Hand-in-hand with an interest in aleatoric, intuitive, automatic, and ludic processes, improvisation plays a significant role in Songs of the New Erotics’ performances, usually within fairly structured pieces involving costumes, props, actions, sounds, backing tapes, etc. Since 2001, Songs of the New Erotics has embarked on a series of performances that employ an extreme economy of means and an “out on a limb” experimentalism. The performer enters a largely uncontrolled and unfamiliar environment armed only with a few simple props/objects/costumes. All actions/interactions then arise purely from the specific circumstances of the physical space, audience, ambient sounds, accidents, etc. In this way, improvisation is allowed to generate the form, character, and meaning of each piece. Songs of the New Erotics will present a one-hour improvisation for audience and video.

Toronto-based polymedia artist W.A. Davison has been engaged in the production of music, film, performance, writing, and visual art since the early 80’s. He attended the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design and studied experimental music at Dalhousie University. Since 1993, he has presented works under the name Songs of the New Erotics. These performances combine music/audio art with an absurdist/surrealist visual and performative presence, and are a result of Davison’s work with Recordism, an art/magick ideology rooted in chance and automatism. His work has been discussed in academic essays, and featured on radio, television, and print media across Canada and abroad.

Hidden from the performer, yet in plain view of the audience, an alarm is set to go off and Laura begins. Her task?...to create an ending...her text?...the last lines of 100 Hollywood films. Mixing live performance and video projection, Finale... magnifies our struggle to find closure while poking fun at our attempts at constructing a perfect ending – in both performance and everyday life.

Laura Nanni works in the areas of performance, installation, direction, and design. She has exhibited works and participated in performances across Canada including group shows at Fifth Parallel Gallery (Regina), Koffler Gallery, OCAD, and U of T (Toronto), and Mobilivre (Montréal). She has worked with Soulpepper, the Stratford Festival, and Bluemouth Inc., and is co-artistic director of One Man Tag Productions. Laura’s most recent endeavour is The Automatic Tourist Project, a series of site-specific installations, mail art and performance works.

"I intend on infiltrating highrises [any office building, apartment/condo, hotel, or school, over 4 stories] as a commentary on ownership of air. Once inside, I will scale the centre of the building’s stairwell ascending and descending and will leave a chalk tag of cree syllabics saying: e-kisinawatastihk piyesisak ohci as symbolic evidence of this reclamation. I will also use low-watt radio equipment to broadcast audio at selected locations as part of this action. I do this in order to honour and symbolically re-claim the air above the land where these structures currently exist. It is arrogant of governments to zone that which is not theirs. I do this for the birds – it is still their domain! If you can assist me in gaining entry into any buildings, if you would like to climb with me, witness the activity, document it; or if you have audio you would allow me to air, I invite you to email me: niya@ndnnrkey.net."

Cheryl l'Hirondelle is an Alberta born, Saskatchewan based, halfbreed multi/interdisciplinary artist (Metis/Cree - non status/treaty, german). Since the early 80's she has created, performed, collaborated and presented work in performance art, music, theatre, performance poetry, storytelling, video and new media. Since the early 90's she has worked as an arts programmer, cultural strategist/activist, arts consultant and producer independently and within the national artist-run network, first nations bands and tribal councils, and government agencies. She is currently developing performative physical endurance interventions, is producing interactive net.art projects (ndnnrkey.net) and is one half of the singing duo nikamok.

"BUTTER, POWDER & SUGAR"
EXERGY – butter dance
Melati Suryodarmo (Indonesia/Germany)
Friday, October 22, 8pm
XPACE

There are moments
Which I never expect to be happened
Which are exploded when I loose my view
Which remain empty when I want to fulfil

Accident is just one moment
Silence is just one moment
Happiness is just one moment
This is just one moment
Of being caught by the moment
Melati dances on the butter

"I intend to touch the fluid border between the body and its environment through my artwork. I aim to create a concentrated level of intensity without the use of narrative structures. Talking about politics, society or psychology makes no sense to me if the nerves are not able to digest the information. I love it when a performance reaches a level of factual absurdity."

Melati Suryodarmo graduated in International Relations and Political Sciences in Bandung, Indonesia before moving to Germany in 1994 to study at the Hochschule für Bildende Künst Braunschweig with Marina Abramovic. She finished her Meisterschule in Performance Art in 2002. Suryodarmo has participated in exhibitions and festivals throughout Europe including IPFO 2003, brrr Porto and VV2 at the Venice Biennale. Suryodarmo's performances are concerned with articulating the social and the political through her body.

"BUTTER, POWDER & SUGAR"
Towards the Pure
Helinä Hukkataival (Finland)
Friday, October 22, 8pm
XPACE

Towards the Pure is about trying to cleanse oneself in public.

Helinä Hukkataival’s work has been influenced by more than 11 years of practice in Tai Chi and Zen meditation. She is drawn to the minimalist style of the Japanese tea ceremony and the simple performative acts of Fluxus. Sometimes comparing her performances to long forgotten rituals or to dreams shared by the audience, her works often have surrealistic elements and, like dreams, are always open to interpretation.

"BUTTER, POWDER & SUGAR"
Crumbs
Maria Legault (Canada)
Friday, October 22, 8pm
XPACE

A grotesque durational performance about gargantuan famine and pathetic attempts to alleviate it by feeding of crumbs; debased parcels of greater things. In Crumbs, horror-film type characters, coated with glutinous food substances, will repeat gestures over and over to enact disturbing psychological and physical hungers.

Maria Legault is an interdisciplinary artist that 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 an MFA from the University of Guelph. Her work has been exhibited across Canada in such venues as Mercer Union, InterAccess, Forest City Gallery and Ne Plus Ultra. She currently resides in Toronto where she eats too much sugar.

For this performance, the artist and his stunt-double will embark upon a scaled down archetypal odyssey. The Roll of the Artist offers the thrill of minor spectacle and the edifying undertones of critique. Combining physical and aesthetic risks of uncertain degree, it is part stunt and part inquiry – a brief adventure in art and delegation.

John Marriott lives and works in Toronto where he is a writer and artist working in video, installation, performance and urban intervention. His works have been seen in publications, exhibitions and screenings internationally. His installations were presented in a solo exhibition at the Power Plant in Toronto (1996). His videos have been screened at Medienkunstpreis at ZKM (Germany), the Rotterdam International Festival of Film and Video (Netherlands), and the Lausanne Underground Festival (Switzerland). His street performance series Art that Says Hello received critical praise in Artforum International (1998), and last year his performance interventions Incidental Park Zones and You were staged in Vancouver as part of the Expect Delays series at Artspeak Gallery.

Performance Spaces for Domestic Animals is a 30-minute stand-up theory session that examines collaborations between artists and so-called domestic animals. Questions raised include: How and what can humans perform for animals? How can boundaries between performer/audience, and animal/human be shifted in ways that are truly fantastic for all parties involved?

The central focus of the session will be recent video and performance work I have produced with my cat, Sabre. Through these works I imagine or propose relationships based on hybridity, ambiguity and good times, rather than the control-and-management paradigms, which currently dominate human and animal exchanges. The nature of performance and the performance of nature will be reconsidered through an embrace of the everyday, and the sentimental. Hands-on lab component and half-time yoga break included.

Though textual play and analysis have been my strong suit, I am shifting from a concentration on modes of critique and deconstruction to those of attention, exchange, imagination, animation, and hands-on construction. One of my current projects is The Institute for Feline + Human Collaboration, stationed in the Squirrel Street area of Banff, Alberta. The Institute is a site for ongoing projects in interspecies communication and cohabitation. Current research includes an examination of the ways animals are held in urban environments, and how interactions with animals inform our understanding of interactions with machines.

Haunt is an excavation of a hidden history for an unspecified location in the Toronto area. The work consists of a performance intervention, which intersects into the mythological structures of the immediate environment. The work leaves behind a memoriam, which is a space of dwelling and imagination. The intervention is then reframed into a video work, which will be introduced by Matt Hawthorn at XPACE.

My practice is founded on a concern with the interrelationship of action and environment, and moves between art, architecture, performance, video and new media. I am interested in the ways that we experience our environment and the hidden histories of the spaces we inhabit. In particular I am concerned with the processes of mythology, and the way that our perception is shaped through the interaction of truths and fictions in terms of our spaces, selves and bodies.

"I am interested in the relationship between myself and the others, and how I am the ‘other’ of the ‘other’, with its implications in the construction of my own self as a male artist, in an era where the image of the ‘other’ is validated through the use of technology; in particular, I am interested in the use of surveillance technology as a media of exploration of our relationship with the perceived world of the "other", in fear and distrust. I want to explore the natural other, i.e. women, to also confront the notions of male dominance and female power. This work is a reflection on a historical performance by Allan Kaprow, Satisfaction (1976), re-constructed in a post-war-on-terror world, re-analyzed from post-modern feminist thinking."

Alexander Del Re is a long-time scholar of Performance Art history. He has worked as a performance artist since 1993, performing in Chile, Bolivia, Argentina, Spain, USA and Canada. In addition to his solo work, he collaborates with Camila Schliebener in sound performance experiments of the duo "Girls in a Cage", publishing under the independent label Bad Format Records, producing audio material for performances and films. Del Re teaches Performance Art in several universities in Chile. Since 1997 he has been a producer and curator of international and local performance art events, beginning with Performare, the first international Performance Art event ever presented in Chile. He has published numerous articles in journals, catalogues and online publications. His essay "Confronta tu Icono" (Confront your Icon), is included in the recent Anthology of Latin American Performance, compiled by Josefina Alcazar.

 “We are investigating the modern phenomenon of home improvement as spiritual quest. By approaching suburban shelter with the outdated languages of the sexual freedom and self-improvement "religions," we hope to find the historical continuity among all three and find what our culture is really seeking in slate floors and chromed bath taps. By turning the act of home improvement into an orgiastic performance ritual, we will simultaneously manifest the touching absurdity of consumer life and create a shamanistic/religious spectacle from the base materials of bathroom and kitchen remodeling.”

Tamara Paris + Matt Fontaine have been collaborating since 2002. With a background in experimental theatre, their performances often straddle the controversial line between performance art and drama. Their work deals with American consumer mythology and the spiritual consequences of technology and the hedonic treadmill.

Sawyer will perform music (both in a concert setting and busking around the streets of Toronto) and produce small, anonymous public interventions.
Mathew Sawyer is a co-presentation with Art Metropole.

Born in London in 1977, Mathew Sawyer studied at the Chelsea College of Art and has shown internationally, including exhibitions at the Lisson Gallery and Whitechaple. “His pieces describe, for the most part, his tragicomic, typically unrequited, attempts to make contact with or have his presence acknowledged by others.” – Matthew Higgs, ArtForum (1/1/2003)

A creation by PME – Jacob Wren, Martin Bélanger, Samuel Roy Bois, Simone Moir and Tracy Wright with the artistic collaboration of Alexandra Rockingham Gill and Julie Andrée T.

A performance in the form of a rock band. An attempt to turn the theatre into a public forum for the expression of political and personal ideas. An opportunity to find out whether it is possible, over the course of an hour, for us to form some sort of contingent, temporary community with the audience. Unrehearsed Beauty / Le Génie des Autres combines intense moral ambivalence with a touching desire to live in a world in which ones thoughts and feelings might actually have some genuine societal effect.

Like many of us living in the world today, a world defined by too much or not enough work and a general environment of virtually meaningless consumer over-stimulation, the performance of Unrehearsed Beauty exists on the cusp of an over-taxed personal honesty straining for something simpler: a chance to speak quietly about the things which really matter, play some songs which make us kind of happy even if we don't play them as well as we might, and create a small fissure in the impossible through which something negative (or even something positive) might gently emerge.

Commissioned by the Bergen International Theatre-BIT (Norvége) and Les 20 jours du théâtre à risque (Montréal) in 1997, Jacob Wren worked with director Carole Nadeau of Théâtre Pont Bridge (Montréal) and three Norwegian performers, presenting a workshop of Unrehearsed Beauty for the international event, TheatreTextContext. The text was published by Coach House Books (Toronto) in 1999. This performance is loosely based upon the original text which can be read at: www.chbooks.com/online/unrehearsed_beauty. Presented in Hamburg, Berlin, Tokyo, Cardiff, Glasgow, Manchester, Bergen, Oslo, Trondheim and Prague, Unrehearsed Beauty is a co-production with: BIT Teatergarasjen (Norway), Carrefour international de théâtre de Québec, Kampnagel (Hamburg), MAI (Montréal, arts interculturels) and Les Productions Recto-Verso / Méduse (Quebec City).

PME has been recognised throughout Europe for its last production En français comme en anglais, it’s easy to criticize, which was performed in Norway, the Czech Republic, Germany, Portugal, France, England, Wales, Croatia, Sweden and Belgium as well as in New York, Toronto, Quebec City and in Montréal at Tangente, Usine C and the Festival de Théâtre des Amériques.

"Esther Ferrer strictly dissociates that core of the artistic work from all shapes of happenings or any other type of standing born in the XX century. Her actions deal with single subject; they are reduced to the extreme; they are not shows; they are not fiction; they are always anchored in the reality while being artificial and in a new context. They represent nothing. Their emptiness and absurdity turn the viewer into an interpreter; they submerge her/him in a process of interpretation. Even if the viewer behaves reluctantly or even leaves, she/he continues participating actively ..." – Helga de la Motte “Rationality and unpredictability.”

Performances have been Esther Ferrer's principal form of artistic expression since 1966. Her work, both as a soloist and as a member of the group ZAJ, has been oriented to ephemeral artistic action rather than to permanent artistic production. She created, in collaboration with the painter José Antonio Sistiaga the first "Workshop for Free Expression" in the 1960s, an activity that was to inspire other similar groups in Spain. Other visual art projects include reworked photographs, installations, canvases and constructions based on the prime number series. Her work is a very particular kind of minimalism, which she sometimes terms "rigorous absurdity." She has performed throughout Europe as well as in Cuba, the US, Canada, Japan and Korea. In 1999 she represented Spain in the Venice Biennale.

The desire for profit clears all obstacles that are blocked on its path. This course of action is a rule for the fittest to maintain their muscles. Be it legal or illegal in his own ruling, moral or immoral in his own parameter the gluttonous character will always persist and snatch your consciousness. The ecstasy is like blowing the resources into the air while all of us are busy yearning for the climax.

“Mideo M. Cruz's art production has been built upon overtly and subversively expanding and evolving communicative language and contexts, aiming to stimulate interaction and critical consumption of art. Taking his multi-sensory advocacy from the streets to the internet and galleries, Cruz has crafted political yet humorous work and social discourse realized both collectively and individually. As an artist-organizer, he has consistently addressed issues of haphazard globalization vis å vis identity and skewed access to productive assets.” – Eileen Legaspi Ramirez.

Mideo M. Cruz is central to the revival of performance art in Manila. He is an active artist-cultural activitist in Southeast Asia. In 1992, Mideo initiated the art collective, UGAT Lahi, a group identified for their significant street art. Mideo is currently vigorously involved with New World Disorder, an international artists network focused on the subtle imitation of capitalist strategies. He is presently engaged in the action art event tupada.

7a*11d concludes the Festival with a panel and roundtable discussion with participating artists, collective members and the audience. INFILTRATION calls up notions of covert operations and dissembling, often having to do with outsiders penetrating structures or organizations, covertly or semi-legally. Artists have often inserted themselves into situations and places where they do not belong, in order to convert the symbolic meaning of those places; but the theoretical underpinnings of these strategies deserve fuller illumination. The ideas in common with performance practices and the infiltration of internet sites and the www, as well as the rising phenomenon of urban infiltration – with a proliferation of zines and ejournals providing resources for those who would explore areas not designed for public usage – provide intriguing links. Moderated by Johanna Householder.