Between Intimacy and Architecture: subtle and relational performance in public place

Performance Art workshop with Victoria Stanton

January 10-12, 2014, 10am-5:30pm
Registration Deadline: January 6, 2013

This workshop will be bilingual (English and French)

To Register
Application Deadline: January 6, 2013
Maximum number of participants: 10
Workshop Fee: $250
A $50 non-refundable deposit will be required in order to reserve your spot. Payment can be made by cheque (made out to Centre des arts actuels Skol), or through PayPal.

Workshop Description
How do we listen to each other? How do we interact? How do we respond to the landscape around us? How do we engage with time and space? Cultivating attentive awareness, empathetic presence and peripheral vision, this workshop will explore the multiple and very personalized ways in which we experience and foster intimacy and connection – in ourselves, towards others, and in relation to place. We will explore how time and space are intimately connected and linked to how we develop a relationship to the space and people around us; how repetition of an action (over time) within a particular space necessarily creates familiarity with that space, within the various contexts in which we find ourselves to be. We will also explore how the ways in which a “non-productive” use of time, as carried out in public (place) activates a space. Finally, we will attempt to create contexts to explore ways of experiencing various kinds of “in-betweens,” (the spaces between thought and action, between actions, between each other, between ourselves and the spaces around us.)

Key ideas:

• Activating space • Holding space • Connecting to space • Connecting to others

The importance in relational/public practices to be able to also activate:

• Empathetic / compassionate presence (1. towards yourself, 2. towards others)
• Non-judgment
• Attentive awareness/ full observation
• Groundedness (what is your container)
• Faith, Trust

Performance Philosophy
Whether working in participatory, durational, task-based or audio-visual performance, the constant thread in my work is an investigation into the ability (and the desire) to hold a space, to appropriate and disrupt the quotidian, to create spontaneous intimacy, to tread vulnerability. Investing a performative presence and consciousness within multiple spaces/times, I continuously underscore the complex aspects of “transaction” and the possibility for transformation.

Much recent work explores the elusive “in-between” – that invisible, liminal space between myself and the audience (whether a group or just one person) or between myself and my object/action/location – whether appearing “on stage” (in a black box, white cube, bar or loft) or “out in the world” (in public sites and “non-art” contexts). The “in-between” is my inquiry into transitional space: as manifested on stage (has the performance ended?), as presented through relational exchange (is this a performance? Is this Art?), and as experienced out in the world through geopoetic meandering, and the conscious inhabiting of non-places found in the built environment.  These subtle forms of testing the limits of vulnerability make up an overall practice (and multiple research processes) as an artist working in – and with – space and time.