Yoko Ono Birthday Party fundraiser
Wednesday February 18, 1998
Club Shanghai
247 Spadina Ave, 4th floor
Yoko Ono Birthday Party was a fundraising event for the 7a*11d International Festival of Performance Art.
This eyewitness account is from an email sent by co-organizer/participant Paul Couillard on February 25, 1998, to U.S.-based performance artist Frank Moore, who had participated in the first 7a*11d festival the previous year.
YOKO ONO BIRTHDAY PARTY
was a 7a*11d fundraiser event that took place on February 18/98 in honour of Yoko Ono’s 65th birthday.
The venue was Club Shanghai, a 4th floor club in the heart of Toronto’s downtown Chinatown area overlooking Spadina.
We had asked artists to do works that were either inspired by Yoko Ono’s work or recreations of her work. Our invitations were a series of 12 different handbills (though actually every one was different, since the photocopy originals were individually decorated with scraps of Japanese paper) with pictures of Yoko and instructions pieces from her book Grapefruit . The book (if you don’t know it) is a series of instructions of art actions for individuals to do in the areas of music painting, event, object, poetry, film and dance.
Several of the artists decided to work based on what they read on the handbills. A lot of people did not know any of Yoko Ono’s performance work before the event — so we were also raising awareness of a great artist as well as raising money for this summer’s festival.
Some of the pieces:
I had made up a series of envelopes each with a different instruction from Grapefruit printed on the outside of each one. I went up to each person attending and asked them a series of questions, starting with “Numbers or Words?” Based on their reply, I would have them choose either the number or title of one of the seven chapters of Grapefruit, and then choose an appropriate envelope. The envelopes were sealed, with something inside each one. I told each person that they were not to open the envelope until they had completed the performance printed on the outside. This was my birthday gift to them in honour of Yoko Ono.
e.g. VOICE PIECE FOR SOPRANO
[chosen at random from the few remaining envelopes]
Scream.
1. against the wind
2. against the wall
3. against the sky
1961 autumn
from Grapefruit
a book of instructions by Yoko Ono
Copyright (c) 1964, 1970 Yoko Ono
[Do the piece and then e-mail me and I’ll send you something…]
My boyfriend Ed Johnson had laid out a painted sheet on the floor and was lying on his back with his head underneath a cardboard box. A second hole was cut in the box on the opposite side for someone else to put their head in. There was an instruction that read: “Place your head in the box / Repeat something that was said to you today / Leave, or sleep.”
In one corner of the room, a woman named Koren Bellman had placed bundles of clothes in laundry baskets. There was an instruction to choose some clothes from the baskets and fold them neatly in a pile. As the evening wore on, she would take each bundle, go behind a tarp and put on the clothes, then come out and improvise the movements and vocalizations (sounds, not words) she felt from each set of clothing.
Me and me, a male/female performance duo who appear all over town in matching outfits and do wonderfully understated performance actions had set up a single bed in the middle of space which they were sharing. They would do occasional gestures, playing with each other and interacting non-verbally with the crowd.
Early in the evening, a woman named Pam Patterson and her 9-year-old daughter Erin did a dance with two chairs that included standing on the chairs, raising their legs to piss on them like dogs, wetting newspapers that had been placed in a circle around the chairs using watering cans, and playing a game of ‘musical chairs’ — all while traffic sounds played in the background. Most of the choreography was done by Erin.
An art college student named Stephen Rife who only does performances that use fire did a ‘bagism’ piece in which he made ‘bags’ out of newspapers and placed them in various parts of the room. Then he had different audience members light them all simultaneously in all four corners. As the ‘bags’ burned, they became lighter, lifting off the ground and floating into the air. Turning to ash but still retaining a shrunken version of their original shape, they were like fire balloons hanging gracefully in a circle around the room.
Two women named Alison [?] and Ann Marie Hood had taken a series of chairs and dressed them up in ball gowns and tuxedo suits. As different short sequences of music played, they created different tableaux with the chairs, from soft jazz to Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven” (hilarious to see how the chairs edged closer or farther apart as they played the beginning, somewhere in the middle, then a few minutes (hours?) later, then near the end… It was like watching time-lapse photos)
A woman named Jenny Keith did a strange ‘game’ piece where she handed out different coloured wrappers and then had people open them and read what was inside. No one could figure out the point, but it took people deeper into the child-like birthday mood of the evening.
Andy Paterson, a performance artist who Frank and co. will remember from last year’s 7a*11d (the guy who did the Performance: A Performance rant as Professor Wordsworth, eventually coming out nude to the music from Thus Spake Zarathustra to sing “I love the cameras! I love the lights!” Sort of a Canadian version of John Fleck’s piece “It’s all about me”), did a bizarre lipsync as his character Norman Desmond to Yoko Ono’s Open Your Box.
Whenever there weren’t performances on stage, we had Yoko Ono music playing (excellently DJed by Andrew Zealley, a local musician and Yoko Ono fan/friend), and Yoko Ono videos playing on a video projector that the Club already had set up.
To get into the birthday spirit, all the tables had cupcakes with tall thin birthday candles on them (65 in all), trays of sushi circulated all evening, and there was cheesy birthday stuff like a big picture of Yoko that could tell your fortune if you spun the centre dial (a printed saying would be revealed in her cut-out mouth), a game of Twister that had different coloured circles with Yoko Ono’s face on them, and a giant photo of the famous naked Yoko/John picture with John’s face cut out so you could get your polaroid taken naked with Yoko Ono.
It was great fun, we made a little bit of money, and got to celebrate the work of an important artist. Whose birthday should we celebrate next?