Program
Thursday, January 19 // Friday, January 20 // Saturday, January 21
Saturday, January 21
- REGINA GYPSY: THE QUEER CITY CAB COMPANY // CINDY BAKER - SASKATOON
Durational & Arranged Performance - Various Times - Day & Nightview details »
Regina Gypsy is a free-spirited taxicab, an indiscriminate chariot of abundant bounty who will pick up anyone who beckons her their way. Yes, she's been around the block a few times, and her undercarriage is sagging, but that just means she really knows her way around and she's willing to take you there. She is drawn to flamboyant revelry and gaiety but has a soft spot for those of modest means, offering sweet comfort and safe passage to lonely travelers, weary wanderers, amorous couples and intoxicated parties alike. Queer friends of Queen City rejoice! Regina Gypsy's underground taxicab caravan is in town, though sadly for a fleeting two nights only.
In this performance, I will hire myself (and my car) out as an underground taxi for the duration of the Queer City festival. Following in the tradition of gay cabs that have operated on and off in large cities such as New York, San Francisco and London for the past 4 decades, I will offer safe, courteous passage to festival patrons needing to get to or from Queer City Cinema events and social gatherings, or to anyone needing my services during the run of the performance. Outfitted with all the trappings of a tasteful gay bar bathroom – condoms, lube, a selection of queer reading material, old cigarette burns – Regina Gypsy: The Queer City Cab Company is a performance art project masquerading as a volunteer designated driving service catering to the queer community.
Please call or text Cindy @ 533 3645 anytime during the festival to arrange pickup by Regina Gypsy: The Queer City Cab Company. Cindy will be available 24 hours a day but won't guarantee to return calls immediately or be ready at a moment's notice, as she does need to sleep, eat, etc. Your call will not incur long-distance charges.
Interdisciplinary and performance artist Cindy Baker is passionate about gender culture, queer theory, and fat activism. Baker considers context her primary medium, working with whatever materials are needed to allow her to concentrate on the theoretical, conceptual and ephemeral aspects of her work. She believes that her art exists in its experience, and not in its objects.
Some of Baker's biggest interests are skewing context and (re)examining societal standards, especially as they relate to language and dissemination of information, and she perceives a need for intervention and collaboration, both within the art world and in the community at large.
With a background of working, volunteering, and sitting on the board for several artist-run centres in Western Canada, Cindy has a particular professional interest in the function of artist-run centres as a breeding ground of deviation. She is based out of Saskatoon, Saskatchewan.
cindeb@populust.ca
www.lovecindybaker.com
- PROFESSIONAL WRESTLING WORKSHOP W/ JAMIE LEWIS HADLEY
Balfour Collegiate - 1245 College Ave. - Wrestling Room 138. BUY TICKET NOW!view details »
make your way in on east side of school and enter on the most southern end of school building. Parking available out side of building.
WORKSHOP STARTS @ 10AM AND ENDS @ 5PM
ADMISSION - $50 (INCLUDES CATERED LUNCH)
The emphasis of the workshop is on the potentiality of the body. The kinaesthetic demands of Professional Wrestling will be used as a practical methodology in an attempt to stimulate the participant’s engagement with their body as a corporeal site. Rhythm, pattern, weight distribution, endurance and posture are all crucial elements of the discipline and the skills learned from this physical exploration will benefit any artist who works with their body as a communicative device. The intensive will be structured around progressively learning the fundamental physical and psychological principles of wrestling. During the intensive, participants will begin to explore the concept of ‘storytelling’ or the ‘psychology’ of putting on a wrestling match. Within the discipline, the ability to capture and manipulate the spectator’s attention and emotions is crucial, and from this radical approach to the performance/spectator relationship there is huge potential for the acquisition of these skills to be translated into the participant’s own practice.
Please note: Professional Wrestling is an incredibly physical activity: bumps, bruises and sprains are common; therefore to minimize the risk of serious injury, applicants should have a reasonably good level of fitness and flexibility.
jamie lewis hadley has been training and performing within the wrestling community for over 8 years. Since 2009 he has been crafting and presenting work that utilizes the experiences within this community to make challenging work that interrogates the politics of blood, violence duration, and spectator complicity. In 2010 he received a major commission from The Old Vic and Ideastap to put on two huge wrestling shows in the heart of London. He also recently completed an AHRC funded research project that investigated the performance of masculinities within professional wrestling, and how these performances interact with the dissemination of pain.
To register for the Wrestling Workshop, please visit queercitycinema.ca and sign up for one of the 16 spots available. Workshop restricted to 18 years and over. Please arrive @ 9:45AM in order to be ready to start workshop at 10AM. If you are in possession of knee and elbow pads, please bring with you.
- THIS ROSE MADE OF LEATHER // JAMIE LEWIS HADLEY - LONDON
Performance Starts at 8:00 PM - Duration - 30 Min.view details »
this rose made of leather attempts to investigate and promote the materiality of the body and spectator complicity. Competing against, and subverting the use of a stack of ceramic tiles exactly his height, lewis hadley explores the politics of blood and masculinity through strategies of repetition and a display of physical endurance.
Please be aware this performance contains some graphic material.
Since completing a BA Hons and MRes in Theatre and Performance at the University of Plymouth, jamie lewis hadley has been working predominantly as a solo live artist, showing work in the UK, USA, mainland Europe. His current practice utilizes his career as a professional wrestler and uses it as a departure point to create live art performances, actions and installations that explore, both aesthetically and thematically: deterioration, endurance, pain and violence. He uses these experiences to interrogate the politics of blood and violence, deterioration of the male body and explicit homosocial behavioural patterns and daily performances across multiple sporting spheres. His current interest and area of research is concerned with the construction and performance of masculinity and how spectacles and control of pain, violence and blood interact with the performance of masculinities. He has performed with influential live artists such as Ron Athey, Ernst Fischer and Dominic Johnson. His other main line of enquiry is concerned with using repetition and duration as strategies to interrogate the spectator’s capacity for complicity, and aims to create charged spaces that incubate negotiable viewings of the male body and its behaviours. He is also co-founder and associate artist at] performance s p a c e [ in Hackney Wick.
- ILLEGAL TENDER // GEORGE STAMOS – MONTREAL
Performance Starts at 9:30 PM - Duration 30 Min. with Post-Performance Chatview details »
Illegal Tender is in part a tribute to the now deceased infamous Quentin Crisp. The solo incorporates footage of Crisp and Stamos from 1996 with interactive dialogue and live performance actions.
The 2011 process of creating Illegal Tender included Stamos’ reexamination of an archival video from 1996 of a meeting between Crisp and Stamos. The video was shot in The Versailles Room of Pandora's Box, a private fetish club in Manhattan as research for a group show Stamos was making in 1996-1997 called Red Light Roosters. In the end, the video was not used in Red Light Roosters and has not been shown publicly until now in Illegal Tender.
After keeping this video in his closet for the past 15 years, periodically reviewing it and listening to its echoes, Stamos has been waiting for this meeting with Quentin to have a resonance with his art practice and life. Now in 2011/2012 as Stamos (currently 42) looks at issues of aging, gay legacy, desire and the impact of his six year long career as a sex-worker that ended nearly twenty years ago, Stamos connects the memory and video documentation of this meeting to the present within the shape of a solo titled Illegal Tender.
This performance will be the world premier of Illegal Tender.
Contemporary choreographer/performer/artistic director George Stamos received his BA in choreography and improvisation from The School For New Dance Development in Amsterdam, The Netherlands and has 20 years of professional experience in the contemporary dance world.
His choreographic work has been presented by L’Agora De La Dance, The Baryshnikov Center For The Arts, PS 122, The Joyce Soho, Studio 303, Theatre D’Aujourd’hui, Live Art Productions, The Canada Dance Festival, The Fluid Festival, Tangente, The LSPU Hall, Dancemakers Center For Creation, Dancing on the Edge Festival, Vancouver International Dance Festival, Harbourfront Centre, International Ness Festival Amsterdam and various other arts organizations. Stamos' projects have received support from The Canada Council For The Arts and The Conseil Des Arts et des Lettres du Quebec regularly since 1998.
George has also danced with numerous renowned choreographers throughout his career, the most influential on his practice being Sara Shelton Mann and Benoit Lachambre. George was a sex-worker’s rights and AIDS activist from 1987-1993 and gogo dancer from 1989-2000. Outside of his current projects Husk, LIKLIK PIK and Illegal Tender, George also works as a dancer with Nyata Nyata, a contemporary African dance company based in Montreal.
- PERFORMATORIUM LABOUNGE - FREE
7:00 PM to Late - Neutral Groundview details »
A space for exploration, experimentation, and discovery awaits in Performatorium Labounge. The public is invited and encouraged to create and participate in both scheduled and impromptu performances that will accompany and occur before, in-between and after the ‘main stage’ performances at Performatorium.
Set within the festival’s social space (aka - the ‘black carpet room’ at Neutral Ground C.A.F.) these performances/happenings/events/acts can be durational, interactive, participatory, short, long, solo or group, planned or spontaneous, energetic or static, with disinhibiton, willingness, curiosity, and community the key factors in the creation of Performatorium Labounge.
Join us for a drink, a look, and perhaps your own moment at Performatorium Labounge. To propose an idea for Labounge, please contact Gary Varro at queercitycinema@yahoo.ca
- QUEER SURVIVAL CAMPOUT SNOWCAVE // ANTHEA BLACK - ALBERTA/LONDON
PERFORMANCE VIDEO COMPONENT - FREE
Neutral Groundview details »
In honor of winter and community, this video will be screened in the intimate and cozy room adjacent to the main gallery at Neutral Ground.
QUEER SURVIVAL CAMPOUT SNOWCAVE
ANTHEA BLACK, 2010-2011, HD video, 9:05 minutes, looped for exhibition.
Queer Survival Campout Snowcave is a performance video that takes place in a quinzee, which is a DIY structure made from a big pile of snow that is hollowed out to make a cave and sometimes used for winter survival and shelter. Snow occupies an important place in the Prairie, Northern and Canadian imaginations; it can be a benevolent, insulating and feminizing part of the landscape, or it can be a hysterical, cruel and blinding force of nature. Here, snow, and all of its associations set the scene for a video where local queer artists were invited into the cave to campout, celebrate, eat, drink and performatively take shelter from the hostile forces of nature and culture that surround.
With participation by Cait Harben, Jamie Q and Kelly O’Dette.
Anthea Black is a Canadian artist, art writer and cultural worker. Her work in printmaking, textiles, performance and video is preoccupied with setting a stage for queer collaborative practice and inserting intimate gestures into public spaces. Her recent exhibitions include: PopSex! Responses to the History of Sexual Science at the Illingworth Kerr Gallery / ACAD in Calgary, Gestures of Resistance at the Museum of Contemporary Craft in Portland, OR and QIY: Queer It Yourself – Tools for Survival at the National Queer Arts Festival in San Francisco.