June 22 - September 18, 2016
Curated by Julia Paoli and Christine Shaw
The Cage is a Stage is a multi-compositional project composed of two gallery exhibitions, a billboard, and a short performance at the Blackwood Gallery, an evening-length performance that premieres onstage at The Power Plant's Harbourfront Centre Theatre, and a publication.
Click here to download the micropublication, The Cage is a Stage: Field Notes, featuring research, texts, and source material corresponding to each of the twenty performance vignettes that comprise The Cage is a Stage, with an introduction by Emily Mast and full colour illustrations throughout.
Opening Reception and Performance
Saturday, June 25, 2–5pm
A FREE shuttle bus will depart from Mercer Union (1286 Bloor St West) at 2:00pm and return for 5:00pm in time for the opening of Width of a Witch, a solo exhibition by Jason Dodge, and reading by CAConrad.
Performance at the Harbourfront Centre Theatre
Wednesday, June 29, 8pm
Thursday, June 30, 8pm
Admission: FREE for members of The Power Plant, $12 non-members
Tickets will be made available for purchase later in Spring 2016 online or via the Harbourfront Centre Box Office at 416.973.4000.
Forum: Why Look at Cages?
Friday, July 22, 10–5pm
Jackman Humanities Institute & University of Toronto Mississauga (UTM)
Presented by the Blackwood Gallery & Animals in the Law and Humanities
Drawing from John Berger’s 1977 essay, Why Look at Animals?, this one-day event examines the juxtapositions and intersections of human and animal, with speakers from across disciplines including sociology, law, music, and filmmaking.
With Abbas Akhavan (artist, Toronto), Mitchell Akiyama (composer and scholar, York University), Stefan Dolgert (Social Sciences, Brock University), Columba Gonzalez (Anthropology, University of Toronto), Liz Marshall (filmmaker, Toronto), Tracy McDonald (History, McMaster University), MH Tse (Law, Harvard University), Judith Nicholson (Communication Studies, Wilfrid Laurier University), and Erika Ritter (writer, Toronto), former participants of the Inside-Out program (which brings together incarcerated students and campus-enrolled UTM students as classmates), and performers Kumari Giles, Benjamin Kamino, and Andrea Spaziani.
For more information on the forum, Why Look at Cages?, please click here.
FREE Contemporary Art Bus Tour
Sunday, August 14, 12–5pm
The tour starts at Mercer Union (1286 Bloor Street West) at 12pm and then departs for Blackwood Gallery, Oakville Galleries, and the Art Gallery of Hamilton, returning to 1286 Bloor Street West at 5pm. Seating is limited. Please RSVP by Friday, August 12 to blackwood.gallery@utoronto.ca or 905.828.3789.
Running with Concepts: The Choreographic Edition
September 16–18, University of Toronto Mississauga
Emily Mast will speak about her practice at Running with Concepts: The Choreographic Edition. This three-day hybrid event is part colloquium, part workshop, part performance, and part experiment. For more information on the conference, please click here.
The Blackwood Gallery and The Power Plant are pleased to present The Cage is a Stage, a co-commissioned project by Los Angeles-based artist Emily Mast. In her choreographed performances and installations, Mast incorporates bodies, movement, sound, and light as live sculptural material. Her work emerges from collaborative practices that celebrate their ambiguous position between art, theater, poetry and dance. Mast often allows her work to unfold in chapters, presenting iterations and offshoots of the same piece in various contexts. This strategy comes from her longstanding interest in the imprecision of language, the unreliability of memory, and the value of inaccuracy as they relate to systems of belief in contemporary society.
The Cage is a Stage is a multi-compositional project composed of two gallery exhibitions, a billboard, a short performance at the Blackwood Gallery, an evening-length performance that premieres onstage at The Power Plant’s Harbourfront Centre Theatre, and a publication. By scrutinizing animality, the project examines some of the deep-seated compulsions of the human species, such as the need to control, tame, punish, and play. Mast constructs a landscape of stylized vignettes in order to expand on ideas that John Berger puts forth in his essay “Why Look at Animals,” in which he compares zoos to art galleries. Stating that each cage acts as a frame around the animal inside, he proposes that visitors stroll from cage to cage in the zoo much like they stroll from artwork to artwork in an exhibition. Like a theatre set, zoo décor is pure illusion, and what is outside of these delusory environments therefore holds the promise of being “real.” As a result, what’s inside becomes a fictionalized account of the “natural,” revealing more about who we are as storytellers than the subject of the story itself.
During the development of her project Mast researched both animal captivity and human confinement. She conducted interviews with animal experts, including a zoo curator, an anthrozoologist (who studies the interaction between humans and animals) and a telepathic interspecies communicator. At the same time, she examined emotional expression in animals, the affective bonds between humans and animals, and the intersections of speciesism, racism, and sexism. To highlight her findings, she cast a core group of performers to physically interpret and embody her integrative points of interest. Her cast is comprised of a method actor who specializes in emulating ape movement, a Butoh dancer who explores animal and human social psychology, a ballerina turned cirque performer, an artist who works with the animal/human gaze, and a child actor and horse fanatic. In her collaborative work with them, Mast has generated scores that serve as “frames” in which to explore and examine both the political implications of marginalization and the behaviour of humans through a cultural understanding of animal nature.
The Cage is a Stage was developed in collaboration with and performed by Heyward Bracey, Kiara Gamboa, Garrett Hallman, Angelina Prendergast, and Joe Seely.
Video interviews with Emily Mast and performers Heyward Bracey, Kiara Gamboa, Angelina Prendergast, and Joe Seely.
Videographer: Mike Dopsa
Video documentation of performance at Blackwood Gallery on June 25, 2016. Choreographed by Emily Mast and performed by Heyward Bracey, Kiara Gamboa, Angelina Prendergast, and Joe Seely.
Videographer: Mike Dopsa
Heyward Bracey, Kiara Gamboa, Garrett Hallman, Angelina Prendergast, Joe Seely
Sound
Ted Byrnes, percussion
Michael Day, composition & turntables
Lights
Oz Weaver
Associate Lighting Designer & Production Stage Manager
Noah Feaver
Ape suits
Joe Seely
Costumes
Nicolette Henry, Emily Mast, Joe Seely
Set and Props
Emily Mast, Joe Seely
Dramaturgy
Alison Cooley, Rachel Kauder Nalebuff, Emily Mast, Julia Paoli, Christine Shaw
Photography
Betsy Lin Seder, Soyoung Shin
Video assistance
Christopher Richmond
Gallery Installation Technicians
Petrina Ng, Ryan Park, Matthew Tegel
Performance Technicians
Brian Aitken, Paul Zingrone
Documentation
Henry Chan, Toni Hafkenscheid, John Verhaeven
Program Design
Matthew Hoffman
Program Printing
Colour Code
Program Publisher
Blackwood Gallery
The Cage is a Stage is presented in partnership with The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery and is co-curated by Julia Paoli, Associate Curator at The Power Plant and Christine Shaw, Director/Curator at the Blackwood Gallery.
Why Look at Cages? is presented in partnership with the Jackman Humanities Institute.
The Blackwood Gallery is supported by the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Department of Visual Studies, University of Toronto Mississauga. Funding for additional staff support made possible through the Young Canada Works in Heritage Organizations program, Department of Canadian Heritage. The Canadian Museums Association administers the museum component of the YCW program on behalf of the Department of Canadian Heritage.
Special thanks to
Peter Urbanek, MiST Theatre (UTM), Jim Smagata, Joe Taylor, Rob Sandolowich, Gillian Gamboa, Simone Forti, Mikaal Sulaiman, Sylvain Oswald, Tim Reid, Kim Schoen, Marty Schnapf, Cammie Staros, Olivia Mole, Marcella Faustini, Rick Hager, Davie Blue, Alisa Ratner, Hannah Chodos, Katie Oscar, Zuty Lorz, Lulu, Sean Den Bok, The Los Angeles Zoo, Deborah Erickson, Mary Getten, Shoshana Avree, Rachel Mayeri, Roberto Martin, Gustine Fudicker, Carol Katz, Kestrel Leah, Paloma Street Studio, Jmy James, Pieter, Shelby Brage, Lucas Littlejohn, Susanna Weingarten, Hugh McCormick, Mark Borman, Ingrid Evans, Martha Mast, Eric Mast, E*Rock, Zadie Haendel, Karl Haendel, Hazel
