FADO is pleased to offer a 6-day intensive performance art workshop facilitated by VestAndPage (Verena Stenke and Andrea Pagnes). 

WORKSHOP DATES: April 14-19, 2014

Daily from 9am-6pm

COST: $150

We don't want cost to be a barrier. Please contact us is you are experiencing economic circumstances that might prevent your participation. Please contact us for more information on how to register at: info@performanceart.ca

CONDITIONS: Participants are asked to commit to the entirety of the workshop period. Maximum number of participants is 15.

LOCATION: Artscape Youngplace (Flex Studio), 180 Shaw Street, Toronto

PUBLIC Presentation: Saturday April 19, 7pm

The workshop culiminates in a public presentation of the performance art works created during the week by the workshop participants. All welcome / FREE

In this 6-day intensive MayDay performance art workshop, participants experience VestAndPage’s unique method through the process of making a performance art piece. Through practical exercises and reflecting on the use of the body as a tool, the workshop will focus on introspection as a way to develop authentic modes of expression and artistic action, and participants will be provided with the means to conceive, develop, and realize their own performance piece. Through methodology aimed at understanding prevailing behavioral patterns, participants will develop new ways of communicating and overcoming fears created by conflicting contemporary conditions. The workshops will also offer insight into the framework of process-led and conceptual art practice, with the aim to provide basis for future material. Participants will develop a heightened awareness of mind and body, with the means to stimulate artistic personal action though inner sensitivity.

As facilitators, VestAndPage will lead exercises on a range of performance techniques and approaches which blur the boundaries between fine art, live art and contemporary performance practices:

• Working solo and as a group;
• Creating intimate solo performance material;
• Devising and improvisation techniques;
• Actions/rules/chance-based techniques;
• Objects and actions in space as performance;
• Developing quality of presence;
• Confidence in using the physical self as a vehicle for meaning in performance;
• Audience-performer relationships – levels and modes of interaction;
• Exploring the role of time and pattern – e.g. duration, endurance, speed, and repetition.

Through the following processes:

• To work towards touching point zero in judgment and intention, heightening perception, introspection, to then rebuild an authenticity-based expression, to transform visions and ideas into a concrete artistic action.
• To take distance from being virtuous by establishing, evaluating, and energizing the personal action in se.
• To free oneself from common behavorial patterns so as to create new ways of encountering, collaborating and living.
• To overcome the fragile constituent limits, may they be based on physicality, fears or social patterns.
• To touch and strengthen the most human inner sensors in order to activate personal and universal memories, for using as germinal matter for future artistic substance.
• To enter a state of heightened awareness and perception, in order to conceive out-of-the-ordinary artistic visions, being in first instance process-led.

Actions and exercises are innovative and process-led, inspired by processes and methods such as: Dynamic Creative Breathing, Social Theater, Living Theater, Grotowski, Barba Stanislavsky, Leclerc, Oriental Theatre, Martial Arts, Contemporary Dance & Butoh, Authenticity, Inner Library, Liminality, Breath, Archetypes, Rituality, Memory activation, Object work, Time-Duration-Rhythm, Voice/Sound, Emotional Atmosphere, Inter-activity, Group dynamics, Macro- and Microspherology.

ABOUT VestAndPage

Verena Stenke and Andrea Pagnes have been working together since 2006, generating art in the mediums of live performance, filmmaking and writing, and through independent curatorship. Their works have been presented widely across Europe, Asia, the Americas and Africa. Their practice is process-led and conceived psycho-geographically in response to architecture, natural surroundings or historical sites. It examines the fragility of the individual within different social or environmental spheres. Exploring what, as human beings, we still have to offer, VestAndPage question our existence within a humanity characterized by social exclusion and global atrocities. Animated by a nomadic, confrontational spirit, they apply the themes of acceptance, resistance, crisis and endurance with a poetic bodily approach to art practice.

For more information on the artists and their workshop approach, please visit:

www.vest-and-page.de

TO REGISTER OR FOR MORE INFO:

info@performanceart.ca

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Image credits (L to R): Photo 1: 'Fragile Limits' at CONFL!CTA, Punta Arenas, Chile, December 2010. Photos 2, 8: 'MayDay' at Museo Universitario del Chopo, Mexico City, October 2013. Presented by TRANSMUTED Network. Photograph by Elisa Garza. Photos 3-6: 'Fragile Limits' at ]performance s p a c e [, London, September 2013. Photograph by Marco Pinelli. Photo 7: 'Fragile Limits' at Seoul Art Space, Seoul, August 2012. On occasion of Mulle Arts Festival. Photograph by HeiJi Park.