VIVA! 2009 est terminé…
Viva! est terminé. Ce fût une deuxième édition intense et étonnante. La programmation fût vaste et originale. Et le public, toujours au rendez-vous, était nombreux et d’une qualité d’écoute qui fût très apprécié par les artistes.
Nous voulions écrire un dernier mot sur le blog Viva! pour remercier les personnes qui ont mis de l’huile de coude au quotidien du festival. Particulièrement les bénévoles qui ont fait un travail magistral. Autant au bain que dans les centres d’artistes participants. Merci à SP38, le cuisinier magique, qui a nourri des centaines de bouches quotidiennement. Merci aux auteurs des blogues anglos et francos. La couverture du festival fût foisonnante en observations et réflexions. La fréquentation quotidienne du site web a atteind des sommets grâce à vous!
Finallement, un merci total aux aes artistes, qui nous ont montré, encore une fois, que la performance est un art puissant et généreux qui va beaucoup plus loin que les préjugés trop souvent entendus.
Mots de la fin
Je ne pouvais pas quitter cette plateforme géniale que fut le blogue de VIVA! tout au long du festival sans écrire un dernier billet. C’est l’heure des bilans, les trois performances qui se sont, à mon avis, le plus démarqués lors de ces neufs derniers jours d’art action sont (en ordre alphabétique) : Jean-Pierre Gauthier dans le dock du Fashion plaza, Guillaume Adjutor Provost lors des soirées QuéCan dans’ pool et Dominique Pétrin à la galerie La Centrale.
sp38, claudia and lili
this is sp38 making crepes outside. vive la crise! claudia, his partner, and lili, his daughter were with us for the entire festival as well.
sp38 organized a crepe lottery in support of dairy producers of europe – each crepe sold = one happy cow.
for 200 crepes :
48 eggs
2-3 k flour
6 litres milk
.5 litre of water
2 beers
and lots of time because you can only make one crepe at a time, just like cows can only produce so much milk in one day.
bernadette houde as the flash
this is a faked stick figure drawing representing bernadette houde. it is fake because bernie did not stay still long enough for me to “get” her (this stick figure thing is pretty tricky i tell you.) if you showed up at the bain, or came to any viva! art action event you probably saw bernadette houde. however, i won’t hold it against you if you can’t describe what she looks like. i think she was mostly a blur of shining eyes, dark hair, and smiles. catherine bodmer wrote about bernie here
bernadette houde (aka bernie bankrupt): http://bernadettehoude.com
joshua schwebel
in my agenda: the name, josh, an arrow, the time, 17:30 – 18:30. then the words, parc bernard – st-viateur hutchison. the times and the names of the street i copied from the lost/found section of the classifieds in the mirroir. joshua schwebel was hiding in public space and he had announced the locations and times in the lost/found sections of the classifieds.
the locations were announced with the dates, time and place. no “thing” or “person” was listed as “lost.” this was not a game of hide and seek. but on the day i went looking for josh (as an informed “insider” as to the nature of what the lost/found referred to) i did not know if i would find josh, or indeed if he was even hiding. i set off on my bike looking for parc bernard, somewhere between st-viateur and hutchison. after doing the turn of the block i decided to ask a young girl if she knew where parc bernard was. or if there was even a park nearby. she informed me (with an air of exasperation) that parc was the name of a street and so was bernard, and no…there was no parc bernard nearby. (uh..huh adomished by a twelve-year old).
catherine bodmer and kit malo…corn huskers
it was our last meal of viva! art action 2009. maybe i should have felt nostalgic, but…the corn was soooooo good and with REAL BUTTER! yes folks, blocks of real butter to roll your corn in. and yes, catherine bodmer and kit malo really did start out the husking corn performance. on the sidewalk in front of the bain. a huge sack of corn and two huge pots to put the corn in once husked. and then another huger (not a real word i know) pot on a burner that the corn cooked in that carl kept watch over so clumsy people wouldn’t accidently bump into the gas gauge and set the place (or themselves) on fire.
it was nice to just hang out, to be physically close to people and to enjoy the corn (and butter.) i like it when people get to a place in their relationships when you can just sit back, not say much and be.
catherine bodmer: http://catherinebodmer.com
kit malo: http://www.lambsamongwolves.com
L’épluchette finale
Aujourd’hui, je n’ai pas envie de disserter sur la performance. Mon cerveau enrhumé me laisse dans la brume et je m’accroche à la soirée d’hier, le dernier repas convivial de VIVA!. Après avoir passé quelques jours dans le bain, il était bien de sortir dehors pour manger. Quelques tables de pique-nique avaient été déposées aux alentours du bâtiment. SP38 préparait des crêpes pour sa tombola. Carl était le maître du feu et du chaudron pour distribuer les derniers maïs de la saison. L’amateuse (je cite ici une dame du quartier) de blé d’inde en moi a été comblée. L’épi chaud qui creuse le beurre, le sel de table iodé à profusion et des conversations sur l’ABC de la cuisson du blé d’inde. Une belle occasion pour créer un moment fort de convivialité. Précieux comme expérience. -Manon T.
Une dernière p’tite vite?
Après un party qui, selon mes sources, était bien arrosé, la dernière journée de VIVA s’est déroulée de façon assez paisible.
La dernière série de causerie a eu lieu en après-midi. Articule a offert la chance au public d’entendre les propos des artistes de sa programmation du festival. Le duo composé de Paul Couillard et Ed Johnson sont les présentateurs qui se sont le plus démarqués de cette matinée de artist-talk. Ces derniers – très généreux dans leur exposé – ont très éloquemment parlé de leur pratique en couple. Leurs discours étaient remplis de précieux conseils pour les performeurs en herbe. Leurs allocutions étaient plus intéressantes que leur performance qu’ils ont livré le jeudi précédent au Bain Saint-Michel.
ed johnson and paul couillard, monika gunther and ruedi schill, plus christian messier talk
it is interesting what is said, how it is said, and what is not said when listening to artists talk of their work. because five artists talked (two groups of two) one after the other, the differences and similarities between their respective approaches to performance, and to performance presentation was striking.
for instance, christian stood in front of us the whole time and did not have any visual presentation. he reminded me of gwendoline robin, the other artist who also worked in a very direct way with the element of risk. as gwendoline worked with the colours white and black, christian worked with the colours burgundy and white. both artists spoke of the pleasure of knowing and mastering a skill, or rather, their material. both artists vacated any kind of social, political, or personal meaning from their work, and rather spoke of their work through a visual language. the poetics of the image, of the confrontation between this violent gesture and the beauty of the image created.
flutura and besnik haxillari…talk
the day following their performance at la central flutura and besnik gave an artist talk, a very generous and personalized artist talk. sharing their struggles as a couple, as a family with first one child…and then twins, as immigrants and as artists. there were many things spoken of but two stand out in my mind:
1) how, through doing their performances an unforeseen aspect of endurance kept cropping up. body endurance. whether it be the endurance of standing for an hour and holding one’s arm stretched out, or the endurance of turning a rope over and over and over while waiting for the technical apparatus to kick in. this is the difference between “imagining” and “doing,” kinda like the difference between theory and practice. even actions that seem super banal can cause stress on the body when repeated and held over time.
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