33
ERIN BRUBACHER
DECEMBER 18, 2013
"I'm wondering what you can tell me, about your birthdays, counting back from how old you are now, as far as you can remember..."
Last December Erin turned 33. Since then she's asked 33 people to talk about their birthdays. She's been making a home movie, to be screened at her birthday party, a year later, this December 18th at 9pm. You're invited.
Admission: Free. Cake: Welcome.
Erin Brubacher makes invitations, situations and images that interrupt and enter the everyday. Her work often explores unoccupied spaces between strangers.
MAGNIFICENT OBSESSIONS
BENJAMIN EDELBERG
DECEMBER 12 - 15, 2013
Remixing found images, shapes and mediums, Benjamin Edelberg blurs the lines between collage, photography and film. In Magnificent Obsessions, Edelberg explores the themes and processes of mimicry and stealing. Inspired by Douglas Sirk’s 1954 masterpiece of false identity, blindness and desire, the works presented beg the viewer to read them in specific environment, context and history. Yet, Edelberg’s figures, their identities, genders and sexualities remain ambiguous while shapes refuse to be placed within any conventional context. In this way viewing Edelberg’s work becomes a fun game. Magnificent Obsessions will also feature a video installation, which is an assemblage of found and original footage with stop-motion animation where Edelberg further explores his printmaking making techniques and themes.
Benjamin Edelberg is a Toronto-based artist who has exhibited his work in the USA and Canada, most recently as ALL CAPS! Festival Artist in Residence.
EXPIATING SYSTEMATIC GUILT
CURATED BY JAMIE ROSS
DECEMBER 1ST 2013, 7PM
Expiating Stigmatic Guilt presents eight contemporary Radical Faeries and Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence screen works from the USA and Canada.
Since the modern movements for gay and lesbian visibility and liberation emerged in North America, there have been strong networks of counter-cultural expression. Families, lineages and queer traditions have thrived on the margins of the mainstream queer cultural consciousness, out of the spotlight.
Work created at Radical Faerie sanctuaries, queer pagan rural land projects scattered across the continent, will screen with work on the great traditional gay folk art of experimental drag. The program is crowned by Joe Balass' recent documentary Joy: Portrait of a Nun, honouring the life of one of the founders of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence.
Followed by a Q&A with directors in attendance.
$5
THE GIRL IN THE PICTURE TRIES TO HANG UP THE PHONE
WRITTEN AND PERFORMED BY HUME BAUGH
DIRECTED BY MARK CASSIDY
November 27, 28, 30 (no show on Nov 29)
December 3, 4, 5, 6, and 7 @ 8 p.m.
December 1 and 8 @ 2:30 p.m.
“Long before she died, my mother disappeared.
Inside herself. Into a fog of alcohol …”
What is it like to grow up as the son of a dynamic, successful, charismatic alcoholic? And after her death, to try to find her, to see her whole - perhaps for the first time - through the tangled labyrinths of story and memory? Part remembrance, part exorcism, part investigation, part celebration, this one-person show chronicles a man’s struggle to understand his mother’s life and death. Intimate, honest, and finally redemptive, it is a testament to the power of love between a mother and son. THE GIRL IN THE PICTURE TRIES TO HANG UP THE PHONE asks us to honestly examine what we think love is, and to imagine loving better.
Tickets are $20 each but Sunday December 1 is PWYC.
Tickets are available online via EventBrite at thegirlinthepicture.eventbrite.ca or by cash sale at the door.
“Baugh's performance was a riveting one” - Greg Burliuk, The Kingston Whig Standard
MATURE YOUNG ADULTS
WESLEY J COLFORD
NOVEMBER 19 - 24, 2013
Directed by Alexander Offord and Featuring Renée Haché and Wesley J. Colford
"Everyone has been a teenager in love. Or will be." This tragi-comic examination of first love in small towns begins when Jon and Caitlin, two "mature young adults" from Cape Breton, are reunited in the park where their relationship bloomed and wilted. Is it possible to escape the container your community places you in? How do you create a unique identity in a world where labels and gossip move through cyberspace like lightning? When does love start to end?
Produced by Aim for the Tangent Theatre
"...vibrant and engaging... see it, think about it."
DECADES: THE ROWAN TREE
MATTHEW LEMCHE & CHRISTOPHER REDMAN
NOVEMBER 16, 2013
In 2002, two friends, Chris Redman and Matt Lemche filmed interviews and scenes with what would be their older selves, ten years into the future. To make sure they both showed up to finish the film, they got tattoos of a time and place to meet: The Rowan Tree at Laufas Church, Iceland, May 3rd, 2012, 1ish.
PUSSY BASKET PRESENTS:
LITERHAIRY SALON
NOVEMBER 16, 2013
PUSSY BASKET is back at Videofag and we're taking the literary salon/beauty salon pun a little too far. This edition brings you MATTHEW J. TRAFFORD, CATHERINE HERNANDEZ, CATHY PETCH, UNCOMMONLY ANDRE, AMY J. LESTER, SEBASTIAN FLYTE, BROCK HESSEL, and mistress of ceremonies NANCY BOCOCK.
PWYC at the door
$5 hair cuts
JIBZ CAMERON
PERSONA: PERFORMING YOURSELF
NOVEMBER 15, 2013
This three-hour workshop will bring you a condensed version of the course Jibz Cameron teaches in the MFA Performance Studies Department at NYU called Persona: Performing Yourself.
Jibz Cameron is a performance/video artist and actor who lives and works in New York City. Her work as alter ego Dynasty Handbag has been presented at such institutions as The New Museum, The Kitchen, DTW, MOMA PS1, Joe’s Pub, PS122, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, MOCAtv, OUTFEST, SXSW Film Festival, Performa ’07, ’09, ’11, Mo-Wave: Seattle’s Queer Music & Arts Festival, and , many international dives both great and small.
Presented in partnership with Pleasure Dome
Short Sentences (+ other discursive formations)
Curated by Clint Enns
November 13th 2013, 8:00PM
Short Sentences (+ other discursive formations) consists of three works that use performance to explore ideas regarding communication and language. This night is guaranteed to generate one of the most interesting post-screening discussions.
Program:
Seven Segments - Andrew James Paterson (2012, 29 min., super 8 -> DV)
Seven Segments is a film/video hybrid adapted from a series of per formative, self-recited monologues previously titled Mono Logical.
Kokoro is for Heart - Philip Hoffman (1999, 7 min., 16mm)
Kokoro is for Heart features poet Gerry Shikatani and explores the relationships surrounding language, image and sound, set to the backdrop of a gravel pit.
Short Sentences 1993-2005 - Francesco Gagliardi (2006, 33 min., super 8 -> DV)
A film based on Gertrude Stein's 1932 play Short Sentences.
WILDLIFE: QUEER ZOOLOGY
Curated by Humboldt Magnussen
November 8th - 10th 2013
Homo sapiens are not the only queers on the planet, it is a well know fact that animals are also here and queer and we need to get used to it. This exhibition brings together seven artists that were asked to explore the notion of the queer animal, and how queers have used animals as a symbol to discuss their identity and community. The artists have approached the subject matter from a variety of media including drawing, painting, performance, sculpture and silkscreen prints.
The show opens on Friday November 8th from 7:00pm to 10:00 at Videofag in Kensington Market (187 Augusta Ave) with music by DJ Mary Mack and performance art by Humboldt Magnussen.
Artists Include:
Alexis Boyle, Gustavo Cerquera Benjumea, Humboldt Magnussen, Michael Rennick, Danielle Nicole Smith, Corinne Teed & Mary Tremonte.
I'M SICK OF ME TOO
2 NIGHTS WITH RM VAUGHAN
November 5 & 6, 8pm
The Toronto debut of two new projects by Toronto's own RM Vaughan. After a year away in a foreign land, Vaughan has missed you all terribly and promises to hug each of you repeatedly until you are breathless and/or just really want him to stop.
I'm Sick of Me Too unfolds in two parts.
On November 5, a discussion with local journalists about art and culture writing, a discussion prompted by the arrival of Vaughan's latest book Compared To Hitler: Selected Essays. Lively, and later drunken, conversation! And also a book to buy or shoplift.
On November 6, it's time for the happy, much-awaited Toronto debut of That's What Friends Are For. Assembled by CFMDC (Canadian Filmmakers' Distribution Centre), That's What Friends Are For is a survey of Vaughan's video collaborations with local artists Jared Mitchell and Laura Cowell, as well as international artists Michael Achtman (UK), Finn Jackson Ballard (Germany), and Rollin Leonard (USA). That's What Friends Are For is accompanied by a new text on Vaughan's video work by Lambda-Award winning Queer film historian Matthew Hays.
PWYC
THE W.O.W. PROJECT PRESENTS
A Reading of SUSAN G. COLE's "A Fertile Imagination"
Monday November 4th 2013, 8:00PM
Directed by Clare Preuss
Featuring: Anna Chatterton, Evalyn Parry, Neema Bickerseth
"What Mel Thinks About Lesbians - A Theatrical Essay"
An Installation/Performance
Directed by Mel Hague Featuring: Lindsey Clark & Natasha GreenblattBringing together Queer Women Theatre artists and their friends and supporters to watch, laugh, share, chat, connect.
RARE FRUITS
Sunday November 3rd 2013, 1:00PM
We buy the fruit, you eat it! Videofag is inviting you to try a bunch of delicious fruit you aren't going to find at any old Sobeys.Steven Parkes, a self-proclaimed fruit-addict and connoisseur, wants to introduce you to some of the local fruits he fell in love with while traveling the Southern hemisphere. A hobbyist grower of tropical fruit and an education in forest conservation, Steven will show you how to eat them and what they taste like.
ALL THE MISTAKES I'VE MADE
DANIEL COCKBURN
NOV 1, 2013, 7:30 PM
$8 / $5 Members & Students
@ John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design, University of Toronto, 230 College Street
A co-presentation with Pleasure Dome, Videofag & University of Toronto’s Visual Studies Department
We are pleased to welcome Daniel Cockburn back to Toronto where he will be performing his most recent anti-artist talk All The Mistakes I’ve Made. After over nearly a decade of making videos, Daniel Cockburn has made some mistakes. Aesthetic ones, technical ones, ideological ones. If you have seen his acclaimed work then you may have noticed some of them. If you haven’t, All The Mistakes I’ve Made is your opportunity to be personally guided through Cockburn’s missteps by the artist himself. In his disarmingly sincere and precise manner, Cockburn’s artist talk-cum-methodological manifesto explores his own errors of judgment and how they are perhaps emblematic of larger negative trends in contemporary art and cinema-making. Illustrated with excerpts from his personal œuvre of artistic regret, this lecture-style performance is both playful and profound, personal and wide-reaching in its meditation on creative misguidance. But of course, it could very well be a bad idea itself.
SIX SERMONS ABOUT SATAN //
KENNETH ANGER'S LUCIFER RISING
OCT 31, 10PM
This event, part sewing circle, part encounter group, part story telling event, asks the question about what happens sociologist, an Oxford educated Anglican priest, a curator/writer, a metal musician and critical and sculptor meet on this most occult night to talk around legendary filmmaker Kenneth Anger's Lucifer Rising.
These short sermons use Anger's film to springboard a discussion of everything the film talks about but critics don't. This is a conversation about the glamour of Satan, how He is represented, what the implications of the figure is, in these post-secular age having the film work as a kind of fun house mirror.
FROM CURATOR ANTHONY EASTON WITH PARTICIPANTS:
Cimminnee Holt, Jon Davies, Alison Falby, David Kristiansen, Rachel E McRae.
A new play by Zack Russell, starring Kayla Lorette & Matt O’Connor, dramaturgy / co-direction by Vivien Endicott-Douglas, with music by Robin Hatch, and lights by Marianna Khoury.
FIXED centres on Gayle, the inventor of a hook-up app for men. It's been fifty years since his last success but he's finally come up with something new: men broadcast right into your home. To demo the app, he's hired a dozen hot young guys - but a glitch has us stuck on boy #1. From 1950s London to 2050s Los Angeles, FIXED skips through time in a mad search for pleasure.
Tickets are $10. Seating is limited, so we recommend reserving in advance.
After each show, audiences are invited stay and chat – your feedback during Week 1 of performances will influence the show as it morphs into Week 2.
Get your fix.
ALL OUR HAPPY DAYS ARE STUPID
OCT 24 - NOV 3, 8PM
Suburban Beast and Videofag proudly present the world premiere of All Our Happy Days Are Stupid by internationally celebrated Canadian writer Sheila Heti.
A play by Sheila Heti with songs by Dan Bejar
Directed by Jordan Tannahill
October 24 - November 3 (no performance October 28), 8pm
Featuring: Erin Brubacher, Alexander Carson, Henri Faberge, Nick Hune-Brown, Kayla Lorette, Becky Johnson, Jon McCurley, Michael McManus, Meghan Swaby, Naomi Skwarna, Anne Wessels, Carl Wilson, Lorna Wright.
Suburban Beast is producing the long-anticpated world premiere of novelist Sheila Heti's debut play All Our Happy Days Are Stupid. The show will run from October 24 - November 3 at Videofag, director Jordan Tannahill's intimate Kensington Market storefront theatre. Featuring songs by acclaimed musician Dan Bejar (Destroyer), Set Designs by Rae Powell, and a cast of Sheila and Jordan's friends, this uproariously unwieldy new play is an irreverent and gut-punching critique of the pursuit of happiness.
The play's surreal narrative follows The Oddis and the Sings, two families on vacation in Paris, France. But far from the blissful respite they seek, their holidays become their undoing. Heti's struggle to write this infamously 'unproduceable' play over the past ten years is one of the central plot-lines in her internationally heralded novel How Should a Person Be?, which David Haglund of the New York Times called "Funny...odd, original, and nearly unclassifiable...unlike any novel I can think of."
After years of the script being passed over by established theatres, largely on account of it's unusual form and massive cast, Sheila and Jordan decided to gather together a group of their friends for a reading of it in a friend's backyard. As Sheila said in a November 2012 Globe and Mail article, at the backyard reading 'the things that just never worked, somehow they worked." It is in this spirit of gathering friends together to do the impossible that the piece will have it's birth at Videofag this fall.
A GRINDR-POWERED THRILLER BY ZACK RUSSELL
September 26 - October 12, 8PM
STARE.PRINT.BLUE. - VOYEURING THE APPARATUS
THE DIGITAL DRAMATURGY LAB
A slow-mo/real time/timelapsing performance-installation played by hybrid bodies, interweaving actions with mechanical and digital technology, enduring the relativity of time.
“A form of industrial action in which employees work at a deliberately slow pace.”
A Dictionary of Business and Management. 2009
Created, coded, designed, and struggled through by: Antje Budde, Karyn McCallum, Assaf Gadot, Myrto Koumarianos, Lex Moakler, Michael Reinhardt, Aidan Dahlin Nolan
Assisted by: Nazli AkhtariPerformed by: Myrto Koumarianos
October 5, 2013 - Nuit Blanche
ERIC MOSCHOPEDIS & MIA RUSHTON
with an installation by Heather Kai Smith and Shawn Dicey
Hunter, Gatherer, Purveyor—a project in art and social engagement—brings together elements of craft, performance, and civic participation to create popsicles made from local vegetation and civic water sources. Composed of three primary public actions, Hunter, Gatherer, Purveyor includes: a) the finding and collecting of fruits, grasses, flowers, bark, roots and other edible plant life that grows in specific neighbourhoods in a city; b) the processing of these ingredients into community-specific popsicles and; c) purveying these popsicles at Videofag on the final weekend of the intervention (September 21 and 22, 11am - 4pm).
Opening, Friday September 20 7pm - 10pm
September 21 and 22, 11am - 4pm
animalparts presents
the tenderpits trilogy: parts 1 + 2
TENDERPITS
REVENGE of the POPINJAY
★★★★ “sharply sensitive and risky” -The Times [London]
“hilarious and harrowing avant-garde autobiography” -Flavorpill, NYC
Tenderpits // A diaper-clad wizard journeys from the wilderness of Canada to NYC, where he buys a gun, crashes a Broadway production of Three Sisters, befriends an illegal Mexican Immigrant, and goes on a psycho-sexual rampage.
Revenge of the Popinjay // Someone is killing the heterosexuals! As dozens of brutal slayings engulf the city in panic, a young man rises to fame in underground rap clubs.
WARNING: Adult content, extreme violence, and graphic heterophobia.
tickets: $18, with dickpic $15
FADO presents ERIC LETOURNEAU
Quatre re-traités* tiré de '"ils" "viennent" : Khédive et Mamelouk, en un seul, sur son patron (work-in progress) is a psychogeo(hörspiel) performance involving radio transmission, narration and action, with a simultaneous translation from French to English and/or Italian. Psychogeo(hörspiel) is a neologism created by combining 'psychogeography' meaning an approach to geography that emphasizes playfulness and drifting around urban environments; and the German word 'hörspiel' meaning radio-play or radio-drama.
This performance includes the participation of Toronto performer Claude Wittmann, and on recorded media by Alice Lafontaine, Alexandre St-Onge, Marie Brassard and Jac Berrocal.
The audience is encouraged to bring portable radios or walkman radios so they can leave the gallery and move around the neighbourhood during the action, picking up snippets of the narrative remotely.
August 15, 2013
*** JENNIFER CHAN AT VIDEOFAG ***
We think Jennifer Chan is one of the most exciting artists exploring the aesthetics and politics of the Internet. Join us for a one-night survey of Jennifer's facking incredible video work - a dozen acerbic and hilarious pieces exploring web culture and it's semiotics. The screening will be followed by a Q&A with Jennifer, who is coming all the way up from New York on a train to join us for the night.
August 14, 2013
KENSINGTON MARKET WALMART
Hey everyone, Wal-Mart and Videofag have teamed up to open a pop-up superstore right in the heart of Kensington Market! We're so excited to present you with a selection of low priced toiletries and canned food items at prices that will outstrip all of our neighbourhood vendors!
Featuring a performance by Humbolt Magnussen and 'Long Live the Working Class' by Hannah Enkel and Philip Sheldon.
July 27 - 28, 2013
CO-PRESENTED WITH TEAM VECTOR
A weekend of gaming and gays
This two day pop-up arcade and exhibition will feature works that address the theme “Queer Arcade” in unexpected ways: video games made for any platform, experimental GAYmes, Queering of traditional games, ROM hacks, machinima, board games, RPGs, card games, arcade ephemera, and more!
A PUNK OPERA BY HENRI FABERGÉ
in collaboration with Juliann Wilding, Alex Tindal, Kayla Lorette, Miguel Rivas, and Roger Bainbridge
Henri Fabergé and company are adapting their sensational, raunchy monthly cabaret Feint of Hart into a two-part extravaganza at Videofag. This multidisciplinary hurricane in a teapcup (film! theatre! music! comedy!) chronicles the fictional early years of Fabergé at the Boyce Navel Academy. A sprawling cast of Toronto artists enact these fever dreams, and Juliann Wilding concocts magic as artistic director and costume designer.
HISTORY BOYS: ACADEMIC DISCIPLINE
June 27, 2013
A PRIDE Edition follow-up to their wildly successful first reading (which packed the place) the History Boys (Jeremy Willard and Michael Lyons) school you on titillating queer history with readings from their irreverent Xtra! column.
PUSSY BASKET
We've paid tribute to Gertrude Stein (with Fleurus I and II) now it's time to pay tribute to Stein's wife Alice B. Toklas, aka Pussy, and their dog, Basket.
June 26, 7:30PM
Join Queer Writes and Emcee Jade Elektra for an evening of bent word with bill bissett, David Bateman, Cathy Petch, Brock Hessel and The Neurotic Slores! Readings by David Bateman and bill bissett are funded by the League of Canadian Poets and The Toronto Arts Council.
A SMALL PERFORMANCE FESTIVAL PRESENTED BY
BIRDTOWN & SWANVILLE
In which we hold a regular sized evening of little performances by such greats as Kathleen Phillips, Bridget Moser, Monique Moses, Birdtown and Swanville, Weaves (Jasmyn Burke), Nobody's Business Theatre, and Meredith R. Cheesbrough. We also screen a film by Sofia Bohdanowicz.
A father and daughter collaborate. A comment on kinship, diasporic labour, devotion, and the factory as a site of creativity.
Francisco Mecija works at a beer-brewing factory as a mechanical engineer. At work, in his spare time he has been designing and building household items from materials that he's found in the factory. He has built knives, book-ends, shoe horns, dumbbell sets, cutting boards, music stands, picture frames, and small stools. All of these items share a distinct aesthetic in their design and choice of material. We will display these items in order to provoke questions about what qualifies as an art object. We will also exhibit a collaborative piece, created with the intention of forging closeness with my father.
Co=presented with our neighbours Kapisanan Philippine Centre for Arts & Culture
CASEY MECIJA & FRANCIS MECIJA
MICHAEL ROSS ALBERT / THE UNIT
1929. A Kensington Market Speakeasy. Toronto Jewish Gangsters. A Murder.
A staged reading of Michael Ross Albert's TOUGH JEWS, presented by The Unit, featuring: Whitney Allen, Nathan Barrett, Brandon Coffey, Sochi Fried, Tanja Jacobs, Michael Rubenfeld, and Paolo Santalucia.
A PLAY BY JANE MONTGOMERY GRIFFITHS
DIRECTED BY JESSICA RUANO
SAPPHO …in 9 fragments by Jane Montgomery Griffiths makes its Canadian premiere June 2013 in Toronto, Ottawa, and Montreal. Directed by Jessica Ruano, and featuring Victoria Grove, this politically-charged and visually-compelling solo performance achieved critical and popular acclaim in London, England with a sold-out extended run.
Within a secluded cavern, Ancient Greece’s first love poet laments her erasure from history, while a chorus girl named Atthis is seduced into a modern-day Sapphic romance.
“Uncommonly exhilarating”
★★★★ EXEUNT MAGAZINE
“Victoria Grove is fantastic, she is magnetic and mysterious, dominating”
★★★★ REMOTE GOAT
"Stunningly athletic and entirely sensuous”
★★★★ THE LADY
June 15 talkback facilitaed by The WOW Project's Mel Hague
AN EXHIBITION CURATED BY KEN MOFFATT WITH HEATHER BAIN
KEITH COLE, PATRICK DECOSTE, WILL MUNRO, FASTWURMS, ANDREW HARWOOD, CHARLIE HUNTER, PETER KINGSTONE, DARRYL VOCAT, KALUP LINZY, SHAUN LEONARDO, MELISSA LEVIN, PAUL MARLOW, TARA MATEIK, JOHNSON NGO, LEX VAUGHAN, RM VAUGHAN, CHASE JOYNT, NINA ARSENAULT, ADONIS VOLANAKIS
This blockbuster exhibition will feature work exploring masculinity and it's representations, by a whos-who of the Canadian queer art world. Curated by Videofag's thinker-in-residence Ken Moffatt, in collaboration with Heather Bain.
AN EXHIBITION BY KEITH COLE
An exhibition of works on paper, including Cole's infamous 'Army of Black Lesbians' collages.
A SCREENING CURATED BY MARCIN WISNIEWSKI
An intriguing and personal exploration of the immediacy and intimacy offered by the smart phone technology. Based around the ambiguous phrase “What’s Your Sex?”, the screening will present new works by Toronto based artists Julian Calleros, Kiley May, and Mark Pariselli along with submissions from various smart phone users.
Presented by Inside Out Film Festival, Videofag, and Trinity Square Video.
Mysterious and gently poetic, The Biographer is the story of a father searching for his daughter amid the wreckage of an abandoned seaside carnival where he believes she disappeared, and a meditation on the ways we redeem ourselves — or fail to — through the stories we tell ourselves about our lives. The new play by CBC Literary Award winner Daniel Karasik, directed by Alan Dilworth.
Nominated for 2 Dora Mavor Moore Awards: 'Best New Play' and 'Best Original Sound Design'.
A PLAY BY DANIEL KARASIK
DIRECTED BY ALAN DILWORTH
FEATURING ED PASTKO, STEWART ARNOTT, MIRIAM FERNANDES
WRITTEN & PERFORMED BY STEWART LEGERE
DIRECTED BY CHRISTIAN BARRY
Presented by The Accidental Mechanics Group
El Camino or The Field of Stars is a dark, playful, queer solo performance that combines storytelling, confessional theatre, and stand-up comedy that tells the story of an unnamed man attempting to unpack the damage caused by the deep-seated homophobia he experienced in his most recent relationship. As the protagonist, Stewart Legere weaves together tales of a doomed relationship, a trip to Italy gone wrong, and a mysterious fascination with El Camino de Santiago de Compostella, an ancient walking pilgrimage through France and Spain. Working through fear, awkwardness, and shame, he charms, cajoles, pushes and pulls, provokes, and consoles his way through stories of love, loss, and the complex struggles of a young queer couple dealing with internalized homophobia. El Camino or The Field of Stars is a confessional tragicomedy shared with wild abandon.
Nick and Emily from Mi Casa Theatre (Ottawa) are partnering up with the boys from Videofag (Toronto) to make some music videos. At the end of the week we're going to play the cabaret songs and lullabies we've been working on, film some live stuff, tell some funny and embarrassing stories and have some drinks. And you're invited.
Part concert, part tell-all autobiography, part schadenfreude. Come get down with us!
MI CASA THEATRE
A slick salesman pitchin' to buy a farmgirl's land gets himself shot in the leg. Will he fall in love? Bleed to death? See the error of his ways? Or, will she blow his brains out? A kinetic dance-theatre piece about fracking and it's human implications.
CHALA HUNTER & NATHAN BARRETT
M A R K I T
curated by Jennifer Caprau & Coman Poon
M A R K I T were a series of micro performance interventions in Kensington Market, fuelled by the urgency to respond to changes taking place in KM. Recent threats to the character of KM include plans for formula stores such as Walmart and Loblaws, in conjunction with landlords hiking rent to force out decades-old family businesses. In solidarity with activists fighting to save our community, we believe that engaging conversation through live art will contribute to preserving KM’s distinctly organic ecology. Renegade, independent and reflecting the cultural roots and alternative heart that is Kensington Market. Instigated by KM-based artists Jennifer H. Capraru and Coman Poon, in collaboration with Videofag.
WHEN: Saturday, March 30, 2013, 2-8pm
WHERE: In and around Videofag, 187 Augusta, and Bellevue Square.
WHO: Barbara Lindenbergh (dance), Humbolt Magnussen (ritual), Leora Morris + Susanna Fournier (play reading), Alvis Parsley (poetry walk), Sarah Peebles + Colin Fisher (music with shō and gu zheng), Mark Reinhart (guerrilla intervention), Helene Vosters + Cassie Scott (performance art), Claude Wittmann (performance art), and Jacob Zimmer (storytelling).
$10 SITUATIONS
The Dietrich Group
THE AESTHETICS OF FAILURE
Curated by: Adrienne Crossman
March 25th - 27th, 2013
An exhibition of glitch
Featuring: Lauren Helena Pelc-McArthur, Jon Perez, Brianna Lowe, Cale Weir, Felix Larios, Peter Rahul, Stan, Krzyzanowski, Tobias Williams, Cassie Pyatt, Lindsay Cahill, Boy Pussy, Henry Warwick, Pat Nav, Dylan Berryman, Acey Rowe, Adrienne Crossman, Ethan Hanzel, Erin Rei, William Andrew Finlay Stewart, Joel Putz
3 performance installations by D.A. Hoskins
re touch respond re connect
re/de constructing iconic images from the past work and explorations from visual artist/director/choreographer D.A. Hoskins.
Land of Fuck Deconstruct
Feb 6, 7, 8 - 8PM
Featuring Danielle Baskerville, Brendan Wyatt, Andrew Bathory
I Am Marilyn
March 13 - 8PM
Featuring Brendan WyattWords - Byron Fast
Hard Candy Deconstruct
April 11, 12, 13 - 8PM
Featuring Danielle Baskerville, Brendan Wyatt
Spoken Word - Jill Battson
About the Dietrich GroupInstigated to expand the expressive potential of dance by means of collaborative exchange and open dialogue, The Dietrich Group has established a core of diverse artists since its inception in 2008. In its activities the platform draws from a broad range of artistic disciplines while maintaining a focus on the strength and power of dance in theatre. The Dietrich Group is interested in distinct realities – a defining road map that lives amongst an infinite range of ideas, opinions and existences. States and statements, acknowledgements and reiteration, embodiment, absorption and questioning are all fundamental in The Dietrich Group’s investigations in dance.
RIPE FOR EMBARRASSMENT: FOR A NEW MUSICAL MASOCHISM (A LECTURE)
& TOMB OF THE UNKNOWN COMPOSER [A BRIEF CONCERT]
featuring Matador Oven and Adam Overton
April 3rd, 2013 8:00PM
Ripe for Embarrassment: For a New Musical Masochism is a manifesto—written by Matador Oven, translated by Adam Overton—proposing a new paradigm in composer/performer relations, wherein the composer is a masochist who uses score-based Cageian indeterminacy in hopes of being humiliated by a willing performer. Tomb of the Unknown Composer, by Adam Overton (and cited in Matador Oven's Ripe for Embarrassment) is a concert featuring performances of re-named and mis-attributed scores.
WHAT I LOVE ABOUT BEING QUEER
Vivek Shraya
March 28 - April 3
Videofag is thrilled to host an overview exhibit of Vivek Shraya's 'What I LOVE about being QUEER' project. WILABQ began as a short film that was created to showcase and celebrate the positive aspects of being queer, partially as a direct response to conversations with queer youth struggling with this complicated part of their identity. To answer this question is essentially to think of queerness queerly, as for many queers, we first learn how to answer the opposite. The film focuses on 34 beautiful queers tackling this complicated question.
Shortly thereafter, as an extension to the film, a web project was created where any queer, anywhere, could submit a photo and share what they love about being queer. The What I LOVE about being QUEER exhibit features the film, outtakes and the many answers from the web project, illustrating that there are truly hundreds of reasons to love being queer.
“Another unique and powerful offering from one of the the LGBT community’s most original and gifted talents. Anything Shraya touches turns to gold.”
- SUSAN G. COLE (NOW Magazine)
GROANERS
March 14th-17th, 2013
Curated by Miles Stemp and Felix Kalmenson
With Performances by:
Bridget Moser, Dan Epstein +TBA
With Art by:
Mike Billington, Derrick Guerin, Reid Jenkins, Adrienne Kammerer, Felix Kalmenson, Michelle Kurancid, Cameron Lee, Scott Leeming, Life of a Craphead, Stephen Mcleod, Adam Medley, Bridget Moser, Beth Emily Richards, Laura Simon, Miles Stemp, Paul Tjepkema, Evan Tyler, Elliot Vredenburg, Nikki Woolsey
GAWD MESS AMERIKA
March 17 2013
American Ex-Pats, Sybil Lamb and Saurin Galloway, celebrate St. Pat's with a gallery show featuring a selection of prints and original artwork starting at just .99
There will be tunes, and there will be terror!
Chaotic sperm of the moment performances welcum
Music, Masterpieces, and Matadors - For Posers and Hosers
Don't forget your loonies, toonies, and green backs!
VIGIL(ANCE)
February 22 - Mar 3, 2013 (7pm - 10pm)
Co-presented by the 34th Rhubarb Festival
Vigil(ance) is a mobile intervention part of the 34th Rhubarb Festival that aims to illuminate spaces in our city where we feel unsafe or unwelcome by holding candlelight vigils in them. Bars, alleys, parks, bus shelters, stairwells... each night we will visit three different sites selected by the participants. Anyone is welcome to join our vigilante vigils, and it costs nothing to participate.
MEDITATIONS IN AN EMERGENCY
Peter Kingstone
Curated by Ellen Waker
February 28 - March 10, 2013
“Each time my heart is broken it makes me feel more adventurous.”
- Frank O’Hara, from “Meditations in an Emergency”
The ‘labour of love’ - a sentiment commonly associated with biblical and Shakespearian origins - is again taken up in the recent body of work by Peter Kingstone within the exhibition Meditations in an Emergency. Taking its title from the 1954 poem by New York School poet Frank O’Hara, what can be thought of as ‘tender casualty’ unites both bodies of work (recent and past) as the highs and lows of human experience present themself. While we’ve come to understand by now that Kingstone is always implicated in his subjects to some degree, his works are at the same time not about him at all. This binary is again reinforced within the exhibition with a new twist: the introduction of drawing studies by a self-professed video artist. This exhibition aims to marry older, disparate works with a more recent series that focuses on Joan of Arc’s war sergeant, Gilles de Rais; and to suggest how concepts of labour exist both in the social and private realm. Meditations in an Emergency explores the role of labour using complex narrative structures, sites of domesticity and lo-fi video strategies to establish a critical experience for the viewer. These intimate stories unfold as viewers move throughout the space, offering a more personal setting for digesting this dichotomous narrative of love and labour.
THE SHORT FILMS OF JULIAN RICHINGS
February 25, 2013
One of Canada's most iconic character actors, Julian Richings has created memorable performances in over fifty films. This screening showcases Richings' short film collaborations with some of Canada's best emerging and established filmmakers.
Films include:
The Facts in the Case of Mr. Hallow, by Rodrigo Gudino & Vincent Marcone
Animal Control, by Kire Papputs
Half Nelson, by John Fawcett
Architecture of the Moon, by Kyle Sanderson
I LOVE YOU, YOKO ONO (HAPPY 80TH BIRTHDAY)
Andil Gosine
February 17, 2013
Some friends and I are throwing Yoko a birthday party at Videofag
Love You, Yoko Ono!
xo Andil
2:00-6:00 pm "GRAPEFRUIT (Andil's Edit)"
featuring Angel Beyde, Heidi Cho, Sarah Creagen, Jaime Galindo, Rebecca Kranias, Pamila Matharu, Joshua Vettivelu and Eric Kostiuk Williams
And a special video installation by Gein Wong
6:00-8:00 pm ONOSTAGE+SCREEN
featuring performances by Golboo Amani, June Chua, Francisco-Fernando Granados, Sidra/Ali and Gein Wong!
8:00-10:00 pm ONOMIX
featuring DJ Kevin Hegge and drag performances by Athena McQueen and Miss Nookie Galore!
THE BEAST AND HER MAGICAL DIARIES
Jesi the Elder
February 21, 2013
Come journey through the wonderfully warped world of Jesi the Elder, full of chimeric landforms, melting bodies, radical womanhood, sentient objects, and disarming ruptures of time and space.Come journey through the wonderfully warped world of Jesi the Elder, full of chimeric landforms, melting bodies, radical womanhood, sentient objects, and disarming ruptures of time and space. Inspired by her nomadic lifestyle , The Beast and Her Magical Diaries is a one-night retrospective of Jesi the Elder's animated short films and music videos structured as a fever-dream travelogue. From Mexico to India the evening explores, anecdotally and aesthetically, the impact Jesi's travels have had on some of her recent work. Her animations are also diaries of her most traversed landscape: that of her own vivid imagination.
VECTOR GAME + ART CONVERGENCE
F@n F_ck#ry & Vector Closing Party
February 24, 2013
Come meet many of the artists who have participated in the festival, have a drink and enjoy weird and wonderful experimentations and creative interventions made by fans. Program includes work by: Bryan Peterson, Mat Lindenberg, Tomasz Wlaźlak, David Musgrave & Toronto artists Edward Shallow Jim Munroe, Mark Pellegrino & Sean Grounds.
Vector Game + Art Convergence is a four day Game Art Festival and symposium centered around games as the tool and inspiration for contemporary art making.
TO MYSELF AT 28
Sky Gilbert
February 15, 16 2013
Sky Gilbert is now 60 years old and he had a big party in December 2012 at Buddies In Bad Times Theatre to celebrate. He sang, to great applause “I’m Still Here” to an adoring crowd. But that wasn’t enough for him - now he has to go and write a new play about what it’s like to be sixty years old! To Myself at 28 is, according to Sky “one of the most embarrassing, humiliating, and masochistic confessional plays ever written.”
Sky Gilbert writes, directs and acts in To Myself at 28 - and he shares the stage with up and comer Spencer Charles Smith. In this forty minute prototype for a performance, inspired by Judith Halberstam’s The Queer Art of Failure, Sky explores what it’s like to be an old, crippled, homosexual.
SACKVILLE, AUGUSTA'S YOURS
February 2, 2013
Co-ordinated by Erin Brubacher and Sue Johnson
A bit of Bagtown on Augusta Ave
Sackville footage from 1945-1967; super 8 projections by John Porter; music videos by Jon Claytor and Ilse Kramer; new shorts by Amanda Fauteux and Sue Johnson... The screening was proceeded by 'SappyFeast', a fundraising dinner for Sackville's SappyFeast hosted up the street at Double Double Land. A delightful dogs breakfast from 'Sackville I'm Yours - The Moving Image', programmed by Sarah Evans and presented by Struts Gallery & Faucet Media Arts Centre in Sackville NB.
RAE SPOON AND KALEB ROBERTSON
February 1, 2013
Videofag hosted an intimate evening of music, storytelling, and performance by indie musician/author Rae Spoon, with an opening performance by Kaleb Robertson. Rae was workshopping a new performance about family and home called Sprint as well as playing some new songs. Kaleb Robertson is a dynamic performer who has graced many stages around Toronto with burlesque, drag, dance, and performance art.
THINKER IN RESIDENCE, JANUARY 2013
Natalie Kouri-Towe
Natalie Kouri-Towe was Videofag's January 2013 'Thinker in Residence.' She used the space as a base camp for research and community engagement, and orchestrated two discursive events: The Queer Apocalypse (in conversation with Atom Cianfarani, January 17 2013) and Tender Revolution (January 30, 2013). Natalie is a Toronto-based academic and activist who works collaboratively in art-based social and political practices. Her work centres on queerness, social movements and transnational solidarity, with a focus on queer Palestine-solidarity movements.
IN/OUT
Peter Rahul
In/Out chronicles Peter Rahul’s experiments with near-obsolete analog video hardware. By utilizing the same source as both input and output, psychedelic self-generative patterns emerge like a living energy source. As a techno-archaeologist, Rahul hopes to better understand the limitations of failed technologies, and revitalize their nostalgic aesthetic. In/Out was an ongoing video installation in Videofag’s front window throughout December 2012 and January 2013.
BEAUTIFUL BUFFALO WEEK
1. THE UNIT PRESENTS: TWO PLAYS BY NEIL WECHSLER
January 28, 2013
Part of 'Beautiful Buffalo' week
The Unit Dramaturgy Collective, led by founding co-artistic directors Susanna Fournier and Toby Malone, looks to bring the city’s dramaturgical energies together and revisit the way that we create and promote new work. On January 28, The Unit will present the readings of two acclaimed plays by Buffalo-based Neil Wechsler, Grenadine and The Brown Bull of Cuailnge.
2. BUFFALO HATES YOU TOO: VIDEOS AND SHORT FILMS FROM BUFFALO, NY
Curated by Julian Montague and Jax Deluca
January 31, 2013
For many Torontonians Buffalo is a city of house fires, shopping malls and not much else. But underneath the surface there is a diverse, thriving arts community that is engaged in figuring out what the rust belt city is going to become. This screening will present recent film and video work from the Buffalo scene.
Julian Montague is a Buffalo based visual artist and graphic designer.
Jax Deluca is a video, sound, performance artist and musician and the current executive director of Squeaky Wheel Buffalo Media Resources.
3. JULIAN MONTAGUE IN CONVERSATION WITH BROKEN CITY LAB
February 1, 2013
Joshua Babcock and Cristina Naccarato are Toronto-based operatives of the chiefly Windsor-area based Broken City Lab, an artist-led interdisciplinary creative research collective and non-profit organization working to explore and unfold curiosities around locality, infrastructures, education, and creative practise leading towards civic change. Julian Montague is a Bufflo-based artist whose work frequently draws upon the socio-political ecologies and aesthetics of the American Rustbelt.
Videofag hosted these three artists in discussion on the ways in which artists cities with an abundance of space - specifically in so-called 'North American Rustbelt' - are innovating new functions for disused buildings/public spaces, and in the process reinventing the possibilities of neighbourhoods, community, and the artist's role within a city.
CINEMATIC VISIONS FROM WINNIPEG, MANITOBA
January 24, 2013
Program 1 (7PM): City Sympathy
Curated by Clint Enns & Leslie Supnet
The sign on the way into Winnipeg, Manitoba at one time cryptically read "One Great City!" It now factually reads "Heart of the Continent." City symphonies are a genre of films that attempt to encapsulate the spirit and uniqueness of a city. Poetic in nature, they attempt to provide a lyrical impression of the city in order to reveal the cities inner reality. City Sympathy is a collection of films from Winnipeg, Manitoba that attempt to examine the lo-budget inventiveness that is entwined into our civic consciousness.
Program 2 (9PM): Greg Hanec's Downtime (1985, 65 minutes)
"Life in Winnipeg is grim, grimy and gruesome. An austere film with touches of offbeat humour. Dark and brooding it paints a dismal picture of life for young people out on their own. The actors and words of its characters—strangers thrust into unexpected intimacy—are funny, unnerving and insightful." This rarely shown film originally screened at the 1986 Berlin International Film Festival and has since established a reputation as "one of the best feature films made in Manitoba." (Take One)
ARTISTS IN RESIDENCE
JANUARY 2013
Videofag has been privileged to provide space and resources to a number of artists and projects this month.
Iris Fraser, closed-door screening of her feature film Brother Frank
Leora Morris and Susanna Fournier, workshop/staged reading of Fournier's play 'Stencilboy and Other Portraits'
Michael Rubenfeld, Sarah Garton Stanley, and Natasha Greenblatt, rehearsal space for performance project 'mothermothermothermother...'
Rosamund Small, staged reading of her play 'Genesis and Other Stories'
and Erin Brubacher threw a couple wicked, impromptu charades nights
AMPLIFYING FEMME
Kim Crosby, Catherine Hernandez, Kiley May
January 22, 2013
Join us for an evening of loud and vulnerable musings on femme identity. The evening opens with a screening and Q & A of Kiley May's 'Homo Noeticus' , first presented at the 2011 Inside Out Toronto LGBT Film Festival. It continues with Catherine Hernandez's 'Femme Playlist' ,a performance piece outlining the many experiences leading to self definition as a femme through humour, song and shit disturbing. Closing the evening is Kim Katrin Crosby's internationally presented workshop, 'In Fierceness & Vulnerability: Deconstructing and Resisting Femmephobia'.
HISTORY BOYS: FIRST PERIOD
January 16, 2013
Perverse, intelligent, fabulous, from Alexander the Great and his sexy warrior-lover, to Chinese homos in the Dominion of Canada, the History Boys take you on a journey through gay history. Join the boys in an evening of readings of their irreverent column, followed by a Q&A. Take the “Sexy History Test,” show off your sexy brain, get schooled! If you aren’t careful you just might learn something!
History Boys is a regular column in Fab Magazine by Jeremy Willard and Michael Lyons that focuses on gay people, movements and events throughout history, with illustrations by the fabulous Eric Williams.
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SISSY BOY YOUTUBE NIGHT
curated by Jon Davies
January 11, 2013
From Toddlers with expertly choreographed Lady Gaga moves to unsettling teen twink booty-shaking routines, join us for a Very Special Screening of YouTube videos of ecstatically dancing sissy boys. Sissy Boy YouTube Night promises to tap into foundational (traumatic?) memories of queer childhood and adolescent pleasures, opening the doors to welcome these exuberant, effeminate young performers into the bi-curious, gay, queer, genderqueer and/or trans identities that they might not even know can exist for themselves. We want to acknowledge and celebrate sissy-boy behaviour, which often takes the form of embodied diva worship (ie. dancing with glee and abandon to female pop vocalists) as more than a shame-laced passing phase, and ultimately propose that queer/trans identity become the default – rather than an aberration from the norm – for kids in the 21st century.
Curated by Jon Davies and inspired by The Gays of Tomorrow, performed with Sholem Krishtalka at Ryeberg Live, 2010.
