Welcome to
Performatorium 2014

This year’s festival brings together a wide range of performances that address spirituality • persona • transformation • transcendence • ritual • ecstasy – and in doing so creates an immersive experience for performers and audience alike. From quiet and contemplative, to loud and spectacular, to memorial and abjectly beautiful, this year’s performances are mysterious and curious, requiring audiences to take the time to absorb, feel and engage.

In an attempt to create collective intimacy for both audience and performers, some of the performances occur simultaneously within a shared space – which in turn becomes a sanctum, retreat, oasis. In this context, some of the performances can be seen as installations or stations or perhaps even shrines of some kind, with audiences having the freedom to move into and out of these active and passive spaces over the course of several hours. These ‘stations’ act like gravity – a pull and release of the mind and spirit to inquire, witness and finally experience.

As many of the performances presented at Performatorium 2014 run from four to eight hours, performers and audience are contained within a zone that over time becomes transformative and transcendent with ritualized and repetitive action providing a way into personal, political, cultural and spiritual realms. Hypnotic and mesmerizing images collide with socially aware snaps of reality to create performance that is both sublimely intoxicating and subversively sobering.

The remaining works investigate spirituality, persona and transformation through projected image, music, song and language. With audience in relation to performer more distinct and present throughout the entirety of these performances, the shared experience is more pronounced and dynamic and may involve audience participation and/or may activate audience into other (altered) states of consciousness and being.

Ultimately, the intent of Performatorium 2014 is to create places and spaces where body, mind and soul are offered stimuli for the purpose of reflection, refraction, confrontation, friction, disruption, challenge, solace, reassurance, enlightenment, liberation, connection, contemplation, mindfulness and release - and an extended list of experiences that can not be expressed through words.

Of course, as much as Performatorium 2014 is about looking at and being part of collective and shared space and consciousness, it also reflects the divergent ways in which we all ponder and react to ideas about self-awareness, self-actualization and awareness of others that come into and out of our spheres of experience. Not unlike the work being presented, the very structure of Performatorium 2014 invites discovery, exploration and different ways of looking at fluidity of identity and the complimentary and contradictory aspects of human and non-human nature.

Gary Varro
Artistic Director
December 2013