GUIMOND, Emma-Kate (with Rue JOVANOVIC)

Strong Legs Folding
Wednesday October 9, 7 pm
630 Queen Street East

A performed auto-theory about love and obligation competing in a time when living is becoming unaffordable. This is a psychosomatic inquiry into how the body and language metabolize difficulties into forms of desire and intention. Performed with somatic therapist and artist, Rue Jovanovic, who plays the role of witness, stagehand, and friend – these three functions co-mingle to complicate economies of labour and care. Rigorous but sensual, a series of actions are performed in tandem with anecdotes where the underlying question is: what do we owe each other?

Emma-Kate Guimond comes to performance to be seen but also to see, deciphering ways to stage the question of why these drives are so essential to living. Between writing and the body, layers of askew translations pile into dense but exact sequences, alternating performative modes from authentic to plastic, dancerly, workerly, or melodramatic. The outcome might be felt as peculiar combinations of blunt, cartoony, dark, wordy, psychological, and visceral.