Looking Back and Looking Forward to Mark 35 Years

My final year as the Festival Director for Rhubarb fortuitously coincided with an opportunity to reflect on the past as it marked a milestone anniversary for Canada’s longest-running new works festival. The 35th festival explored multiple dimensions of time and place; bringing together works that unearthed and remixed elements of our past with projects that fearlessly questioned our current conditions and radically envisioned possibilities for the future: fantastical, sci-fi and queer, with utopian and dystopian views. It was also a banner year that once again broke attendance records and saw over 100 artists involved.

This future focus was most present in artists and projects that truly pushed the boundaries of their chosen form. From experimental prop comedian Bridget Moser to the virtuoso, gender-obliterating performance of Montreal dancer Gerard Reyes, this year’s Rhubarb was about testing the limit of what we think is possible.

Powerfully challenging classical notions of artistic production and archive was a special presentation of Heather Cassils (co-presented with Pleasure Dome and Trinity Square Video in association with York University). The artist unleashed their extensive physical strength and training on a 2,000 block of clay with a full-blown attack of kicks and blows in total darkness. The spectacle was illuminated only by the flash of a photographer burning the image into the viewers’ retinas.

Cassils’ work anchored the opening night of the festival, which also saw artists such as Alvis Choi, Paul Couillard & Ed Johnson (co-presented with FADO Performance Art Centre) and Evan Tapper took over the entire theatre with performance interventions and installations hidden throughout the many nooks and crannies of the 100-year-old building.

The festival also featured a collection of work that honored the past with artists exploring new ways in which history may be created, preserved and shared. A special collaboration with the Canadian Lesbian and Gay Archives opened up their audio archives for a marathon 24-hour listening party facilitated and designed by artist Christopher Willes. The Festival launched an archive of its own with an interactive installation at Buddies in Bad Times Theatre sharing a year-long archiving project that documented the entire 35-year Rhubarb performance history. Perhaps the greatest moment of this anniversary year was the late-night cabaret “35 Performances for 35 Years” hosted by Shannon Cochrane and Keith Cole that featured 5-minute recreations of past work and new Rhubarb-inspired works from artists who had, combined, been featured in all of Rhubarb’s 35 iterations from Rhubarb founder Sky Gilbert to Buddies' 2014 Artist in Residence, Tawiah M’carthy.

The festival also included a historic partnership with four organizations that, like Buddies in Bad Times, hold unique places of distinction for the queer community. Projects activated and made public new areas of these organizations, which included The 519 Church Street Community Centre, Glad Day Bookshop, The Canadian Lesbian and Gay Archives and Pink Triangle Press. Working site-specifically in these spaces, artists delved into the concept of archive; acknowledging not only what is documented and remembered, but also what is lost or yet to be uncovered. 

Read my NOW Magazine interview on the 35th Rhubarb here.

Featured Artists Included: 
Roynation, Kerri Flannigan, Maggie MacDonald, Hope Thompson, Sedina Fiati, Vivek Shraya, Nat Trembly, Small Wooden Shoe, Jill Connell, Katie Swift, Henri Fabergé, Kayla Lorette, Alex Tindal, Bridget Moser, Gerard Reyes, Humboldt Magnussen, Viktor Lukawski, Nicolas Di Gaetano, Deanna Jones, Golboo Amani, Christopher Willes, Paul Couillard, Ed Johnson, Alvis Parsley, Evan Tapper, Birdtown and Swanville, Heather Cassils, Alejandro Santiago, Keith Cole, Shannon Cochrane, Sky Gilbert, Cynthia Grant, David Roche, Daniel David Moses, Ed Roy, Death Waits, Mammalian Diving Reflex, Rosa Laborde, Coman Poon, David Bateman, Cathy Gordon, Sarah Stanley, Chad Dembski, Sonja Mills, Shannon Cochrane, Alistair Newton, Jordan Tannahill, Tawiah M’carthy, Life of a Craphead, Patricia Wilson, Nicolas Billon, Erin Brubacher, Vertical City, Ill Nana, Liz Peterson, Ryan G. Hinds, Hannah Moscovitch, Regina the Gentlelady, Adam Lazarus, Catherine Hernandez, Gein Wong, Rory Jade Grey, Jackie Rowland, Ramon Vitug, lemonTree creations, Gein Wong with Kim Crosby, Jade Lee Hoy, Mark Reinhart, Katrin Whitehead and more.

Read full project descriptions and credits for Rhubarb here.

Photos courtesy of Buddies in Bad Times Theatre and the artists.

Read photo/image credits for Rhubarb 2014 here.

Exploring the ritual of performance

In 2013, my curation of Rhubarb revolved around the concept of ritual: everyday rituals, social rituals, rituals of activism, healing, sex, and rites of passage. This concept also recognized the ritual of performance itself, from dramaturgical structure to the way it is created and experienced by a festival audience.

In a festival that is extremely kinetic and stimulating, I sought out work that encouraged audiences to slow down, meditate, and reflect.  I also sought out artists and projects that responded to the concept of ritual in unexpected and trangressive ways.

Artists investigated personal rituals like marriage ceremonies and funeral rites, they revisited time spent with family. Artists also looked at the rituals we knowingly and unknowingly engage in at a societal level – artists from western Canada investigated cowboy culture, dancers played with the spirituality of UFOs, performance artists created a score based on on the spot 'how to' searches of the internet and activists presented a late night cabaret of political protest in response to slut shaming and sexual violence.

In the festival’s second week, at the end of each night, audiences gathered for a Peachy Coochy on Ritual curated and hosted by Erin Brubacher, an adaptation of the PechaKucha which saw a succession of individuals from the artistic community and beyond making fast paced, image-based presentations on notions of ritual: the occasional, the everyday, the invented and the inherited.

Leading up to the festival a group of artists and community members met regularly as a knitting circle to create large-scale pieces that knit bombed the outdoor and common spaces of Buddies in Bad Times Theatre with bright bursts of colour on the coldest of winter nights.

As a special presentation, I also commissioned a performance work by Canadian broadcaster, musician, filmmaker, and actress Sook Yin Lee, who collaborated with dancer and choreographer Benjamin Kamino to create a multimedia exploration of memory and forgetting.

This year’s Rhubarb also saw the return of the One-to-One Performance Series, which filled the local 519 Church Street Community Centre with intimate performance encounters designed for a single audience member a time. This notion of intimate performance was expanded this year and introduced performances in small spaces throughout the performance venue and surrounding neighbourhood. Outside of the one-to-one structure, the experiment with intimate performance continued - audiences ranging from 5-15 witnessed rope bondage performances and impromptu dance works, while other small audiences sat in on a fictional support group and participated in roaming candlelit vigils around the city. 

Read my interview with NOW Magazine, "Rhubarb's Bold Ritual" here.

Featured Artists Included: 
Coral Maloney, Ian Mozdzen, Sasha Kleinplatz, Vincent Chevalier, Leora Morris, Scott Christian, David Christo, Colin Doyle, Caitlin Driscoll, Alex Fallis, Sochi Fried, Eleanor Hewlings, Viv Moore, Andy Trithardt, John Paul Kane, Trixie & Beever, Kaleb Robertson, Ill Nana, Roynation, Nichola Ward, Vag Halen, Alex Tigchelaar, Jess Dobkin, Christine Poutney, Keisha Scott, Laura Kane, Hoa Nguyen, Zoe Whittall, Cat Nimmo, Nicolas Billon, Ravi Jain, Claire Calnan, Jessica Moss, Sook-Yin Lee, Benjamin Kamino, Brandy Leary, Ryan Lee, Amy Hampton, Jennifer Robichaud, Lucy Rupert, Louis Laberge Cote, James Bunton, Katie Sly, Shaista Latif, Bruce Barton, Martin Julien, Andrew Zeally, Rachel Steinberg, Davy Bisaro, Max Alexander, Cathy Gordon, Stacey Sproule, Michael Rubenfeld, Mary Berchard, Sarah Stanley, Natasha Greenblatt, Brescia Brixia Bloodbeard, Melisse Watson, Naty Tremblay, Joce Tremblay, Andrew Tay, Andres Galeano, Ike Trinks, Adam Paolozza, Sam Sholdice, Viktor Lukawski, Rob Feetham, Daniele Bartolini, Miranda Calderon, Erin Brubacher, George Stamos, Sina Gilani, Alistair Newton, Aemilius (Milo) Ramirez, Gein Wong, Jordan Tannahill, William Christopher Ellis, Johnny Forever, Kate McGrann, Michael MacKid, Debbie Arruda, Isidra Cruz, Katy Grabstas, Kesta Graham, Marcia Johnson, Kristy Kennedy, Dylan Uscher, Kim Crosby, Vivek Shraya and more.

Read full project descriptions and credits for Rhubarb here.

Photos courtesy of Buddies in Bad Times Theatre and the artists.

Read photo/image credits for Rhubarb 2013 here. 

Raw. Radical. Performance. Exploring the possibilities and limitations of the body.

For my second year as Rhubarb festival director I looked to the generator and performer of work: the body. The collection of over 40 new performance works investigated the complexities of the body in history and contemporary life, in both intimate and public settings. Audiences were invited to experience this idea of the body one-to-one exchange and collective experience; witnessing the possibilities and limitations of our physical form.

Some artists focused on the body’s viscera, creating characters that were driven to extremes--consuming glass (Adam Lazarus’ “Bleed”), exploring legends of cannibalistic spirits (Birdtown and Swanville’s “Settlers”), and staging surgeries with knitted organs and surgical tools (Johnny Forever and Marisa Hoicka’s “Trust my Gut”). Others focused on the possibilities of the body as an artistic vessel – Kenji Oullete’s Klangkorper 2.0 turned your body into a musical instrument, while Claude Whitman’s “Betterave Rouge / Red Beet” and Evan Vipond’s “Gender Me” explored the performativity of feeding and dressing your body. This theme was anchored by a special presentation Keith Hennessy’s seminal performance piece “CROTCH,” which featured daringly intimate acts of physical connection and distance.

The festival featured a great number of artists working in dance, including an early sharing of “Yellow Towel” by Dana Michel, tackling notions surrounding her Caribbean heritage; “Made to Order,” led by Eroca Nicols, in which a cast of dancers interpreted ‘performance orders’ on the night of from members of the audience; and “affliction” by Thomas Morgan-Jones and Clare Preuss, exploring the body in the grips of Multiple Sclerosis.

The festival also continued the highly-successful Mobile Works series of public performance interventions highlighted by the roaming boom-box parade, “Tom and Gary’s Decentralized Dance Party,” but this year counter-balanced that with a series of one-to-one performances presented in partnership with The 519 Church Street Community Centre that transformed a local community centre into a platform for intimate encounters between artists and audience in elevators, kitchens, closets, and meeting rooms.

Read my NOW Magazine Interview on Rhubarb 2012 here.

Read my Xtra Interview on Rhubarb 2012 here.

Featured Artists Included:
Adam Lazarus, Phil Luzi, Michelle Ramsay, Gillian Gallow, Alex Napier, Naomi Skwarna, Emma McKenna, Amy Lam, Liz Peterson, Meghan Swaby, Sojourner Truth Parsons, Yamantaka//Sonic Titan, Birdtown and Swanville, Aynsley Moorhouse, Berenicci Hershorn, Cassy Walker, Audrey Dwyer, Claude Wittmann, Damien Atkins, Paul Dunn, Andrew Kushnir, Ashlie Corcoran, Kimberly Purtell, Daniel Jelani Ellis, Evalyn Parry, David Frankovich, Evan Vipond, Heather Hermant, James Diamond, Jamie Ebbs, Alistair Newton, Johnny Forever, Marisa Hoicka, Johnson Ngo, Jona Nah, Justin Vivan Bond, Nath Ann Carrera, Keith Hennessy, Kenji Ouellet, Katharina Weinhuber, Eroca Nicols, Krista Posyniak, Madeleine Shen, Sky Fairchild-Waller, Cara Spooner, Rob Kingsbury, Jaren Fennell, Messapotamia LeFae, Peter Mitton, Leah Fay Goldstein, Emma-Kate Guimond, Julia Thomas, Brooke Manning, Light Fires, Maggie Hutchenson, Elinor Whidden, Zita Nyarady, Heather McLean, Loree Lawrence, Meera Margaret Singh, Luke Painter, Melissa D’Agostino, Diana Bentley, Rose Plotek, Eleanor Hewlings, Amy Nostbakken, KatieSwift, Sarah Stanley, Michael Rubenfeld, Shannon Roszell, Sian Robinson Davies, Dan Watson, Mikiki, Dana Michel, Thomas Morgan-Jones, Clare Preuss, Nina Lee Aquino, Kawa Ada, Rosa Laborde, Natasha Mytnowych, Tommie-Amber Pirie, Philip Riccio, Scott McCord, Darrah Teitel, Esther Jun, Margaret Evans, Patrice Goodman, Lisa Li, Natasha Greenblatt, Joe Pagnan, Michael David Lorsch, Brendan Healy and more.

Read full project descriptions and credits for Rhubarb here.

Photos courtesy of Buddies in Bad Times Theatre and the artists.

Read photo/image credits for Rhubarb 2012 here.

A convergence of disciplines, artists and audience across Toronto.

Artists took to the streets with overheard stories broadcast on subways and interventions performed in a major downtown intersection. International artists collaborated with local artists on ways of being and creating together. New work in the areas of theatre, dance, performance art, music and hybrid forms converged every night at Buddies in Bad Times Theatre. This truly diverse sampling of the possibilities of performance drew record-setting audiences to the festival.

For my first year as festival director for Buddies in Bad Times Theatre’s Rhubarb Festival, I focused on the idea of convergence. The festival has a unique structure where audiences experience multiple short works in a single evening, and works play concurrently in different spaces, encouraging people to self select their viewing experience. This curatorial challenge prompted me to investigate how work changes when in conversation with other work, and to program artists who pushed opposing boundaries and interacted with their audiences and each other in unique ways.  Audiences experienced text-based theatre, immersive performance, dance, film, and music in a single evening – unified by an artistic spirit of risk and exploration.

Perhaps the most significant new initiative I undertook in this first year was to introduce a series of work that engaged with the broader city of Toronto. I instituted a new series of Mobile Works that encompassed site-specific performances and mobile performance interventions into public spaces such as Yonge-Dundas square and the city’s subway system. This civic engagement also continued inside the hub for the festival, Buddies in Bad Times Theatre, with events such as the “Toronto Show and Tell” (curated by me) featuring guest of all ages from across the city sharing objects and stories special to their experience of Toronto; the community forum on Toronto’s internal geographic segregation “Let’s Get it Together: Bridging the Great Divide,” and Small Wooden Shoe’s imaginative urban design project “Upper Toronto Community Consultation,” that asked participants, “What kind of city would you want to live in, if we could make a city from scratch? If we built a new city in the sky above the current Toronto?”

With an eye to future editions of the festival and new approaches in performance, I engaged international artists as part of Rhubarb to offer workshops and collaborate with local artists. Scotland’s Adrian Howells offered a workshop in one-to-one performance andLos Angeles’s My Barbarian led local artist-participants through workshops and a public performance of “Post-Living Ante-ActionTheatre,” evolving from the company’s interdisciplinary practice and avant-garde collectives of the 1960s, as well as drawing on current events and political situations. These learning opportunities also served as a lynchpin that connected many local organizations to the festival – establishing a partner network that would be a mainstay of my time at Rhubarb. I collaborated with organizations such as Cahoots Theatre Projects, fu-GEN, Native Earth Performing Arts, FADO Performance Art Centre, Harbourfront Centre, b current, The Theatre Centre and the University of Toronto to co-present work within the festival and offer these educational opportunities for artists within our communities.

Read my interview with The Toronto Star on Rhubarb 2011 here.

Read my interview with NOW Magazine on Rhubarb 2011 here.

 Featured Artists Included: 
Alex Napier, Philip McKee, Hannah Cheeseman, Liz Peterson, Alicia Grant, Andrea Spaziani, Alistair Newton, Sky Fairchild-Waller, Matt Dolmage, Bruce Dow, Nick Green, Tyson James, Clinton Walker, Anthony MacPherson,  Bruce Dow, Nick Green, Tyson James, Clinton Walker, Anthony MacPherson, Anna Jane McIntyre, Ben Chaisson, MiMo and iNSiDEaMiND, Bruce LaBruce, Erin Brandenburg, Andrew Penner, Brian Poirier, Iner Souster, Howie Shia, Rachel Ford, Henry Adam Svec, Erin Brubacher, Ian Mozdzen, Mia van Leeuwen, Kaleb Robertson, Kevin Rees and Sean MacMahon, Nicolas Billon, Ravi Jain, Claire Calnan, Olive-or-Oliver,  Evalyn Parry, Pricilla Guy, Kate Nankervis, Meg Gennings, Cathy Gordon, Tara Beagan, Michael Wheeler, Keith Barker, Margaret Evans, Christine Horne, Jordan Tannahill, Johnnie Walker, Morgan Norwich, Adam Bourret, Mark Shyzer, Michael David Lorsch, Mark Aikman, Coman Poon, Erica Mott,  Darren O’Donnell, Emelie Chhangur, Jonathan Goldsbie, 2Fik, Oreet Ashery, My Barbarian, Debahis Sinha, Jajube Mandiela, Maxine Marcellin, Tanya Pillay, Meghan Swaby, Navneet Rai, Malube Uhindu-Gingala, Chy Ryan Spain, Femmes de Feu, Zirco Circus, Helene Vosters, Marlene Mendonca, Saul Garcia, Tara Ostiguy, Beyhan Farhadi, Bradley High, Guillermo Galindo, Life of a Craphead, Richard Windeyer, a.rawlings, Ciara Adams, Chris Dupuis, Maggie Flynn, Evan Vipond, Evalyn Parry, Andrew Robinson, Clinton Walker, Jacob Zimmer, Tim Maly and more.

Read full project descriptions and credits for Rhubarb here.

Photos and images courtesy of Buddies in Bad Times Theatre and the artists. 

Read photo/image credits for Rhubarb 2011 here.

Realizing Ideas, Revealing Potential.

In my second year working on HATCH, I looked to build upon the spirit of mentorship formalized in the previous year by selecting a group of artists who could benefit from participation in each other’s creative practices. I expanded the learning and exchange by establishing a culture of shared development throughout the fall into the spring when the work was shared with an audience– open rehearsals, sharing of work in progress with fellow artists, and opportunities for group discussion fostered a space of dialogue and collaboration between these four projects.

From a curatorial standpoint, I gathered a group of artists that were interested in experimenting with and delving into questions related to the body. How do our ideas manifest in the body? How can the body be considered and used as an artistic material? How does the brain process and interpret what the body experiences? How does urban space affect the body?  How does perpetrating acts of violence against others affect the body? How is the body controlled and regulated by law? And how do we create a social body through non-physical interactions?

Jess Dobkin’s “Everything I’ve Got” was an examination of creativity and mortality ruminating on what happens to unrealized ideas. Her raw and intimate performance experiment put her entire catalogue of ideas on stage with urgency, vulnerability and humour while contemplating: When is our work finished and when are we complete?

Next, “Body Cartography” by Alicia Grant and Cara Spooner, in collaboration with visual artist Simon Rabyniuk and well as urban theorist Alex Marques, used mapping, city-sprawling bicycle adventures, personal stories and the “city as a score” as a springboard for examining how we experience place thorough our bodies as well as how the body and is shaped by urban landscape and architecture. The piece playfully explored the concepts of home, isolation, over-crowding and what is carried with us in our bodies and our pockets.

The third project in the season was Praxis Theatre’s “Section 98,” an open-sourced and interactive performance that invited the audience to participate via social media before, during and after the performance. Live tweets were incorporated as both backdrop and content for the piece, that explored and debated individual and civil rights in Canada, further impacted by the social body we create online.

The fourth project was Birdtown and Swanville’s “The Physical Ramifications of Attempted Global Domination,” which sought to examine the physical impacts of actualized ideas and consequences of perpetrating mass violence against others. The physical ailments of notorious dictators was the jumping off point for what became an absurdist game show of feats of strength, debate, dance and melodrama.

The season concluded with The Room's "Red Machine: Under The Knife," digging into the biology of the human brain. The creative team, comprised of neuroscientists, dancers, designers, directors, performers, and musicians, began by considering how a single event could be interpreted by four distinct areas of the brain. Utilizing multiple audio visual tools and every inch of the theatre as playing space, the company experimented with ways in which the brain's internal functions and the body's sensory experiences could be dissected, abstracted and translated into an immersive space for the audience.

View the HATCH 2010 webpage here.

Photos and images courtesy of the artists.

View photo/image credits here.

Creating a Fertile Seeding Ground for New Work

Creating a space for artists to take well-supported risks in new performance methodologies. HATCH 2009 saw artists re-imagine methods of collaborative creation, embed themselves inside frat houses, find new ways of making music, and blended reality TV stunts with the roots of burlesque to lampoon our ideas of masculinity and.

HATCH: emerging performance projects program at Toronto’s Harbourfront Centre is a unique offering in the city that takes a small group of projects into residency each year to test new performance experiments and ideas, which are provided professional support from proposal to realization, culminating in a one-week residency and performance in a fully-equipped studio theatre. Audiences have the opportunity to be the first to view these works in their infancy stage and to be a part of the continued development of the project through their participation and feedback.

For my first year as program coordinator and curator, I gathered a group of artists that were exploring historical and collective narratives – how social concepts of initiation and identity inform the way we tell our stories. I also worked to create a deeper culture of mentorship inside the festival, providing artists not only with dramaturgical support but formalizing their mentorship in the areas of marketing, publicity, production and producing, with hands-on workshops and one-on-one sessions with myself and other members of the Harbourfront Centre team. To this end, I hoped to solidify the program as an experience that nurtured artists as both creators and producers.

Aluna Theatre’s “Nohayquiensepa/Nooneknows” was an experiment in new media and dance using an adapted form of Colombian collaborative creation to tell a story of violence and oppression that becomes a thing of inheritance. In a similar exploration of the influence of cultural heritage, Kitchen Band Production’s "Petrichor" combined theatrical storytelling with inventive live music and projected images to tell the story of a family of Mexican Mennonite field workers and the Southern Ontario farmers who employ them.

 Jordan Tannahill’s “Takes Two Men to Make a Brother” and Gale Allen’s “All I Ever Wanted” used gender as a starting point for similar investigations, examining the peculiarities of spaces traditionally occupied by or associated with heterosexual men. Tannahill’s project, featuring a cast of real frat boys, was an investigation into college frat culture and its complex relationship to homoeroticism and homophobia. The piece featured dramatic re-enactments, video documentation, and performance actions inspired by party stunts and hazing rituals, woven together by personals stories and revelations on the nature of manhood, sexuality and fraternity. Allen, on the other hand, took on macho culture, from a female perspective, re-performing and responding to stunts by shock culture icons like Jackass’ Johnny Knoxville and Steve-O with an all-female group, blending the roots of burlesque, carnival and high physicality risk-taking on stage.

View the  HATCH 2009 press release here.

Photos courtesy of the artists.

View photo/image credits here.