By Jenn Snider
Welcome to the 7a*11d International Festival of Performance Art Blog!
Echoing the introductions by the other half of this year’s blogging-duo, I’m Jenn Snider, an arts worker/artist/student/curator/over-caffeinated researcher based in Toronto, Canada. Alongside the fabulous Alison Cooley, I’ll be reporting, archiving, following, and absorbing all the physical flows and embodied phenomena presented at the festival. Between the two of us, we’ll be crafting this blog as a textually performative and (hopefully) informative repository over the coming days.*
7a*11d is once again offering an incredible array of performances by stellar Canadian and International artists. I hope you’ll be there for much (if not all) of what’s in store.
On this, the eve of the launch of the festival’s 10th edition, I’m interested in reflecting (as one does on anniversaries) on how the events that take place in this festival’s context don’t end when the sun sets, or begin when the clock strikes.
Last night, many of this year’s artists and festival organizers gathered to share a meal. Amidst the introductions, clinking glasses, and bursts of laughter, some of the artists casually discussed their work, and many spoke of their process and its evolving, refining, and emergent manners and forms. These snippets of conversation got me thinking about ‘the festival’ itself as a process… how it exists and appears as an ever emerging slippery set of experiences made of time and space on bodies, singular and in groups, of gestures and senses, language and light, and more (and more, and more). I wondered today about what will happen at the festival tomorrow, and how thrilling it is that we really can’t know what we’ll see or feel. So, I reflected on that, and I’ll probably reflect on it again in the coming days.
But last night, I found myself thinking about a particular marking of a moment (pictured below), when Johanna Householder and Angelo Pedari performed the ringing of our dinner bell. I guess I felt that, for me, the festival began when the bells reached their highest height and together we watched them fall, and heard them ring.
Tomorrow, or the day after that, or the next, maybe you’ll feel that the festival begins for you when you decide to move in its direction and contribute to its festival-ness.
See you soon!
*Also, check out Alison’s performance art BINGO, and play along!
