The Rhubarb Festival
February 4 – 13, 2022

The bacterial residency format for this year’s festival means that you can catch a different artist each day of Rhubarb. Some artists will share more than once on their day, or offer glimpses into longer durational performances.

Please note that we are keeping our capacity to 25 people in the Chamber space (including artists and staff), so the number of tickets/spots available is very limited.

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Admission to the festival will require confirmation from our box office staff after filling out the form. This year, there is no ticket fee to attend the festival.

For more information on COVID safety for each performance (e.g. performer masking, check the Health & Safety tab).

Friday, February 4

Fragile Glim

A multi-form soundscape composition for degenerative piano, field recordings, improvisation, and spoken word, Fragile Glim questions the need for anthropocentric ideals of beauty and exploring unadorned-organic modes in musical performance.

neo-speculative artist Stanford Cheung
poet Alvin Wong

performance times
6PM & 8PM

 

Saturday, February 5

Land of the Living

In this work Louise plays with metaphors of a kind of parasite, disease, infection and decay both spiritually and physically in lieu of the times we have been and are currently living in. In most ways this performance has nothing to do with the Covid-19 Pandemic but mostly has to do with a part of our history as people while using elements of our current state.

artist Louise Liliefeldt

performance time
6PM

 

Sunday, February 6

Working with Wood

Like the rest of nature, a tree is a responsive and creative body and should not be fixed simply in the realm of the material nor the sublime. In this durational performance, Johannes responds to the central festival installation, alongside a collection of tree remnants that he has come to know. Integrating movement, sound, and footage of nature, these recollections and contemplations will unfold as an honouring of the trees’ lives.

artist Johannes Zits

This is a durational performance.
viewing times
3PM & 4:30PM

 

Monday, February 7

looking for a safe home

Artist claude wittmann, having found an (at least temporary) ending to his second months-long housing crisis in less than two years, has invited visual artist and writer Serena McCarroll to join him; Serena went through a similar eleven-month long crisis in 2021. Together, they will accept and receive the Rhubarb Festival frame as a paying container that can allow them, in some way, to ground nanobits of their internal decay and trauma, and if possible nourish a personal need of the moment.

viewing time
7PM

 

Tuesday, February 8

Rats of Woolpit

Splett and Ward play alien rats with yeast infections who harvest the mold from cupcakes and the mossy detritus from pop-psychology in this electronic and sensory performance.

created and performed by Brawk Ward + Esther Splett
outside eye David Bateman

performance times
7PM + 8:30PM

 

Wednesday, February 9

Akin to the Hurricane

Continuing an iterative series that began in 2018, this impromptu sound performance utilizes the symbolic space of the hurricane to question ideas of sovereignty and belonging. This is an effort to exercise fugitivity as a point of agency, autonomy and potentiality.

artist Jesús Hilario-Reyes
collaborator Callum Magnum

performance times
7PM + 8PM

 

Thursday, February 10

Between Points A and B, there are infinite potential directions of movement: A Micro-Party!

In 1977, a golden record of the Sounds of Earth was shot to outer space on the Voyager spacecraft. Now in the so-called Anthropocene, as today’s artists and cultural programmers, we’ve gathered our own top picks. So come share space, while we spin our favourite records of protest & resistance. Entrance your eyes and nose with a steady stream of live-remixed film projections, and with our resident fungi. Time is a loop, time layers; together we will draw a space to decompose and recompose, to remix and regenerate.

concept and performance Claudia Edwards + Tram Nghiem

viewing time
6:30PM + 8PM

 

Friday, February 11

Matter/Matter + Memory

Generational duo Ruby Caldwell Kramer and Lara Kramer use curiosity and play to plunge into the flesh of remembrance and discovery, charting a living landscape of their relationship in this howl towards what is reimagined.

conceived and performed by Ruby Caldwell Kramer +  Lara Kramer

performance times
6PM & 7:30PM

 

Saturday, February 12

Stumped: Conversation 3 at the End of Theatre

In conversation with the space and festival installation, Sarah Garton Stanley presents the third lecture in a series of five exchanges at the end of theatre, modelled off of the annual Massey Lectures.

performer and creator Sarah Garton Stanley
music and sound designer Richard Feren
dramaturg Nick Carpenter

performance times
4:30PM & 5:30PM

 

Sunday, February 13

MAPS

Meditating on kinship, gut memory, and our connections to place, Jessica Johns shares with the audience a process of framing dehydrated SCOBYs, beading significant places and trails onto the stretched canvases they create.

artist Jessica Johns

viewing times
12PM & 1PM

 

Throughout the festival (installation)

Phosphos

In a timeless space flooded with light, light artist Paul Chambers erects a permeable boundary between matter and emptiness, warmth and absence, sleep and wakefulness. As images come pouring in, and the setting subtly altered through delicate manipulations, this entrancing ceremony invites audience members to sharpen their gaze.

light artist Paul Chambers
soundscape composer Jesse Peter Ash

special thanks to Maxime Sauvage, Nathalie Banger, Chad Dembski, Lael Stellick

note: the installation will not be running on Monday, February 7.

 

After the residency

note: Two socially-engaged Rhubarb projects (one by Moe Angelos and one by Myung-Sun Kim) will occur at a later date dependent on COVID safety and restrictions. We will share updates as they’re available.

With this year’s limited capacity, we wanted to create an opportunity for more audience members to experience Andrea Shin Ling’s installation, Calculus of an infinite rot, part 1. 

Space is limited, with viewing slots available most days of the festival at 11AM and 12PM (this includes about fifteen minutes to check-in, and thirty minutes in the space with the installation).

Book Now

Artist statement from Andrea Shin Ling

Installation Credits
lead artist Andrea Shin Ling
curator Clayton Lee
fabricators Leah Ataide + Nicholas Hoban
technical support Betty Poon + Anna Gregorczyk + Olga Chomiak + Natasha Christie-Holmes (Temerty Faculty of Medicine at the University of Toronto)
special thanks to Toronto Tree Removal + Ataide Family Farm + FADO Performance Art Centre + Jehoshua Sharma

festival director Clayton Lee
design lead Andrea Shin Ling
programming committee Shannon Cochrane, seeley quest, Keijaun Thomas + Arielle Twist
lighting designer Echo Zhou
associate lighting designer Sruthi Suresan

Clayton (he/him) is a Toronto-based performance artist. Previous performances include (◕‿◕✿) at The Performance Arcade in Wellington, New Zealand and Chapter’s EXPERIMENTICA in Cardiff, Wales; Duets for Beginners (SummerWorks); Chew, Chew, Swallow, Spit (Rhubarb Festival); and Informal Beginnings (Katzman Contemporary’s Duration & Dialogue II). His publication Brandy, the Virgin Slayer – Missed Connections appears as part of the BOOK MACHINE Project at Centre Pompidou in Paris, now part of its permanent Kandinsky Collection. Clayton is also the Managing Producer of Selfconscious Productions, which presents the annual CanadaHub at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe.

Andrea Ling (CA) is an architect, artist, and researcher working at the intersection of design, fabrication and biology. Her work focuses on how the critical application of biological and computational processes can move society away from exploitative systems of production to regenerative ones. She is the 2020 S+T+ARTS prize winner for her work as the 2019 Creative Resident at Ginkgo Bioworks designing the decay of artifacts in order to access material circularity. She graduated from the MIT Media Lab, Mediated Matter group, where she was a research assistant on the Aguahoja project. Andrea is an architect with the Ontario Association of Architects and a founding partner at designGUILD, a Toronto-based art & design collective. She is currently an A&T fellow at the Institute of Technology and Architecture at ETH Zurich.

Special thanks

For Phosphos

Thank You: Maxime Sauvage, Nathalie Banger, Chad Dembski, Lael Stellick

Creative Residencies La Chapelle Scènes Contemporaines + Concordia University
With the support of Festival TransAmériques + Parts+Labour_Danse

For Akin to the Hurricane
Anne Barber (Shadowland Theatre) and Maya Hall

Moe Angelos

Moe Angelos is a theatre artist and writer. She made Book Club performances with FADO Performance Art Centre and with Rhubarb in 2020, when Zoom was a business video conferencing platform. She’s one of the OBIE-Award winning Five Lesbian Brothers and has worked at NYC’s Wow Café since 1981. Moe works with The Builders Association and she’s been a mentor in Queer/Art/Mentorship. Now, she’s developing a piece with the Builders about clickworkers called I Agree to the Terms that will premiere in 2022 at NYU’s Skirball Center. During Covid-19, she’s appeared on Zoom, Twitch and Streamyard.

Ruby Caldwell Kramer + Lara Kramer

Lara Kramer is a performer, choreographer, and multidisciplinary artist of mixed Oji-cree and settler heritage. She lives and works in Tiohtià:ke/Mooniyang/Montreal. Her choreographic work and research over the last thirteen years have been grounded in intergenerational relations, intergenerational knowledge, and the impacts of the Indian Residential Schools of Canada. She is the first generation in her family to not attend the Residential schools.

Ruby Caldwell Kramer loves cats and painting. Matter/Matter + Memory is the first paired performance work for Ruby and Lara. She performed in This Time Will be Different in 2018, a group work created by Lara Kramer and Emilie Monnet.

Lara: website // instagram

Paul Chambers

Paul Chambers (concept) is a Montréal-based lighting designer, visual artist, educator and co-artistic director of CHA collective & holds a BFA (Sculpture Major) from Concordia University and a DEP in Design for the Theatre from John Abbott College. Working with artists across different disciplines, collaborating on new dance works has always been a priority for him. In addition to leading workshops and lectures on design, Paul teaches at Concordia University in the Contemporary Dance department, and coaches design students at The National Theatre School of Canada. Recent design credits include work with  Lara Kramer Dance, Amanda Acorn, Dorian Nuskind-Oder, Catherine Lavoie-Marcus, Priscilla Guy, Maria Kefirova, Katie Ward, PME-ART, Danse CarpeDiem, MAYDAY, Parts+Labour_Danse, Destins Croisés, Benjamin Kamino, & Public Recordings. In his work, Paul looks to reimagine the use of lighting in live stage arts, challenging the codes of theatrical practice, and create lighting installations that question how we perceive light when we are immersed in it.

website

Jesse Peter Ash (sound design) has been working with Sound for 20 years – designing, composing and mixing for theatre, film, and installations and pursuing personal sound and music based projects with work having been heard across Canada and around the world. Recent contributions include the digital theatre project, Antioch; An Enhanced Reading (Talisman, Montreal), installation Liens/Ties (NTS/Monument National), and play Mob (Centaur, Montreal). Past standouts include Mutable Tongues (Place des Arts), The God That Comes with Hawksley Workman (2B, Tour), Waiting for Godot (Stratford Festival) and En Attendant Godot (Théâtre du Nouveau Monde), Robert Wilson’s Mind Gap Exhibition (Norsk Teknisk Museum, Oslo) and international tour of Wilson’s Krapp’s Last Tape as well as his own sound piece Aural Histories: Monument (Third Space, Saint John). In addition to Sound work Jesse spent several years creating multimedia installations as a Technical Director with Montreal’s Moment Factory. Jesse is a Production graduate of the National Theatre School of Canada and Audio Engineering Technology from O.I.A.R.T and teaches Sound Design at John Abbott College.

Stanford Cheung

Stanford Cheung is a Neo-Speculative Artist working as a concert pianist, intermedia poet, and sound architect from Toronto who maintains an active international performing career as a recitalist and soloist North America, the UK, Canada, Europe, and Asia. Embodying a plethora of artistic outputs from literary publications, installation art, graphic scores, electronics, improvisations, recordings, to interactive concerts, Stanford collaborates with a broad range of renowned artists including The Honourable Elizabeth. A. Baker, Morgan Fisher, Steven J Fowler, Scott Hunter, Jonathan Kawchuk, Nobuo Kubota, Elæ Moss, Marc di Saverio, and Jordan A.Y Smith among others. Such collaborations have resulted in cross-disciplinary creations that have been exhibited/forthcoming at institutions including the Banff Centre for the Arts, the Orpheus Institute Belgium, the Kitakyushu Centre for Contemporary Arts, Harvard University, The University of Edinburgh, Christchurch University, and Osaka University.

Presently, Stanford is a Doctoral music student at McGill University where his research dissertation is “Wabi-sabi Behind the Scenes in Ryuichi Sakamoto’s Async.”

website // instagram // sound archive

Claudia Edwards + Tram Nghiem

Claudia Edwards is a performance artist based in Toronto, Canada. Of Indo-Guyanese and British descent, their work explores issues of identity, memory, queerness, power, and decolonization. Their approach is conceptually driven, and formally determined by operation and circulation, spanning the forms of relational performance, experimental dance, photography, video, text, and objects. Their curatorial work includes HOTWIRE, a live art series featuring QTBIPOC artists hosted by Hub14, and serving on the Rhubarb 2020 curatorial collective. Edwards received their BFA at Concordia University in 2016. They have created works for Pi*llory, FADO Performance Art Centre, Buzzcut Festival, Flux Factory, and more, and have presented performances and workshops in festivals and galleries across Canada, the US, the UK, and live online.

Tram Nghiem is a queer Vietnamese/Chinese artist working with stills and moving images. Trained in digital video through professional work, their art practice uses process-based inquiries, digital/analog methods, and often reworks personal and public archives as art.

Claudia: website // instagram
Tram: instagram

Jesús Hilario-Reyes

Currently based in Brooklyn, New York, Jesús Hilario-Reyes (born 1996, San Juan, Puerto Rico) is an interdisciplinary artist with a Bachelor’s in Fine Arts Studio from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Recently a recipient of the Leslie Lohman Museum Fellowship, the Drawing a Blank Artist Grant, and the upcoming Bemis Center Residency (2022) program. Jesús Hilario-Reyes has exhibited/screened both nationally and internationally, most notably at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Black Star Film Festival and Mana Contemporary. While situating their practice at the crossroads of sonic performance, new media, and expanded cinema, their iterative works examine carnival and rave culture throughout the West, to take on a necessary satirical approach to undermine the systems at play.

website // instagram // twitter

Jessica Johns

Jessica Johns is a nehiyaw aunty with English-Irish ancestry and a member of Sucker Creek First Nation in Treaty 8 territory in Northern Alberta. MAPS is a visual rendering of microbial connection between people and land. Made with dehydrated SCOBY (symbiotic culture of bacteria and yeast), my kokum Eileen Smith’s thread, and beads, MAPS denotes all the places family members and friends have built homemade kombucha using offspring from the mother SCOBY.

twitter // instagram

Myung-Sun Kim

Myung-Sun Kim is an artist and a curator, born in Seoul, South Korea and currently based in Toronto, Canada. Her practice explores questions around belonging, inheritance, kinship and lineage. She has presented her work across North America and in Finland, including Art Gallery of Ontario, MOCA Toronto, FADO Performance Art Centre, and Plug In ICA. As a curator, she has led curatorial programming at galleries and festivals including Toronto Reel Asian International Film Festival, Inside Out Film Festival, The Theatre Centre, and most recently at the Toronto Biennial of Art as the Curator of Public Programming & Learning.

instagram

Louise Liliefeldt

Liliefeldt is a Toronto based Performance Artist and painter. As a South African woman who immigrated to Canada at a young age, her work often draws directly from this culture and her lived experiences in order to talk about issues related to the politics of identity as it intersects with gender and race. She is interested in the possibilities of the body in space and the effect of time in a space. Her work examines the cultural conventions of spectatorship and the links between emotional/psychological states and physical experience.

Sarah Garton Stanley

Director, dramaturg, and Ph.D. Candidate in Cultural Studies at Queen’s University, Sarah Garton Stanley is originally from Montreal, now lives on the unceded and ancestral lands of the Mi’kmaq People in Southwest Nova Scotia. During her tenure as the Associate Artistic Director of English Theatre at the National Arts Centre, she led The Cycle(s). Sarah co-founded SpiderWebShow and FOLDA and co-invented SketchSpace. Sarah spent the first part of her life trying to be extraordinary. Having failed at that… she is spending the second half of her life working towards being ordinary and developing rituals to say goodbye to the things that no longer serve her in this quest.

website // instagram // twitter

Brawk Ward + Esther Splett

Esther Splett incorporates performance art into their experimental electronic music and describes themself as “the ghost of Emily Brontë resurrected as a bottle blonde synth player who just wants to have fun but can’t.”

Brawk Ward tries to imagine other paths their addictions can take beyond the fork in the road offered in recovery programs: either “jails, institutions, and death” or abstinence. The only “beyond” Brawk has found has been through poetry, object puppetry, and drag.

Together Esther Splett and Brawk Ward are nothing more than “gays and BPD art hoes” used to curb moisture, control odor, and soothe minor skin irritations.

Brawk: instagram
Esther: instagram

claude wittmann + Serena McCarroll

claude wittmann:
january 16, 2021: i identify as a white invisibly disabled, transgendered artist and recipient of the Ontario Disability Support Program (ODSP), who, after 15 years of work investigating gender identity through performance art, shifted in 2017 to root his practice deeper into the teachings received during crisis times. my intents now weave actions from survival mode, and depending on my life in the moment, these actions aim at my personal and/or my community survival and safety and/or at systemic change. i haven’t had the time and energy to update my website for months: claudewittmann.ca

Serena McCarroll received her BFA in Photography from Emily Carr University of Art & Design and her MFA in Documentary Media from Ryerson University. Her work has been shown in galleries such as Harbourfront Centre (Toronto), Stride Gallery (Calgary), The Art Gallery of Southwestern Manitoba, Paved Arts (Saskatoon), The Nickle Arts Museum (Calgary) & IMA Gallery (as a featured solo exhibition at Toronto’s Scotiabank Contact Photography Festival). She has written for Broken Pencil Magazine and The Walrus. She is the author of the book All Citizens, published in 2012 by Conundrum Press.

Johannes Zits

Since graduating in 1984, Johannes has presented work across Canada and internationally. In 2013, he presented a collection of his videos at FIFA in Montreal and the following year presented the performance, “Island” at M:ST Festival, Calgary, as well as venues in Shanghai and Chongqing, China. His photographic and collage work has been featured in galleries in Vienna, Berlin, Shanghai, Hamburg, Caen and Mexico City. From 2011-14 he facilitated the Intensive Performance Art Workshop at Artscape Gibraltar Point and  and started the curatorial project S.P.A.N.E.. He was also a member of the curatorial team Duration And Dialogue (2015-17).  In 2019 the Copenhagen Contemporary Museum commissioned him to create a score for their permanent collection and performed at the International Biennial of Asuncion, Paraguay. In 2020, Johannes was the artist-in-residence at Western University’s McIntosh Gallery in London, Ontario, presenting the exhibition Listening To Trees.

website

(present throughout the festival)
Calculus of an infinite rot, part 1 – Andrea Shin Ling
Bacteria, mold, and mushrooms present in the room/air; tripping hazards

Friday, February 4
FRAGILE GLIM – Stanford Cheung
Potential rotting wood

Sunday, February 6
Working with Wood – Johannes Zits
Unmasked performer; nudity; axe usage in performance; moving throughout the space

Wednesday, February 9
Akin to the Hurricane – Jesús Hilario-Reyes
Unmasked performers; strobe lights & haze; loud music;
whip usage in performance

Friday, February 11
Matter/Matter + Memory – Lara Kramer + Ruby Caldwell Kramer
Unmasked performers

COVID-19 Safety

All patrons attending the festival must present proof of vaccination, and fill out a COVID screening questionnaire prior to entering the building. Anyone experiencing symptoms will not be allowed into the space.

As well, we ask everyone in the building to wear an N-95, KN-95, or equivalent mask. We will have some additional masks onsite for those who need them.

There is no fixed seating in the performance space (we will have some chairs available for folks who need/want to sit), so audience members are asked to maintain a distance of six feet between any other audience member not in their households. 

Read more about the theatre’s COVID safety measures here.

We’ll be including more details about each of the performance as it relates to COVID safety (e.g. performer masking) below. Please take a read before booking your ticket, and feel free to get in touch with us at tickets@buddiesinbadtimes.com if you have any questions or concerns.

Friday, February 4 – Stanford Cheung – performers are masked
Saturday, February 5 – Louise Liliefeldt – performer is masked
Sunday, February 6 – Johannes Zits – performer is not masked
Monday, February 7 – claude wittmann + Serena McCaroll – performers are masked, capacity is reduced to 10 people
Tuesday, February 8 – Brawk Ward + Esther Splett – performers are masked
Wednesday, February 9 – Jesús Hilario-Reyes – performers are not masked
Thursday, February 10 – Claudia Edwards + Tram Nghiem – masking to be confirmed
Friday, February 11 – Lara Kramer + Ruby Caldwell Kramer – performers are not masked
Saturday, Febuary 12 – Sarah Garton Stanley – masking to be confirmed
Sunday, February 13 – Jessica Johns – masking to be confirmed

 

A Living Installation

Calculus of an infinite rot, part 1 is a living installation, which means that a complex network of mycelium, bacteria, and mold is growing on the installation’s objects. Beyond the mycelium and bacteria that were intentionally inoculated onto the installation, the molds present here are common and already existing in the air we breathe. The installation is merely making visible that which is already present. If you have any allergies related to any of the above, please be advised.

Note that the festival space is set up without chairs for the audience, however we will have chairs on hand for those who would like one. You can tell us in advance on the registration form, or just let us know when you arrive at the theatre.

Need ASL-interpretation, a sighted guide, or another form of assistance? Please feel free to let us know of any access needs on the sign-up form/ticketing page, or e-mail tickets@buddiesinbadtimes.com, and we will do our best to accommodate.

For more information on our theatre’s accessibility features, click here.

Launched to mark the festival’s 35^th anniversary, The Rhubarb Archive is a (hopefully) comprehensive list of all the projects, performances, experiments, parties, and special events to ever grace the stage at Canada’s longest-running new works festival

VISIT THE ARCHIVE

Decay and Regeneration: Re-framing the Rhubarb Festival  – Intermission Magazine

Four Good Thing that have happened for Theatre in Toronto – The Toronto Star

Designing Decay: Calculus of an Infinite Rot at the Rhubarb Festival, Toronto – Canadian Architect

“TORONTO’S GO-TO EVENT FOR THOUGHT-PROVOKING, POLITICAL, ADVENTUROUS ENTERTAINMENT”
-Toronto Life

“ONE OF THE BEST EVENTS ON THE TORONTO THEATRE CALENDAR”
-Toronto Star

“A TORONTO THEATRE INSTITUTION”
-Xtra

“THE WILDEST THEATRE FEST IN TOWN”
-Toronto Life

“RHUBARB IS IMPOSSIBLE TO PREDICT, BUT EVEN MORE IMPOSSIBLE TO RESIST”
-My Gay Toronto