CONVERSATION: Henry Adam Svec and Samuel Morgenstein

Rhubarb artists Henry Adam Svec (On Livingston’s Method) and MiMo's Samuel Morgenstein (And Sheep Were Scared…) discuss their work with music, new collaborations, storytelling and the status quo…

Henry Svec: How does your piece approach music? Is the work discovered in the process of performance or will you bring in finished compositions? 

Samuel Morgenstein: Our piece is a collection of ideas revolving around a central concept.  We collectively know where the piece should go and where it will end.  Over time, we discover how the journey will unfurl.  This discovery happens during rehearsals and quite possibly during the actual performance as well.  MiMo rarely performs 'finished compositions', rather we keep notes of concepts and ideas that are turned into performances.

HS: So is the collaborative process part of the work itself?  I mean, is it important for you guys to foreground the organic/improvisatory aspect of your performance, or is it more about the signal/"output"? 

SM: The journey is as important as the final destination.  Although we predetermine what sounds will be occurring in the piece, what instruments or objects will be played, and what mood or textures we are attempting to achieve, ultimately improvisation and chance occurrence dictate how these elements will interact.  This is what makes a MiMo performance exciting for both the listener and the performer.

HS: Sounds exciting! So I wonder which aspects of your process you think of in political terms? (Your website mentions the "status quo.") Which status quo do you see your work in relation to, and how do you define yourselves against it? Do you mean the status quo in music?

SM: We are referring to the status quo in music.  We challenge the mundane nature of most pop music while exploring the musical potential of objects not classified as 'instruments'.  Although some of our compositions do reflect upon political figures or events (our piece Truth Persists is an homage to Mahatma Gandhi and was performed on his birthday several years ago), we do not consider ourselves overtly political.

OUT AND ABOUT: Rhubarb Artists in the City

Some of the amazing artists at this year's Rhubarb are super-hard at work, with other shows in theatres around Toronto.

• Claire Calnan, Nicolas Billon and Ravi Jain from Godwin's Law are bringing back their Summerworks hit GREENLAND to the Tarragon January 27 and 28, with The Bauty Project: the male gaze's Jajube Mandiela in the cast
• Ben Chaisson (who is collaborating with MiMo and iNSiDEaMiND on And Sheep Are Scared...) is designing the spooky projections for THE MILL (Part 4): Ash at the Young Centre for the Performing Arts
• Jesus Chrysler's Christine Horne is busy talking about the theatre school experience over on the Praxis Theatre Blog
• And Native Earth Performing Arts - who is partnering with Buddies to bring My Barbarian's Post-Living Ante-Action Theatre (PoLAAT) to the festival is presenting the new works festival Weesagechak at The Theatre Centre

And in other very exciting news - the full and final schedule for Rhubarb is now in a downloadable, printer friendly form (click here to view). This has info on all the shows and events at Rhubarb, including a newly added screening of Bruce LaBruce's A Weekend in Alphaville.

INTERVIEW: Life & Limb

New to the festival this year, Mobile Works take Rhubarb out in to the city - Life & Limb had a chat about their Mobile Works show k[NO]w places, private behavior, and how performances and audiences can change when you put them in a public space.

What creative process did you undergo to develop k[NO]w places?

The individual members of the collective formed after collaborating during a workshop, directed by Guillermo Gómez-Peña and Roberto Sifuentes of La Pocha Nostra, in June of 2010. They have carried on the collective collaboration process, inspired by the methodology of La Pocha Nostra, to develop k[NO]w places. The Pocha process is image based and centered upon exploring issues of embodiment, particularly as it connects to the borders of our identity. It is through imagery that our script develops, rather than the other way around. These tenants form the core of our process. 

What challenges does a mobile performance piece pose?

The primary challenge is unpredictability. The unknown and often unsuspecting audiences members can often (re)direct the energy and even the trajectory of a performance. The inverted performance of spectatorship during a mobile performance can produce beautiful moments of improvisation; it can also produce anxiety since there is pressure upon the performers to keep the passerby engaged enough to stop and watch the performance. In addition, the weather, especially in February, can provide undesired challenges for performers; it can also influence the very presence of an audience. 

Why have you chosen to explore the boundaries between public and private in your performance?

It was important for us to bring private acts into public spaces because there is a sort of blind faith most of us have in the scripts of public urban spaces, which, by virtue of being social spaces, condition how we function in them; there is an assumption that this conditioning is beyond our control. What happens when we take strategic control of this space? What happens when we explore other modes of being in public? We felt that the most obvious way to explore that is to invert the public by juxtaposing it against the private. The purpose is to democratize, even if it is for a movement, this social space that many of us take for granted. 

What expectations do you have from your audience?

We hope that our performance is provoking enough for audiences to identify and question their own behaviour in public spaces; to reflect upon and engage in other ways of relating to public spaces; and to make conscious the implicit and often arbitrary borders we place between modes of being. In simpler terms, we want the boundaries between the interior and the exterior to be explicit and, in turn, to be questioned. 

What inspired some of the images that are present in this performance?

Ultimately, our personal negotiations through public/private space have inspired our personas. These include: the voyeur, which sits at the border of public/private divide; an embodiment of violence, as it relates to the privatization of femininity and masculinity upon the queer male body; the masquerade of beauty and the vanity which conditions our movements; the performance of war upon the body; and the public scripts we perform at our most intimate moments. These personas, in a number of ways, give the audience a public glimpse into the private lives of the performers.

Visit the Life & Limb website or find programming info for k[NO]w places and other Rhubarb details online here.

TOP 5: Alicia Grant

Alicia Grant's Top 5 Places in Toronto to See the Sky

Are you sick of looking at your shoes all the time? Do you want to forget about buildings for 30 seconds? You can feel all cosmic, right here in the centre of Toronto. 

 

 

 

We asked Rhubarb artist Alicia Grant (Stay Here, Don't Go) to provide us with a fun way to view the city.  Here's what she came back with - The Top 5 Places in Toronto to See the Sky.  

1. Dovercourt House  

    Bloor + Dovercourt - 3rd Floor Studio

2. No Frills Parking Lot

    Dundas + Lansdowne

   

3. The Beach

    Queen + Woodbine

4. Roof of Kensington Market Parking Garage

    Dundas + Spadina

5. Strange New Park

    Queen + Dufferin

Alicia Grant's Stay Here, Don't Go is part of Rhubarb Week 1, February 16 - 20. Full programming details on-line here.

MEET NOBODY'S BUSINESS: Johnnie Walker and Morgan Norwich

Rhubarb artists Nobody's Business are gettin' busy this winter and we're glad it's at Buddies.

You can see them in an independent presentation of Redheaded Stepchild & A Maude-Lynne Evening, the return of 2 of their sell-out hits opening tomorrow night! Then come back in week two of Rhubarb for their cozy, sexy and playful Who Who Who's Got a Crush on You? (A Slumber Party for Boys). 

Morgan Norwich and Johnnie Walker - photo by Greg Wong

TOP 5: Life of a Craphead

Life of A Craphead presents

Top 5 Places to Feel Depressed About Yourself in Toronto

1. McDonald's parking lot, at Bathurst and Dundas, facing the fence.

2. Looking at the prices of half-opened Fancy Feast in the pet food aisle at the Bargain Store at Bloor and Lansdowne.

3. Receiving gifts from a GoodLife fitness promoter on the street.

4. The food court at Toronto Western Hospital, first floor.

5. At Turtle Island City Dump, when you see companies you pay extra to be environmentally friendly, that claim they recycle used diapers, just dump them in with the regular garbage. Stop them!

Conceptual comedians Life of A Craphead, Amy Lam and Jon McCurley, will perform Please Copy Us Forever as part of Rhubarb’s Mobile Works. 

You can visit them at Double Double Land or find Rhubarb programming details here.

CONVERSATION: Jordan Tannahill and Sean Macmahon

Jordan Tannahill of Suburban Beast - Bravisolvia - and Sean Macmahon from emergency exit - RUN LIKE HELL (vagy menj a Pokolba) - ask each other about their new projects, what keeps them coming back to Rhubarb, and what goes into the perfect sandwich.

Sean Macmahon: What excites you most about multi disciplinary work?

Jordan Tannahill: Hopefully it can be the best of multiple worlds.

SM: Any personal connection to Bravislovia?

JT: It’s entirely personal. It’s an imaginary country I invented at the age of ten and essentially lived in until I went to university.

SM: Some of your collaborators went to Ryerson. How did you all meet? Did you go to rye high as well?... (if you did, i'd love to hear your thoughts.)

JT: Yup, in fact I’m a newly minted grad of Rye High’s Film Production program. My collaborator Samuel Lebel-Wong, a wonderful filmmaker and producer who has shot all of the ‘live-films’ I’ve created through Suburban Beast (Insurgency, Post Eden, and now Bravislovia), was a classmate of mine. And, while they went through Ryerson’s Technical Theatre program, I actually met and began working with Suburban Beast’s producer Paul Beauchamp and production manager Rebecca Powell when we were all in high school together in Ottawa. In fact, I’ve know Paul since we were in Grade 7... so the connection goes back a long ways! 

SM: What’s your favorite sandwich? (being, of course, the perfect food.)

JT: I eat a tuna fish sandwich with baby spinach on a toasted muesli bagel for lunch every day. It’s very specific and has to be done just right. I’m wholly unoriginal when it comes to lunch. 

Jordan Tannhill in Bravislovia

MEET THE ARTISTS: Intersection Project & My Barbarian

Meet Toronto’s own INTERSECTION PROJECT

“Intersection Project is the first Mobile Works piece in the festival, a new initiative this year that infiltrates public space with performance.  These works will be as much for accidental audiences that stumble upon the piece as it is for the Rhubarb community. This group, led by Priscilla Guy and Kate Nankervis, has been organizing large-scale public performances around Toronto since the fall of last year. Each time they perform, they engage different sites, changing the way we see our surroundings. The video of them in Queen’s Park made me think instantly of the G20 protests, and I think it's a great example of the dualities present in this year’s programming. It can be seen as a critique of what’s happening politically and socially in our city right now, as well as an optimistic and playful celebration.” 

– Laura

Visit Intersection Project's website or find them at Rhubarb here.

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Rhubarb Welcomes Visiting Guest Artists, LA-Performance Collective My Barbarian

This year, Sundays at Rhubarb are a little different.  Sunday Socials will feature a mix of politically-minded performances and events.  One of these is a public presentation of My Barbarian's Post-Living Ante-Action Theater, (PoLAAT) created with local artists.

PoLAAT, an original performance form developed by the company, which evolves from their own interdisciplinary practice as well as two avant-garde collectives of the 1960's: New York's Living Theatre and Munich's Action-Theater. The performance will also draw on current events and political situations. This is the Canadian premiere, following Post-Living Ante-Action Theater projects in New York and Cairo.

PoLAAT  is co-presented with the Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery in partnership with b current, Cahoots Theatre Company, fu-GEN Theatre, Native Earth Performing Arts and The Graduate Centre for Study of Drama at U of T

Check out their website or find them at Rhubarb here 

HEY FRIENDS: Laura Nanni speaks

Hey friends,

Welcome to YYZ Buddies and the 32nd Annual Rhubarb Festival!

The work in this year's Rhubarb responds to the immediate pressures of our changing city by providing a platform for divergent voices and creating a much needed space to come together for action, reflection and exchange.  

With help from Cole J Alvis and Laurel Green, Rhubarb’s Artistic Associates, we’ll use YYZ Buddies to profile our artists, performances and special events, but more importantly, as a site for discussion with you leading up to the Festival.

I look forward to introducing you to some of the most exciting artists from our city and beyond. I know they’ll want to get to know you too.

Cheers,

Laura

Rhubarb Festival Director

RHUBARB: see what's in store

Just in time for The Rhubarb festival, the blog is back!

Programming for the 32nd Rhubarb festival is now on-line at the Buddies website. Festival Director Laura Nanni’s inaugural line-up includes sacrilegious celebrity impersonations, utopian science fiction, mass pop-up performances in secret spots around the city, and all kinds of glorious transgressions.

RHUBARB'S NEW TWO-WEEK FORMAT

Mainstage Evenings: Wed-Sat, beginning at 8pm - different programming each night

Sunday Socials: an affably social day of politically-minded performances and events - PWYC

Mobile Works: artists infiltrate the streets of Toronto with surprising performances designed for public spaces - FREE

YYZ Buddies is the home for a whole bunch of cool Rhubarb extras, including videos, artist interviews and other special goodies, so keep checking back.