Program
Thursday, January 10 // Friday, January 11 // Saturday, January 12
Friday, January 11
Human Rights Radio
CJTR RADIO – 91.3 FM // 12 NOON TO 1 PMview details »
What better way to compliment this years theme on oral communication than with a radio broadcast. Several artists from this year’s festival will participate as guests on CJTR’s Human Rights Radio program, lending their literal and figurative voices to issues from queer art to queer sex to queer politics. Jim Hutchings and Amber Christensen host.
Human Rights Radio is an hour long radio show on Regina's Community Radio Station CJTR. It is hosted by Amnesty International volunteers and covers a wide range of human rights topics from treatment of indigenous peoples nationally and internationally to prisoners of conscience in many lands. It is heard weekly at noon on Fridays at 91.3FM.
Amber Christensen is a public librarian and occasional film and video maker. She is currently the host of the Morning Swim music program, heard every Tuesday morning on CJTR: Regina's Community Radio.
Having spent nearly forty years working at small town radio stations, Jim Hutchings is a relative newcomer to Regina. He has been involved with Amnesty International and Human Rights Radio for over three years.
Art For Lunch
UNIVERSITY OF REGINA // 3737 WASCANA PARKWAY - RIDDELL CENTRE ROOM 050 // 12 NOON TO 1 PMview details »
Bring your own lunch and join University of Regina students and faculty for a presentation by artist BENNY NEMEROFSKY RAMSAY (Berlin/Montreal) who appears as part of this years Performatorium2013.
Art For Lunch takes place at 12:05 pm and ends at 12:50 pm in Riddell Centre Room 050. For more information call the Department of Visual Arts at: (306) 585-5572 or email risa.horowitz@uregina.ca or leesa.streifler@uregina.ca
The Bells of Knox Metropolitan Church // Wayne Tunison // Regina
KNOX METROPOLITAN CHURCH // 2340 VICTORIA AVE. @ LORNE ST. // ENTRANCE: LORNE ST. DOORS
7:30 PM TO 8PM // ONE PERFORMANCE ONLY BUY NOW!view details »
Wayne Tunison is the Master Bell ringer for the Regina Bell Ringers. He is a mechanical engineer that is more than just bent towards the arts. In a five-decade career, he has composed music, restored bells, integrated theatre and performance art with bells and toured internationally. When it is warm enough, the bells often beckon the locals to the fine performances at Knox Metropolitan Church.
Speculum Orum: Shackled to the Dead - Requiem for Voice and Piano // M. Lamar // New York
KNOX METROPOLITAN CHURCH // 2340 VICTORIA AVE. @ LORNE ST. // ENTRANCE: LORNE ST. DOORS
8PM // ONE PERFORMANCE ONLY BUY NOW!view details »
The Atlantic Ocean holds the remains of countless black bodies, people lost en-route from home to the new world. During the transatlantic slave trade, millions of Africans were carried in bondage to America. A horrifying percentage did not survive the journey. This piece is about them.
Many of the captured people preferred death to slavery. They jumped overboard or tried to starve themselves. In those circumstances the slaver would use a device called a speculum orum to keep the captives’ mouths open while they were forced to eat. In the fetid holds of slave ships, live bodies were shackled to the dead, sometimes for days and months at a time. The artist M. Lamar believes that we are all also shackled to the dead. The water that rises from the ocean, falls as rain into our reservoirs, and flows down the pipes to our faucets, was once and is still their grave. This water, water that is now inside all of us, conceals and reveals the truth about who we are. The abducted Africans had their mouths forced open. M. Lamar states, "I will willingly open my mouth to lift my voice and let the spirits dance. Yes, we are shackled to the dead! They speak to us and through us. Let their voices rise!"
M. Lamar is a countertenor, pianist and composer whose work draws heavily from African American Spirituals, Opera, late 20th century avant-garde music, as well as popular forms like blues and rock. Lamar's work has been presented internationally most recently at The International Theater Festival Donzdorf, Germany, Cathedral of St. John the Divine New York, and The African American Arts and Culture Complex San Francisco. Lamar has also presented work at PS122, Dixon Place, Joe's Pub, Abrons Art Center, The Chocolate Factory, Galapagos Art Space, Center for Performance Research, and Washington Center for Performing Arts among others. In 2008 Lamar's work was presented along side world renowned performance artist Ron Athey in the Biennale d’art performatif de Rouyn-Noranda in Quebec, Canada. Also, 2008 found Lamar as featured performer in Tony-nominated performance artist Justin Bonds award-winning show Lustre at P.S.122 and Abrons Arts Center. M. Lamar is also a recording artist, having released a full length album: Souls On Lockdown, a 7- inch single: The Conquest and an EP: Negro Gothic.
Can • Did // Layard Thompson // Tennessee
KNOX METROPOLITAN CHURCH // 2340 VICTORIA AVE. @ LORNE ST. // ENTRANCE: LORNE ST. DOORS
9PM // ONE PERFORMANCE ONLY BUY NOW!view details »
Of the moment: an experiment in movement...Can • Did is a vocal clown's ridiculousness and a trickster's ridicule. Crafted with mundane objects, eccentric voices, quirky movements and alien language this solo performance aims to surprise audience and performer alike.
"Mr. Thompson’s physicality marries arch deconstructions with a particular ferociousness; you can pet him, but he isn’t housebroken..." (The New York Times)
Layard Thompson’s work - including four adaptations of solos by quixotic choreographer Deborah Hay - typically employs movement, vocals and elaborate costume/sets. Currently, he is developing two collaborations with choreographers Hana van der Kolk and Scott Heron. In November, his evening-length work with Heron, A-1 TWINK SPREE MELEE performed at New Orleans Fringe Festival to sold out audiences.
In the past, he has had the pleasure of being a founding member of gender-fuck clowns The Pixie Harlots and working with such performing artists as Justin Vivian Bond, Taylor Mac, and Juliette Mapp, among others. In the Spring of 2010, he re-performed four works by seminal performance artist Marina Abramovic in her historic retrospective The Artist is Present at New York’s Museum of Modern. He has appeared in two films, Jonathan Caouette's Tarnation and John Cameron Mitchell's Shortbus. Layard lives in rural Tennessee amongst a community of queer homesteaders on an artist-owned and operated community center and retreat space known as Sassafras. www.layardthompson.com
NEUTRAL GROUND GALLERY 1856 Scarth Street, 2nd floor
ALL EVENTS AT NEUTRAL GROUND ARE FREE
Day breaks instead of night falling // Benny Nemerofsky Ramsay – Berlin/Montreal
ART EXHIBITION/INSTALLATION – VARIOUS COMPONENTS
EXHIBITION CONTINUES DURING REGULAR GALLERY HOURS UNTIL JANUARY 18.view details »
Day breaks instead of night falling
It was morning, and yet it was dusk. A call was heard from a golden horn. A call echoed from deep within the forest. A call was silently inferred: a lost memory from decades past. The call was made of many voices, and the voices were strange.
Evocative voices from history find their way into a suite of sound of video pieces by Benny Nemerofsky Ramsay, punctuated by performance, print and textile.
PERFORMANCE @ 8pm – ONE PERFORMANCE ONLY
Benny Nemerofsky Ramsay (1973) is an artist and diarist. His creative gestures in video, sound, print and textiles contemplate the history of song, the rendering of love and emotion into language, and the resurrection and manipulation of voices – sung, spoken or screamed. His work has been exhibited throughout Canada, Europe and Asia and is represented in the collection of the National Gallery of Canada. www.nemerofsky.ca
Layard Thompson’s work - including four adaptations of solos by quixotic choreographer Deborah Hay - typically employs movement, vocals and elaborate costume/sets. Currently, he is developing two collaborations with choreographers Hana van der Kolk and Scott Heron. In November, his evening-length work with Heron, A-1 TWINK SPREE MELEE performed at New Orleans Fringe Festival to sold out audiences.
In the past, he has had the pleasure of being a founding member of gender-fuck clowns The Pixie Harlots and working with such performing artists as Justin Vivian Bond, Taylor Mac, and Juliette Mapp, among others. In the Spring of 2010, he re-performed four works by seminal performance artist Marina Abramovic in her historic retrospective The Artist is Present at New York’s Museum of Modern. He has appeared in two films, Jonathan Caouette's Tarnation and John Cameron Mitchell's Shortbus. Layard lives in rural Tennessee amongst a community of queer homesteaders on an artist-owned and operated community center and retreat space known as Sassafras. www.layardthompson.com
DBGH : Down in a Blaze of GloryHole // Mikiki // TORONTO
NEUTRAL GROUND GALLERY // ONE-TO-ONE PERFORMANCES – 10PM-12AM
ADDITIONAL PERFORMANCES – 7PM-11PM THURSDAY
TOTAL PERFORMANCES LIMITEDview details »
With this project, Mikiki inhabits the queer culturally geographic space of the glory hole. A space that is known for tearing an opening into the thin veneer of heterosexist spatial awareness. Looking to the catalogue essay for No Place: Queer Geographies On Screen, the fashioning and re-imagining of a glory hole cubicle within a queer performance art festival venue operates to affirm the venue as a site of “shared spatial and sexual orientation” by insisting on offering a zone for intimate and secretive exchanges within a larger social space. Mikiki brings stories, treats, suggestions, and a collaborative spirit to their side of the hole. What do you bring?
THIS IS A ONE-TO-ONE PERFORMANCE ON A FIRST COME FIRST SERVED BASIS – TIME LIMIT: 15 MINUTES – TOTAL PERFORMANCES LIMITED TO APPROX. 16
Mikiki is a performance artist, sexual health educator and community agent provocateur. An itinerant Newfoundlander, his practice constantly returns to the social and political landscape born from a St. John’s cultural context. His creative work is deeply rooted in the history of performance art, and his performances actively sample and remix references as disparate as radical drag icon Leigh Bowery, pop singer Whitney Houston, and Serbian artist Marina Abramovic. Mikiki’s identity as an artist is informed and intrinsically linked to his work as a sexual health educator and harm reduction worker. Creative themes often address safe-sex negotiations, identity construction, attitudes about drug use, disclosure of sexual identity and health status, community building through skills sharing, testimonial and story-telling. Mikiki’s artistic gestures engage a wide range of political concerns, from the state-sanctioned murder of homosexuals in Iran to the socio-political significance of shoulder pads.
The Room Downstairs // Samantha Sweeting // London, UK
NEUTRAL GROUND GALLERY // ONE-TO-ONE PERFORMANCES – 10PM-12AM
ADDITIONAL PERFORMANCES – 7PM-11PM THURSDAY
TOTAL PERFORMANCES LIMITEDview details »
Telephone, arm chair, small room.
The telephone is ringing.
Hello? you say, lifting the receiver.
Hello, her voice replies. Can you tell me about the home of your childhood?
Central to The Room Downstairs is a long distance telephone conversation across time zones, where distant memories of infancy are disclosed to an absent stranger. Inside a small room, provisionally furnished with signifiers of the domestic, you sit in a lone armchair to await a scheduled phone call. The telephone rings and a female voice requests a description of your childhood home. From the mother’s womb to the doll’s house to the primary nest that acts as a blueprint for all subsequent shelters, The Room Downstairs is an exploration of the miniature and gigantic dwelling places of our unconscious.
THIS IS A ONE-TO-ONE PERFORMANCE ON A FIRST COME FIRST SERVED BASIS – TIME LIMIT: 20 MINUTES – TOTAL PERFORMANCES LIMITED TO APPROX. 12
Samantha Sweeting is an interdisciplinary artist based in London. Drawing upon memory, myth, psychoanalytic theory, fairytales and the domestic, her practice uses embodied storytelling to examine human/animal nature and nurture, boundaries and desire. Samantha’s work has recently been exhibited in Tate Liverpool’s Alice in Wonderland, touring to MART in Italy and the Hamburger Kunsthalle in Germany. Recent solo shows have been at Kapelica Gallery in Ljubljana and Blanc Gallery in Belgium. Her artwork is currently included in the Moby-Dick Big Read project.
Bedtime Story for the Edge of the World // Shawna Dempsey and Lorri Millan / Winnipeg
NEUTRAL GROUND GALLERY // READING AT 11PM
ADDITIONAL READING – 9PM AND 10PM THURSDAYview details »
Cozy up as Shawna Dempsey and Lorri Millan read you a Bedtime Story for the Edge of the World. These rollicking yarns, set in the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries, are set amidst shifting frontiers of power and possibility, and are peopled by women who question puritanical values of good and evil, right and wrong, and the sense of promise and opportunity that the so-called New World has traditionally implied. Pirate queens, inventrixes and sideshow performers stumble through tall tales usually reserved for men with guns and white hats; plucky spinsters, religious zealots, deities and office workers challenge well-worn fables that continue to shape North America's notion of itself and its dreams for the future. Dempsey and Millan's Bedtime Stories are decidedly for adults – sometimes sexy, sometimes disquieting. Either way, they won't put you to sleep.
In 1989, Shawna Dempsey and Lorri Millan began collaborating on multi-disciplinary projects like We’re Talking Vulva – a rock and roll music video sung by female genitalia; the spoken word video What Does a Lesbian Look Like – which played on rotation on MuchMusic; and A Day in the Life of a Bull-Dyke – a mock magazine and film featuring wry exposés of lesbian life. More recent works include the Winnipeg Tarot Company, which collected Winnipeggers’ stories in exchange for a Prairie-flavoured fortune telling, Consideration Liberation Army, a guerilla movement of kindness extremists, and Lesbian National Parks and Services, a piece in which Lorri and Shawna patrol the streets in full ranger gear, keeping people safe, calming the jittery heteros and always looking for new recruits. All of their work challenges normative ideas of love, sexuality and humanity, and has been seen across Canada, the United States – including New York’s Museum of Modern Art – Sri Lanka, Turkey, Australia, Europe, Japan and more.
PERFORMATORIUM LABOUNGE - NEUTRAL GROUND GALLERY
THURSDAY JANUARY 10 // 7 PM TO LATE
FRIDAY JANUARY 11 // 10 PM TO LATEview details »
A space for exploration, experimentation, and discovery, Labounge is the festival’s social space. Join us for a drink, a look, and perhaps your own moment at Labounge.
DJs Eugean and po-tree (Jeannie Straub and Sean Flotre) spin chill and downtempo beats.