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.