Stage Door News
Stage Door News
Public Recordings announced its 2017/2018 season to an excited audience of supporters, partners and community members on Tuesday, October 24 at Toronto’s welcoming new party spot, Less Bar. The evening was hosted by the company’s new Associate Artists, performance maker Liz Peterson and composer/dramaturg Christopher Willes, joining returning Associates Ame Henderson and Evan Webber. DJs Thom Gill and Akash Bansal kept the crowd moving.
Last season Public Recordings presented six major performance works in eight cities in Canada and Japan, including the premiere of Other Jesus which garnered six Dora Mavor Moore nominations for independent theatre. The announcement of its 2017-18 season’s activities affirmed Public Recordings’ commitment to providing long-term creation support for artists and to developing important new cross-disciplinary performances. Both Peterson and Willes are working towards premieres in 2018-19.
To Valerie Solanas and Marilyn Monroe in Recognition of Their Desperation is an ambitious concert performance involving an experimental orchestra of musicians and non-musicians. To Valerie… follows a score created in 1970 by radical American composer and electronic music pioneer Pauline Oliveros. Orchestrated for coloured light and “any instrumentation”, this influential work was created in response to the societal unease of the late 1960’s, and marked a shift in Oliveros’s music towards an experimental practice she developed over her long career that she called Deep Listening. Christopher Willes, in consultation with musician Anne Bourne, initiated this project in August with a well–received first public presentation at Toronto’s Gardiner Museum, as part of the Feminist Art Museum’s programming for Community Arts Space: Art is Change. To Valerie… will continue development this season to premiere in winter 2019.
Public Recordings’ other major project in development is Liz Peterson and Spanish choreographer Marina Colomina’s Borders (sin título). From an initial conversation during Public Recordings’ 2013 production of what we are saying comes a new collaboration about the borders that govern our identities, histories, bodies and nations. This interdisciplinary performance devised through in-studio experimentation borrows a chorus of shape-shifting Goddesses from Aristophanes’ old Greek comedy, The Clouds, to investigate the resistance, dissolution, integration, and traversing of the visible and invisible boundaries between us. Borders is being developed with the support of L’Estruch, Fábrica de Creació de les Arts en Viu, Ajuntament de Sabadell, and La Poderosa, Barcelona, Spain, where the work-in-progress will next be presented this December 16-17, 2017 and premiering in Toronto fall 2018.
Public Recordings also unveiled the next phase of development for New Dramatics, its experimental performance/publication exploring issues surrounding the publication of performance text, scores, plays, and other “written matter” related to performance-making. The New Dramatics project began last season with an editorial meeting–a performance created for the Leonard & Bina Ellen Gallery in Montreal. Frank Cox-O’Connell, Ame Henderson, Evan Webber and Jacob Wren return this work in studio over the upcoming months.
The current season kicked off with the company’s successful fall tour of the award-winning performance encyclopaedia to the Australian Theatre Forum, presented by OzAsia Festival in Adelaide, Australia. Creators Ame Henderson and Evan Webber were joined by collaborators Shannon Cochrane and Tomoyuki Arai as well as an incredible group of Australian artists. Following the creation of performance encyclopaedia, Henderson and Webber travelled to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, to share creation strategies from this project with the remarkable, 30-year-old Five Arts Collective.
The company invites the public to join them online and in person for this year’s development activities.
About Public Recordings
Public Recordings uses the structural and administrative framework of a dance company to question the meanings and possibilities of shared space. We develop and present hypotheses about group work through formal experiments in dance, theatre, music, publication and other collective gestures.
Public Recordings is led by its Associate Artists. Working and managing resources collectively, the Associate Artists direct the company’s projects and help Public Recordings’ collaborators initiate new ones.
Public Recordings is grateful to its supporters: Canada Council for the Arts, Ontario Arts Council, Toronto Arts Council, the Metcalf Foundation and generous individual donors for helping Public Recordings keep doors and minds open.
To Valerie Solanas and Marilyn Monroe in Recognition of Their Desperation (1970) is performed courtesy of The Pauline Oliveros Trust. Published by Smith Publications 1973.
Join us in conversation online at: Facebook / Instagram / Vimeo
2017-10-28
Toronto: Public Recordings Performance Projects announces its 2017/18 season