Free
RSVP: info@lelabo.ca / 416.861.1853
Duration: 45 minutes
Each performance will be followed by an artist talk.
The artistic proposition is running during three nights, audience is free to attend one or all performances.
Allowing ourselves, giving permission to others… Allowing the space to transform itself, receiving permission to transform it… Inhabiting our bodies to invade the space, letting our bodies escape…
Preoccupied by freeing her movements from social constraints, Julie Lassonde explores the concept of permission through a progression of performances. Step by step, latent desires of bodies in space, of the artist and audience, will reveal themselves, shaping a different atmosphere and leaving us a different state than we were at the beginning.
From the traces of the first performance, the foundations of the second one will emerge; and from the second will be born the third.
Exceptionally, Saturday night’s performance will be followed by a performance with Paul Couillard and Ed Johnson presented as part of the AGAVF- Viva ! Art Action exchange.
The duo will perform ‘Duorama #110’. For the last eleven years Paul Couillard and Ed Johnson have worked together on the series ‘Duorama’. Responding to site and examining cultural attitudes toward male intimacy are key elements of their collaborative work.
LE LABO’S MENTORSHIP PROGRAM
This performance is part of Le Labo’s mentorship program that began in November 2011.
This program links three francophone emerging artists with three mid-career artists from Toronto.
Julie Lassonde created this project in conversation with Maria Legault.
« I have felt Maria’s open-mindedness and her interest in my artistic process from our first conversation. From the beginning we trusted each other. I share my questions with her at each step of the development of my creative project. We talk about the environment of my work and about my methodology. She is totally dedicated to my experience and performance even if sometimes I bring Maria to talk about her work, which is so inspiring and helpful. Her positive, generous and patient mind surprises me constantly. »
Julie Lassonde about her relationship with Maria Legault, her mentor.
BIOGRAPHIES
– Julie Lassonde –
Originally from Montreal, Julie Lassonde is an interdisciplinary improviser and performance artist who is interested in femininity and masculinity in art and social justice. Julie studied at the Montreal corporeal mime school. She has presented solo performances and improvisations in Montreal, Toronto, Calgary, Vancouver, Victoria, Berkeley, San Francisco and Edinburgh. She also studied law at McGill University. She is a member of the Law Society of Canada and the Barreau du Québec. In 2006, she was awarded the Law and Society Graduate Fellowship and an interdisciplinary master’s degree at the University of Victoria. She received the ‘Innovative Electronic Theses & Dissertations Award’ from the Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations for her thesis, in 2007, in Uppsala, Sweden. Julie published “Performing Law” in ‘The International Journal of the Arts in Society’ (2006) and co-edited the book ‘Collision: Interarts Practice and Research’ (2008). She previously served on the board of Interaccess Electronic Media Arts Centre and Hum Dansoundart Not Just A Dance Company in Toronto.
“I always love to be alone in an empty space, as starting point. I enter for moment through a physical and muscular work from my theatral and bodily mime formations. The political experience of my body is revealed step by step thanks to the influence of my law studies. So I improvise and build my performances using sounds, objects, sometimes words as the extension of my body position regarding the space and others that are inside it. I deal with performance art as the possibility to transform societal codes. »
– Maria Legault –
Maria Legault is an inter-disciplinary artist who has coated her face in bubble gum, been hidden in clouds of blue cotton candy and stuffed crevices with pink icing.
She holds a BFA from Concordia University and a MFA from the University of Guelph.
Her work has been exhibited internationally in such venues as Mercer Union, Inter-Access, Forest City Gallery, 7a11d Performance Festival, Toronto Alternative Art Fair International and the Drake Hotel in Canada as well as the Galapagos Art Space in New York and the Castle of Imagination performance festival in Poland.
Maria was recently given the Best Emerging Artist Award at the Untitled Art Awards in Toronto. She currently resides in Toronto where she eats too much sugar and makes art sometimes.
– Paul Couillard –
Paul Couillard has been working as an artist, curator, and cultural theorist since 1985. He has created more than 200 solo and collaborative performance works in 21 countries. He was the Performance Art Curator for Fado from 1993 to 2007, and is also a founding co-curator of the 7a*11d International Performance Art Festival, both based in Toronto. He is currently editing Canadian Performance Art Legends, a series of combined text and DVD publications on senior Canadian performance artists. The first installment, ‘La Dragu: the Living Art of Margaret Dragu’ was released in 2002, while the second book, ‘Ironic to Iconic: The Performance Works of Tanya Mars’ was released in 2008.
– Ed Johnson –
Ed Johnson is a visual artist who has been creating performance art works since 1996. His solo work has often explored issues of communication/non-communication (‘Box, Words of Love’) and of HIV status (‘Inquisitive/Inquisitor, Untitled « [sic] »‘). Currently his focus is on the landscape of male bodies and self-image, including his most recent project in Belfast for Bbeyond, ‘Pro tanto quid retribaumus’ (‘for so much what shall we repay’). Ed Johnson is a founding member of Fado, an artist run centre for performance art located in Toronto.