Compartmentalizing art makes it difficult to decide what goes in what showcase

Spending last week in Montréal for the 17th edition of The Edgy Women Festival, I return home to Edmonton with the same question two years in a row: would Festival City be open to this type of festival, and how would the works be viewed and contextualized? Last year’s festival favourite Jess Dobkin returned with her first full-length piece, “Everything I’ve Got,” and speaking as both a critic and organizer who has been trying to bring this piece into town, I remain at a loss as to which of our city’s array of festivals her work could possibly fit in to. It’s not just that the performance may be radically queer, which would align it to new kid on the block, Exposure: Edmonton’s Queer Arts and Culture Festival, or that the work needs to be understood as performance art, which would fit into Visualeyez: Canada’s Annual Performance Art Festival; or that it needs to be formally staged as a theatre piece exploring the physical vulnerabilities of the human body, which would maybe fit into The Expanse Movement Arts Festival.

Image credit: Jess Dobkin by David Hawe

Dobkin’s works, like many contemporary works that are of interest, do not fall neatly or even hardly into any single artistic category—and nor should they. The question I am asking is this: if the most innovative works continue to exist outside of our predetermined themes, how will we ever make room for this type of work to be shown here in predetermined Festival City?

Shannon Cochrane, who founded and continues to curate Toronto’s 7a-11d International Festival of Performance Art gave an exemplary performance of a work that could exist in various worlds, from white-cube galleries to site-specific to black box theatre. Cochrane’s work is deeply methodical in its acknowledgment of its own art history, with a focus on intent and transparency. When following performances by old school circus theatre and aggressive contemporary dance from France, Cochrane was not contextualized nor constrained under a single lens, but existed as another shade of artistic engagement.

Audience development is always of interest, and always a learning curve when it comes to interdisciplinary work. The audiences that packed Tangente Theatre in Montréal were a real cross-section of the population that could have just as easily shown up to any art gallery, concert or just gone out to dinner. There was no framework that the festival was politically and formally aligning to queer feminist performance works, though that recurring theme was neither a given nor a surprise. This was mostly about a chance to see more women on stage, and though maybe the politics have been taken for granted, they also don’t need to be repeated reassuringly into the marketing strategies—the programming should say it all. One of the resulting gems of lining up mixed nights is that no one art form can purport to be marginalized, as there is a false hierarchy between disciplines such as theatre, dance, music, film and performance art that many artists have unfortunately lived up to.

Art has been said to be a state of encounter, one that I read as mutually affecting both artist/performer and audience in an almost chemical way that is also visceral and mental, emotional and spiritual. I believe this, and so I wonder why we continue to group our intakes of art into such discrete compartments.

While pedantic, disciplines are important for distinguishing formal concerns and progress, though there has always been constant and vibrant overlap between the disciplines throughout history that push each form to grow and remain relevant. Once a discipline has been named, we as artists, audience and media need to remember that disciplines are not fixed, but fluid concepts that should be open for questioning.

*First published in Vue Weekly and republished on Prairie Artsters

- Amy Fung

I’ll admit up front that circus work has never been a favorite of mine. But as circus elements from trapeze, hoop, and contortion find their way into other forms of the performing arts, I can respect elements of their physicality that don’t make me feel like I’m clapping for human tricks. The three piece trio directed by Krin Maren Haglund started off with a strong image of androgynous beige pods coming to life. But it was immediately clear that they were creating work for a much larger space than the Tangente, as rope and fabric work was completely lost in the lights and their  projections of movement could have hit audiences across the street. Arranged as a series of personal and artistic discoveries from the first applications of cosmetic colour to the act of self expression in a series of specialized solos, the piece as a whole appeared to want to break out of traditional circus conventions, but remained very much still trapped in that framework from music choices to their relationships with the audience.

Shifting then into “Dream On, Track 1” from La Zampa, the piece explodes open with an image of a shattered bottle filled with sand filling in the space between performer and audience. Capturing the entire piece in this one image, the summation can be simply noted as going from sexy and potentially raw to predictable and safe. Magali Millian, who co-choregraphed the piece with partner Romuald Luydlin, brings together a lot of pretty elements and rides on the jarring visceral tones of PJ Harvey’s “Rid of Me”, but the movements themselves never seem to cater to the abandonment that it tries to achieve by all other means. The work remains very soft, and controlled, and unfortunately, contrived.

Perhaps as the best performance I saw at the festival this year, Shannon Cochrane’s “Well Known Performance” crafted some of the most profound images through contemporary performance art that was both highly thoughtful and engaging. From her methodical steps to set up the scene of a long dressed table and her own preparation of self care and hygiene, to meeting or trying to meet every single member of the audience, the tone of deadpan seriousness was intensely precise, yet earnest in execution every step of the way. As she prepares for her own party, Cochrane takes out a tetra pack of Viagra pills and shows them to the audience, before popping one herself. She goes on to do some light levitation, eats a banana, and gives the audience a brief backgrounder on the drug and its representation as inequality in the business of pharmaceuticals and research and development.

Through reductive questioning that basically leaves a cross section of single women over the age of 18 with no dietary restrictions or family histories of heart conditions, Cochrane invites up those members of the audience for a store bought chocolate cake that she laces before them with crushed up Viagra and sprinkles. The unpredictable and unscriptable reactions from the participating audience now sitting along this table adorned with glassware and a bouquet of flowers range from expressions of genuine concern, unimpressed, curious, and just slightly gleeful as they wondered if they were actually going to be taking Viagra on stage. Their expressions, which capture the essence of the piece, was the absolute highlight of the show. Cochrane also prolongs this moment by addressing her having to either pull the piece, change it significantly, or sign a “release from responsibility” letter clearing Tangente and another other third party producers all legal responsibilities for the health and safety of any audience member ingesting Viagra. Exploiting the paradox that her piece is about free will, and that the form now stipulates that she the artist is responsible for her audience regardless of whether they eat the cake or not, all of the women represented their rights as individuals in eating the cake, not eating the cake, eating around the laced icing, or digging right into it, and gradually relaxed into chatter and enjoyment of the moment amongst themselves. Accompanying their digestion with a somber cake eating song about having no castration fear, the piece in that moment worked extremely well within the black box of theatre, holding your utmost and deserved attention in a way that a gallery space could not, playing off the presence of the participating audience that was simply exceptional.

- Amy Fung

Demonstrating its international eclecticism as we head into the final stretch of Edgy 2010, the festival lines up Berlin-based Yumiko Yoshioka with up and coming Montréal cabaret favorite Lise Vigneault and American dance and performance artist Karen Sherman for an evening of transformative identities.

Yoshioka, working with choreographer Rena Konstantaki, maintains strong aesthetic roots in the art of Butoh, which as a form unto itself, has been traditionally a male-dominated practice in its embodied and encompassing presence of breath and androgyny. Working with a frame of a life cycle from cocoon to rebirth to desire and self, Yoshioka’s movements progress from taut to flow, complementing this arch of movement with costume and an electronic soundtrack (a soundtrack that was at times competing with its performer, leaving me unsure who was leading who). While the concept of metamorphosis is certainly not new, I was at least hoping for something different to occur, something different in thought and expression that would open up the archetype of metamorphism in a contemporary context, but I was left unsatisfied for such.

Next was Vigneault’s first extended piece, “Keep It To Yourself, Dear”, a video-heavy play on the social faux pas of awkwardness. Making a name in the local cabaret scene, Vigneault’s charm is in her offbeat comic timing, but that timing did not space for pause in the text-heavy video produced in the fashion of pedantic instructional tapes. Learning to use iMovie for this project, Vigneault perhaps gave too much credence to the video when she should have trusted herself as a performer to carry the weight of the work. Shifting in personality from smug scientist to awkward social deviant breaking out in a restrained solo, her interest in the physicality of her characters is noted and I look forward to seeing her next projects that demonstrate better her range of movement.
Finishing the evening with the strongest work, Sherman’s “Demolition Boy” is a strangely captivating exploration of artistic self worth and Tyra Banks. Hovering a very fine line between the serious hardcore of American modern dance to the deadpan absurdity of anyone tapped into the paradoxes of pop culture, Sherman puts forward notions of judgment and failure by using an actual audio recording of a grant jury deliberating the merits of her own work. The crux, however, is that she plays the audio recording as a dub over an edit of Tyra Bank’s “The Gay Truth Booth,” apparently a segment where the stereotypes of gay men are invited onto the women’s talk show to teach and inspire women to be better women, when all the while, the character of Karen in a tie and sweater vest is idolizing the fashion of her friend, Nick, who is activated by an audience member and held captive as her muse. The work as a whole hinges on Sherman’s almost hypnotizing presence on stage, which fascinatingly enough, does not waver over the course of her own judgment.

En On will be at Tangente again on March 26 at 7:30 p.m. with an artist talk to follow

- Amy Fung

As the Montreal premiere for her first full length feature, Jess Dobkin’s “Everything I’ve Got” certainly lived up to its namesake by spilling out idea after precious idea of unrealized and unborn performance ideas from years in the making.

Continuing her startling and heartwarming approach to the concept of vulnerability, Dobkin opens up her notebooks with a palpable sense of urgency and unleashes a flood of one liner ideas from “borrow dogs” to “buy stocks, and sell them” and constructs them into a modern day living shrine.

While perhaps on paper they seem precocious, in live execution, Dobkin’s unwittingly trademark deadpan openness and lack of personal filter brings you into a world of the utmost intimacies and vulnerabilities that any human should hardly be able to stand. From the opening image of a hoodie-clad Dobkin stripping away her layers to reveal the unfleshed dream of a human mirror ball, to the intricate shadow puppetry via a visual presenter for the fable of the unicorn–which arguably stands in for the livelihood of contemporary queers–Dobkin goes on a journey of self-investigation that ranges from dildo-borne alter egos to video-based worm holes, escalating the dreamscape of audience participation into a nexus beyond the expectations of endurance-based performance art.

While the imagery and concepts were at times disjointed, there were powerful moments of narrative that brokered the darkest of black humour and the most honest of self-doubt. The piece as a whole has a feeling it sits unfinished, and as the third showing, it is arguable the piece remains shifting in how it approaches the tedious subject matter of “what is performance?”
If we are to understand the construction of images as performance as two fold, one of which questions where the image comes from, and one which questions where the image is intended, Dobkin’s performance would come up unfinished as the ideas presented are not fully processed by the artist for what they could mean within a larger frame, namely, within the frame of historicity. They currently stand as valid ideas, remaining in notebooks, poignantly shared on stage with such an earnest rawness that it’s difficult to judge, but as a captive audience, there must be a reason for witnessing this performance, and that communication is not yet clear in its execution, but the sentiment to engage is there.

Some of the most interesting elements were the use of diegetic sound, where the rustling of paper was heard off stage, but unseen on (yet unexplored), and the use of prerecorded video altering our live perception of performance was cleverly employed to further expand the limitations of the body on stage.

While her use of dildos is certainly not shocking, nor is it meant to be, an audience question afterwards reminds me that Dobkin’s curiosity with her body, especially her orifices as a performance tactic, remains uncommon in its no nonsense delivery, and is truly an uncommon treat to witness as most other performers hold onto an unfitting ideology or routine when their efforts are actually unnecesssary or blasé in its delivery.

Certainly resembling a suturing of moments easily lost and an exploration of what is “allowed” in the realm of live performance, “Everything I’ve Got” stands as one of the bravest demonstrations of performance I have ever witnessed, avidly asking the stunned audience in a matter of utmost vulnerability, “Do you know what I mean?”.  We may not, but perhaps that is the point, as the lingering question of how we share our most intimate moments is more a question to the audience of how we accept such intimate moments, and unfortunately, it does not appear that we yet know how to embrace intimacy and vulnerability without prefabricated judgments and expectations.

- Amy Fung

In her fourth appearance at Edgy Women Festival, Jess Dobkin returns with her first presentation of a full length piece and a week long workshop on the concept of intimacy.

Finding time after her first day’s workshop at Studio 303, the Toronto-based performance artist explains that she’s not so much “teaching” intimacy, but exploring the idea of what intimacy is, and also what it is not.

“Its complexity as a subject is slippery in nature, drawing more questions than answers–that’s what draws me to the subject. In the last few days, I’ve been asking myself a lot: How do we create value or judge intimacy?”

The questions associated with Dobkin’s intimacy workshop aligns back to the scope of the festival itself, says Dobkin, “I am exploring and interested in these elements of risk, trust and vulnerability. That’s where I was coming from in designing this workshop.”

Catch Dobkin’s “Everything I’ve Got” for one night only on Wed, March 24, 7:30 p.m. Tangente. Get your tickets in advance.

- Amy Fung

As an arts writer based in Edmonton, I’m delighted for the opportunity to write on daring and innovative interdisciplinary art for Edgy Women 2010 in Montréal.

So it’s with fondness that I’ve noticed this year’s Edgy Women press image along with last year’s poster image are both of edgy (and tall) women from Edmonton.

Last year it was a sweaty image of performer and playwright (and coincidentally enough, my neighbor) Kristine Nutting appearing to be wiping butter out of her ass,

Kristine Nutting

while this year it’s of T.L. Cowan, spoken word artist sitting on the loo. The staged photo of tutu T.L. on the can was from her collaborative multidisc project, “The Twisted She Project”, which she developed and premiered in Edmonton before moving on to her post-doc in Calgary and tenure in Saskatoon.

T.L. Cowan

Catch T.L. at Edgy Boum on March 20 and my forthcoming reviews and interviews, focused mostly on the second week of events.

Sincerely yours,

Amy Fung