Guaranteed Basic Income for Artists

Proud to be in good company as a signee on this important open letter. Guaranteed Basic Income should be in place for all, and would be particularly beneficial for artists, performers, and cultural workers. We need to support the people who imagine, shape, and reflect the world on our behalf.

In the pandemic’s wake, the arts communities, versatile and adaptable, are evolving in new and exciting ways. Artists, writers, technicians, and performers will continue to create and to inspire the world around them. Their creation of novel forms of digital culture, music and performance art, online entertainment, movies, literary works, arts and crafts will allow people to weather times of solitude, hardship, and ruptures in social behaviour and contribute to their overall well-being.

We envision a Basic Income Guarantee that ensures financial stability without eroding the existing federal support for arts and culture programs. Unconditional access to a basic income will support the remarkable creative capacity of individuals and provide employment opportunities, bold visions and community inspiration.

You can read the entire letter HERE. And read the CBC article covering the story HERE.

Bergen Summer Research School

I’m so excited to be heading off to Norway next week to take part in the Bergen Summer Research School at the University of Bergen. This summer school brings together scholars, policy makers, and PhD students from all around the world to tackle some of the most pressing social, political, and environmental issues of our time.

I’ll be participating in a two week course that looks at connecting the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals to local, national, and global cultural policy. We’ll be focusing on issues pertaining to arts heritage, indigeneity, cultural rights, and intellectual property, digitization and glocalization, and postcoloniality and sustainable development. I cannot wait to immerse myself in these topics.

Jess Thom + Samuel Beckett at ReelAbilities TO

I had the immense pleasure of hosting a discussion and audience Q&A with performer Jess Thom following a screening of the film Me, My Mouth and I at the ReelAbilties Toronto film festival in June.

The film, directed by Sophie Robinson, chronicles Thom’s journey of learning the ferociously difficult theatre piece Not I, by playwright Samuel Beckett. Thom is the first disability-identified performer to take on the role, and her performance of the work is electric and utterly personal. It was fantastic to chat with Thom (and her friend and creative collaborator, Matthew Pountney) following the screening—we discussed the disruptive potential of disability arts, the ongoing need for accessible theatre practices, Thoms’ views on disability activism, and much more.

ReelAbilities is a festival that originally began in the USA, and which showcases films by and about Deaf and disability culture and is such an important contribution to disability art and culture in North America. More info on the festival HERE.

COMPOSITIONS: a micro-performance series

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Really happy to have started the year off performing in an intimate house concert in Parkdale, Toronto. The performance was the first in the new COMPOSITIONS series that I am helping to produce through Sesquisharp Productions. Curated by Shalon T. Webber-Heffernan, this series of micro-performances explores a whole host of performative and musical work and plays with issues of scale.

COMPOSITIONS #1 featured myself, pianist Jon McSpadden, and performance art duo xLQ. We also screened short films by Brian Johnson and Valerie Calam and Paul Shepherd. Despite the frigid temperatures (temperatures in Toronto dropped to a low of -20 degrees celsius!) , we had a great crowd brave the weather to join us. Despite the business of doing a PhD, I am always reminded how rewarding performing can be—sharing some wild contemporary music with people on a cold, snowy night does the soul good!

Performative Temporalities

Had a great time at the Sick Theories conference this past week, where I presented my paper “The performative temporalities of sickness.” The event was live streamed and can be found on the Sick Theories YouTube channel.

It was such a joy (and only mildly intimidating) for me to be on a panel about Performance and Embodied Art Practices alongside artists and scholars like Allyson Mitchell, Eliza Chandler, Kim Collins, Deirdre Logue, and Ether Ignagni (who co-presented on their incredible project Death Cafe), as well as performer lo bil, and curator Jacqueline Mabey

A big thanks to the organizers for their labour in putting this event together. Always so nourishing to be in a space with brilliant and creative scholars, activists, and artists.

Nocturne Halifax

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Sesquisharp Productions is at it again! We’ve turned our successful concert “Let Evening Come” into a performance installation piece that will premiere at Nocturne Halifax (Halifax’s version of the all night art festival Nuit Blanche!)

The theme this year is “nomadic reciprocity”. As usual, there will be so many amazing artists and performers to check out. Sesquisharp has a site in downtown Dartmouth which we will be transforming into a nighttime dreamscape.

Come check us out at the corner of Portland Street and Victoria Road in Dartmouth between 6:00pm-12:00am on Saturday, October 13th.

Sick Theories Conference

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I am looking forward to presenting a paper at this upcoming conference— “Sick Theories: A Trans-disciplinary Conference on Sickness and Sexuality” in November. Organized by Margeaux Feldman and Lauren Fournier, the conference is bringing together “scholars, writers, artists, activists, and educators to untangle the relationships between sickness and sexuality.”

I’m excited to explore these ideas from the perspective of performance studies and critical disability studies (the two fields that my PhD work is rooted in). I’ll be speaking about sickness and temporality in performance, looking at disability-identified performers whose work explores specific temporal experiences of chronic illness.

You can check out the full schedule HERE.

Let Evening Come

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My work as a producer and performer is picking up again, as my company Sesquisharp Productions (which I co-founded in 2012 with Jacob Caines) has emerged out of hiatus. Jacob and I had hit 'pause' on things for a few years as we were living in different cities and focused on different projects. But now, despite still being separated by a few hundred kilometres, we're relaunching Sesquisharp with renewed enthusiasm. 

Based across Halifax and Toronto, Sesquisharp is an arts collective that is rethinking the concert experience--programming classical and contemporary music in innovative ways and with interdisciplinary collaborations. 

We just performed an amazing sold-out run of Let Evening Come the MacPhee Centre in Halifax; a show all about experiences of night, darkness, and catharsis. It was truly a joy to develop this show with a group of amazingly talented performers and creators and I can't wait to announce the other exciting projects we have lined up!

Head over to www.sesquisharp.com for more info, or check out some of the photos from the show below (all photo credits to MJ Photographics)

Mobilities Pedagogy Workshop

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This past weekend I had the opportunity to attend a workshop at Wilfrid Laurier University that was focused on Mobilities Pedagogies. Mobility studies is a wide-ranging and expansive field that covers a large number of topics, from migration to urban infrastructure to digital data networks.  It is a field that uses the lens of mobility to address many of the most pressing humanitarian, environmental, urban, and technological issues of our time.

My interest in mobility studies comes from both a performance studies and disability studies perspective. This workshop was an exciting opportunity to hear from a number of scholars from all different disciplines about their pedagogical approach to mobility studies. More information can be found on the Global Mobilities Network site here: http://wp.lancs.ac.uk/globalmobilities/2018/03/24/mobilities-pedagogies-symposium/