Program
Thursday, January 10 // Friday, January 11 // Saturday, January 12
Thursday, January 10
NEUTRAL GROUND GALLERY 1856 SCARTH STREET, 2ND FLOOR
ALL EVENTS AT NEUTRAL GROUND ARE FREE
Day breaks instead of night falling // Benny Nemerofsky Ramsay // Berlin/Montreal
ART EXHIBITION/INSTALLATION – OPENING 7PM - VARIOUS COMPONENTS
8PM - PERFORMANCE BY BENNY NEMEROFSKY RAMSAY WITH LAYARD THOMPSON
ONE PERFORMANCE ONLYview details »
EXHIBITION – opens and continues during regular gallery hours until January 18
Day breaks instead of night falling
It was morning, and yet it was dusk. A call was heard from a golden horn. A call echoed from deep within the forest. A call was silently inferred: a lost memory from decades past. The call was made of many voices, and the voices were strange.
Evocative voices from history find their way into a suite of sound and video pieces by Benny Nemerofsky Ramsay, punctuated by performance, print and textile.
Morningdusk
PERFORMANCE @ 8pm – ONE PERFORMANCE ONLY
Benny Nemerofsky Ramsay with Layard Thompson
A live mise-en-scène to accompany the gilded lamentations of Nemerofsky's sound installation The Return. An incantation of simultaneous day break and twilight, with gestures, words and calls gleaned from texts by Jean Genet and Hans Christian Andersen.
Benny Nemerofsky Ramsay (1973) is an artist and diarist. His creative gestures in video, sound, print and textiles contemplate the history of song, the rendering of love and emotion into language, and the resurrection and manipulation of voices – sung, spoken or screamed. His work has been exhibited throughout Canada, Europe and Asia and is represented in the collection of the National Gallery of Canada. www.nemerofsky.ca
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Layard Thompson’s work - including four adaptations of solos by quixotic choreographer Deborah Hay - typically employs movement, vocals and elaborate costume/sets. Currently, he is developing two collaborations with choreographers Hana van der Kolk and Scott Heron. In November, his evening-length work with Heron, A-1 TWINK SPREE MELEE performed at New Orleans Fringe Festival to sold out audiences.
In the past, he has had the pleasure of being a founding member of gender-fuck clowns The Pixie Harlots and working with such performing artists as Justin Vivian Bond, Taylor Mac, and Juliette Mapp, among others. In the Spring of 2010, he re-performed four works by seminal performance artist Marina Abramovic in her historic retrospective The Artist is Present at New York’s Museum of Modern. He has appeared in two films, Jonathan Caouette's Tarnation and John Cameron Mitchell's Shortbus. Layard lives in rural Tennessee amongst a community of queer homesteaders on an artist-owned and operated community center and retreat space known as Sassafras. www.layardthompson.com
DBGH : Down in a Blaze of GloryHole // Mikiki // Toronto
ONE-TO-ONE PERFORMANCES – 7PM TO 11PM
ADDITIONAL PERFORMANCES – 10PM-12AM FRIDAY
TOTAL PERFORMANCES LIMITEDview details »
With this project, Mikiki inhabits the queer culturally geographic space of the glory hole. A space that is known for tearing an opening into the thin veneer of heterosexist spatial awareness. Looking to the catalogue essay for No Place: Queer Geographies On Screen, the fashioning and re-imagining of a glory hole cubicle within a queer performance art festival venue operates to affirm the venue as a site of “shared spatial and sexual orientation” by insisting on offering a zone for intimate and secretive exchanges within a larger social space. Mikiki brings stories, treats, suggestions, and a collaborative spirit to their side of the hole. What do you bring?
THIS IS A ONE-TO-ONE PERFORMANCE ON A FIRST COME FIRST SERVED BASIS – TIME LIMIT: 15 MINUTES – TOTAL PERFORMANCES LIMITED TO APPROX. 16
Mikiki is a performance artist, sexual health educator and community agent provocateur. An itinerant Newfoundlander, his practice constantly returns to the social and political landscape born from a St. John’s cultural context. His creative work is deeply rooted in the history of performance art, and his performances actively sample and remix references as disparate as radical drag icon Leigh Bowery, pop singer Whitney Houston, and Serbian artist Marina Abramovic. Mikiki’s identity as an artist is informed and intrinsically linked to his work as a sexual health educator and harm reduction worker. Creative themes often address safe-sex negotiations, identity construction, attitudes about drug use, disclosure of sexual identity and health status, community building through skills sharing, testimonial and story-telling. Mikiki’s artistic gestures engage a wide range of political concerns, from the state-sanctioned murder of homosexuals in Iran to the socio-political significance of shoulder pads.
The Room Downstairs // Samantha Sweeting // London, UK
ONE-TO-ONE PERFORMANCES – 7PM TO 11PM
ADDITIONAL PERFORMANCES – 10PM-12AM FRIDAY
TOTAL PERFORMANCES LIMITEDview details »
Telephone, arm chair, small room.
The telephone is ringing.
Hello? you say, lifting the receiver.
Hello, her voice replies. Can you tell me about the home of your childhood?
Central to The Room Downstairs is a long distance telephone conversation across time zones, where distant memories of infancy are disclosed to an absent stranger. Inside a small room, provisionally furnished with signifiers of the domestic, you sit in a lone armchair to await a scheduled phone call. The telephone rings and a female voice requests a description of your childhood home. From the mother’s womb to the doll’s house to the primary nest that acts as a blueprint for all subsequent shelters, The Room Downstairs is an exploration of the miniature and gigantic dwelling places of our unconscious.
THIS IS A ONE-TO-ONE PERFORMANCE ON A FIRST COME FIRST SERVED BASIS – TIME LIMIT: 20 MINUTES – TOTAL PERFORMANCES LIMITED TO APPROX. 12
Samantha Sweeting is an interdisciplinary artist based in London. Drawing upon memory, myth, psychoanalytic theory, fairytales and the domestic, her practice uses embodied storytelling to examine human/animal nature and nurture, boundaries and desire. Samantha’s work has recently been exhibited in Tate Liverpool’s Alice in Wonderland, touring to MART in Italy and the Hamburger Kunsthalle in Germany. Recent solo shows have been at Kapelica Gallery in Ljubljana and Blanc Gallery in Belgium. Her artwork is currently included in the Moby-Dick Big Read project.
Bedtime Story for the Edge of the World // Shawna Dempsey and Lorri Millan // Winnipeg
READINGS AT 9PM AND 10PM
ADDITIONAL READING – 11PM FRIDAYview details »
Cozy up as Shawna Dempsey and Lorri Millan read you a Bedtime Story for the Edge of the World. These rollicking yarns, set in the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries, are set amidst shifting frontiers of power and possibility, and are peopled by women who question puritanical values of good and evil, right and wrong, and the sense of promise and opportunity that the so-called New World has traditionally implied. Pirate queens, inventrixes and sideshow performers stumble through tall tales usually reserved for men with guns and white hats; plucky spinsters, religious zealots, deities and office workers challenge well-worn fables that continue to shape North America's notion of itself and its dreams for the future. Dempsey and Millan's Bedtime Stories are decidedly for adults - sometimes sexy, sometimes disquieting. Either way, they won't put you to sleep.
In 1989, Shawna Dempsey and Lorri Millan began collaborating on multi-disciplinary projects like We’re Talking Vulva – a rock and roll music video sung by female genitalia; the spoken word video What Does a Lesbian Look Like – which played on rotation on MuchMusic; and A Day in the Life of a Bull-Dyke – a mock magazine and film featuring wry exposés of lesbian life. More recent works include the Winnipeg Tarot Company, which collected Winnipeggers’ stories in exchange for a Prairie-flavoured fortune telling, Consideration Liberation Army, a guerilla movement of kindness extremists, and Lesbian National Parks and Services, a piece in which Lorri and Shawna patrol the streets in full ranger gear, keeping people safe, calming the jittery heteros and always looking for new recruits. All of their work challenges normative ideas of love, sexuality and humanity, and has been seen across Canada, the United States – including New York’s Museum of Modern Art – Sri Lanka, Turkey, Australia, Europe, Japan and more.
Performatorium Labounge
THURSDAY JANUARY 10 // 7 PM TO LATE
FRIDAY JANUARY 11 // 10 PM TO LATEview details »
A space for exploration, experimentation, and discovery, Labounge is the festival’s social space. Join us for a drink, a look, and perhaps your own moment at Labounge.
DJs Eugean and po-tree (Jeannie Straub and Sean Flotre) spin chill and downtempo beats.