Thursday, February 18, 2016
3:00 - 9:30 PM
Finishing Lines: One-Day Performance Festival At Forest City Gallery, 258 Richmond Street, London, Ontario Co-presented with McIntosh Gallery
Forest City Gallery and McIntosh Gallery are pleased to present Finishing Lines, a one-day performance festival that surveys performance art from across Southern Ontario. Performances included in Finishing Lines confront: lines and erasures, stereotypes and subversions, futility and utility. With beginnings and ends always in question, works in Finishing Lines will negotiate the conflict of self-reflection in the public sphere.
This day of programming with feature one durational (three-hour) performance in the day and three shorter performances in the evening. The daytime performance will be presented as a “drop-in” event anytime between 3 – 6 PM. The evening performances from 6 – 9 PM will have audience seating and a licensed, cash-bar. If attending the evening performances, we ask that you arrive for the first performance at 6:30 PM to be respectful while performances are taking place. This event is free and open to the public.
Daytime Durational Performance: Jessica Karuhanga – 3:00 – 6:00 PM
Evening Performances: Doors at 6 PM Katie Lyle & Shelby Wright – 6:30 – 7:00 PM Stephen Mueller – 7:15 – 8:00 PM Liz Peterson – 8:15– 9:00 PM
Artist Statements and more information below.
Header Photo Courtesy of Stephen Mueller.
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Daytime Durational Performance / Drop in between 3 – 6 PM Jessica Karuhanga / 'Shade Shadow Spectre'
Shade Shadow Spectre is a durational performance by Jessica Karuhanga. The performance involves processes of drawing and erasure using black charcoal dust (ash) and white paper. The palette - black, white and grey shadows. The gesture – a process of covering and unveiling. Unveiled through this process lies a field of positive and negative space. This veil is a spectre. Some language passes through the cross-hatch. Somemay grasp it. Other’s writhe in longing. Murmurs selectively caress, cradle and extol in air through lips. These sounds, these beat pulses, precede language. Marks, lines and sharp folds form under the weight of our bodies.
In an earlier iteration of this project Karuhanga began this performance with a primal dance. These movements were an intuitive mix of traditional east African dance with a subversion of degenerative stereotypes. Bangles, a currency of the slave-trade, adorned my body throughout my gestures resonating as shackles, decoration and percussion. The movements were followed by the emphatic release of charcoal dust across a blank sheet of white paper.
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Evening Performances / Doors at 6 PM / Until 9 PM / Licensed Event / Audience Seating
6:30 – 7:00 PM / Katie Lyle and Shelby Wright / 'Movements for the Neighbouring Room'
Movements for the Neighbouring Room is a collaborative performance project by visual artist Katie Lyle, and dancer/choreographer Shelby Wright. Their work together explores the heightened relationship between an individual and the spaces they live and work in, focusing on themes of privacy, ownership, community and gendered space.
Lyle and Wright began working together in May 2015, and first performed as part of a summer project series Garden Avenue in Toronto. In this first stage of their research, the pair created a series of movements based on the site of the garden as a liminal space between public and private.
In their more recent work, Lyle and Wright consider the event of a compromised private space, where the interruption or manipulation of creative production has the potential to both enhance and derail. The violation becoming a crutch, and an extension of the work itself. In Movements for the Neighbouring Room, two bodies' movements contribute to the same form; sometimes in line, sometimes finishing a line, only partially separated in space from one another, and only ever partially seen.
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7:15 – 8:00 PM / Stephen Mueller / 'Here or There or Not or Now or Never'
e·vent \i-ˈvent\
noun (pl. events)
1. a thing that happens (esp. something important or notable). ⋅ a planned occasion or activity (e.g., a social gathering). ⋅ a single occurrence of a process.
ho·ri·zon \hə-ˈrī-zən\ noun (pl. horizons)
1. the line where the earth or sea seems to meet the sky. 2. the limit or range of a person's knowledge, understanding, or experience. ⋅ the limit of what is possible in a particular field or activity. 3. a layer of soil or rock, or a set of strata, with particular characteristics.
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8:15 – 9:00 PM / Liz Peterson / 'Hard Problem'
Hard Problem is a performance that will use Natalie Depraz's paper The rainbow of emotions as a starting point to examine Liz's practice of improvisation as a dramaturgical tool. Through a cross-disciplinary style of comedy, gestural dance, autobiography and theatre, Hard Problem asks the question, what role does the heart have in our understanding of the world around us? And what does the middle point between purely muscular and metaphorically spiritual look like?
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