A MONTH OF SUNDAYS RETURNS IN APRIL/MAY 2012

AT HUB 14, TORONTO,

FEATURING ARTISTS

SEIKA BOYE,

DAWNE CARLETON AND d. alex meeks, JENNIFER CASTLE,

ERIC CAZDYN, ALICIA GRANT, ADR, VICTORIA CHEONG,

RENEE LEAR, BARBARA LINDENBERG, ALLISON PEACOCK, JOSH THORPE

AND EVAN WEBBER.

Sakura, Paris, Jardins des Plantes, 2009

A MONTH OF SUNDAYS

APRIL 4 - MAY 2 2010

GENERAL INFORMATION

A Month of Sundays is a multi-disciplinary performance series curated and hosted by Aimée Dawn Robinson. Past installments of the series (February 2007 and June 2007) were held at the now defunct shared studio space of the Inter-Galactic Arts Co-op in the Darling Building. To date, A Month of Sundays has hosted twenty-three artists in three performance seasons. Past installments of the series are also detailed on this site -- keep scrolling down, down, down.

This spring, ADR has partnered with HUB 14 to revive the series (thank-you, HUB 14). And this year's program includes artists who have shown work in the series in the past. Other artists on the program are new to preforming in general, while others are coming out of semi-retirement to present work in the show. Please continue reading here (keep scrolling -- down, down, down) to see what each of the ten wonderful, dedicated and unique artists has planned for the series.

Thank-you for attending, talking about and supporting this series in the past.

Hope to see you again this time.

PERFORMANCE SCHEDULE

All performances are on Sundays at 1:30pm sharp

at HUB 14

14 Markham (Toronto)

one block West of Queen and Bathurst

www.hub14.org

Each performance is approximately one hour and fifteen minutes.

Each artist's performance/screening/reading/lecture/dance is about 1/2 hour.

There will be one intermission at each show.

Admission is PWYC

Please note: All door money goes directly to the artists

and is the only fee they are paid for their work in the series.

Refreshments will be available by donation.

APRIL 4:

ALLISON PEACOCK

CHRISTIE PEARSON

APRIL 11:

CLAUDIA WITTMANN

COLIN CLARK

APRIL 18:

ADR

VICTORIA CHEONG

APRIL 25:

ANNA SILVERSTEIN

MEAGAN O'SHEA

MAY 2:

RENEE LEAR

ALEC NEWELL

SUNDAY APRIL 4: ALLISON PEACOCK, CHRISTIE PEARSON

ALLISON PEACOCK

Allison Peacock is an artist based in Toronto, working primarily with dance, performance and video. Her choreography has been presented at Movement Research at the Judson Church (in collaboration with Victoria Cheong), Extermination Music Night, the Yukon Arts Centre and the Canada Dance Festival. She holds a B.A. from the University of Toronto, completed training at the School of Toronto Dance Theatre, and pursued international training projects through the support of the Canada Council for the Arts.

ABOUT ALLISON'S PERFORMANCE

Practice

As of March 1st 2010 I will rehearse the same series of movements daily until performing as part of A Month of Sundays. For several years I have been committed to improvisation as the primary source for movement generation, and have refused to repeat performances on the ground that a fundamental part of the experience of dance is its temporality. I have also been subjugating movement material for conceptual ideas, and using technology in a way that could be interpreted as an interruption. Now, for simplicity’s sake, I am just going to practice one thing everyday in the limited space I live in. The culture of dance is committed to the idea of practice as a way to refine movement and allow the body to fully convey information. I would like to revisit this idea with a renewed interest, after having worked for several years to change movement patterns that were integral in my professional training as a dancer. Practice will also be the first installment of three parts, in which a single movement performance is expressed in a variety of presentations.

CHRISTIE PEARSON

Christie Pearson is an artist, writer and architect who makes poems, sculptures, buildings, events, performances and installations. She is a member of Scapegoat: Architecture, Landscape and Political Economy editorial board; The Wade Collective festival of installation and performance art (www.wadetoronto.com); THE WAVES sound events (www.thewaves.ca); and Urbanvessel performance collective (www.urbanvessel.org). Her work has been presented in venues such as Alphabet City, Ascent, Canadian Centre for Architecture, Descant, Goethe Institute, On Site, Senses and Society, York Quay Gallery.

ABOUT CHRISTIE'S PERFORMANCE

Christie Pearson will be reading from her prose pomes Geneology and Stomachache.

SUNDAY APRIL 11: CLAUDIA WITTMANN, COLIN CLARK/FLEISCHMOP

photo of Claudia in her work, my heart is black (Toronto, May 30, 2009, site-specific performance at the Kodak building). photographer unknown

CLAUDIA WITTMANN

Claudia Wittmann performs since 2003. Her process is based on her butoh training with SU-EN (Sweden) and on her work with artist Paul Couillard who has been guiding her through the curriculum of Jerzy Grotowski since January 2006. Claudia works from her body memory and she is currently interested in the relationship between this memory and gender identity. In performance, she aims at transformation and intimacy with the audience. Claudia has also led workshop-performances and she has curated events which explored the role of the audience in performance. Claudia holds a PhD in biology and a Master's degree in the history and philosophy of science. www.claudiawittmann.ca.

PAUL COUILLARD

Paul Couillard has been working as an artist, curator and cultural theorist since 1985, focusing on site-specific and durational performance art practices. He has created at least 200 works in 20 countries, often in collaboration with his partner Ed Johnson. Couillard was the Performance Art Curator for Fado from its inception in 1993 until 2007, and he is also a founding co-curator of the 7a*11d International Festival of Performance Art. Couillard has taught at McMaster University and the University of Toronto Scarborough, and is currently a doctoral student in the York/Ryerson Joint Program in Communication and Culture. He also works privately as a source coach, helping self-scripting artists to clarify their creative vision and find ways into their own physical and psychological material.

ABOUT CLAUDIA'S PERFORMANCE

Claudia Wittmann will present work that is part of a larger project on self-betrayal. “As I am writing this blurb on February 27, 2010, I see that this project makes me face things in new ways. It brings me to a struggle with my own busy mind and with my very unstable relationship with the concepts of self and of gender - does my body know my gender? why the hell do I feel like a woman when I am disempowered? is this about trauma? This project is also an exciting step towards a new way to relate to the audience. With the guidance of my collaborator Paul Couillard, I want to integrate the audience into the work and let the work become what it needs to be.”

COLIN CLARK and FLEISCHMOP

Colin Clark studied interdisciplinary art and cultural theory at York University. His composition teachers, at York and elsewhere, included James Tenney, Peter Zaparinuk, and Udo Kasemets. Colin's music is driven by the idea that music is first and foremost a social experience, and he has been lucky to improvise and compose with ensembles such the neither/nor collective, The Thorpe, and Fleischmop. He has written soundtracks for experimental films by Izabella Pruska-Oldenhof and R. Bruce Elder, which have been shown at film festivals and cinematheques internationally.

Fleischmop is Alex Geddie (synth), Kelly Egan (optical sound squawkbox), and Colin Clark (guitar).

Alex Geddie is a Canadian musician and artist. He has performed improvised instrumental and computer music around the world (but mostly in Toronto) and exhibited his installation artwork in Toronto, France, Belgium, Germany and Taiwan. He attended Ryerson University and Le Fresnoy, Studio National des Arts Contemporains in Tourcoing, France. In Toronto, he continues to record music, collaborate with artists, serve as technician, and teach the odd programming night class at Ryerson.

ABOUT FLEISCHMOP'S PERFORMANCE

Three compositions for Fleischmop, performed on synths, optical sound squawkbox, and guitar. Materially, these pieces are derived from medieval ballads, folk tunes, Monteverdi and Elvis, filtered through the limitations of process and simple music notations. Virtuosity replaced by something unique to the time, place, and people who make it.

SUNDAY APRIL 18: ADR, VICTORIA CHEONG

photo of ADR improvising in OKQuoi?! Festival, Sackville, NB, 2009

photo by Eric Chenaux

AIMEE DAWN ROBINSON

Aimée Dawn Robinson is an improvising dancer, musician, landscape gardener, writer/researcher and visual artist/video maker. She has performed, studied and taught dance in Canada, the United States, Malaysia and Japan.

Between 2008 and 2010 Aimée traveled to Japan twice to study dance and farming with the formidable Min Tanaka on Body Weather Farm in Hakushu. Prior to studying with Tanaka, Aimée participated in butoh workshops with Yukio Waguri, SU-EN, Joan Laage and Yoshito Ohno.

Aimée holds her Master’s of Arts from York University, Department of Dance (thesis: Forgetting Memory: The butoh of Tatsumi Hijikata and Kazuo Ohno, 2005). Her current research project, A Body of Memory, explores memory and forgetting in improvising, butoh and Canadian Aboriginal dance. The archive of this research will appear online in the winter of 2011.

With Barbara Lindenberg, Aimée co-founded the dance series Up Darling and is the founder/director of multi-disciplinary performance series, A Month of Sundays. Aimée collaborated and performed with theatre company Small Wooden Shoe in It’s a Matter of Scale and Dedicated to the Revolutions (and continues to perform Dedicated with them).

ABOUT AIMEE'S PERFORMANCE

ADR will perform a solo, improvised dance to two songs in her head -- Crooked Jack (Dick Gaughan) and I Guess I’ve Come to Live Here in your Eyes (Willie Nelson).

video still from Remembrance, Victoria Cheong

VICTORIA CHEONG

Since receiving a degree in fine arts from Ryerson University's film school, Victoria Cheong has experimented, created and collaborated in film, video, installation and performance. She has worked as curator and organizer of events, Nuit Blanche Devereaux and the New Toronto Works Show. Victoria is also part of the free noise project Heavywater, providing visual accompaniment to sound created by Wolfgang Nessel.

www.victoriacheong.com

ABOUT VICTORIA'S PEICE

Remembrance is a series of vignettes about the living processes of memory: the unstable re-making and re-imagining of experiences and my inclination to document them. I have collected moments as souvenirs, the wind has moved them through my field of vision and then laid them to rest somewhere I can't see. I imagine that they are tucked away in that primal place where we keep the history of our joy and pain to recall it as it once was, forever.

Remembrance features music by Pocahaunted and was made with help and encouragement from Yuula Benivolski, Jennifer Castle, Lucas Cheong, Isla Craig, Jeff Garcia, Naomi Hocura, Guntar Kravis, Davida Nemeroff, Wolfgang Nessel, Jimmy Palferro, Jacob Sheen, Anna Silverstein, Zoja Smutny, Alex Tait and The Tranzac.

SUNDAY APRIL 25: ANNA SILVERSTEIN, MEAGAN O'SHEA

ANNA SILVERSTEIN

Anna can be seen from great distances, whole city blocks away, across ponds, maybe even lakes, from one mountain top to another. It’s her hair, each strand with a life of it’s own. Expanding towards you, back towards her and then to you again, not quite curls but something like that. There is a life force in this hair, a manifestation of an open curiosity and a discerning intelligence (with a special and particular aptitude for detail). Anna’s hair has taken on the character and spirit of her brain and for this we are all thankful! Seen in and experienced through this wild splay of human thread is Anna’s interest in all things unruly and encompassing. Though with closer inspection, with an eye to the many knots, caverns and twisty turns, one can see Anna’s commitment to the complexity of minutia; the intricate, well defined veins of a leaf. This orientation to the big and broad, alongside, the small and intricate has brought Anna to the study of both organic and inorganic structures; the building and the beehive, the scream and the tape recorder. Her mind topped with such a mass of hair has found itself in the world of architecture, entomology, noise making, puppetry and drawing. Following the direction of her locks Anna looks forward, sideways, backward, straight- up and straight- down. - written by Myera Waese

ABOUT ANNA'S PERFORMANCE

When a butterfly has wings that look like the eyes of an owl and a bug looks like the twig it is sitting on: Anna will present some findings on entomological mimicry through the form of a lecture with demonstrative drawings.

photo of Meagan by Omer Yukseker

MEAGAN O'SHEA

Meagan O’Shea/Stand Up Dance work includes: based on actual unrelated events (2009), Coffee for One (2007), dance like no one is watching, something blue (2006), As I unravel small maps of my spirit (2005), First Kissed/Intimate Awkward (2004), Night Stills (2003). Meagan has created ensemble work the School of Dance (2010), York Dance Ensemble (2010), IDAC (‘08 & ‘06), Loose Confederacy of Newfoundland (2004), Crimson Coast Dance Society (2004), YMI Dancing (1999-2008), and for Dusk Dances (2002) and Dance Ontario (2001).

Meagan has been guest artist in residence at fabrik Potsdam in Germany, New Dance Alliance(NYC), Earthdance(MA), Dance Base in Scotland, and in Canada at Le Groupe Dance Lab, Sunshine Coast Dance Society, The Banff Centre, and The Theatre Centre. She also works as a director, creative facilitator and teacher. She is co-founder (2004) and co-artistic director of hub14 Art & Performance Works, an organization that supports dance and related arts through presentation, workshop and residency programs. www.standupdance.com

ABOUT MEAGAN'S PERFORMANCE

Interested in the process of translation between idea and action, Meagan works in the abstract and the concrete. Improvising, planning, and mapping out instructions, sometimes quoting, often clever, Meagan intertwines ideas and concepts to create an original web making the banal spectacular and revealing the spectacular to be common place. In the spirit of A Month of Sundays, Meagan will create a structure for performance over the course of a month of Sundays.

SUNDAY MAY 2: RENEE LEAR, ALEC NEWELL

video still from Commute (2010) Renée Lear

RENEE LEAR

Renée Lear is a Toronto based visual artist currently working with video and video mixing in live environments. She got a BFA from Ryerson University in New Media and an MFA from York University. Her work has been shown in art galleries, film and video festivals, ad hoc public spaces, dance clubs and performance spaces.

ABOUT RENEE'S PEICE

Commute (Downsview Station to Spadina Station 5 times)

(2010) Video

I work an hour outside of the city where I live. Every day a commute. Two hours a day. Ten hours a week. The numbers add up over a lifetime. My commute takes up too much time from my life for me to hate it, or to simply let it pass by unnoticed—so I look for ways to engage it. The subway portion of my route is about 18 minutes long. I sit in the front window seat at the head of the first car. It’s the best seat on the train. And, oddly enough, it’s often available. From here, I experience my ride home as a series of window views. Both transparent and reflective, this window is already a creative space for an active viewer, providing a natural layering of inside and outside, in front and behind, on and through. The repeated video recording of this window over five days adds temporal layers to the mix: now and then. The result is an ambiguity of space and time that is immanent—but not readily present—in the commute, an atemporal synchrony of experience, more concerned with the journey as it exists in the present than a future destination.

ALEC NEWELL

Alec Newell is a gardener and musician, living and working in Toronto. In his teens he began playing drums in R&B bands across southern Ontario, and kept that up for the next twenty years or so, until he gradually shifted over to guitar as his main instrument. Although he continues to write and record solo projects in his home studio, he semi-retired from performing when his son was born in 1998, to concentrate on being a dad...so this Month of Sundays gig is a special event for him.

ABOUT AL'S PERFORMANCE

For this show I'll be playing some recent compositions on acoustic guitar, which I'll be running through some vintage 1980's gear (a Boss DD2 digital delay pedal, and a Roland Cube 20 guitar amp).

A Month of Sundays: General Information

A Month of Sundays is a performance series featuring two sets per matinee. Each of the eight invited artists has been given up to one half hour to do with whatever they wish in this intimate, low-tech studio enviroment.

Please read through the following posts for more information on the artists and their plans for the series.

Performances will be held each Sunday in June

at 1:30pm at:
96 Spadina (at Adelaide)
Suite 802 (blue double doors, eighth floor)

Please arrive on time -- the door to the building is locked on Sundays.

Someone friendly will admit you at the Spadina entrance between 1:15 and 1:30.
Refreshments will be served by donation.

Admission is $7.00 or PWYC

For more information please email: motherdrift@hotmail.com

Queen and Spadina photo by bigdaddyhame

Sunday June 3: No Man Band

Bio: No Man Band

The No Man Band (Doug Tielli) sings mostly Brititish Isles folk songs in falsetto through various objects that alter or filter the tone of the voice such as a teapot, a bottle, contact-miked neck as well as other surface, amplified instruments, bowls of water, etc. At the same time as the singing and often preceding, in between, and succeeding the singing, other sound sources are activated: small objects being dropped, feedback, styrofoam being flicked, scratching, dictaphones, radios, bottle-blowing, ... All performed with an attention to inadvertance, physicality, and tininess.

Photo of Doug by Jennifer Castle

June 3: Allison Peacock

Bio: Allison Peacock

Allison Peacock is a Toronto-based dance artist. Her work has been presented at the 2006 Toronto International Dance Festival, 2004 Canada Dance Festival and the Yukon Arts Centre. She completed her training at the School of Toronto Dance Theatre in 2004, and has gone on to pursue training in Brussels, Belgium and Vienna, Austria through the support of the Canada Council for the Arts. Her work examines illusion, dance constructs, the secret love of jazz dance circa 1985, and feelings.

Allison's notes for this performance:

Solos of Me not as Myself
or
Dances for, as and by Stevie Nicks

Projections, projecting, projects, potentials, progression, pity, self-pity, self-loathing, love, loss, life, identity, idols, adulthood, ideas, idioms, idiosyncrasies, transformation, jazz dance, television, monsters, the eighties, this is me and my dance. Stevie Nicks? Well, she is a special and amazing singer. And the Fleetwood Mac soap opera produced some timeless and emotionally charged rock music.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fleetwood_Mac
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stevie_Nicks

Stevie’s hits (mainly Stand Back and Edge of Seventeen) are two songs that have continued to inspire me to dance; and the image of Nicks permeated my childhood mind as the penultimate vision of womanhood. Cockatoos, capes and tambourines. Although Stevie’s paraphernalia seems absurd to me now, her songs of living and love have deeply resonated with me in adulthood. And ultimately this dance is just about combining other people’s songs, videos and personas to get to my point about some stuff.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uJznRZRoLEk

Photo by Allison Peacock.

Allison’s project has been supported by the Canada Council and the Toronto Arts Council

We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts which last year invested $15 million in dance throughout Canada.
Nous remercions de son soutien le Conseil des Arts du Canada, qui a investi 15 millions de dollars l'an dernier dans la danse à travers le Canada.Produced with the support of the City of Toronto through the Toronto Arts Council.

Sunday June 10: Aaron Lumley and Neil Sochasky

Bio: Aaron Lumley

Aaron Lumley is a Toronto-based double bassist working primarily in the field of free improvisation. He leads a psychedelic free jazz band called ZZ Sharrock and collaborates regularly with Brandon Valdivia, Colin Fisher, Jonathan Adjemian, Matt Dunn, and Tilman Lewis. His experience with dance includes improvising duos with Alix Bemrose, Neil Sochasky, and Julia Sasso.

Bio: Neil Sochasky:

Raised in New Brunswick with a wise dog, a friendly goose, and a sister who knew too much for her own good, Neil Sochasky survived a career in international espionage (don't tell his mom) and found modern dance. In the years since he has worked with TDT, CCDT, the YDE, NMDT, Corpus' DD, Kd'D (some other acronyms) and originated roles in works by numerous independent artists including Eryn Dace Trudell, D.A. Hoskins, Meagan O'Shea, Julia Sasso, Holly Small, and Michael Trent. He's now found a home amongst the fine fellows at Dancemakers. Neil has recently taken up the ancient art of Thai Yoga Massage and gives a darn good massage between dance gigs and gluten-free meals.

Aaron writes of this performance:

Neil and I have been improvising together since January. This ongoing process has provided each of us with an opportunity to explore the relationship between sound and movement. We're not interested in constructing pieces where the musician accompanies the dancer, or the dancer follows the music. Instead, we have been concentrating on finding ways for the musician and the dancer to contribute equally in the shaping of a single performance.

Photo of Aaron by Michael Keith
Photo of Neil by Ella Cooper

Sunday June 10: Josh Thorpe

Bio: Josh Thorpe

Josh Thorpe is a musician, artist, writer, and publisher living in Toronto. His first CD, Flocklight, is available on Rat-drifting, and others are due in 2007 on both Rat-drifting and Bennifer. He has a BFA from Simon Fraser University, where he studied interdisciplinary art and music with David McIntyre and Barry Truax, and an MA from York University, where he studied with James Tenney. In September, 2007, Thorpe will begin a master’s of visual studies at University of Toronto.

Thorpe's work has been performed at the neither/nor festivette, Mercer Union, the Music Gallery, Theatre La Chapelle, and other venues across Canada by Arraymusic, Continuum, the Draperies, Drumheller, and others. He also plays experimental rock and concert music on guitar, ukulele, mouth harp, odds and ends, and voice. His trio, The Thorpe, has played various locations in Toronto and New York and plans to release its debut CD, A Feedback Situation, in 2007. Thorpe has edited and published two books, Very Short Stories and Jokes of Toronto, has been published in Border Crossings art magazine, and has lectured at Trampoline Hall on the rescue and care of the infant opossum.

Josh plans for this performance:

New songs with guitar, uke, dictaphone, and other odds and ends. Possible players include Allison Cameron and Jennifer Castle.

Sunday June 17: Renée Lear

Bio: Renée Lear

Renée Lear is a Toronto based visual artist. She works in a variety of media including film, photography, viewer-interactive installation and video. She is currently working with video mixing in live environments and site-specific video projection installations. Her work has been shown in galleries, ad hoc public spaces, dance clubs and performance spaces such as Forman Art Gallery in Quebec, Sixty Four Steps Contemporary Art and Design, Rat-drifting Series at Arraymusic Studio, El Mocambo, Labyrinth, Sneaky Dee’s and Turning Point at The Gladstone in Toronto. She has worked both solo and in collaboration with internationally recognized experimental musicians, indi dance performers and dj’s including Martin Arnold, The Reveries, NuBreed, Tinkertoy, Dave Dub, and A Man Called Warwick.

Renée writes of this performance:

The piece I present will be a continuation of my love affair with video and windows. Having fallen particularly hard for the Darling studio windows where A Month of Sundays takes place, I have already been building a collection of video material featuring them and their transparent/translucent qualities. For this particular Sunday, I intend to put together a site-specific video projection installation that makes use of my already existing collection and gives me an excuse to collect more. And the windows themselves will be the presentation surface for the installation.


Photo: Darling Window Under Wrap by Renée Lear

Sunday June 17: Megan English

Bio: Megan English

Megan English is a graduate of York University's Dance Program. She has had the pleasure of performing and presenting work at many Toronto venues and series including: Vivid, Up Darling, TIDF (formerly fFIDA), Small Potatoes, Series 808 and A.W.O.L's Whole Exhibition. Megan trained as a Dance Movement Therapist in London, England. At that time, she performed as a member of the dance theatre company Zephyr in Zanussi at London's Resolutions!, the Chelsey Theatre and the Chichester Fringe. Most recently, she appeared in a video for the Toronto based band, The Great Lake Swimmers. Megan enjoys teaching dance and later this year will be joining the National Ballet for their fall tour as a dance educator.

Megan says of this performance:

The ideas that percolated during the making of this solo are...going through life half awake or waking up after being asleep for a very long time. Coping with the imposition of structure versus the joy of creating your own. It is also a tribute to the beasts within us that we fight with only to discover they mean well.

Sunday, June 24: ADR

ADR will improvise to the songs in her head.

Photos of ADR by Kevin Parnell/Aperture Enzyme from Wavelength/Images Festival with Deep Dark United, April 2006.

Sunday, June 24: The Guayaveras

Bio: The Guayaveras

The guayavera is the national dress shirt of Puerto Rico, bountiful with embroidered ornaments running through its characteristic four pockets. The Guayaveras (Eric Chenaux and Ryan Driver) play music indoors and out.

Inside, The Guayaveras play myopically detailed post-punk electro improvised music with prepared/bowed guitar and polyphonous analog synth. Outdoors, the Guayaveras have performed their tropical adornments for promiscuous lovers of summer song on Paul's porch in Kensington Market (the site of last years Guayaveras' in the market cdr, on the patio of Ideal Coffee, at the entrance to the Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery and a forgotten glittery shoe store on Queen street near Spadina.

Photo of guayaveras by Marla Hlady.

FEBRUARY 2007 INSTALLMENT : FINAL SHOW

Thanks to everyone who has come out to these shows. It has been a pleasure.

If you keep scrolling down here you'll see almost everything you need to know about the series.

Check out the links below to see press.

http://www.zoilus.com/

http://www.thestar.com/article/178859

See you Sunday for the last show (for now).

A Month of Sundays: General Information

A Month of Sundays is a performance series featuring two sets per matinee -- one dance and one music. Each of the eight invited artists has been given up to one half hour to do with whatever they wish in this intimate, low-tech studio enviroment. Please read through the following posts for more information on the artists and their plans for the series.

Performances will be held each Sunday in February at 1:30pm at:
96 Spadina (at Adelaide)
Suite 802 (red doors, eighth floor)

Please arrive on time -- the door to the building is locked on Sundays.
Someone friendly will admit you at the Spadina entrance between 1:15 and 1:30.

Refreshments will be served by donation.
Admission is $7.00 or PWYC.
For more information please email: motherdrift@hotmail.com

Sunday February 4: The Thorpe

Bio: The Thorpe:

The Thorpe (Aimée Dawn Robinson, Josh Thorpe, and Colin Clark) has been recording warped pop songs together for the past several years. "We listen to a song we like on headphones, improvise to it, record the improvisations, and mix a new song from the resulting recording." For the first time in Toronto, The Thorpe will remove the headphones and perform loose songs based on their recorded work.

A note from Colin: "The original plan for A Month of Sundays, was to write a new piece for my Lions ensemble. While the music is coming along nicely, I'm not quite ready to let it go yet. Instead, I've decided to postpone the Lions gig and play again with The Thorpe. We're long overdue for another live performance. Stay tuned for a Lions performance in late spring, and in the meantime I hope you'll come and see The Thorpe instead."

Photo of the actual Thorpe headphones by Colin Clark. Thanks Warren.

Sunday February 4: Claudia Wittmann

Bio: Claudia Wittman
Claudia Wittmann has studied butoh mainly with SU-EN for whom she performed in Stockholm in 2002, 2003 and 2005. She has also performed for a video piece by filmmaker Brenda Goldstein in Toronto. Her own work deals with body memory and with the transformation potential that it represents. Claudia has shown work at the Shared Habitat2 Festival in 2003, with the Green Tea productions and in the Natural Light Window Gallery in 2004, in a duet with Hiroshi K. Miyamoto in 2005. In 2006, she created Liver which she presented at the Xpace gallery in Toronto. For Liver, Claudia approached her source material with a new emotional intimacy, discovered through her work with artist Paul Couillard and the curriculum of experimental theater researcher Jerzy Grotowski.

Claudia writes about her work for this performance:

For now, my intention is to present a butoh solo piece. It will have to do with my relationship with this strong image that I see and at the same time can't really see on my right side. This is work with body memory and it is the first time I am starting from the concept of a relationship. I am not sure about sound yet. Possibly there will be none.

Photo by John Lauener of Claudia in her work Liver.

Sunday February 11: Moth Ring, Janet Macpherson and Jason Benoit

Bio: Janet Macpherson
Janet Macpherson is a Toronto based ceramic artist and musician. Janet has collaborated with several Toronto musicians on a variety of musical projects. She began performing in 2001 with psyche bluegrass band Dog Rose which included Aimee Dawn Robinson, Eric Chenaux, Jason Benoit, Marcus Quin and Doug Tielli. Janet also sang and played whammied harmonica in The Tristanos; a band that featured ballads and songs by Eric Chenaux with Martin Arnold, Steven Parkinson, Marcus Quin, and John Sherlock. More recently she performed in Colin Clark’s ensemble Lions at Mercer Union, playing harmonica and synthesizer with Aimée Dawn Robinson, Eric Chenaux and Alex Geddies. She is excited to be performing with this group again at A Month of Sundays. Currently Janet is singing and playing guitar in Moth Ring, a new band featuring songs by Jason Benoit along with Mike Overton and Rob Clutton.

Photo of Janet: Hillary Massman

Bio: Jason Benoit
Jason Benoit has played music in solo performances and in the bands Mungo Gave Me, Black Kermit, The Raunches, Dog Rose, The Wheelhands, Everybody Get Sick, and Moth Ring, has appeared in duet performances with Eric Chenaux and Andrew Zuckerman, and has provided music for the plays Maya and Madder.

Janet and Jason write about their work for this performance:

For A Month of Sundays, Janet Macpherson and Jason Benoit will give their original take on the tradition of song which began with the bards and troubadours, intermarried with the blues, and continues to evolve through what is known as “popular music”. Expect banjo, guitar (acoustic, electric, and slide), with lyrics that touch on and disperse such topics as heartbreak, delirium, death, the friendship between Jesus and Satan, disembodiment, the downfall of arrogance

Sunday February 11: Aimée Dawn Robinson

Bio: Aimée Dawn Robinson
Aimée Dawn Robinson is a dancer, writer, presenter and visual artist. In collaboration with Barbara Lindenberg, Aimée co-designs and co-directs the Up Darling contemporary dance series in Toronto. A dedicated improviser, Aimée has collaborated with musicians Martin Arnold, Jennifer Castle, Eric Chenaux, Ryan Driver, Alex Lukashevsky, Kurt Newman and Doug Tielli in venues such as Studio 303, Rat-Drifting, Ulterior, Window, Images Festival, fFIDA, Older and Reckless, Wavelength, Pick Seven, Up Darling, Casa del Popolo and the rooftop of 11 Kensington. She records and performs with trio The Thorpe (with Colin Clark and Josh Thorpe) and has composed dance scores for artists Tamara Cosby, Seika Boye and herself. Aimée has had the pleasure of working with dance artists Motaz Kabbani, Barb Lindenberg, Viv Moore and Terrill Maguire, though she most often performs solo as mother drift. Aimée holds her Masters of Arts from the department of Dance, York University

Photo: John Lauener

Aimée writes about her work for this performance:
One of two things will happen. I might show a version of a new group piece I am working on called The No-Mystery Project (which involves dancers interacting with a recorded instruction score) or I might perform the ninth installment in my ongoing improvisation series, mother drift dances to the songs on her head. In this series, I cover (the way a band performs a cover) the chosen songs -- by reacting to/with the music in memory and by making a replication of the song, however filtered, altered and imperfect it becomes through performance. In this series to date I have danced to songs by James Brown, Jimi Hendrix, Neil Young, Jennifer Castle and British Isles folk musicians Waterson:Carthy, Silly Sisters, Dick Gaughan and Nic Jones. This time I might use a Carla Bley tune called Ida Lupino.

Sunday February 18: Ame Henderson

Bio:Ame Henderson
Ame Henderson is a dance artist originally from Vancouver Island and currently living in Toronto. Her works Blue* *Disco (2002), memories and statements (2004), Manual for Incidence (2005), /Dance/Songs/ (2006), and the ongoing investigation The Instruction Project (2006) have been presented in Croatia, The Netherlands and Canada. Public Recordings, founded in 2004, is a developing structure to support and produce her creative projects. As a performer, Ame collaborates regularly with Small Wooden Shoe and recently appeared in the work of Tino Sehgal. Ame was a participant in the panel “Fragile Positions: Performance in the 21st Century” in Halifax (2004) and in the research project Clash (2006/2007) initiated by Lynda Gaudreau. Ame is a co-director of Hub 14, a performance and research space in Toronto.

Ame writes about her work for this performance:
instructions for a dance apart #2 / Toronto

The Instruction Project is an accumulating set of experiments initiated by Ame Henderson that have so far involved a number of artists from Montreal and Toronto. At the core of this research are curiosities about transference, translation and communication, especially as these ideas relate to dancing and presence. For A Month of Sundays, Ame navigates between two subjective sets of instructions for recreating an event that she did not attend.

Instructions: Claudia Fancello and Katie Ewald

Special Guest: Jacob Zimmer

Music: Scott Maynard

Thanks to Eric Craven.

Sunday February 18: The Draperies

Bio: The Draperies

Eric Chenaux (electric guitar), Ryan Driver (pictured here playing quasi-ruler bass in a photo by Jean Martin) and Doug Tielli.

"The Draperies improvise with no set program, no expressed strategies, but not exactly freely. There's a real sense of shared responsibility here to make music for a listener to listen to (not for the players to play or the players to listen to; at least not until they're done playing). There's a lot of music here: noise and pitch; high and low; short and long; thin (like a razor or a wisp of smoke from a blown out candle) and thick (like a pig-foot stew or a magic marker); not much fast and slow; all manner of attacks; lots of dynamics (but not too much loud and soft). This is music with intensities that is utterly not about intensity. The Draperies' music sounds nothing like folk music; but it feels like folk music".
-- from the Rat-Drifting website (see links above)

Sunday February 25: Stephen Parkinson

Bio: Stephen Parkinson
Stephen Parkinson studied composition in Waterloo, San Diego and Victoria with Rudolf Komorous, John Celona, Michael Longton, Owen Underhill and Roger Reynolds. His piece Desires Are Already Memories is recorded by Arraymusic on their New World c.d. and Eve Egoyan has recorded two of his compositions for piano: Rainbow Valley on her disc, thethingsinbetween and Trail on The Art of Touching the Keyboard.
Stephen’s main compositional practice involves writing for do-it-yourself situations featuring himself and various friends (with various musical backgrounds) as performers, reacting to a variety of methods of prescription/notation, involving toy instruments/electronics/vintage turntables/ field recordings as well as more traditional musical instruments.

Stephen writes about his work for this performance:
…coming soon…

Sunday February 25: Barbara Lindenberg

Bio: Barbara Lindenberg

(drawing of Barb by Jennifer Castle)

Barbara Lindenberg, choreographer/performer/co-producer of the Up Darling series, is originally from Victoria, BC. Since graduating from York University’s Dance Program, she has had the pleasures of traveling to interesting places, witnessing and participating in inspiring art, and meeting kind and talented people.As a performer, Barbara has enjoyed working with Sara Porter, Learie McNicolls, Magali Charrier, Hope Terry, Megan English, Denise Duric, Aimée Dawn Robinson, Kd’D2 (a Kaeja Dance project) and other artists.

Her recent choreographic works include a group piece which was presented at Up Darling 3 in October 2006, and 2 solo works incorporating 16mm film. She recently traveled to Shanghai with her 2003 solo piece Through Glass and Water.

Barb writes about her work for this performance:

Barbara Lindenberg will be presenting, Second Thoughts, a new solo work. The movement is drawn from a collection of impulses and is then re-composed in a calculated manner. Inspired by the process of decision making, Second Thoughts is as much an exercise in process as it is a revealing look into the artists’ calendar of emotions.