Search Results for: verb frau tv season 5

DRAGU, Margaret

TYPICAL DAY podcast series (7a*11d edition)

TYPICAL DAY is an illustrated audio podcast series by Verb Frau TV and supportTHEsupport that profiles how artists and other cultural workers live. The format is inspired by the antique illustrated dictionaries I loved as a young child hanging out in the public library; and also, the monthly quizzes at the front of Cosmopolitan magazine.

VERB FRAU TV began in 2011; and supportTHEsupport began in 2019. They are about service, care, community building, friendship, health and love. They blur definitions of performance with hybrid experiences: combinations of live in person, live on ZOOM, live streaming; and recorded/edited/screened in public/private, and posted on social media to be watched on your phone. VERB FRAU and supportTHEsupport ask “is it live or is it MEMOREX?”

Margaret Dragu was the recipient of the Governor General’s Award for Visual and Media Arts in 2012, Éminence Grise (2012) for 7a*11d, and, in 2000, first artist in FADO’s publication series Canadian Performance Art Legends. Dragu works in video, installation, web/analogue publication & performance. Spanning relational, durational, interventionist and community-based practices, she has shown in Canada, USA & Europe.

To see more of Margaret Dragu’s ‘Typical Day” interviews, visit her Vimeo page.

NEW NORMAL: an embodied novel
Wednesday September 4 7:30 pm
TTC Oakvale Greenspace (in front of the Oakvale Green Community Gardens), 77 Oakvale Avenue
FREE

with the assistance of dance captains Claudia Moore, Rob Abubo and Mikiki

NEW NORMAL is a walk’n’roll dusk-to-dark performance-for-camera where the audience is inside the performance as they walk’n’roll with easily-learned-gestures from Dragu’s urban stories of negotiating public transit with mobility aids, wheelchairs and baby strollers that the performing public listen to on their cellphones.

Margaret has some advance instructions/suggestions to enhance your participation in the performance:

1. Please download the 4 audio files (mp3 format) below to your cellphone before the performance so that you can be part of the soundtrack.

New Normal #1
New Normal #2
New Normal #3
New Normal #4

2. We’ll ask you to play them live, so remember to bring your cellphone to NEW NORMAL.

3. Wear your reflective safety gear for night visibility – vests, armbands, etc.

Thanks to:
– Justine A. Chambers and Kage for choreography and audio research and development;
– Dorothy Bennie, Paul Couillard, David Fox, Michael Glassbourg and Sarah Sheard as the the impromptu choir for the audio recordings; and
– the Toronto Transit Commission for allowing the use of the TTC Oakvale Greenspace for this project.

Margaret Dragu works in video, installation, web/analogue publication and performance. Spanning relational, durational, interventionist and community-based practices, she has presented her work across Canada, the United States and Europe. An innovator and pioneer in Canadian art, Dragu is a 7a*11d Éminence Grise (2012), was the first artist featured in FADO’s Performance Art Legends publication series, and was the recipient of the Governor General’s Award for Visual and Media Arts in 2012. Her favourite art-making material is still the body despite or because of her bionic status as a grateful owner of two recent hip replacements.

Body Atlas
Saturday August 24 2 pm
Bachir/Yerex Presentation Space @ 401 Commons, 401 Richmond Street West, 4th floor
& live-streamed
FREE

Join ‘Dr. Margaret’ [Dragu] and ‘Dr. Fiona’ [Griffiths] for a walk and talk and do performative lecture. Medicine meets Pee-wee Herman in this informal investigation of Griffiths’ and Dragu’s medical and artistic practices, explored through the lens of chosen body parts. Part conversation, part performance, this event will feature body stories, experiences and medical actions centred around notions of body knowledge, health and art by two of Canada’s most astute and experienced performance-based physical practitioners.

For more information on this project and extensive documentation, see the KinesTHESES Digital Toolkit:
13. A negotiated interaction: Body Atlas by Margaret Dragu and Fiona Griffiths (Description, video recording, “dead” livestream)

VERB FRAU TV Season 5: 7a*11d
Thursday October 13 to Saturday October 15; Tuesday October 18 to Saturday October 22 4 pm
online

VERB FRAU TV = verb woman television = DIY TV = margaret dragu = making and talking about performance = daily practice. VERB FRAU TV blends video art, reporting and conversations on contemporary performance art practices in a daily online TV show. Each live streamed episode includes a 15 minute interview with a special and fascinating artist performing or working during the festival, a daily yoga exercise, live cooking to create a daily appetizer to share with her special guest, and other stuff.

Margaret Dragu works in video, installation, web-based/book-publication and performance. Spanning relational, durational, interventionist and community-based practices, her performances have been presented in galleries, museums, theatres, nightclubs, libraries, universities and site speciﬁc venues including parks, botanical gardens, and public parade routes across Canada, the United States and Europe. An innovator and pioneer in Canadian art, Dragu is a 7a*11d Éminence Grise (2012), and was the recipient of the Governor General’s Award for Visual and Media Arts in 2012.

Season 5: Episode 1 with Kate Barry

Season 5: Episode 2 with Bartolomé Ferrando

Season 5: Episode 3 with Golboo Amani

Season 5: Episode 4 with Chun Hua Catherine Dong

Season 5: Episode 5 with Paul Couillard

Season 5: Episode 6 with All Day All Desktop Performances

Season 5: Episode 7 with Elizabeth Chitty

Season 5: Episode 8 with Mikiki

Season 5: Episode 9 (pre)rolling and (w)rapping

For links to the original (unedited) live streams, go to https://7a-11d.ca/festival_updates/verb-frau-daed-live-stream/

VERB FRAU TV Seasons 1 through 4 are available for free on iTunes, the artist’s and VIVO’s websites.
https://www.vivomediaarts.com/programming/series/verb-frau-tv

Yoga with Margaret Dragu
Wednesday October 24 to Sunday October 28 10 am
Toronto Free Gallery

VERB WOMAN: remembering to forget
Wednesday October 24 to Sunday October 28 11 am
Toronto Free Gallery

I make art like I make bread. Je sais la recette pour la fabrication du pain mais je ne sais pas vraiment ce que je vais faire jusqu’au moment où je commence. I listen to my heart, psyche, and body. Like a bricoleur, I employ EVERYTHING AT HAND: research, social engagement, community, photography, science, new media, social media; aussi bien que des disciplines traditionnelles comme la danse, la musique, le théâtre, la sculpture et les arts domestiques. My performance, video and new media work appears in flash mobs and art galleries, billboards and bus shelters, theatres and malls, on the internet and your cell phone. It is relational, durational, interventionist and community-based.

Margaret Dragu is the first artist featured in Fado’s Canadian Performance Art Legends publication series highlighting the work of senior Canadian performance artists. She is a 2012 Laureate of the Canadian Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts. She is also the recipient of the City of Richmond’s Most Innovative Artist Award, Ethel Tibbett’s Woman of the Year Award for The Arts, Richmond Women’s Centre’s Inspirational Woman Award, and the Mall Peepre Award for Outstanding Fitness Leader. She is an internationally famous cleaning lady.

Chtistine Korte’s eyewitness account
Sylvie Ferré compte témoin (1)
Sylvie Ferré compte témoin (2)

Margaret Dragu Lady Justice — Margaret Dragu as Lady Justice, 2012 PHOTO Martin Lipman

Forgetting & Remembering

I yearn to be pure. But I am so messy.

I worked in the dance world from 1969-72, but Modern Dance was conservative, narrow; there was no place for me. I was introduced to the ideas in Yvonne Rainier’s “No Manifesto” (1965) by making art with visual artists who were jumping off the walls to make Happenings with poets, theatre artists, photographers, sculptors:

No to spectacle no to virtuosity no to transformations and magic and make believe no to glamour and transcendency of the star image no to the heroic no to the anti-heroic no to trash imagery no to involvement of performer or spectator no to style no to camp no to seduction of spectator by the wiles of the performer no to eccentricity no to moving or being moved.

I was only dimly aware that the manifesto originated from Rainier. These ideas were mirrored and infused with what was happening in the real world—marches, grassroots organizing, social and educational upheaval, anti-Viet Nam War and Civil Rights Movements, the birth of feminism and gay rights, Back to the Land Communes. It wasn’t a time of labels, definitions or authorship.

One of the techniques used to find new movement patterns was chance-choreography. Merce Cunningham and John Cage employed chance operations in the early 1950s at Black Mountain College with avant-garde, modern, and minimalist visual artists, architects, sculptors, writers and intellectuals. John Cage said that improvisation was not as interesting a method to find new movement (or music or aktion), as the artist always improvises by doing what he/she knows or with what she/he is comfortable. Chance breaks through that comfort. It is pure and head-driven.

I still use chance techniques for performance. I find it freeing. Still. The way durational work is freeing because you have a real task that you must apply yourself to by merely doing it—again, again, again for a long time. This combined with exploring eastern religions surely is what led to durational/relational practices (e.g. Vito Acconcci’s 1969 work Following Piece).

There remains a coolness, a purity and a head-first aesthetic/value to chance work(s) like Cage’s 4’33” (1952), Water Walk performed on a 1960 TV episode of “I’ve Got a Secret,” and Rainier’s Continuous Project – Altered Daily (1970), anything from the 800 performance “events” by Merce Cunningham. This in contrast to infamous frenzied outcomes like Carolee Schneemann’s 1964 Meat Joy work. Perhaps Yvonne Rainier’s move from dance to film was fed by an interest in narrative (deconstructed or manipulated) and a desire to break away from the body-as-object coolness and purity. To get messy. In fact, a need to be and express the female. I don’t know. I am probably projecting myself onto her because I identify with her in some ways and share some common history.

Part of me longs to be pure and make work that follows Rainier’s manifesto and Cage-ian parameters. But somehow real life, the body, and discordant aesthetics always come into play, making my work messy. Even Yvonne, in Feelings are Facts published in 2006 by MIT Press, expresses some regret over her notorious “No Manifesto.”

I yearn to be pure. But I am so messy.

— Margaret Dragu

The Wall Is in my Head
Wednesday October 31 6:33 am (sunrise) – 10:30 pm
Elle Corazon | 176, rue Bernard Ouest, Montréal

ReciproCity/ RéciproCité Montréal round table discussion
Thursday November 1 12 pm – 5 pm
L’ancien Copie-Art | 813, rue Ontario

Organized by Josée Tremblay as part of ReciproCity/RéciproCité Montréal
Sponsored by Studio 303

The Wall Is in my Head
Saturday November 3 12 pm – 12 am
Gladstone Hotel | 1214 Queen Street West

ReciproCity/RéciproCité Toronto round table discussion
Sunday November 4 1 pm

Organized by Paul Couillard as part of ReciproCity/RéciproCité Toronto

Margaret Dragu is celebrating her third decade as a performance artist. She has presented her work in galleries, museums, theatres, nightclubs, libraries, universities and site-specific venues including parks, botanical gardens, and public parade routes across Canada, the west and east coast of the United States, and in western Europe. Margaret is also a film and video artist, writer, choreographer, actor, and radio broadcaster. She is a fitness instructor and personal trainer at community centres and hospitals in the city of Richmond, BC, specializing in clients with heart/stroke history, osteoporosis, arthritis, and for the visually impaired as well as clients requiring post-rehab and post-surgery programmes. Margaret’s recent performance work is a series entitled Conscious Corpus. It is a series of investigations of the body that draws upon a holistic lexicon from both her fine arts and body arts practice.

BARRY, Kate

Kate Barry performing Justice (After Margaret Dragu) at Geary Lane

Justice (After Margaret Dragu)
Saturday October 15 7:30 pm
Geary Lane

Justice (After Margaret Dragu) is an homage not only to those of us who seek freedom from arcane systems of power, but also to artist Margaret Dragu and her well-known persona Lady Justice, who bears witness to our determination to exact judicial reform. My performance will reflect on issues of violence and sexuality in the 21st century. I bring to the conversation current feminist critiques that stem from the #ibelievesurvivors, Slut Walk and Stop Rape movements. Justice (After Margaret Dragu) explores the interrelation of fear, (in)justice and the body, following themes of agency, power and intersubjectivity in my overall practice.

Kate Barry’s work investigates the performative capacities of the human body through video, drawing and performance art. She received her BFA from Emily Carr University of Art & Design in Vancouver, and her MFA from the University of Ottawa. She has exhibited and performed works both curated and self-produced throughout Canada as well as internationally.

Jessica Karuhanga’s eyewitness account
Verb Frau TV Season 5: Episode1 with Kate Barry
Unedited *dead* livestream of Verb Frau TV with Kate Barry

CHITTY, Elizabeth

Elizabeth Chitty performing Daylighting at Geary Lane

Daylighting Walks
Thursday October 13, Saturday October 15 6:30 pm, Sunday October 16 4 pm
Starting from Geary Lane

Walk with me. We are at the western edge of the watershed of a lost river, Garrison Creek. I will tell you something, then we will stroll through the neighbourhood for half an hour in silence. Perhaps we will hear water beneath our feet, on the surface of the concrete, in our bodies or the air. You can tell your thoughts to the microphone. (Audio files generated in the walks may be used in the performance, Daylighting.) Please bring only water in re-fillable bottles to these walks.

Daylighting route:

For research for this work, I am very much indebted to the community organization Lost Rivers Walks (see in particular their Lost Rivers Central Toronto Key Map) and citizen geographer and photographer Michael Cook (see his page on the Garrison Creek West Branch Storm Trunk Relief Sewer). Daylighting Walks will cover a very short above ground portion of the sewer path.

Daylighting
Friday October 21 7:30 pm

Shining light on the street surface and conjuring an image of the buried creek to the east, we will provide relief to what lives in the cracks. We will listen to one another thinking about water in the city. We will walk a straight line like the city’s grid, but you can choose to meander like water, which knows what to do.

Interdisciplinarity has been at the core of Elizabeth Chitty’s artistic practice for 41 years. Site, corporeality, temporality and attention to process thread through her work, which addresses being in a body, a place, with others. She creates performances and video and sound installations and lives in St. Catharines, Ontario.

Michelle Lacombe’s eyewitness account
Verb Frau TV Season 5: Episode 7 with Elizabeth Chitty
Unedited *dead* livestream of Verb Frau TV with Elizabeth Chitty

I explore what it means to be in a body, a place, with others. Interrelations of temporal-kinaesthetic-visual-aural-textual interests flow through my body of work.

Judson Dance Theater was one of the earliest influences on my work. The artist-run centres of the 1970s provided the perfect place to start applying ideas from one art form to another. Conceptual art was my springboard and evidence remains in my work. The social value of art has always gnawed at me and this intensified when I moved from an urban art community to a rural area. This strengthened my early resolve to value both subject and form. Living outside a sympatico art community likely exacerbated finding a balance with participatory and social practices. Mothering and spiritual practice provoked me to vow to never let my work add to the hatred and suffering in the world—and why bother when popular culture does it so well? Resisting our culture’s privileging of The Word but having verbal proclivities, I’ve worked hard against my monkey mind to wayfind into my body.

I make video and sound installations and performances. There have also been artist gardens and some constructed photographs. I recently started to make single-channel video again. I like the public realm and have often worked outdoors. I’ve written text since the get-go and there are words in most of my work. Some of it is maybe poetry and some of it is drawn from technical reports. There’s humour in my work but most of it is Very Serious. Most of the poetry was written in times of plummeted emotions and turmoil.

Performances have ranged across fairly broad territory. Most of them have used video and there was a time of two large-scale works with multiple still image projections. I am happy to make performances for a stage if requested and I’ve avoided all allegiance to either/or performance lineages except at first when I vigorously rejected dance. Later that seemed arbitrary and of-a-certain-time, and I came to appreciate the depth of sensorial sensitivity, expressive integrity and boggling skill amongst dancers I admired.

Most of my recent work is about water in North Niagara, where I live. Currently my work often involves groups of people walking together. It reconnects with performances I did in the 1990s in which the audience walked paths and trails (one of which was performed at the first 7a*11d festival). My current work is place-based. I focus on place mostly through considering a site’s geology, plants and birds, natural and built landscapes, governance including treaties, histories, and water and its infrastructure. To do this I research and engage with community members in walking, looking and listening. Walks generate video and audio files that I use in subsequent digital spaces. The work is anchored in sensing and making sense of our surroundings through bodily experience, social interactions, and simple technologies. The ground might shift a little through a lurking lens of social justice.

I’ve made art continually for 41 years regardless of whether anyone was watching. My old standbys are: The personal is political. Think globally, act locally. Don’t be a jerk.

— ELIZABETH CHITTY

Progress of the Body
Thursday August 7 to Monday August 11 9 pm
Trinity Bellwoods Park (Queen St W to Dundas St W, Gore Vale Ave to Crawford St)

Curated by Terril-Lee W. Calder-Fujii, Jenny Keith & Derek Mohamed as part of Sediment

Performers: Bee Palomino (aka Barbara Baltus), Nell Chitty, Elizabeth Chitty, Anne-Marie Hood, Helen Jones, Vanessa Lambeck and Susan Macpherson
Lighting realized by Chris Clifford
Audio Recording by Paul Hodge

Elizabeth Chitty is a senior interdisciplinary artist working in performance, video and installation. She has also been active in arts support fields as a producer, consultant, administrator, curator, technician, writer, teacher, and practices as a mediator, facilitator and consultant in conflict resolution. The imagery Chitty uses is based on an interest in cultural conceptions of the processes and organs of consciousness; specifically notions of the relationship between the physical body and the immaterial (spirit, emotion).

Artist’s description of the performance

FERRANDO, Bartolomé

Bartolomé Ferrando performing Sound performance with newspaper | Sound performance with little objects at Geary Lane

Sound performance with newspaper
Sound performance with little objects
Thursday October 13 7:30 pm
Geary Lane

I am interested in creating a new language with or without words. It is an open language, created in relation to the visuality of the elements. I read objects, not words, and when I do it, I discover different voices within myself. I try to develop a primitive language of multiple voices whose feeling/meaning I don’t know. It’s my own language, but one in which I ﬁnd myself lost. I am (or I am there; it’s me), but dissolved/dismissed. And so, I try to transcribe the objects through a general language that all will be able to understand and appreciate in their own way.

Bartolomé Ferrando is a performer and visual poet based in Valencia, Spain. He teaches intermedia and performance at the University of Valencia. Ferrando is a member of various improvised music and voice groups including Flatus Vocis Trio, Taller de Música Mundana, Rojo, and JOP. His performance work has been presented across Europe, and in Argentina, Canada, Chile, China, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Israel, Japan, Korea, Mexico, Singapore, USA and Vietnam.

Jessica Karuhanga’s eyewitness account
Verb Frau TV Season 5: Episode 2 with Bartolomé Ferrando
https://7a-11d.ca/?s=bartolome

MIKIKI

NSA
Friday October 21 7:30 pm
Geary Lane

I fuck up. I want to fuck up. I mean I don’t want to fuck up, but I am drawn into it. So let’s explore that. NSA is both a theoretical study of fucking up and a somatic process of Authentic Movement that pulls lyrical elements from a deeper, unconscious place into a performance of ritualized instructions. This project is concerned with the complexities of bodily and mental self-ownership, the impacts and residue of sustained duration on self-efficacy, reflecting a disillusionment with the politic of radical social change and ﬁnding solace within acts of self-containment and interpersonal and self-reflexive connection in the now.

Mikiki is a queer performance and video artist, and a queer community health activist from Newfoundland. Their work has been shown in artist-run centres, public galleries, performance festivals and self-produced interventions throughout Canada. Mikiki has worked as a Sexuality Educator in public schools, a Bathhouse Attendant, a Drag Queen Karaoke Hostess, a Gay Men’s Health & Wellness Outreach Worker, a Harm Reduction Street Outreach Worker and an HIV tester.

Michelle Lacombe’s eyewitness account
Verb Frau TV Season 5: Episode 8 with Mikiki
Unedited *dead* livestream of Verb Frau TV with Mikiki

VERB FRAU TV SEASON 5: NOW ONLINE

Golboo Amani performing on Verb Faru TV with Margaret Dragu

Artist Margaret Dragu returns for a fifth season of Verb Frau; an ongoing experiment in broadcast that consolidates many of Dragu’s personae in Verb Frau TV as feature interviewer, performer, and personality, Verb Frau, investigating contemporary performance art practice through conversations with international artists, from the new and emerging to the senior and famous.

Verb Frau TV Season 7 now online

In 2016, we invited Vancouver-based artist Margaret Dragu to create a daily livestream during the 11th 7a*11d International Festival of Performance Art, which resulted in the production of VERB FRAU TV Season 5: 7a*11d. She loved it so much, she decided to return for our 2018 edition to interview a number of our visiting artists …

Verb Frau TV Season 7 now online Read More »

VERB FRAU dead live streams

Did you miss an episode of the live-streamed VERB FRAU TV, Season 5? Can’t wait for the high-quality faster-paced, edited-for-prime-time version to be published? It’s OK, you’re in luck! Here is the link to those “dead” livestreams, like virtually being there all over again:

https://youtu.be/9UhY9cnh6Is (Ep. 1 w/Kate Barry; preroll ends approx. 23 minutes in)

https://youtu.be/FCtrAhMFvTk (Ep. 2 w/Bartolomé Ferrando; preroll ends approx. 17 minutes in)

https://youtu.be/1W0cyhNpecc (Ep. 3 w/Golboo Amani; preroll ends approx. 26 minutes in)

https://youtu.be/08z79ZJVWHU(Ep. 4 w/Catherine Dong; preroll ends approx. 21 minutes in)

https://youtu.be/OLlKbBgVIGg (Ep. 5 w/Paul Couillard; preroll ends approx. 28 minutes in)

Margaret Dragu

By Jessica Karuhanga VERB FRAU TV Season 5: 7a*11d I have just returned from the kitchen with Michelle. We were guests on the last episode of the fifth season of VERB FRAU TV. Well, it was more of a follow-up to close the season. The idea behind our debrief was in essence to unravel and …

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2016 Festival Bloggers’ Reflection

Tanya Mars making opening announcements at the 11th 7a*11d Festival at Geary Lane

By Jessica Karuhanga A conversation between Jessica Karuhanga and Michelle Lacombe M. Having seen some previous editions of 7a*11d, what, to you, distinguished this one from other incarnations? Did it feel representative of the festival? J. I have attended the last three iterations of 7a*11d so I will speak to these experiences. What I know …

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