In terms of professions, I define myself first as a performance artist, but that label is closely followed by at least two others: performance curator and, more recently performance theorist. This confluence of roles is no accident; it reflects how I discovered that there was such a thing as performance art in the first place. …

5. Para-sites of Performance Art: Some Brief Thoughts on the Role of Artist-Curator Read More »

While the live situation may enable the phenomenological relations of flesh-to-flesh engagement, the documentary exchange (viewer/reader <—> document) is equally intersubjective.(Jones 1997: 12) Art historian and theorist Amelia Jones has written extensively about the uneasy relationship between live, body-based art practices and the documents such practices produce. Despite the heavy investment of both performance scholars …

4. You Are Here (“you had to be there…”): Experience and Representation Read More »

For me [performance has] always been about breathing the same air, and being in the same room, and feeling your pheromones and your cells and your energy vibrations and all of that very corporeal, very tactile-kinesthetic kind of stuff. Archives are […] remains that […] the actual bodies aren’t there any more. To me that’s …

3. Performing Access: A Video Conversation on (Artist) Archives with Paul Couillard and Margaret Dragu (August 30, 2019) Read More »

If we consider performance as ‘of’ disappearance, if we think of the ephemeral as that which ‘vanishes,’ and if we think of performance as the antithesis of preservation, do we limit ourselves to an understanding of performance predetermined by a cultural habituation to the patrilineal, West-identified (arguably white-cultural) logic of the archive?(Schneider, 65) Much has …

2. Assembling a Toolkit vs. the Logic of the Archive Read More »

By Paul Couillard KinesTHESES was developed and organized by me (Paul Couillard) under the auspices of the Toronto Performance Art Collective (TPAC) as an “off-year” project.[1] KinesTHESES features 10 artists, who were invited to develop works that would engage an audience of participants and witnesses not simply as eyes and ears but as tactile-kinesthetic creatures: …

1. KinesTHESES Project Background: Introducing the Digital Toolkit Idea Read More »