2019 KinesTHESES
Welcome to the site of Toronto Performance Art Collective (TPAC), organizers of the biennial 7a*11d International Festival of Performance Art, English Canada’s oldest performance art festival, taking place in Toronto since 1997 (next festival will be October 2020).
Our “off-year” project for 2019 is KinesTHESES, taking place between August and December, curated by TPAC member Paul Couillard. For KinesTHESES features a total of 10 residencies that will generate new, site-specific actions that engage the moving bodies of audience participants. Featured artists in the series include
Barak adé Soleil
Margaret Dragu
Esther Ferrer
Fiona Griffiths
Louise Liliefeldt
Stephanie Marshall
Robin Poitras
Jessica Thompson
claude wittmann
Sakiko Yamaoka
German philosopher Edmund Husserl used the term “the kinestheses” to describe the perceptual experiences of bodily movement. He argued that these senses, above all, are the core of subjectivity. The fact that we can feel ourselves move, and that we have an innate sense of our position in space, is foundational to our ability to conceive of ourselves as “I”s.
KinesTHESES will feature works that take the notion of “moving” their audiences in the most literal sense. Rather than engaging audience members as sets of eyes and ears, these projects remind us that we are, above all, animate forms: tactile-kinesthetic creatures that first learn who we are and discover our world by moving through our environment as bodies experiencing dynamic flows and encountering surfaces and textures. These are the building blocks of what we come to recognize as time, space and matter.
Artists
Schedule
Toronto Performance Art Collective gratefully acknowledges the support of:
And a special thanks to our co-presenters and venue sponsors
The Toronto Performance Art Collective lives and works on the traditional and unceded territory of the Anishinaabe, Mississaugas and Haudenosaunee people in the North Part of Turtle Island, land bound by the Dish with One Spoon covenant.*** Subsequent Indigenous Nations and peoples, settlers, immigrants, refugees, and displaced people have been invited into this treaty in the spirit of peace, friendship and respect.
Acknowledging territory is only one step in the necessary work to challenge the legacies of colonialism, and cultivate strong and meaningful relationships with the First Peoples of Canada.
***The Dish With One Spoon is a treaty between the Anishinaabe, Mississaugas and Haudenosaunee that bound them to share the territory and protect the land. The Dish represents what is now southern Ontario, from the Great Lakes to Quebec and from Lake Simcoe into the United States. This covenant tells us that all who share the territory eat out of the same Dish, with only one spoon. We share the responsibility of ensuring the dish is never empty, which includes taking care of the land and the creatures that cohabit it. There are no knives at the table; we must keep the peace.
(Revised from a text composed by Eliza Chandler using the Land Acknowledgment developed by Ryerson University's Aboriginal Education Council as a reference. Thanks to Vanessa Dion Fletcher for providing us with Eliza's text.)