You’ve read about them in Xtra!, The National Post, on BlogTO and Torontoist (just to name a few!). Starting tonight, you can be among the first to experience one-to-one performance at Rhubarb. At 5:00 we open the box office at the 519 Church Street Community Centre for first-come, first-served Pay What You Can (cash only!) appointment bookings with our one-to-one artists. Before your appointment, hang out and read a book or play a game in our waiting room or grab a Rhubarb –themed bite from our friends at Fabarnak.
Did you know that you can start your one-to-one experience at home?
If you have a smartphone, MP3 player or other headphone-equipped device at the ready, click here to download Walk With Me by Aynsley Moorhouse. Head to the Buddies Box Office, press play, and voila! Your walk to the 519 becomes an artistic experience not to be missed. If you’re reading this now and can’t make it to a computer in time, not to worry—we’ll have a laptop at the 519 where you can download Aynsley’s piece.
You may remember reading our domino interview with five one-to-one artists. This week, we bring you part two, featuring Berenicci Hershorn, Kenji Ouellet, Johnson Ngo, Aynsley Moorhouse and David Frankovich.
BERENICCI HERSHORN
In Blue Light, you and Berenicci will exchange secrets. Don’t worry—she won’t tell.
Kenji Ouellet to Berenicci Hershorn:
What importance does telling the truth have for you generally, and what role does this play in your performance?
Berenicci: My very first artistic inspiration was a little onion that peeled away to nothing in my astonished hands. And I have been forever fascinated by the way we come to know things. The process by which we edge our way around the circumference of comprehension, working towards a centre we may never ever find. There’s such an exquisite rhythm to it.
“We dance around in a ring and suppose,
But the secret sits in the middle and knows”
JOHNSON NGO
Come and Make Your Own China Doll with Johnson Ngo as he shares his story with you.
Berenicci Hershorn to Johnson Ngo:
Your work, as I know it, deals with identity albeit in a very visual, metaphorical and often tangential way. Looking back at the work I’ve done over the years, I see that work I thought was cooly cerebral and conceptual turns out to be very personal indeed. Given that we use our person as our medium, do you think that all performance work deals with identity whether the artist owns up to that or not?”
Johnson: Since our person is used as medium, I feel that all performance inherently deals with identity, but there is a difference between works dealing strictly with identity (and politics) and those dealing with more dominant themes. Not to mention the works of artists, such as Cindy Sherman and Nikki S. Lee, whose works intrinsically deals with the performance of identity.
I address the construction and fluidity of identity, specifically within a homosexual context. Prejudice and stereotypes are just some of the themes I am working with within my performances.
DAVID FRANKOVICH
Hungry and curious about your past, present and future? Come to Psychic Cooking Show where David Frankovich will cook you a meal and tell you your fortune.
Psychic Cooking Show
Johnson Ngo to David Frankovich:
Do you have a personal connection to mysticism or fortune-telling?
David: I’m really interested in rituals. With tarot, for example, every reading is different. It may consist of the same structure, the same set of ritual actions, yet will always be different. Performance is the same way. Once a performance begins it opens to any number of possibilities. Every time it is performed a performance changes and the performer in turn is changed by the performance. In a way, this can be thought of as a kind of magic. Transformation through ritual action. On a personal level, I come from a media arts background, so discovering performance was for me a profoundly transformative experience. It has changed and continues to change the ways that I think about art and make art. I definitely feel changed when I perform, and often when I experience a performance. I wouldn’t call it a mystical experience in a literal sense, but it is very powerful, which is maybe why I’m drawn to the idea of a kind of ritualized performance practice.
AYNSLEY MOORHOUSE
Walk With Me
David Frankovich to Aynsley Moorhouse:
What, for you, is the relationship between sound, memory and walking?
Aynsley: For me, the relationship is more about that between your memory and your perceptions. How you interact with the world and the way you travel through it depends on how your brain processes the things around you. I’m fascinated by what happens when you can’t trust your perceptions, and the anxiety and disorientation that can result from this mistrust. If, for example, you can’t navigate your way home from somewhere you’ve known your whole life, walking becomes something scary and foreign. Likewise, you can only trust what you hear if you understand the sound or have heard it before. Typically the brain creates and maintains a catalog of familiar sounds which can be used to categorize and interpret new ones. When this system breaks down, sounds can become disorienting and confusing, reinforcing that you can no longer understand or trust your perceptions, and then by extension, the world around you.
KENJI OUELLET
Kenji flew all the way from Germany to bring you Klangkorper, in which a choreography is played out on his audience member’s body.
Aynsley Moorhouse to Kenji Ouellet:
Can you describe the challenges of conveying narrative through touch?
Klangkörper, the performance presented at the festival, involves no narrative in the sense of what is usually understood as storytelling.
Its structures are related to those used in instrumental music or dance (when dance is abstract rather than narrative). For a musician, musical structures (like, say, a sonata form) can be experienced as a kind of narrative, but this might not be the experience of the average listener of a piece of music.
A sound and a touch component interact and have a dialogue within Klangkoerper, creating other types of dynamics, so those similarities can only say so much anyway.
Parts of Piece touchée no 2, another piece [of mine], deal directly with story-telling, and more generally touch and language. Generating meaning with touch (through similarity, relation or convention) can be challenging, but I felt that the most difficult thing was rather to find or create texts that could be set to a touch score in an interesting way.
One-to-one performances run from Friday, February 10th through Sunday, February 12th. Fridays from 6PM to 10 PM (last performance at 9:30) and Sunday from 2-5 PM (last performance at 4:20). PWYC, cash only, first-come first-served. Box office opens one hour prior to performances.
