Her current research brings feminist approaches to technology to such sites as algorithmic culture, the “sharing” economy, and the changing structures of care labour.
Christine Shaw is Director/Curator of the Blackwood Gallery and Assistant Professor, Teaching Stream in the Department of Visual Studies at the University of Toronto Mississauga. Her practice is committed to curatorial experimentation, collective cognition, and applied philosophical inquiry. She has been active in collectively run autonomous education and curatorial projects, including the Toronto School of Creativity & Inquiry (2005-2010), and, currently, Letters & Handshakes with Greig de Peuter. Her recent curatorial projects include FALSEWORK, Furnishing Positions, The Figure in the Carpet, The pen moves across the earth… and The Cage is a Stage at the Blackwood Gallery; Migrant Choir at the 2015 Venice Biennale; Carlos Amorales: Black Cloud at The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery; and The Work of Wind for Nuit Blanche 2015, Toronto.
The School for the Movement of the Technicolor People is a large-scale installation and performance platform that acts as a dance school. The School for the Movement of the Technicolor People responds to the limited positioning of Black and queer movers in the dance and art worlds amidst the evolving violence against Black bodies, gentrification, and the persistent erasure of communities of colour throughout history. This multidisciplinary platform is built from the dance company WXPT (We are the Paper, We are the Trees), which uses dance moves, protest forms, weight exchange, concealment strategies, and the everyday movement vocabularies of survival and celebration that structure Black and queer life. Heyward Bracey is a butoh influenced dancer/movement artist. Turay Turay is a performance artist and social justice advocate. Ashley Hunt is an image-maker, writer, and educator. Kim Zumpfe is an artist, educator, and sculptor. WXPT is an intentional community in the form of a dance company.
Heyward Bracey - a butoh influenced dancer/movement artist - has worked and performed with a number of experimental dance collectives including Corpus Delicti, Body Weather Laboratory, Los Angeles Movement Arts and most recently WXPT - The School for the Movement of the Technicolor People. He has collaborated with master butoh artist Katsura Kan in Los Angeles,
New York and at the Seattle International Dance Festival. His recent solo, "Stealing Skin 6," was presented at the Bare Bones Butoh Showcase in San Francisco, Pieter Performance Space in Los Angeles and Central Cultural Los
Talleres in Mexico City. Heyward's interest in the body as a social/political/spiritual process has led to recent collaborations with Emily Mast in "The Least Important Things," presented at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and "The Cage is a Stage," presented at University of Toronto Mississauga, the Harbourfront Centre Theater, Toronto and the REDCAT Los Angeles.
Turay Turay (pronouns They, Them and Theirs) is a Black, queer, gender non-conforming performance artist and social justice advocate. Their communion with dance has been mostly a private practice of transformative healing. Turay has been in a movement practice with WXPT, March 2015, as a means of affirming and further exploring their relationship to dance. Turay comes to their practice as a means of radical self-care.
Ashley Hunt is interested in how images, objects, writing and performance can engage social ideas and actions, including those of social movements, daily life, the exercise of political power, and the disciplinary boundaries that separate our art worlds from the larger worlds in which they sit. His work looks to structures that allow people to accumulate power, and those which keep others from getting it, while learning from the ways people come to know, contribute to or resist these structures. Rather than seeing art and activism as two exclusive spheres of practice, he approaches them as mutual and complimentary — drawing upon the ideas and aesthetics of social movements, cultural theory and art alike, the theorizing and practices of each informing the other. Recent exhibitions and performances include Diverseworks in Houston, Cue Art Foundation, Threewalls Gallery in Chicago, The Kitchen in New York, the 2012 Made in L.A. Biennial of the Hammer Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, the Tate Modern, and Woodbourne State Correctional Institute in upstate New York. Recent writing has appeared in X-TRA Contemporary Art Quarterly (2014), Native Strategies issue 4 (2014), Shifter Magazine #20 (2013). Hunt lives in Los Angeles, where he directs the Program in Photography and Media at CalArts.
Kim Zumpfe is an artist and educator who lives and works in Los Angeles. Her work moves and negotiates between bodies, objects, and politicized space - to interrogate encounters where there is a collapse of identity, intimacy, and power structures. She investigates the self within constructed sites and architectures, spaces and where multiple bodies develop, displace, produce, and forget to maintain boundaries and relations. Her work investigates the possibilities of where borders within these forms disperse through engagement with various media, including images, sculpture, video, installation, sound, and performance. Within her collaborations and individual work, she works to expand the potentials of resistance by producing psychological spaces that contain porosities of bent time(s) including the provisional, temporary, transient, unstable, and the illegible. Zumpfe’s work has been exhibited at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE), UCR Culver Center for the Arts Riverside, DiverseWorks, University Art Gallery Irvine, Visual Arts Center Fullerton, University Art Museum Long Beach, and several public and online sites. She is a member of Emily O, a free-floating artist collective that questions the relationship between individual and collective processes and identity through organizing exhibitions and collaborative writing.
Alvin Luong is an artist from Toronto. Luong works with lens-based media and performance to consider how documentations and instructions are created and how they can be interpreted. Luong has exhibited in group exhibitions at Gallery 44 and Trinity Square Video, and exhibited commissioned works at Trinity Square Video. Upcoming exhibitions include a solo project at PLATFORM centre for photographic + digital arts in 2017/18. He holds a Bachelor of Arts (Honours) in Visual Studies from the University of Toronto.
Olive Mckeon is a dancer and researcher based in Oakland. A doctoral candidate at UCLA, she is writing a dissertation on the political economy of concert dance, focusing on 20th century modern dance in San Francisco. She works with SALTA, the feminist curatorial collective, to run a monthly experimental dance series in Oakland. She is lecturer in the Critical Studies department at the California College of the Arts.
MORTIFIED is a two-person band: visual artist Camilla Singh, and choreographer Jenn Goodwin, who immerse themselves in their emotional response to a combative world. Adopting the format of a band to encompass a range of activities, MORTIFIED creates a sonic experience through movement and mayhem. The performances result in a “concert” exploring aggression and enthusiasm, kindness and rage, pride and regret, through tap dancing, cheerleading, drumming, and fight choreography.
Angela Veronica Wong is the author of how to survive a hotel fire, a featured poetry debut in Poets & Writers, and elsa (2017). Her chapbooks include Dear Johnny, In Your Last Letter, winner of a Poetry Society of America New York Chapbook fellowship. She has been anthologized in The Best American Poetry and Please Excuse This Poem. Her performance work has been featured or is forthcoming at independent galleries in Buffalo and New York City.
Caroline Doherty employs multiple media to engage questions of communication, violence, and power. She completed an MFA at SUNY Buffalo in 2016, and a BFA in Sculpture at Massachusetts College of Art in 2004. She has exhibited, performed, collaborated, taught, and been a resident artist in North America, Europe, East Africa, and China, most recently at SOMA in Mexico City; ArtPark in Lewiston, NY; Tsinghua University in Beijing; the Chongjiang Contemporary Art Museum in Chongqing; and CEPA Gallery in Buffalo. Alongside her art practice, Caroline teaches people of many ages and backgrounds how to make and do new things.
Francisco-Fernando Granados’ multidisciplinary critical practice spans performance, installation, cultural theory, digital media, public art, and community-based projects. He has presented work in venues including the Art Gallery of Ontario, Vancouver Art Gallery, Darling Foundry (Montreal), Hessel Museum of Art (NY), Ex Teresa Arte Actual (Mexico City), and Theatre Academy at the University of the Arts (Helsinki). Awards and honours include the Governor General’s Silver Medal for academic achievement upon graduating from Emily Carr University in 2010, and being named as one of Canada's 30 Under 30 by BLOUIN ARTINFO in 2014. He completed a Masters of Visual Studies at the University of Toronto in 2012 and is a member of the 7a*11d International Performance Festival Collective.
Johanna Householder works through performance, dance, video and intermedia art. Her interest in how ideas move through bodies has led her largely collaborative practice. She has performed most recently at Performancear o Morir in Chihuahua, Mexico, at undisclosed territory in Java, and set her own 1978 solo on dancer Megumi Kokuba for Singular Bodies, Toronto Dance Theatre. She is a founder of the 7a*11d International Festival of Performance Art which holds its 11th biennial in Toronto this October. Artexte, Montréal and YYZBooks, Toronto have just published her second book, both edited in collaboration with Tanya Mars, titled More Caught in the Act: an anthology of performance art by Canadian women, 2016.
Gabriel Levine is a researcher, writer, musician, and interdisciplinary artist, whose work explores vernacular experimentation in the visual and performing arts. His writing has appeared in the journals TOPIA, PUBLIC, and the Journal of Curatorial Studies, and his music and performance projects have toured widely. In 2016, he curated and produced Animate Entities: Objects in Performance, a two-day festival at the University of Toronto. He is the co-editor (with Marcus Boon) of Practice: A Reader. He is currently a SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Theatre at Concordia University.
Amelia Ehrhardt is a choreographer, performer, curator, and obsessive organizer. She makes work that interrogates, provokes, and troubles what we see as the specificities and parameters of contemporary dance. She has worked in residence and shown her work at HATCH/Harbourfront Centre, Toronto Dance Theatre, Studio 303, and the OFFTA (Montréal). She has performed in works by Carol Anderson, Susie Burpee, Julia Sasso and Menaka Thakkar, and has worked extensively with multimedia artist Zeesy Powers. She holds an honours BA in Dance Studies from York University and has trained independently in Toronto, Montréal, and Vienna. Amelia is the Curator at Dancemakers and is the founder of Flowchart: a Series of Performance. She was on the creative team of the Toronto Dance Community Love-In from 2013-2015 and in 2015 she was the Curator of the inaugural dance series at SummerWorks Performance Festival.
Fabien Maltais-Bayda is a graduate student at the University of Toronto’s Centre for Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies, with the support of a Joseph-Armand Bombardier Scholarship from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council. He has previously worked with Montreal contemporary dance presenter Tangente, as well as the International Community of Performing Arts Curators (CICA-ICAC), and recently returned from the Summer Institute Cologne, co-hosted by the University of Cologne and Northwestern University. Fabien regularly writes on contemporary dance and performance for publications including MOMUS and esse. Forthcoming projects include a chapter investigating the emerging curatorial typology of the dance retrospective, co-written with Joseph Henry, in the anthology Curating Live Arts: Global Perspectives, Envisioning Theory and Practice.
k.g. Guttman is a Canadian artist, educator, and research candidate in the PhDArts program of Leiden University and the Royal Academy of Art The Hague, Netherlands. Her work, funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, considers post-colonial/neo-colonial discourse, choreographic practice, and site-specific interventions. From 2008-2013, k.g. held the appointment of Assistant Professor in the Department of Contemporary Dance, Concordia University, Montreal. In 2016-17, k.g. is an artist in residence at Artexte, Montreal. Her upcoming book project entitled “it’s like hammering into nothing when I speak it” will be launched at Articule, Montreal.
Stephanie Anderson is a PhD candidate in Art and Visual Culture at Western University with a specialization in labour theory, the creative economy, and the politics of maker culture. She has held curatorial and research internships at the McMichael Canadian Art Collection in Kleinburg, Ontario and McIntosh Gallery in London, Ontario. In 2015 she co-organized Re: Mediation: A Dialogue on Immersive and Interactive Art, a symposium held in conjunction with the exhibition Very Nervous System at McIntosh Gallery. Her current research explores the historically fraught relationship between artistic production and the wider structures of work and labor which characterize late capitalism.
Kirsty Robertson is an Associate Professor of Contemporary Art and Museum Studies at
Western University, Canada. Her research focuses on activism, visual culture, and changing economies. She has published widely on the topic and is currently finishing her book Tear Gas Epiphanies: New Economies of Protest, Vision, and Culture in Canad. More recently, she has turned her attention to the study of wearable technologies, immersive environments, and the potential overlap(s) between textiles and technologies. She considers these issues within the framework of globalization, activism, and creative economies. Her co-edited volume, Imagining Resistance: Visual Culture, and Activism in Canada, was released in 2011, and her tri-authored volume Putting IP in its Place: Rights Discourse, Creativity and the Everyday was released by Oxford University Press in December 2013.
Shannon Stratton is the William and Mildred Lasdon Chief Curator at The Museum of Arts and Design (New York). For 12 years she was the Director and Curator of Threewalls in Chicago, a contemporary art space that she co-founded in 2003. Threewalls founded the Hand-in-Glove Conference and later co-founded the Common Field Network for grassroots arts initiatives as well as publishing PHONEBOOK, a guide to grassroots and alternative artist resources throughout the United States. Current exhibitions include Atmosphere for Enjoyment, the first exhibition to deal solely with Harry Bertoia's sounding sculptures and the traveling exhibition, Faith Wilding: Fearful Symmetries, the first retrospective of the work of Wilding, a key figure in the feminist art movement. Other curatorial projects have included Resonating Bodies at The Soap Factory, Minneapolis, MN (2013) and Gestures of Resistance: The Slow Assertions of Craft at The Portland Museum of Contemporary Craft, Portland, OR (2010).
Running with Concepts, the Choreographic Edition is generously suppotred by the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, the Department of Visual Studies (UTM) through the Graduate Expansion Fund, the Jackman Humanities Institute Program for the Arts, and the Consulate General of France in Toronto.
