#visualeyez2017

Folamh is first up in a series of reviews of Visualeyez 2017. Festival animator Michael Wooley will review all performances from the festival celebrating Awkwardness this year. Find them on the Visualeyez 2017 blog.

“A woman must continually watch herself. She is almost continually accompanied by her own image of herself… Her own sense of being in herself is supplanted by a sense of being appreciated as herself by another.... One might simplify this by saying: men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at.” 

In “Ways of Seeing” art critic John Berger captured what would later be defined as the male gaze. Sympathetic to the feminist movement and its second wave Berger managed to encapsulate not just a lack of representation but an objectification and subjugation. And its message remains relevant today. 

BC artist Julianne Chapple takes inspiration from the message and creates a performance piece that explores the idea of self-image and the perception of women. 

Women Appear (and sometimes they learn how to disappear) will be performed at Visualeyez 2017 on Wednesday and Saturday. 

Latitude 53 chatted with Chapple about her work and inspiration. 

L53: How has this performance evolved? 

JC: It started with a series of self-portraits in my home. Being a performance artist and coming from a dance background these photos were an attempt to capture these micro performances I was doing alone. I had a chance to perform in a series here in Vancouver where I brought the living room into a theatre and performed them for an audience. It will be an extension from a domestic space and move through these movement phrases from the history of images of women. It explores the baggage that comes with the way women are portrayed and how they have been created by men. 

I’m really excited about this performance as it will be set up as an installation because the viewers will be in the same environment. I’m hoping to create a dynamic where everyone in the space can inhabit the role of watcher and watched throughout the evening. I think that will open up new possibilities for me. 

L53: Why is this piece important to you? 

JC: For me as a performer it’s all kind of an exploration of attempting to take control of a viewers perception and trying to use all the baggage that comes with representing a female body in a playful way. It looks at utilizing things like depersonalization and objectification and how you could maybe move in and out of this state of objecthood and take control of that transformation of the subject with an audience. 

Visualeyez 2017 explores awkwardness. The works presented reflect on our interactions with situations where we feel uncomfortable or marginalized and how we react in these changing environments, according to the festival’s curatorial statement. 

American theatre artist Josh Clendenin explores the awkwardness of language in his performance Folamh. The American theatre artist speaks multiple languages, and often feels uncomfortable using each one, especially when in conversation with a native speaker. To heighten the situation Clendenin has centered his performance as a date. 

“I’m fascinated by the potential of connection and the awkwardness that is a date and meeting people and to up that ante in a multilingual situation,” says Clendenin. 

Latitude 53 spoke to Clendenin about his show Folamh, which translates to “blank” or “empty” in Irish. 

Clendenin will perform Folamh Thursday at 3pm and Friday at 8pm as part of Visualeyez. 

L53: What prompted the exploration of language as a form of awkwardness? 

JC: I speak multiple languages, but I have this anxiety when I need to speak to a native speaker. English is my native language but there’s always a space where if I’m speaking French or Irish for a native speaker, I can’t seem to express myself. I wanted to show that the human brain, as you’re trying to find those words, they’re all stored in the same place in the brain, so if you’re trying to access one word in one language you have to access them all at once. You’re literally trying to filter through all of the words that you know. 

The local artists of Pest Control, Kai Villneff and Sarah Ormandy saw the theme of awkwardness as a way to push their creative effort to break down the fourth wall.

The two artists have a background in theatre arts, but were drawn to performance art as a way to create content that has a direct call for the audience to participate and experience the performance in a different way.

“I do lot of improv it’s an opportunity to interact with the audience,” says Ormandy. “A lot of things we’ve worked on as Pest Control is the difficulty to connect and the thought of how we feel in social scenarios and in an art setting.”

Success!!!! Asks the audience to take a self-help journey. Built to explore the demands that we all succeed at the highest levels, Success!!! Will be a guided program to discover your best self. The performance builds on the festival’s theme of awkwardness by providing a six step guide to overcoming awkwardness in social and professional situations as the barrier to success.

“We’ve discussed sociopaths within other project ideas,” says Ormandy. “It enhanced our thought around how to be the ultimate artist and person, colleagues and friends, that was a jumping off point.”

With success of course comes money. And Pest Control want to ensure you have a good relationship with money. Villneff and Ormandy say the competing ideas of success as an artist including the need to be a participant in capitalism and entrepreneurship came up in the planning. And the question of whether it’s money that makes you successful

“We talked about the commodification of art and looking at the art world from a business perspective,” says Villneff.

The combined video and live performance will provide a comprehensive six step guide to rocket you to the top of the art world according to the group.

For 17 years the Visualeyez festival has provided space for performance artists to craft and present performances in spaces we may not be used to as observers. Just as the act of performance art itself challenges cultural norms, Visualeyez has focused in on a theme that questions our contemporary life. As we looked back at the first Visualeyez the themes of surveillance, voyeurism and the boundaries between our personal and private lives emerged as the themes in the early 2000s. This year the festival focuses on the idea of awkwardness.

Curator Todd Janes writes that as technology has permeated our interactions, they have become highly codified.

“If we were to suddenly remove societal perceptions and norms of behaviour then we could examine if there is such a thing as suitable societal interactions. If not then there might not be such a thing as awkwardness.”

From its beginnings in the Dada movement, performance art questioned the place of the artist, and the observer. Poetry began to be performed in unconventional ways. Paintings were brought to life in the 40s and 50s by way of performance work called Action Painting. These roots in abstract thought allows for boundaries to be questioned and broken. Performance art can remove these barriers, question them and place the participant at the heart of interaction.

“The awkward chance possibilities of everyday life are part of what makes performance art such an immediate and palpable form,” says Dr. Natalie Loveless, a professor of the history of art, design and visual culture at the University of Alberta.

“Performance art, at its best, and in every single one of its forms, as far as I am concerned, is not autonomous. It works with the chance elements that emerge in the encounter.”

We spoke to Loveless about performance art and the connections to this year’s theme of awkwardness.

L53: How does our theme of awkwardness lend itself specifically to the medium of performance art? Is there an element of awkwardness inherent to the practice of performance art even if the work is not centred around the theme of awkwardness?

L: The fact that real life and real bodies are often awkward and unruly is a link to this year’s theme. In the performance art modalities that I privilege (body art, Fluxus, social practice, relational and dialogic art, activist intervention and new genre public art, action art and installaction, daily practice, endurance and duration art, to name a few), the action and the body has an obligation to be true to the “reality” of the action or exchange — it is not rehearsed or staged. It is never about pretend. Jeff Huckleberry is not pretending to push through masonite walls, he sets up the parameters for the action, and then, with the audience as witness, follows through on that action (“THICKv1,” 2007). What happens happens, and is allowed to happen. The awkward chance possibilities of everyday life are part of what makes performance art such an immediate and palpable form.

**L53: **How does performance art inform viewers in a different way than other media?

L: Two of the key factors distinguishing (broadly speaking) performance art from, say, experimental theater is that the body is taken as a tool or material in the work, and whatever is happening is really happening. The immediacy and “reality” of performance art implicates, and thereby informs, the viewer by making them complicit in something really happening: a body bleeding or enduring something over a long period of time or otherwise being put “on the line”. As a viewer-participant you are invited to be accountable not to a representation (painterly, sculpturally, or through video) of something, but to something real, happening in real time, right before you. There is a level of material, physical, immediacy, that is specific to performance and communicates things differently.

L53: How does the ephemerality of performance art change how it is interpreted?

**L: **That is a good, and hotly debated, question. Matter of fact, one of my students, Michael Woolley, (this year’s Visualeyez animator) just defended his master’s thesis on this topic! Peggy Phelan, the performance studies scholar, famously wrote that “performance only life is in the present.” Performance Art historian Amelia Jones then countered Phelan, writing about experiencing performance art through documentation, and suggesting that while there is something specific to the presence of the live act, there is also something valuable and specific to the encounter with the representative documentation of that live act. No encounter, Jones counters, is “unmediated” — they are just mediated differently.

I agree with Jones, but these days I find myself really valuing the live, sensorially attuned encounter, and performance art as a site of resistance to life as configured under the speedy “productive” sign of neoliberal capitalism (my new project, Sensing the Anthopocene is all about this — performance modalities that s l o w u s d o w n and attune us differently within our local ecologies). While this doesn’t answer your question at the level of interpretation, it does say a little bit about why ephemerality matters.

L53: Do you have any particular memories of the Visualeyez performance art festival?

**L: **Two performances come to mind, both from the year before last (2015): Luciana D’anunciação’s “The Sound Between” and Rachel Echenberg’s “Nine, Five, and Three.” D’anunciação’s was a responsive and electric (in all senses of the word) sound performance. Echenberg’s was a participatory work that involved groups of people, together, blowing up large-scale balloon structures in publics spaces. I think these two come to mind because my experience of both was of being implicated (made to matter) within the performance actions and because they invited me to attend to the texture and moments and sounds and breaths and breezes of everyday life in a way that still resonates. Each of these performances attuned me aesthetically, and created a space of shared experience where we were not an audience looking at an artist, but rather where the artist created a situation through we we could all co-experience time, organized by simple, refined, orienting, and very material actions.

The 17th edition of Visualeyez starts September 26th. With the annual festival of performance art about to begin, we thought we'd take a look back at the very first edition.

This review of Visualeyez appeared in issue five, volume 3 of the print publication fifty3. Todd Janes recapped the mandate and performances of Visualeyez, which was held February 17 - 21, 2000.

Janes writes that Visualeyez was created out of Latitude 53′s mandate to develop experimental art forms and stimulate dialogue about art in communities, The hope was that the event would 

"grow to serve international showcase and educational forum for performance artists from around the region and around the world, annually presenting hundreds of performances, workshops, lectures, educational seminars and special events featuring the work of acclaimed and emerging performance artists."

Some of the highlights of the event included performance artist Christine Carson (Toronto) working with over 50 volunteer singers to create an early morning interventionist piece in the Grandin LRT station called NUMB HUM. The operatic inspired musical work was performed every morning for five consecutive days for early morning commuters. 

“This work was an interesting bridge to audiences (whether they knew they were audiences or not) and the festival. Carson presented a piece that effectively blurred the roles of performer and audience. Jose Teodoro and Elyne Quan (Edmonton) brought together a group of seven artists to create Agenda, a funny and eerie work that was one of the strongest of the festical. Agenda was a solid presentation captivated the viewers from the beginning and left them wanting more. Singkronoscities (Edmonton) brough t the very ambitious The Story of the Eye to Visualeyez and reminded us of the long history of performance art. Although the performance was rough, I commend the collective for tackling such a difficult piece and making it work. For audience members who had the stamina to remain for the whole time they were rewarded with a truly experimental work that integrated a vast amount of imagery, sound and movement.”

Other performers included Bobbie Todd, Kathleen Arnold, FM Railways, Trace Willin, TWO, Alex Dallas, Jan Streader, Anne Marie Sewell and Trish Sewell.

Janes also writes about the plans for the next Visualeyez which reflect a very relevant issue for the time.